Stage 3: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (5 page)

He could feel his pulse thundering in his ears as he held his breath and took the first step down. He moved with excruciating slowness, holding the railing tight, and bringing the toe of his sneaker down ever-so gently. Once settled on that foot, he moved his hand to a new spot, shifted his weight accordingly, and took one more step down. Now he was just five steps above the widening pool of blood. The man in the flowered shirt looked up, and Mason froze like a statue. The creature listened for a moment, then disregarded the sound and resumed feeding, tearing away meat from deep within the man's throat and wolfing it down hungrily.

Mason saw exposed bone and felt sick to his stomach, but he lowered himself down another step as gently as a leaf falling on grass. But nearly a minute had passed by now and his lungs were burning in his chest. He wouldn't be able to hold his breath much longer. He descended another step and froze, and again the monster in the flowered shirt stopped and listened.

He couldn't keep this up. His chest was on fire. He had to get clear. And then he had an idea. It was a ridiculous notion; a clumsy take on an old movie chestnut, but he was quickly running out of options. He brought his phone up slowly, and took aim at the corner of the stairwell behind the creature. Then he screwed up his courage, steeled himself to run, and lobbed the phone high over the man's head.

The phone crashed into the wall and clattered to the floor. The madman in the flowered shirt immediately leapt to his feet and charged toward the sound, and Mason wasted not a second. He released his breath in a gush and hurled himself down to the landing and around the corner. Of course, the crazy man heard this new louder sound behind him and spun around to grab at whoever it was, but Mason was already around the corner and launching himself down the next flight of stairs three at a time, and all the man caught was air.

Even as he ran, he could hear the madman pounding down the stairs after him at a run. He reached the next platform, grabbed the railing and used it to pivot his body in a fluid swing around the corner and ran on. He didn't spare a second to look back, but he was certain the sounds behind him were growing louder. He was losing ground, and the lunatic would be on him any second. But no sooner had he come to that horrible conclusion than there was a series of sodden thuds behind him, and one loud
crack!

Mason threw himself down one more flight before realizing that the sounds behind him had ceased. He flew down one more flight to be sure, and only then did he turn to look back. He finally stopped, put his hands on his knees, and gasped for air as if he'd just run a marathon or three.

The crazy man had missed a step and fallen. Hard. He was crumpled up at the bottom of the stairs one flight up, and even in the poor lighting, Mason could see his head lolling at an awkward angle. He stood there for some time, gazing up at that horrible bloody face and panting like an asthmatic. His head pounded and his chest ached, but he was alive.

Another win for Mason Tenby…..
he thought crazily.

But then another sound came to him. It was like someone whispering from far away. Was the man in the shorts somehow still alive? Was he trying to call for help even now? Cautiously, Mason padded slowly up a few steps and stopped just short of the madman. It wasn't the poor bastard with the throat like hamburger making that sound, it was the crazy guy with the flowery shirt all red with blood. He was trying to speak, but all that came through was a gurgling growl from deep in his throat. Good God, the madman was still alive!

Mason backed down a few steps and prepared to run, but stopped himself again. The madman wasn't moving. The crazy lilt of his head told Mason everything he needed to know. The lunatic's neck was broken. He wasn't going anywhere under his own power ever again. How he managed to keep breathing was a mystery to Mason, but that was one for the doctors and the cops to figure out.

A feeling of utter relief washed over his body. He could finally breathe and relax. The drama was over. And suddenly, an absolutely ludicrous thought popped into his head. His cell phone. His brand new smartphone that had cost him a week's salary. It was barely two months old and had all of his contacts in it. It also had a week's worth of voicemails. Yeah, okay, those things were probably in the cloud and could be transferred to a new phone, but he also had a bunch of pictures of Becks and him together. No matter how things were now, he couldn't lose those pictures. Not like this. Not yet. Not now. The cops who came to collect the nutjob would get it back to him, sure, but they'd be in no rush. It might take weeks. Months, even. Maybe they'd even stuff it in an evidence box in a dark corner of a warehouse and forget all about it. And so, in spite of just witnessing a murder and barely escaping the homicidal maniac responsible, the only thought in Mason's addled mind now was that he wanted his phone back.

He padded softly to the landing and saw the madman unmoved. He was still in a crumple, one platform up. Mason moved slowly and softly and heard the guy gurgling and sputtering.
It's your fault
….. he thought sardonically,
that's what happens when you eat and run.
At last, Mason was standing over the wreckage that was once a man, and he marveled at how the thing still clung to life. The man's head was turned almost completely around, like some kind of cartoon animal. And yet, as Mason stepped closer, the man's jaws opened and he growled. Mason jumped back, then he stood there positively dumbfounded as the man snapped his jaws, gnashed his teeth, and growled like an unholy beast.

He left the awful scene behind and went two flights up to collect his phone from an even worse one. After stepping gingerly over a widening pool of blood and averting his eyes as best he could, he passed back down, stopped long enough to wipe a smear of blood from the back of the phone on a clean corner of a flowery shirt, and made his way down to the main floor. There, he stepped into a lobby as black as pitch. He couldn't see a blessed thing, but he heard some scuffling near the elevators. He aimed his cell phone in the general direction of the sound, but the light was too weak to see anything.

He called out, "Harv?" and the sounds ceased. After his recent scare, he had an insane vision of the guy in the flowery shirt crouched in the corner, stopping his feeding momentarily and lifting his head at the sound. He made ready to call the doorman's name again, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. Finally, he quickened his pace and hurried for the front door.

Harv was nowhere around. There was a landline on a table near the door, but when he lifted the receiver and put it to his ear, he found that the line was dead.
Damn it! 
Well, maybe Harv was down the sidewalk in that little alcove where he thought no one could see him stealing a quick smoke. If so, Mason would tell him what'd happened, then he'd go find a pay phone. If the pay phones were out, he'd flag down a cop. If a cop didn't drive by, he'd grab a cab to the police station. Or maybe he'd just stand on the street corner screaming bloody murder.

He pushed through the door onto the street, and his mind immediately flashed back to when he'd been aboard the airplane. The street was utter chaos. It was like stepping into a movie mid-scene, and the sheer spectacle of it took his breath away. People were running. People were screaming. Others were running
and
screaming. A woman tore past him, her high heels clicking a frantic staccato on the sidewalk. A man was chasing her, close behind. He had the same bloodied chin, and the same dead eyes as the guy in the flowery shirt. Without thinking, Mason stuck out a foot, and the man tripped over it and fell to the ground. The man skidded to a stop and climbed quickly to his feet, his nose mashed into a bloody pulp and several teeth left behind on the sidewalk, but he ignored his injuries and simply stood there, swinging his head from side to side.

It was just like the guy in the flowery shirt. This madman was listening. Mason hitched his breath in his throat and stood perfectly still. Unless the bastard could hear Mason's heart pounding out a Gene Krupa beat in his chest, he wouldn't find his next victim here. The woman in the heels swiftly disappeared around the corner, and Mason silently hoped she'd make it home.

A fat man across the street wasn't having as much luck. He was on his back, throwing ineffective punches at a face buried in his abundant abdomen and uttering plaintive gurgles that may or may not have been pleas for help. The crazy man he'd tripped picked up on the sounds and suddenly dashed across the street. His threw himself down beside the other lunatic, and Mason suddenly felt like he was watching a scene on Animal Planet where two lions shared a carcass. The two madmen snarled at each other, growling and gnashing their teeth, then they both bowed their heads and resumed to their meal.

A little man raced down the street in the opposite direction. He was stumbling awkwardly, flailing his hands in front of him. There were three people on his tail; two men and a middle-aged woman. Just then, the little man stumbled over a curb and went down. He groped along the ground for a few yards and finally began to climb to his knees, but one of the men was on him just that fast. The creature tore at the man's ankle with his teeth, but the man managed to deliver a solid kick to the assailant's face and clambered back to his feet. Hobbled now, the others were able to close in on him like jungle predators. Mason took a few faltering steps forward, but there was no point in trying to help. The man ran directly into the back end of a parked car, and as he pawed desperately at the obstacle, the others attacked. He fell to the ground under their weight, and the attackers ripped into him like a starving family of hyenas. In seconds, his guts were exposed and hung from his abdomen like a string of fat, greasy sausages.

Suddenly, a car skidded around the corner and roared through the scene. The sound was such that it attracted the attention of every insane creature in the street, and they all rose to their feet and charged headlong at this new sound. A woman came out of nowhere, waving her arms and yelling at the car to stop, but it didn't. It raced past Mason and headed straight down the middle of the road. The three who had taken down the little man ran toward the sound, and the car swerved directly into them. The men fell away to either side, and the woman bounced up and over the hood, cleared the roof, and crashed down behind the car. An arm reached out through a side window of the car, someone inside whooped crazily, and the car sped off around the corner and out of sight.

The woman's skull had been dashed to pieces with the impact, so she would never move again, but one of the men had suffered only a broken leg, and he climbed awkwardly to his knees and listened. The woman who had screamed for the car to stop was still stumbling down the street, following the receding echoes with her arms extended in front of her. As her shoes clicked loudly on the pavement, the injured man took to stumbling after the sound. The woman bumped into the side of a building and took to groping along the wall toward the far corner, then she rounded the corner and was out of sight, and the last Mason saw of the lunatic with the broken leg was when he hobbled around the corner after her, following the sound of clicking heels and soft plaintive sobs. Behind him, the other man who'd been struck by the car followed at distance; back broken, but dutifully crawling along on his elbows, gnashing his teeth, and dragging his useless legs behind him like a grotesque pull-toy.

Mason thought he must have awoken into a nightmare.
This can't be happening
, he kept telling himself.
This can't be happening…….this can't be happening… ….this can't be happening….….
But there was no denying it. It
was
happening. And it was happening all around him. A scream came from an open window across the street. As Mason watched, two dark forms converged, a splash of blood colored the fine lace curtains, and the screams died away as the dark figures sank from view. Another scream from down the street ended in a squelched gurgle. A man emerged from an alley a block away, staggering like a drunk and holding his intestines in his hands. Three different people came from three different directions, converging on the man and bringing him down like a wounded water buffalo.

And all the while, Mason stood against the wall of his building, frozen like a statue and breathing in shallow little gulps of air. He couldn't delude himself into believing that this was looting in the face of a city-wide blackout. This wasn't even a full-blown riot. This was the same phenomenon as on the airplane and in the stairwell, but on an epic scale. This, Mason concluded without the merest shadow of a doubt, was sheer insanity.

Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to be back upstairs in his apartment. Home was safe. Home was his kingdom. Once inside, he could lock the door, throw the bolt, latch the chain, hunker down, and ride out this madness. 

He turned back to the door, and was just about to grab for the handle when a face appeared inches away. He gave a startled gasp and shied back before he realized that the face was on the other side of the glass. And what a face it was. He recognized the old man as a fellow resident, but now the man's gray hair was disheveled, foam drooled from the corner of his mouth like a rabid dog, and his teeth were bared in an angry snarl. But it was the eyes that Mason found so disturbing. They were blank, dull, sightless, yet they stared through the glass as if burrowing directly into Mason's very soul.

He side-stepped slowly and quietly away from the glass and saw the eyes remain fixed straight ahead. Breathing a hushed sigh of relief, Mason eased as soundlessly as he could toward the doorman's little smoke-break hidey-hole, but then another face appeared out of the darkness beyond the glass, and he froze again. He recognized this face, too. He never knew the woman's name, but he'd smiled at her several times in passing. 10th floor, he remembered. She was divorced, with a couple of young kids. Now, she was in the same state as the other crazies; hair in disarray, wild, staring, sightless eyes, and mouth curled up into a snarl. But this pretty young thing dressed only in a baggy pajama top had been a busy little mongrel. Fresh blood caked her mouth and chin and stained the front of her garment, dripping in little rivulets down her bare legs.