Tornado drills always seemed funny to Mark. Even though he lived and worked in the midwest, specifically right in the middle of the aptly named ‘Tornado Alley’, the thought of needing to practice walking to the basement when a siren went off never made much sense. He thought either there would be enough warning that people would be walking normally anyway, or something would have been missed and everyone would panic run down the stairs, trampling the weak and hurdling the dead. Still, if anything it gave him a few minutes break from his work day to sit in the basement and scroll through his YouTube feed.
Rounding the final corner of the stairwell and descending the last half flight of steps he bumped, almost literally, into Felicia. She was the petite, bubbly admin of the clerk’s office above where Mark worked. They’ve had to work together on a number of occasions, and she was one of the few people Mark genuinely enjoyed having contact with. Though she couldn’t have been an inch over 5 feet tall, she was never short on energy and her positive attitude was refreshing every moment he encountered it.
“Hey, Felicia,” he said calmly.