Jake pressed his back against the wall, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. The wind from the open window kept pulling at him, like invisible hands trying to yank him out. He could hear the groan of metal and concrete all around him—the building settling into its new position. Every creak made his heart jump, waiting for the moment when the whole structure would just give up and complete its journey to the ground.
The window beside him was open, curtains whipping violently in the wind. For a split second, he considered it. Maybe if he jumped, aimed for some rubble pile, somehow survived the fall... But no. That was insane. He was twelve stories up—or whatever the equivalent was now with the building tilted like this. The rubble below was concrete and steel and broken glass. Even if the fall didn't kill him outright, the landing would turn him into a human pancake.
His eyes locked onto the apartment door on the opposite end of the room. That was the only way out. The only real option. Just had to get there. Simple, right?
Except the floor was now a steep incline. Fifty-five degrees, maybe steeper. Like trying to climb up the side of a playground slide, except this slide was made of polished apartment flooring and there was nothing to hold onto.
Jake pushed himself away from the wall, his legs shaky beneath him. He tried to take a step forward, upward, toward the door. His foot found purchase for maybe half a second before gravity remembered it existed. His shoe slipped on the smooth floor.
"No, no, no—"
He slid. Fast. His arms windmilled uselessly as he tumbled backward down the slope of what used to be his floor. His shoulder slammed into something hard and metallic—the refrigerator that had also slid down and wedged itself against the lower wall. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. Pain exploded through his side.
"Dammit!" Jake wheezed, clutching his shoulder. "It hurts like hell."
He lay there for a moment, waiting for the worst of the pain to subside to something merely terrible. His apartment wasn't large, but right now, the distance from this refrigerator to that door might as well have been a mile. An impossible, nearly-vertical mile.
Jake forced himself to sit up, wincing with every movement. His eyes scanned the room desperately, looking for anything he could use. The refrigerator was to his left—at least that was something solid to start from. But beyond that? The walls were smooth, featureless. No decorations, no handholds, no convenient ledges. Just blank surfaces that might as well have been coated in ice for all the grip they offered.
The floor was the same. Smooth laminate that he'd been meaning to replace for months but never got around to because who cared about flooring when you were working sixty-hour weeks? Now he was paying for that laziness.
"Ahh, how do I get out of this?" he muttered, running his hands through his hair. Think. There had to be a way. There was always a way.
That's when he heard it. Voices. Muffled, desperate voices coming from somewhere nearby. His neighbors. The apartments around him. People were screaming for help, pounding on walls, crying out for rescue.
"Help! Someone help us!"
"Please! We're trapped!"
"Is anyone there? Can anyone hear us?"
Jake's jaw tightened. What did they expect? Who exactly were they calling out to? This wasn't some minor accident where firefighters could just roll up with a ladder and pluck people from windows. The building had tilted. Collapsed. The skyscraper next door was rubble. This was catastrophic. This was the kind of disaster you saw on the news from other countries, the kind where they spent weeks digging through debris looking for survivors.
"What hope do they have?" Jake whispered to himself, his voice bitter. "Who are they even asking for help? It's not like we're stuck in a mud pool where someone can just reach in and pull us out."
But even as he said it, he felt a twist of guilt in his gut. Those were people. Terrified people. Maybe families. Maybe someone was injured worse than him. What else were they supposed to do except call for help and hope someone heard them?
He looked down at his hands. Still clutching the game controller from before. Fat lot of good that would do him now. No power-up attacks in real life. No special moves to magically transport him to safety. Just him, a useless piece of plastic, and a refrigerator.
The refrigerator.
Jake turned to look at it properly for the first time. The door had swung open during the chaos, and the contents had spilled out in a chaotic mess. Food containers. A carton of milk that had burst open. Some fruit that was now bruised and scattered. And there, among the wreckage of his weekly groceries, he spotted something.
A spoon. Just a regular metal spoon but its end was pointy, probably left there after he'd eaten some yogurt and forgotten to take it to the sink.
He picked it up, turning it over in his hand. The metal was cold, solid. And suddenly, a memory surfaced. A movie he'd watched months ago—some prison escape film where the protagonist had used a spoon to dig through concrete, creating a tunnel over years of patient work.
Jake looked at the spoon. Then at the floor. Then back at the spoon.
"You've got to be kidding me," he said aloud.
But what other choice did he have? He couldn't climb the smooth floor. He couldn't fly to the door. But maybe—just maybe—he could create his own handholds. Or rather, footholds. Little divots in the floor where he could wedge the front of his foot, use them like a climber uses holds on a rock wall.
"He did use it to scoop concrete and make a tunnel," Jake muttered, thinking back to the movie. "But I have to be creative and make footholds to get there."
It was insane. It would take forever. But it was the only plan he had.
Jake positioned himself on top of the refrigerator, using its flat surface as a stable platform. He pressed the tip of the spoon against the floor near the wall and began to scrape. The sound was awful—metal on concrete, a screeching that set his teeth on edge. But it worked. Kind of. Tiny fragments of concrete dust came away with each scrape.
He kept going. Scrape, scrape, scrape. His wrist started to ache after the first few minutes. The palm of his hand, where he gripped the spoon handle, began to throb. The thin metal dug into his flesh with each push.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Time lost meaning. He focused entirely on the task in front of him. Make a hole. Deep enough for his foot. Wide enough that it wouldn't crumble under his weight. He scraped until his hand cramped, then switched hands and kept going. The spoon became an extension of himself. His whole world narrowed to this one small section of floor.
After what felt like an eternity, he paused to check his progress. A hole. Shallow, but definitely there. Maybe two inches deep, shaped roughly like a half-circle. He tested it with his finger. Solid edges. It would hold.
"This would be enough," Jake panted, looking at his work. His palm was bright red, angry and raw from gripping the spoon. "Ah, this is really tiring."
But he couldn't stop. One foothold wasn't going to get him to that door. He needed more. Many more.
He positioned himself to start on the second hole, this one about two feet higher up the incline. And he began to scrape again.
The hours crawled by. Jake's hands started to swell. The skin on his palms began to crack and blister. Every movement hurt, but stopping meant staying trapped, and staying trapped meant... He didn't want to think about what that meant.
Four hours. Four brutal, grinding hours of scraping concrete with a spoon. And when he finally stopped to assess his progress, he had four footholds. Four small divots carved into the floor, positioned strategically close to the left wall so he could lean his body weight against it while moving.
Jake stared up at the door. It was still so far away. So impossibly far.
"I have to make ten more," he said, looking at his own trembling hands. "It's really going to take a lot out of me."
His stomach chose that moment to remind him that he hadn't eaten in hours. A deep, angry growl that resonated through his whole body. When had he last eaten? Lunch at work, probably. That sandwich from the corner deli. That felt like a lifetime ago.
Jake turned back to the refrigerator and surveyed the remains of his food supply. It was a disaster. Glass from broken containers was everywhere—mixed with yogurt, scattered over fruit, embedded in leftover takeout. A water bottle had been punctured by a shard and most of its contents had leaked out, leaving maybe a few ounces sloshing at the bottom. Everything was contaminated.
But he was hungry. Desperately hungry. And who knew how long this would take?
Carefully, so carefully, Jake picked through the mess. He found an apple that only had one small piece of glass stuck in it. He flicked it away and bit into the fruit, not caring that it was bruised. The sweetness exploded on his tongue. He found some crackers still sealed in their packaging. A protein bar. He ate slowly, washing it down with the remaining water, trying not to think about how this might be the last food he had access to for a while.
Then he got back to work.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
The night wore on. Outside his window, the world existed in darkness and chaos. The voices of his neighbors continued to call out for help, though they grew hoarse and weaker as hours passed.
Jake blocked it all out. He had one job. Make the next foothold. Then the next one. Then the one after that.
His hands stopped feeling like hands somewhere around midnight. They became foreign objects at the end of his arms—numb, swollen, barely responsive. But muscle memory took over. Scrape, scrape, scrape. The rhythm was meditative in its monotony.
Foothold five. Six. Seven.
Dawn began to creep through the window. The sky shifted from black to gray to that pale, sickly yellow that came just before sunrise. Jake had worked through the entire night without stopping. Without sleeping. Just him and the spoon and the concrete.
Foothold eight. Nine. Ten.
By the time the sun was fully up—somewhere around seven or eight in the morning, if Jake's internal clock could still be trusted—he was nearly at the top. Nearly at the door. He could see the doorknob from his current position, tantalizingly close.
His body was a map of pain. His feet had started bleeding hours ago, the constant pressure of wedging them into the small holes wearing through his socks and into skin. His hands were unrecognizable—swollen to nearly twice their normal size, the skin split and raw, every nerve ending screaming. They were numb and painful at the same time, if such a thing was possible.
But he was almost there. Almost.
Jake pulled himself up to the final foothold and reached for the doorknob. His fingers stretched out, grasping for the metal handle.
They came up short. Maybe six inches short, but it might as well have been six feet.
"No," Jake breathed. "No, no, no. Not after all this."
He stretched further, his body fully extended, one foot jammed into the highest hold, the other braced against the wall. His fingertips brushed the doorknob. So close. But close didn't open doors.
Think. There had to be something. He'd come too far to fail now because of six measly inches.
His eyes swept the room again, looking for anything with reach. And then he remembered—the refrigerator. The top section had these plastic shelves. Removable ones. Light, but sturdy enough.
"Damn it," Jake muttered. Going back down meant retracing all those footholds in reverse. But what choice did he have?
Slowly, agonizingly, he descended. Each foothold felt more precarious going down than it had going up. Gravity was not his friend. His feet slipped twice, and both times his heart stopped until he caught himself.
When he finally reached the refrigerator, he yanked one of the plastic shelves free. It was maybe two feet long, with a slightly raised corner piece that might—just might—be able to hook onto the doorknob.
The climb back up was worse. He was exhausted now, truly exhausted. Every muscle shook with fatigue. His hands barely responded to commands. But he forced himself upward. One foothold at a time.
When he reached the top again, he carefully positioned the plastic shelf, extending it toward the doorknob like a makeshift extension of his arm. The corner piece caught on the handle. Jake held his breath and pulled.
The doorknob turned.
"I did myself a favor not locking the door," Jake gasped, relief flooding through him. "Or I would've had to jump and hold onto it to open the door."
The door swung open—downward on its hinges, given the building's tilt—and revealed the corridor beyond. It looked like its own disaster zone, debris everywhere, but it was open space. Freedom.
Using the open door as a handhold, Jake pulled himself up and over, his body screaming in protest with every movement. His hands left bloody smears on the door's surface. His feet could barely support his weight.
But he was out. Out of the apartment. Into the corridor.
He collapsed against the tilted hallway wall, chest heaving, vision swimming.
He'd made it.