No Way Out Vol. XI

The first story, 'Escalation,' takes place on July 26, 2015 at a mall in Jingzhou City, central China. Xiang Lu Juan had brought her two-year-old son to a new indoor playground on the sixth floor, and when he spotted the escalators he decided they were part of the ride. Halfway up she noticed three mall employees at the top gesturing at something and pulling serious faces, and she could not work out what they meant. They had found earlier that morning that the metal plate at the top of the escalator was unstable. Rather than shut the escalator down, they left it running, posted staff at the top and called for a repairman who had not arrived. The plate collapsed under Xiang's weight as she stepped off. In the moment before she was pulled into the mechanism she thrust her son up to the employees, and he survived. Two people were arrested over the safety failures and the mall reportedly offered the family an undisclosed settlement.

'Volunteer' is the story of a 23-year-old adventure sportsman named Michael, living in rural Ontario on August 15, 1971, who answered his door to a frantic police officer asking to borrow scuba gear. A swimmer had been missing in a nearby lake for over an hour. Michael refused to hand over the equipment on the grounds that gear without training gets people killed, and offered to dive himself. At the lake he found dozens of officers, park staff and tourists walking the shoreline, the missing man's family in tears, and nobody actually in the water. He picked his entry point off the one anomaly on an otherwise glass-flat surface: a small ripple in the middle. What no one had told him was that two hours earlier a park employee, hoping to make the lake easier to search, had gone into the dam control room and opened a valve feeding a two-foot, thirty-foot-long pipe from the lake into the river. The ripple was the intake. The current stripped Michael's equipment off, forced him into the pipe and drowned him there before pushing his body out onto the riverbank. The swimmer he went in for was found four hours later on the lake shore, about 150 yards from where Michael entered the water. The lake has since been permanently drained.

'The Messiest Place' follows nurse Sharon Dempsey at Meharry Hubbard Hospital in downtown Nashville in July 1993. Her patient Mildred Lancaster, 69, admitted for stomach pain and suffering severe episodes of confusion, kept wandering off to clean other rooms — she had spent her working life as a housekeeper, and when disoriented she reverted to the job. Staff decided against restraining her because she was gentle and cooperative. When she vanished for good, the search was misdirected twice over: the receptionist's system inexplicably showed Mildred had been discharged that morning, and a police search dog picked up her scent at a front door and led handlers down the street. Officers searched a square mile and put a helicopter up. Thirteen days later, on July 28, a security guard found her body in a five-foot pipework trench at a construction site — on the tenth floor of the hospital, a renovation area Mildred had tidied because it looked messy, and where searchers had walked past the hole without looking down. Her family sued for $13 million and later dropped the case.