Security

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “Have you ever felt like—like, going through what we went through, it’s too much to ever explain to somebody? And the idea of even trying—you’re tired before you start.” She’s crying again. She wipes her tears on the sheet. “What it takes to survive that when you’re so small. How it never goes away, not all the way away, not ever.” She shakes on a sob. Brian turns her, very carefully, so she’s cradled to him. Tessa fights for a full breath and says, “If I could’ve told him, if I thought in a million years I could have made him understand how hard it is, even now, especially now, to feel . . .”

  Alone.

  I wonder if the anger is visible in my eyes. It wouldn’t matter. The Thinker is composing a text message, which the Killer—listening to Jules’s continuing screams like a man taking in the symphony—reads, replies to, and grudgingly obeys by walking toward her.

  Whereas I, behind my death mask, roil in Tessa’s self-­assured, self-­centered, self-­fulfilling prophesy that I couldn’t possibly understand her loneliness. While Brian pats and pets and shushes and squeezes, I ask Tessa, Would I be permitted to understand now? Now that I sit alone among the dead, death behind me, death beneath me, watching it watch you and stalk you and I’m powerless to stop it?

  Just as quickly, anger is punctured by Tessa’s voice in my head, asking, Are you sure I was going to say “alone”?

  Brian nudges his lips to Tessa’s and says, so she’ll feel the shapes the words make on her own mouth, “You don’t have to tell me. Or make me understand. I already know.” His tongue darts out to lick a teardrop. “Don’t I.”

  “Yes,” Tessa says. “Yes.”

  “You wanted to love him,” Brian says, “but you couldn’t. You couldn’t do that to him.” He nips her lower lip between his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” says Tessa, to Brian, to me.

  They’re getting turned on again. It’s in their voices, but so is fatigue.

  There is terrible fatigue in Jules’s voice, too, as the Killer comes toward her in the bedroom of Room 1801. She moans like a toddler in a nightmare. She’s wearing a brief silk nightie; it was white, and now it’s red. Jules didn’t help Justin fight; she sat in her corner, like this, and she moaned, like this, and when Justin could no longer fight, Jules still didn’t fight, as the Killer came for her and did all this damage. There’s a butter knife sticking out of Jules’s right ankle. The Killer did that to hobble her. He needn’t have. Terror has hobbled her.

  So why does she fight now, as he reaches for her?

  It’s three o’clock in the morning.

  It’s instinct. This time it isn’t more torture, more bleeding. This time it’s the end. An animal knows. Jules bats at his hand with pointless, open palms. The Killer twists a fistful of her hair and pulls. Jules is dragged backward, through the bedroom. She is dragged past her dead husband, for whom she reaches, crying. It’s pathetic but understandable, her display. She has regressed to a state of primal reaction. The Killer pulls her to the bedroom’s stairs. Then thuds can be heard, and shrieks in time, and then they appear in the regular penthouse’s entryway, and then in the eighteenth floor’s hall. Blood leaves a path behind them. Jules is reaching for her ankles. Both of her ankles have butter knives through them. The Killer drops Jules against the door to Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. He goes to the door to the stairway, opens it, and doesn’t quite close it.

  Brian and Tessa snuggle, speaking so low it’s hard to make out under Jules’s despondence, and Jules’s despondence is made that much more distracting by her attempt to collect herself. She’s trying to get it together. She’s looking around the hallway; she’s looking at the door to Room 1801 and crying anew, mumbling, “Justin, sweetie, sweetie.” She is red; all of her is red. Jules licks each of her palms and tries to scrub the blood off her face. Partly she succeeds; partly she blends it. She tucks back her hair and straightens her nightgown.

  “I’m not knocking on their door,” Jules says. Her chin is high and proud. One might say “snobby,” if one weren’t, at this moment, madly in love with her. “You’ll have to knock, asshole.”

  Jules’s bravery does crumble a little when the Killer swings the stairway door wide and stands forebodingly there.

  But she speaks through the crumbling. It is lovely and dreadful. “Did your mother make you those coveralls? They’re nice. Very Sears.”

  The Killer is slow in walking to her. He is patient, standing over her.

  Jules spits at him. It only hits his shin—the wounded left—but it gets the point across.

  The Killer raises his right hand, which holds his blood-­lathered knife. He raps his knuckles on the door, four times.

  Jules screams so loudly, the Thinker, on the twentieth floor, drops a king of hearts to cover his ears. “Tessa! Don’t open th—”

  Even soundproof rooms have doors through which knocks must echo.

  And if knocks must echo, the barest hint of a scream might do the same, no matter how efficiently the Killer was able to hack through Jules’s voice box and abort the rest of the message. He avoids the arteries again. He retreats to the door to the stairs and leaves it slightly open. Jules’s throat crackles like radio static.

  “What’s—” Tessa is bolt upright in the bed.

  So is Brian. “That sounded like your friend.”

  Tessa’s shuffling clothes, putting them on while walking. She takes Brian’s undershirt by mistake. It’s white, what is colloquially called a “wife-­beater.” Her nipples are pointed shadows underneath it.

  Brian’s leaping into his pants. “Wait. Wait, Tess!”

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  Tessa’s running down the spiral staircase while zipping up her skirt. She has no shoes. Brian’s buckling his belt at the top of the stairs—having shoved into his boots and pulled on his shirt—when Tessa reaches the deluxe penthouse’s door and wrenches it open.

  It’s so bright in the hall, compared to the penthouse. Jules’s body tumbles backward, over the threshold, her crackling throat a slow flow of black blood, the hall light triggering a switch in the deluxe penthouse’s camera feed so that it’s no longer night vision, no longer green, black, and white. So that the Killer’s knife, when he emerges from the stairway’s door, gleams like an oblong ruby. And Tessa is bent over Jules, and Jules is whistling from the throat, and Jules’s mouth mouths the word “Run” over and over again, and Brian is almost down the stairs, but the Killer moves quickly, very quickly, knife high.

  It is evidently not part of the plan to leave any survivors in the hotel.

  I once instructed Tessa, while she and I were boxing, “If a man attacks you and he’s an amateur, yes, certainly, use a knee to the groin. But professional assault personnel wear a cup. If a man attacks you and he looks professional, then, Tessa, put everything you’ve got into a shin kick.”

  Maybe this advice plays in her head.

  Maybe not.

  Maybe it penetrated deep enough into her mind, when she heard it, that it became a part of her, something she’ll carry as long as she lives, however long that will be.

  It will be at least another few seconds, because as the Killer comes for Tessa, as Brian runs across the penthouse to save her, as Jules gurgles, Tessa crouches and curls her left leg tight to the hip, releases it with an outward snap that is like a bear trap tripped, and the arch of her foot—the powerful part—connects solidly with the Killer’s wounded left shin. There is a dull thunk, not a crunch but good anyway, and the Killer makes a kind of desperate yapping noise as the pain of ripped-­open cuts impedes his coordination and he windmills over the women. If the Killer were allowed to fall forward, he might impale himself on his own damn knife, but no, Brian catches him around the belly and hurls him into the kitchen. Tessa’s pulling Jules up to sit against the door frame, seeing the blood, babbling, “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay. Don’t worry,” and like comments that are patently untrue. The Killer has recovered his wits, head-­butts Brian, and Brian falls. The K
iller raises the knife high up in both hands.

  Tessa screams so loudly, the Thinker returns to the security counter. The Thinker is searching for the audio feed volume. The audio feed volume is digital. It requires a code. The Thinker presses random buttons. The foyer’s chandelier goes dark, and the fountain in the maze’s center lights up and jets water at the night sky. The Thinker flaps an impatient wave at the controls and goes back to his cards.

  Brian rolls out of the path of the knife. The Killer uses so much force that he stabs through the carpet and into the flooring. He’s trying to pull the knife free when Tessa kicks him in the face. This time, there is a crunch. There is also wonderful, awful banshee screeching that any sane person would run away from, coming from Tessa’s mouth. The Killer cannot run. He tries to catch Tessa’s feet as they pummel him. Blood leaks out of his mask. He catches her foot, turns it, and she falls to the floor with a thud. She hits her head, but the carpet is stupidly thick. The Killer is wrapping his hands around Tessa’s throat when Brian leaps on his back. The Killer stands, reverses into the kitchen and into the refrigerator. Brian bounces off. Brian ducks a punch that dents the refrigerator, runs around the Killer and helps Tessa stand. “Stairs! Stairs!” Brian shouts as the Killer selects the biggest knife from the knife block. He pulls out a spare and rears back to throw it at Brian, but Tessa stumbles, so Brian falters, so the knife flips past where Brian’s head was a half second ago and embeds into the door frame with a thwummm. Tessa grabs for Jules, but Jules is dead. Brian propels Tessa and himself through the door to the stairwell.

  “Hurry!” Brian says. “Hurry! Hurry! Go!”

  “Is he behind us?”

  “No! He must be taking the elevator! Hurry, Tess! We can beat him—go, go!”

  The Killer’s shoulders quiver with rage. He steps over Jules. He hustles across the hall, into the regular penthouse, across the living room, into the secret elevator. He hits the “Lobby” button and turns around.

  Jules, not dead, smiles at him and raises a stiff middle finger right as the secret elevator’s seam sews shut. She laughs. It’s a gurgling sound. She wiggles so she can fall back to the floor. She flops around as her own blood drowns her.

  “Go! C’mon, Tess, hurry!”

  Brian and Tessa are running past the eleventh floor.

  The Killer, in the secret elevator, passes the ninth floor.

  There are no lights on in the foyer. It is dark as a grave. Until headlights bathe it bright. There’s a Lamborghini tracing the horseshoe of the parking lot. It’s Charles Destin’s Lamborghini.

  “Who is he?” Tessa says, running. They are passing the eighth floor. “Who’d want to do this?”

  The Killer is passing the second floor.

  The Thinker is watching Charles Destin pull on Manderley’s front doors. Destin curses at finding them locked. He has a woman with him. She’s wearing a short, thin gold dress and big hoop earrings. Destin says something to her about “a scenario” and rolls his eyes. He takes her hand and leads her around the outer perimeter of the hotel.

  The Killer is in Franklin’s office. He limps past the desk and filing cabinets, out, past the check-­in counter and the information desk. He goes to the stairway door and stands to the side of it, knife in both hands again, high above his head.

  “Go!” Brian says. “Go, go, go!”

  He and Tessa are running past the fourth floor.

  The Killer is waiting.

  Charles Destin is at the back door to Manderley, the one Brian and Tessa exited to visit the pool. Destin likes to bring women to Manderley for tours, though he rarely does this on Tuesdays. He is opening the back door.

  The Killer’s head turns to the sound of the back door. To the sound of Brian and Tessa, on the stairs (“Go! Go, Tess!”) as they run past the second floor. The Killer goes toward the back door. He is most of the way there when Destin says, “Voilà!” and flips on the chandelier.

  The woman screams. The Killer has the knife high. Destin manages to say, “Who—?” before the knife’s length disappears into the top of the woman’s head. Her eyes become all whites. The stairway door flies open. The Killer lifts the knife, and the woman rises off the ground a few inches, before sliding off and making a pile of skin and bones and thin gold fabric on the floor. The chandelier is bright, now specked with red splats from a geyser that shot from the dead woman’s head, and Destin is running for the front doors. Brian and Tessa are also running for the front doors, and the Killer is limping after them. His legs are long; he is still impressively fast. As Tessa screams, “Del, oh my G—,” Brian is screaming, “Go, Tess!” but Destin shoves Tessa as all three of them near the exit. Tessa slaloms to the left. Destin is a strong man, and determined. Tessa bashes into the fireplace, unsettling the mantel. Delores’s head falls and rolls. Brian runs to help Tessa. Destin gets to the doors and pulls on them, taking for granted they’ll open. They don’t open. The Killer is directly behind him. The Killer stabs, but Destin evades, does a move from his lacrosse days, runs through the wreckage of Delores, and slips. The Killer is running for him, and slips. The both of them bobble hopelessly through the bloody lobby like a pair of children trying to do a standing run down a Slip ’N Slide. Brian and Tessa watch. It’s too strange a sight not to watch. Tessa’s perhaps thinking how, this afternoon, Destin greeted her with a hello and a kiss to each cheek before reading the riot act to his every other employee. Tessa bleeds from a small cut on her right cheek, from the mantel. Her left hand is bleeding again, through her bandage. The Killer’s arm draws back, and the knife whips forward, whirls, sticks—with a thwap—in Charles Destin’s neck. He falls forward.

  It would appear Destin didn’t bankroll this hell after all.

  Brian rockets forward, pulling Tessa toward the back exit, but the Killer moves to block them, and so Brian and Tessa of one mind divert to the stairway door again, and climb.

  “Where’s fucking security?” says Tessa, her voice like a choir in the stairwell.

  “This floor, c’mon!” Brian says, stepping up to four, letting Tessa precede him into the hallway. The carpet is white, the walls white, the doors white with gold numbers on them, and card key locks of gold-­plated steel. Brian puts his back to the stairway door and whispers, “We’ll hear him pass us.”

  Tessa shakes her head, takes his hand, and leads him to a bend in the hallway. They somehow avoided the quarts and quarts of blood that have spilled in the lobby, so Brian’s boots and Tessa’s bare feet leave no prints. Brian puts an arm around her. He lays a finger to his lips. They listen.

  The Killer is sitting on the arm of a reception sofa, pulling up his pant leg to check his wounds. His shin is bleeding, but not badly. It isn’t that serious, but it’s an annoyance.

  The Thinker is pulling up a seat at the security counter. Right beside me. He deposits a playing card facedown in front of my open eyes. Then a card in front of him. Then another card in front of me, until both of us have five cards. The Thinker picks up the five cards he dealt this seeming-­dead man and studies them. It’s a hand of poker.

  The Killer rolls down his pant leg and stands. He skirts the sofa, bends, and stands again with Delores’s head in his right hand. In his left hand is the knife that he pulled, laboriously, from Destin’s neck. The Killer places Delores’s head back on the mantel and goes to Destin, who is not dead but dying. Destin has crawled so that only his feet are visible around the check-­in desk, with the angle of Camera 4. There are other angles available, but they are higher in the bank of monitors, and I can’t look because the Thinker is studying my poker hand. It’s a good hand, one card from a full house. The Thinker makes a sound of displeasure and deals two new hands.

  The Killer walks toward Charles Destin, and Destin’s feet become frantic. The Killer bends to him, and his feet become still more frantic. The Killer’s elbow appears periodically, in a sawing motion.

  The fourth-­floor hallway is high in the bank of monitors. But if one cannot look, one can at leas
t listen.

  Brian’s voice (in a whisper): “What’s taking him so long?”

  Tessa’s: “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Je—”

  Brian’s: “Maybe he took the elevator.”

  Tessa’s: “Christ, Jesus—”

  Brian’s: “How’s your head?”

  Tessa’s: “He killed Jules. God. God, he—”

  Brian’s: “Stay calm. We need to stay calm.”

  Tessa’s (hissing): “You be calm!”

  Brian’s: “That’s the spirit.”

  Tessa’s (laughing, sort of): “We’re gonna die.”

  Brian’s (serious): “No. No we’re not.”

  Tessa’s (crying and trying not to): “No. We’re not. We’re not gonna die.”

  Brian’s: “Again.”

  Tessa’s: “We’re not gonna die.”

  Brian’s: “One more time.”

  Tessa’s (voice like a diamond’s edge): “We’re gonna live. We’re gonna live.”

  Brian’s: “We live. That’s how this goes. Both of us.”

  Tessa’s: “Right. Why’s—what’s—”

  Brian’s: “Doesn’t matter. It’s happening. This is what’s happening now. So say it again.”

  Tessa’s: “Both of us live.”

  Brian’s (a kissing noise): “Where’s he bleeding? I didn’t notice.”

  Tessa’s: “Left shin. And I think I broke his nose.”

  She did. The Killer is taking tissues from a box on the check-­in desk and rolling tubes to stick up his nostrils, under his mask. He bends and rises with Destin’s head in his right hand, knife in his left. He goes to the mantel and puts Destin’s head beside Delores’s.

  Brian’s: “Fire alarms?”

  Tessa’s (sounding regretful): “If the phone lines are—wait.”

  (long pause)

  The Killer looks in the direction of the stairway door. He sags. He takes out his phone, taps, and types.