Amanda Phillips

Delivery Driver

The countdown was on – if I didn’t get this notebook across town soon, who knows what the consequences would be. About 2 years ago I dropped out of a university program I worked my ass off to get into. Not only was it draining my bank account, but it was draining my soul and I needed out. At that point I decided to take a completely different direction with my life, and I got a job as a bike delivery driver in the one of the busiest cities in the world – New York City. Usually this means I’m biking from one side of Manhattan to the next with time sensitive documents, but one spring day in 2020 proved to be more of a surprised. During a regular, less time-sensitive delivery, I decided to take a detour and stumbled upon an abandoned warehouse I had never seen before. I had some time to kill so I decided to check it out – I’ve watched Ghost Adventures since I was in the womb, I figured, I’d be fine. As I wandered the rubble-filled corridors (wheezing from the dust), I heard a moaning in the distance. It was either a ghost or a person and either way this was not the place I wanted to find out, so I reluctantly backed away. At that point it became clear that what I was hearing was someone severely injured, as their weak voice echoed “help” through the halls. I rushed in their direction to find them barely clinging to life. It was a man that had been stabbed multiple times, once in the heart. Horrified, I grabbed my cellphone to immediately dial 9-1-1. To my horror, my cellphone had no connection (being in the middle of an abandoned warehouse can do that). I walked a few feet to the left and to the right trying to find a position where my phone would pick up signal, but I had no success.