by Joshua Ingle
She tried to steady her breathing as she inconspicuously reached a hand into her purse, withdrew the kitchen knife she’d stashed there, then hid it in front of her body, its razor edge ready to strike. When she passed another picture, she checked the reflection in its glass and saw Brandon remove a golf club from behind his back. He raised it to strike. An adrenaline rush gripped Crystal as tightly as she gripped her knife. She whirled around to confront him.
But Brandon’s imposing presence and hateful gaze drained her courage. She froze in place, too terrified to move, even to defend herself. Brandon brought his club down toward her stomach.
From out of nowhere, Virgil the security guard slammed into Brandon with enough force to jerk him off his feet and send him plunging to the floor. The collision with the hard marble audibly knocked the wind out of Brandon and sent the club sliding far out of the way. Crystal backed toward a wall, dropping her braille book in the process.
“Hey!” Cole said. “What’s going on?”
Cole? He was turning into the hallway from the stairwell, feeling his way along the walls, lengthening his gait to reach the action faster.
“Brandon’s fucking crazy!” Crystal yelled to Cole. “Come to me! We need to leave, now.”
Brandon flailed on the ground, trying to regain his breath.
Crystal moved toward Cole, but Virgil—the guy who was supposed to be helping her!—rushed headlong toward her and pinned her against a wall. She yelped. Then for the first time, she noticed his unsettling appearance: the security guard’s clothes were sopping wet, his eyes bloodshot, and his skin a sickly bluish-white. His whole body shook like he couldn’t quite wrestle control of it. The wild panic in his eyes was contagious.
“Run!” he bellowed. “All of you! Back up to your room! You—run! Go!” He barked his sentence fragments with a wild urgency.
Cole neared them. “Virgil. Virgil, buddy. What’s wrong? What do you need?”
“You can’t leave, Cole,” Virgil said. “Do not try and leave this building!”
Crystal ignored him; whatever Virgil’s problem was, it couldn’t possibly be as pressing as hers. “Cole! Brandon tried to hit me in the fucking stomach. Don’t let him near you. We need to go get help.”
“What? Where is he?”
Virgil’s hands still gripped Crystal’s shoulders, and now he tried pulling her away from Cole, back toward the elevator… back toward Brandon. “Please listen,” Virgil said. “You shouldn’t be down here. It’s not safe.”
Shut up and let me go! Crystal wanted to scream, but she feared that it might provoke him further.
Cole followed Virgil’s voice and bumped into him, then he grasped Crystal’s arm when he found her. He tried to get between them and separate them, but his blind maneuvering only prompted more resistance from Virgil.
A short distance away, Brandon stood. He looked fully recovered. His eyes were fuming as he stomped toward them.
Cole and Virgil seemed not to notice the approaching danger as they struggled against each other, pulling Crystal and themselves in all different directions. Virgil continued to slosh water everywhere.
“Virgil, what’s your problem? What are you doing?” Crystal said as calmly as she could, trying not to panic, and failing. “Let me go! Get Brandon! Keep him away from me!”
Virgil abruptly relented and let her go, then raised his arms defensively as if pleading for them to hear him out. “Okay. I don’t want to restrain you. You’re free to choose. But you’re all in great danger.”
Brandon swung mightily and delivered a knockout punch to Virgil’s temple. The guard went down hard, but somehow recovered almost immediately, leaped back to his feet, and assaulted Brandon again.
Crystal led Cole around the scuffle and ran with him toward the rotunda-shaped lobby, where a ring of tall glass windows exposed them to a full view of the outdoors around the condo. If I can get out there and find other people, I’ll be safe.
She heard the thunder of footsteps behind her and turned. Brandon was rushing straight for her, Virgil chasing him. She still gripped the kitchen knife; she raised it to stab Brandon, but he was on her too quickly. He caught her arm and twisted the knife out of her hand. As it clattered against the floor, Brandon clamped his other hand around Crystal’s throat, but just then Virgil caught up to him and pummeled Brandon’s face with inhuman force, instantly taking him down. Brandon’s body crumpled to the floor as limply as a rag doll’s.
Crystal didn’t pause to pick up the knife, she just turned and dragged Cole across the lobby. He resisted, yelling fire and brimstone at Brandon. “You’re done, Brandon! That’s it! You’re fucking done!” Cole apparently didn’t know that Brandon lay unconscious on the floor, and that his yelling was instead directed toward the crazed security guard, who was following them toward the vestibule at the front of the building.
“Please listen,” Virgil said again. “You’re not safe here.” Now he was scaring Crystal almost as much as Brandon did, so she ignored him and helped Cole through the first set of glass double doors. “Crystal.” The security guard’s voice was cold, forceful. “If you go outside, you’re going to die.”
What the hell? Now two maniacs were after Crystal. She needed to call the police.
A car horn blared, cutting through her confusion. Heather sat in her car under the portico outside, gesturing for Crystal to come get in. She looked worried by the presence of Cole and Virgil. Could she see that Crystal was in distress?
Crystal yanked on the front doors.
They were locked.
She tried again, then glanced back at Virgil, who lurked in the lobby, just past the vestibule’s inner doors. “Why won’t the doors open?” Crystal asked him through the glass.
“I locked them.”
Crystal felt panic growing inside her again, so she fought it. With the front doors locked, she and Cole were trapped in the entrance hall. Virgil—and Brandon unconscious behind him—blocked their only exit. “Unlock the doors!” Crystal demanded.
“You can’t leave,” Virgil said. “They already killed the security guard. They’ll kill you too. Call Heather and tell her to drive back down into the garage.”
Crystal turned to Heather and waved frantically. “Heather, help! We’re locked in! Can you open the doors from out there?” Heather probably couldn’t hear her, but responded to her yelling anyway. She turned off her car, got out, and paced toward the doorway. Her actions elicited a frenzied response from Virgil.
“No! Get back in the car!” He burst into the vestibule with Crystal and Cole. “GET BACK IN THE CAR!”
“Do you have your phone?” Crystal asked Cole. “Call the fucking cops.” While she looked around for something to use for self-defense, or to break the glass of the front doors, Heather arrived on the other side of the glass. She yanked on the door handles but they didn’t budge. “Heather, this guy is crazy,” Crystal said. “Break the glass. Find something and break the glass.”
But instead of helping Crystal, Heather remained motionless. She shivered violently.
“Heather?”
“What’s she doing?” Cole asked.
Heather blinked a few times, then looked to the side and reached out her hand as if to touch something next to her. Then she shivered again, her arms went limp, and her whole posture slumped.
“Heather?”
Her eyes took on a strange look then: darkness, emptiness. Virgil, apparently disturbed by what he was seeing, looked away.
“Heather, what’s wrong?”
Seemingly unaware she was being spoken to, Heather calmly and curiously stared around in all directions, as if observing a scenic view.
Then she turned and walked away, toward the road in the distance.
“Heather! Cole, what the fuck is she doing?”
“I can’t see, Crystal. I don’t know.”
“Heather!”
As Heather strode away at a leisurely pace, Crystal continued calling to her, then backed away when Virg
il stepped up to the glass. He gazed out the doors, his head darting in several directions. “They’re here,” he said. “They’re all here.”
A fantastic wind suddenly gathered outside, whipping through the trees both in front of the entrance hall and by the pool out behind the lobby.
Virgil pounced at the inner doors and held one open. “Upstairs, now. Go, go, go, go, go!”
After one last glance back toward Heather, Crystal followed Cole back inside. “Oh no,” Virgil said behind her as she fled. She turned to see him staring at a service door on the far side of the lobby: an open service door.
“Run! Go!”
Virgil ran up to Crystal and pushed her toward the hallway, spurring her to rush even faster. She and Cole sprinted past Brandon’s unconscious form and toward the elevator beyond. Cole’s hand clutched Crystal’s the entire way. When she glanced back, Virgil was facing the open service door and planting his feet, bracing himself. Then he suddenly winced in pain and crumpled to the floor in apparent agony. From two hundred feet down the hallway, she could hear his scream.
•
In the elevator, Crystal and Cole caught their breaths as they rode back to the tenth floor. Crystal hadn’t noticed until now, but Cole seemed flustered too. He’s just as scared as I am.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I guess. What do we do?”
“I don’t know. Where’d Heather go?”
Crystal shook her head. “I don’t know. Can you call nine-one-one already?”
“Yeah.” Cole dialed on his cell as the elevator opened onto the living room of Cole’s condo unit.
Crystal paced toward a window to find out what she could see on the ground. “We’ve gotta get to your car. We’ve gotta leave.”
“There’s no reception in the garage,” Cole said. “Let me call the cops first, then we’ll head down. Yeah, hello?” Speaking to the 9-1-1 operator, Cole quickly related their location, their names, the night’s events.
Crystal scanned the roads below and raised a hand to her mouth when she saw… “Oh, God.”
“What?” Cole stepped up next to her.
“There she is. Heather. She’s floating face down in the fountain.”
“Is she moving?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
The screens enclosing the balcony shuddered as a heavy wind picked up outside. The windows in the kitchen creaked with the force of the gust.
And then, very faintly, came another ominous sound: the whirring of elevator gears. Two, three, four. The floor numbers above the elevator door counted upward.
Cole spoke hurriedly into his phone. “Hey, that psycho guard I told you about is coming up the elevator.” Five, six, seven. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotta go.” He hung up and pocketed the phone as the wind raged outside.
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting you.” Eight, nine… ten.
Cole stepped in front of Crystal. The gesture was nice, but Crystal dug through her purse to find her knife anyway. Then she remembered she’d dropped it downstairs. So she threw her purse aside in case she needed to defend herself.
DING. The elevator doors whisked open. “Virgil, we don’t want any trouble,” Cole said in a fake macho voice that sounded weird coming from him.
Crystal grimaced in dismay, then whispered in Cole’s ear. “It’s Brandon.”
8
For a few moments, Brandon just stared at Cole and the little slut cowering behind him. He’d been in such a hurry that he’d forgotten his golf club downstairs, but that didn’t matter. These two sheep would be easy to deal with. Cole would understand, eventually, once he’d wiped Crystal’s stink off himself. With no one but Brandon to lean on, passive little Cole would never give him up to the authorities. At least Brandon hoped he wouldn’t. Even if he did, there were other ways of escape.
Brandon rubbed his forehead on his shirt sleeve, smearing blood on it, then approached Cole, ready for a fight.
“Heather’s dead,” Cole said.
Brandon halted. He tried to process the startling information. Heather was dead? That didn’t make any sense. He’d just had a conversation with her ten minutes ago, in this very room. She’d just gone downstairs to get her car. Cole must be playing some kind of coward’s trick to get me to back down.
“She drowned in the fountain out front. Go look for yourself.”
What? Brandon shuffled over to the window, keeping his eyes on Crystal in case she tried anything. Then he peeked outside. Indeed, far out front, beside the gates to the main road, Heather’s body drifted in the fountain pool.
Brandon heard a latch click behind him, and turned to find the door to the service hallway opening. Tattered and bleeding, Virgil entered. Small cuts adorned his face, and his clothes were torn in odd places. Brandon hadn’t done that to him—had Heather? Virgil looked like he’d just been in some kind of intense physical confrontation. And he was soaking wet…
Brandon stalked toward him. “What the fuck did you do to Heather?” He landed a punch on Virgil’s forehead. The guard fell, and Brandon kicked him in the gut as hard as he could. “Hey, help me with him!” Brandon called to Cole.
“Calm down. He didn’t do it.”
Yeah, right. Brandon continued to batter the murderous guard relentlessly until Virgil caught his foot and pulled it out from under him. Brandon landed on his back with a thud, and Virgil stood easily, as if the beating had never occurred—just like he had downstairs.
Does this guy feel pain? He had to be tweaked on something heavy. Of all the nights for the dude to wig out, couldn’t he have picked a night less inconvenient for Brandon?
Virgil hurried around the room, examining the walls, the ceiling, and especially the windows. Yep, he was definitely wired up. He talked as fast as a jackhammer. “If we’re done with that, I need you to seal all entrances. I cleared out the downstairs area and managed to close that door to the pool, but they’ll be looking for other ways in. Are there any entrances up here besides the elevator and the service hallway?” Virgil squinted as if trying to remember the condo’s layout, then answered his own question. “Right, the stairwell, but I closed its lobby door earlier. Good. Any windows that open?”
“Just the balcony doors,” Cole answered.
Behind Cole, his whore locked eyes with Brandon. Brandon returned Crystal’s gaze with malice, then wiped off some more blood and struggled to his feet.
Virgil finished his inspection and turned back to Cole. “Okay, we’re safe in here. For now. You can’t go outside, okay?”
Brandon shook his head in disbelief. “The fuck are you doing, man?”
Virgil ignored him and spoke to Cole. “Do you have a gun?”
Cole kept his mouth shut, so Virgil turned to Brandon.
“Do any of you have a gun?”
“None of your business, asswipe.”
“Disassemble it. I’m serious about that. You need to do it immediately. A gun won’t hurt them at all, but they could use it to hurt you. Throw it away.”
“We called the police and they’re on their way,” Cole said. Brandon couldn’t tell if the threat was aimed at Virgil or at himself.
Shit. Crystal was still hunkered behind Cole like he was a human shield. Brandon couldn’t harm her now, not when the police were on their way, but he couldn’t let her rat him out either.
Nothing matters, his inner voice repeated to comfort him. I am indifferent.
Virgil appeared to be even more distraught than Brandon at the news that the police were coming. “You did what? Oh, no. No, now even if we call back and tell them we’re okay, they’ll still send a patrol to check it out.” He rubbed his temples. “Uh, okay, I think—I think I’ll have to leave you, and go save them when they get here.”
Brandon had half a mind to ask him where he got his drugs. On a better night, he would have indulged himself.
“Save them?” Crystal asked.
Virgil raised his head at the question, and a th
in smile formed on his lips. He reached out his hand and addressed Crystal as if meeting a celebrity. “Crystal. Hi.” Crystal reluctantly shook his hand, then Virgil turned to greet Lover Boy. “Cole. A pleasure to meet you. And Brandon.” Virgil crossed the distance to Brandon, but Brandon just stared icily and refused the proffered handshake, so Virgil backed away to address the whole group.
“I’m sorry for my… my entrance. I am—I’m here to save you. I apologize for not getting to Heather or Virgil in time, but three of you are still here, and alive, and I will find a way to save all of you. That’s a promise.”
“You need a fucking straightjacket,” Brandon said as he moved toward the kitchen sink to clean off his face.
Again Virgil ignored him. “I need you all to tell me a little more about yourselves. What sorts of things have been on your minds tonight? Have you recently made any significant, um, choices?”
Scratch.
All heads turned toward the windows, where the noise had originated. It sounded like a shoe dragging on the sidewalk, but muffled by the windows. Probably the patio furniture falling over in the wind. The gusts were strong tonight, sending the balcony screens quivering.
Scratch.
The second noise came from the far kitchen windows, beyond which lay… empty air. Huh? A third and a fourth noise grated outside, and then a steady cacophony joined in, from all directions except the screened-in balcony. Crystal and Cole looked horrified, but Brandon was just sick of whatever game Virgil was playing.
“They’re trying to dig through the walls,” Virgil said. “Don’t worry though. They couldn’t even break a window. We’re safe.”
The chorus of scrapes shifted, leaving the immediate area and moving toward the walls outside the study and the master bedroom. Virgil gingerly walked to the oak doors of the study and peeked inside.
Brandon left the kitchen, followed him, then spoke as if to a child, mocking him. “Virgil, is there something dangerous outside? Maybe we could all escape if you jump out a window to distract it.”
Virgil paused at the study entrance, then entered the room to examine it. “No, don’t worry. The windows and the balcony door in here are closed.”