by Dima Zales
The gray-skinned driver from this morning, the one from behind the wheel of the Crown Victoria, is inside—and he is not alone.
The Dodge Charger driver, the second guy who tried to kill me, is there with him.
The shard of glass is still sticking out of Mr. Charger’s left eye, while his right one stares at me emotionlessly.
I stagger backward.
The two men leap into motion.
Chapter Eleven
Legions of thoughts fight for my attention.
How can the guy with the chunk of glass in his eye be alive?
How come no one stopped him on the way here? Did they think Halloween came early?
How can both of them be walking after what they’ve gone through?
And why do both look exactly like the guys in my morgue dream?
Suppressing these mystifying questions for the moment, I prioritize survival and spin around, my hand diving into my pocket for the keys to my apartment.
Shuffling steps echo in the corridor behind me.
The hallway becomes a tunnel as my vision desperately zooms in on my apartment door.
Without attempting to even out my ragged breathing, I sprint.
I reach the door in two leaps, but my hands shake when I try to insert the key.
The horrible stench intensifies, and all my muscles tense as something brushes my shoulder.
I sink into a squat as I pivot, key clutched tightly in my fist.
Mr. Crown Vic’s hand whooshes by my shoulder as I slice at my attacker’s body with the key.
The tiny piece of metal doesn’t even scratch his shirt.
Before I can straighten my legs, Mr. Charger flanks me on the right.
I stab at his leg.
The key doesn’t pierce his pants, but it should at least hurt a little. Then again, we’re talking about a man who shows little cognizance of the shard of glass sticking out of his eye.
Instead of reacting to the tiny prick of the key, Mr. Charger grabs my neck with his left hand. Dimly, I notice that his right arm is hanging limply at his side, as though broken.
The guy must be a powerlifter because his grip on my neck is stronger than if Ariel were to have me in her clutches. I claw at his hand with all my strength, but no matter how much I try to pry his fingers apart, his hold on my throat just gets tighter.
My feet slide on the floor as he drags me toward the opposite wall.
Through the heartbeat pounding in my ears, I hear a door slam. Maybe a neighbor just saw what’s happening and called the cops? Even if that were the case, if my attacker keeps choking me like this, I won’t survive long enough to be rescued by the police.
Slamming me against the wall, he pushes me up.
My feet leave the floor.
Frantic, I kick him in the groin.
He doesn’t seem to register my kick and keeps raising me higher until his gray face is even with my shoulder.
White blotches of oxygen deprivation invade my sight.
There’s a scuffle in my peripheral vision, but I can’t make out what it is. With my luck, it’s probably Mr. Crown Vic joining his buddy.
The worst thing about the stress symptoms brought on by suffocation is that you can’t do breathing exercises to calm down. After so many seconds without air, I’m approaching a point of no return.
Something inside me snaps, and the more primitive, lizard part of my brain takes over.
I squeeze my hand over the key so hard the sharp edges pierce my skin, and with zero hesitation, I stab at my attacker’s face.
The key goes into my enemy’s one remaining eye, like a spoon into Jell-O.
I yank the key out of the gory hole.
Unfathomably, he continues to squeeze my neck, unfazed.
I kick him again, but it’s like kicking a wall. I flail harder, my body wasting its remaining strength on useless convulsions.
My consciousness is fading faster.
It might be an artifact of all the white flecks messing up my vision, but I think I see white hands grab my tormentor by the neck.
With a sickening crunch, my attacker’s head separates from his body, and I see Vlad—the owner of the white hands.
Though my enemy has no head anymore, his grip on my throat doesn’t loosen.
Vlad grabs my attacker’s wrist and elbow and violently pulls.
The arm that was holding me rips into two pieces, a bone sticking out where the elbow used to be. Only the detached hand is at my neck now, like Thing in The Addams Family.
Vlad rips the hand off my neck, throws it on the floor, and stomps on it with a viciousness arachnophobes reserve for spiders.
Gasping for air, I slide down the wall.
Vlad goes on a stomping rampage. His foot comes down hard on the glass sticking out of the detached head, pushing the shard all the way into the skull, and then more stomping follows, with bones crunching and body parts exploding all around us.
I scramble for my apartment door.
My savior might be more dangerous than my earlier attackers.
At the very least, he’s more savage than they were.
Lunging for the door, I get the key ready for rapid insertion.
The sounds of bones breaking cease, which means Vlad must’ve found a reason to stop his grisly task.
I stick the key into the lock and turn it so hard I scape the skin off my fingers.
The door unlocks, and I shove it all the way open, but before I can enter, a powerful arm blocks my path.
“Who controlled them?” Vlad’s face is a mask of such ugly fury that I can’t believe I found him attractive only minutes prior.
“Let me go,” I croak out, ducking under his arm.
He grabs for my shoulder but gets my shirt.
The material rips as he spins me around to face him.
His eyes are mirrors—like the eyes of the men who wore all black in my TV studio maybe-not-nightmare.
“Who controlled them?” he demands again, and this time, his voice seems to take over the universe.
“I don’t know.” I somehow find the strength to pull away, leaving a part of my shirt in his grip as I take a step back, nearly tripping over the threshold.
His nostrils flare, but he makes no move to come after me. “Invite me in,” he commands through gritted teeth. My reflection in his mirrored eyes is so translucently pale you can almost see the living room through me.
His request is utterly unreasonable, yet something inside me makes me yearn to comply.
Dazedly, I fight the compulsion as a flurry of motion on the floor catches my attention.
Fluffster is standing between me and Vlad.
To my shock, the chinchilla makes a sound that resembles a hybrid between an angry bird’s chirp and a snake’s hiss.
Vlad looks down, his eyes widening as the mirror effect fades. “Domovoi?”
Fluffster stands on his back legs and chirp-hisses again.
I fully expect Vlad to kick my furry friend, and if he does, I’ll stab him in the eye—apparently, I’m capable of that.
To my surprise, Vlad backs away from the door. Before he changes his mind, I slam the door shut and quickly lock it.
Apartment secured, I slide down the door, panting as I rub my aching throat.
Fluffster loses his aggressive stance and jumps onto my lap.
Stroking his heavenly fur instantly calms me, so I double down on relaxation and breathe for five seconds in and out, the way I learned earlier today.
Soon, I drop to just a fifteen out of ten on the freak-out scale. Weirdly, what bothers me the most is that I didn’t faint during this whole incident, yet I did when speaking to a bunch of hedge fund guys this morning.
What’s wrong with my danger priorities?
When I can approximate thinking again, I get my phone out to dial 911, noticing as I do that my fingers are still trembling.
“Sasha,” Ariel says from the middle of the living room. “Are you okay?”
; Ariel’s hair is wet, and she’s covered in a bath towel, so in an epic effort of mental finagling, I realize she must’ve just come out of the shower.
“I’m so far from okay that ‘okay’ might as well be in Australia,” is what I want to say, but all I manage to squeeze out of my dry lips is, “They tried to kill me.”
“What?” Gripping her towel, Ariel rushes over to me and sits on her haunches. “What happened?”
“Body parts,” I say, and the reminder makes my breathing go ragged once more. “Hallway. Vlad. Two guys crash into me with their cars.”
“Slow down.” She puts a hand on my shoulder. “You’re in shock.”
I stroke Fluffster once more, take a deep breath again, and hold it for five seconds before letting it out. A bit calmer, I tell Ariel a broken version of recent events, starting with the gray-skinned guy’s attack at the TV studio and ending with the gray-skinned guys coming out of the elevator—and how Vlad turned them into a pile of gore.
Ariel listens with wide-eyed shock but without the appropriate disbelief. When I’m done, she says urgently, “Don’t call the police.”
“What are you talking about?” I look at her for any signs of this being a joke, but she looks as serious as liver cancer. “There are body parts in the hallway. How can I not call them?”
She gets up, takes Fluffster from me, and puts him on the floor. Then she pulls me up, tugging me away from the door.
“Wait,” I say, but she’s already stuck her head out into the hallway. “He might be lurking there,” I finish lamely.
Ignoring my warning, Ariel leaves the safety of the apartment. I stumble after her on shaking legs, and as I touch the doorway, I hear her murmur to herself, “Wow. These bodies were embalmed at some point.”
“What did you say?” I ask, but she just drags in a man’s smashed torso from the hallway and drops it in the middle of our living room.
I gape at it, unable to believe there’s a chunk of human meat just sitting there. The stench reaches my nostrils, and I gag.
Coughing hoarsely, I pull up my shirt to cover my nose and mouth. “Did you say these guys were already dead a while?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” she says, giving me a fake smile. “It was the shock of seeing that slaughter.”
I’m not as good as Nero at lie detection, but when it comes to Ariel, I can easily tell when she’s lying.
Before I can challenge her, she goes back into the hallway and returns with another limbless—and headless—stinky torso.
That I don’t throw up is a symptom of shock—that, or some other stress-related altered state of consciousness. Through the shreds of this man’s shirt, I can see the carvings that Beatrice—the woman in my dream—made on his skin.
Trying not to breathe in the foul air, I gingerly approach the body and move the shirt over with the tip of my shoe, so I can see the center of his chest.
There are indeed a number of embalming scars.
Checking the other torso, I find the carvings and the scars there too—plus the phone holder Beatrice had made with her knife.
If I wanted a logical explanation for how an embalmed corpse might move, I’d hypothesize a metal skeleton robot under all the dead flesh—something like a Terminator, only with a rotting outer shell. However, I don’t see any metal gleaming from the rotting stubs where the arms, legs, and head used to be.
“Get away from them,” Ariel says as she drags in two legs. “You could get an infection.”
The idea of infection jolts me out of the numb bewilderment encasing me. My stomach violently turns over, and I nearly trip over Fluffster as I run to the bathroom, where I bend over the toilet and lose my second dinner of the day.
Throwing up makes me feel a tiny bit better—as though this is just a case of alcohol poisoning, not an impossible situation that I’ve found myself in. After I wash my hands and face and thoroughly brush my teeth, I feel almost human.
Back in the living room, the pile of body parts is now complete with heads and limbs—but both Fluffster and Ariel are missing.
Before I can freak out, Ariel appears from her room, having changed into jeans and a t-shirt.
She walks determinedly into the kitchen and comes back with a roll of garbage bags in her hand.
“What are you going to do?” I ask, even though it’s obvious she plans to fill the garbage bags with human remains.
“We need to get rid of this before Felix gets home.” She unrolls a bag and separates it from the others. “He’ll freak out.”
I hysterically chuckle at her understatement. Felix is so skittish about blood he once fainted at the sight of a used tampon in the bathroom, and we’ve been covering them with toilet paper ever since. He also forbade Ariel from sharing stories about her med school program because he nearly passed out after hearing one.
“If he sees this, he’ll develop a speech impediment.” I wave my hand to encompass the stinking mess in front of us. “I don’t understand why I’m not fainting myself.”
“Faint if you must. I’ve got this.” Ariel bends down and picks up a small piece of flesh that might be the remnants of the hand that was around my neck.
“But what is your plan?” I ask, trying not to throw up yet again as I hold my shirt up to cover my nose. “You can’t just put garbage bags with body parts into the trash chute. Or are you planning to dump them in the Hudson with all the tourists filming us? You can get a ticket for throwing regular garbage in there, you know. And what about the stench and all the stains in the hallway?”
I picture us getting caught by the cops with bags full of cadavers and shudder.
“I have no idea, but I’ll figure it out.” Ariel puts her grisly trophy into the bag and picks up the eyeless head of Mr. Charger.
Not for the first time, it strikes me that she’s way too calm about this situation. I know she’s seen some things in the Army, and she’s a medical professional and all, but like me, she should be wondering what the hell is going on with embalmed corpses stalking me and Rose’s boyfriend/nephew playing Jack the Ripper.
And why exactly are we not calling the cops?
“Ariel… you seem to know what’s going on.” I put my hands on my hips. “Spill it.”
Without saying a word, she puts the head into the bag and picks up a leg.
“I’m serious. Ariel, if you know something, tell me. What’s happening?”
The doorbell rings.
We exchange terrified glances.
“Maybe Felix lost his keys?” I suggest weakly.
Ariel puts the bag and the leg down, approaches the door, and looks into the peephole.
“It’s not Felix,” she says over her shoulder and, to my utter amazement, unlocks the door.
A short middle-aged man in a leather jacket is standing in the doorway. He looks familiar. I think I’ve seen him walk his dog in Battery Park, but I can’t swear it in my current condition.
His gray eyes examine Ariel, then me, then settle hungrily on the pile of body parts in the middle of the room.
“Greetings,” he says to Ariel. “Vlad called me. My name is Pada,” he says to me—as though Ariel already knows that.
Fluffster runs out of my room and stops in front of me, as if defending me from the newcomer.
“Vlad mentioned the domovoi,” Pada says, eyeing the chinchilla with concern. “Can you ask him to stand down?”
“Fluffster, sweetie, go to my room,” I say, mainly to keep him away from any potential danger. To the stranger, I say, “What do you want?”
What I really want to know is why Ariel hasn’t already smacked the door in the man’s face—just another mystery on a fast-growing list.
“Vlad took care of any nosy neighbors, but you still have a disposal problem.” His eyes dart all over the mound of gore. “Disposal is my specialty.”
“Come inside.” Ariel politely holds the door, as if the stranger has simply offered to fix our broken plumbing.
Pada walks in,
wheeling two large suitcases in each hand. Stopping in front of the pile, he lays the suitcases flat and zips one open.
Inside are bone cutters of various sizes and instruments that would probably make Felix faint if he saw them. There are also cleaning products and garbage bags that look sturdier than ours.
“Would you like some tea?” Ariel asks Pada with a politeness I’d expect from British royalty.
“Yes, thanks,” he says gruffly as he double-bags the garbage bag Ariel herself prepared earlier with his heavier-duty one. “Green if you have it.”
Ariel looks at me and then pointedly at the kitchen. She then walks over there, presumably to make tea, and I follow on autopilot.
I sit down at the table, and she starts the blender without putting anything into the device—I think her goal is to cover any unpleasant noises that might arrive from the living room. If so, I’m grateful.
“What’s going on?” I shout over the noise.
Ignoring me, Ariel pours water into the electric kettle and sets it to boil.
Reaching into the drawer next to the fridge, she takes out a pad and a pencil and sits at the table next to me.
“Tell me again what Beatrice—the woman in your dream—said to the mystery man on the phone,” she says into my ear with obvious urgency.
Straining my memory, I tell her what I can recall, and she writes it down word for word on the pad. Whenever I mention a few really crazy things from the dream—like vampires and werewolves—Ariel seems to shudder, like I’ve slapped her with my words.
“Is this the part where you start explaining to me what you know?” I ask after she stops transcribing.
The kettle whistles. Ariel jumps to her feet and begins to fuss over three teacups.
“Here.” She hands me a cup of chamomile tea—my evening favorite.
“How long do you think you can ignore my questions?” I blow at my tea with frustration, causing a bit to spill on the table. “What is happening?”
There’s a knock on the wall, so Ariel stops the blender and picks up the cup with the green tea.
“I’m done.” Pada walks in and gives Ariel a grumpy half-smile. “Vlad did most of my work for me.”
Ariel hands him his tea.
He gulps it down like it’s cold spring water on a hot day and not the boiling hot liquid that it is.