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Nowhere to Hide Page 2

by Tobin, Tracey


  Nancy looked back up to see that his face was still totally earnest. She raised an eyebrow. “You’re putting me on,” she insisted without the hint of a smile.

  Ken shook his head, threw back the last of his whiskey, and motioned for another. Nancy grabbed the glass and poured another shot while Ken talked. “Scout’s honor,” he told her. “The examiners insisted. First of all, when they began looking her over it had only been about ninety minutes since the altercation in the park, but her body was already room temperature, which should have taken almost half a day to happen. So they started looking closer and found that the acids and gases in her lungs and stomach were too far advanced for someone who was supposed to have been dead for less than two hours. They figure the levels coincided with someone who had been dead for closer to two days.” He accepted the glass from Nancy’s outstretched hand and shot the entire thing in one gulp. “Obviously they must have screwed up somehow, or someone did something to the body before they got to it. Their manager sent them both home for the rest of the week while they send the body away to a bigger lab for more testing. The unofficial conclusion right now is that the woman had some as-yet-unknown disease with symptoms that reflect what the examiners saw.” He shrugged in a way that suggested he thought that the conclusion was complete bullshit.

  Nancy stared at her customer for a few more moments, sure that he must be making the whole thing up to try and freak her out, but she saw no physical evidence on his face to suggest that he might be lying. “How long have those particular examiners been on the job?” she inquired, her voice quiet.

  “Ah,” Ken replied, twirling a finger around the edge of his empty glass. “That was the first thing I thought as well, but one of the two has been working in the morgue for seventeen years now. The other has only been at our hospital for about ten months, but she worked at another for six years before moving here.”

  Nancy nodded. How could a seventeen-year veteran on the job make that kind of insane mistake? Nearly seven years of experience was nothing to scoff at either. But of course it had to be a mistake. The woman had clearly been very much alive when she’d taken a chunk out of that boy’s neck. Nancy found herself leaning toward the somewhat-less-insane idea of an unknown illness.

  They thought in silence for a long while after that. Ken stared at his empty glass, trying to decide if he’d have another. Eventually Nancy broke the silence, opting to change the subject and get her mind off the creepy story of the unknown woman. “Doing anything interesting this weekend?” she asked as nonchalantly as she could.

  Ken shrugged. “There’s a hockey game I’ll probably watch, but that’s about it. You?”

  Nancy thought for a moment before answering. “I think I’ll take Terri-Lynn out, maybe go shopping or something. Cheer her up, you know?”

  “You’re a good friend,” Ken said with a smile. “Maybe I’ll move into your building so you can take me out when I’m sad.”

  Nancy smiled and felt her face grow warm. Her brain went into overdrive, filing through all the possible clever things she could respond with, but instead she just mumbled incoherently.

  “Hmm?” Ken asked, leaning forward.

  With her heart skipping a beat or three, Nancy simply grinned and pretended that she hadn’t said anything at all.

  Nancy had to give herself a mental pat on the back; Terri-Lynn looked significantly more cheerful after spending $300 on new clothes and shoes. Nancy, who’d settled for a nice pair of light blue runners and a cheap digital watch, shook her head and smiled at her neighbor as they lugged their purchases back to Nancy’s red four-door clunker.

  “How big is your closet, exactly?” Nancy asked, laughing. “Do you have a bigger apartment than me or something? Seriously, I couldn’t fit all your clothes in my entire living room.”

  Terri-Lynn snorted and grinned. “I find a way, my dear. Perhaps my wardrobe leads to Narnia!”

  Their school-girlish giggles echoed off the walls of the nearly-empty underground parking garage. They’d shopped right up until closing time, and Nancy’s was one of the few vehicles left in the poorly-lit cement structure.

  As Nancy squashed the bags into her trunk, she noticed that Terri-Lynn had stopped chuckling and was being unusually quiet. “What’s wro-?” she began to ask, but then she followed Terri-Lynn’s gaze. In the far corner of the lot, some sixty feet away, a tall, dark figure was shuffling very slowly in their direction. For a moment Nancy couldn’t even tell that he was moving, but as she stared she could see the small movements of his feet dragging along the cement floor.

  “Hello?” Terri-Lynn called out in a meek voice. The figure didn’t reply.

  “Come on,” Nancy insisted. She grabbed Terri-Lynn’s arm with authority. “Let’s go get some ice cream before the shop closes.” She didn’t know why she felt so nervous about the figure. It wasn’t as though he was rushing toward them. In fact, at his current rate of travel he might not reach them for hours.

  Terri-Lynn was still staring across the lot, but she allowed herself to be pushed into the passenger side of the car. Nancy ran to the driver’s side and jabbed the key into the ignition, turning it so hard that her car cried out in protest before the engine flared to life. A Rolling Stone’s song, just loud enough to give her a mini heart attack, blared through the stereo speakers.

  They had to drive past the shambling figure in order to get out of the lot. Nancy drove much faster than was necessarily safe to get away from it as soon as possible, but she couldn’t help glancing toward it as they whipped by. It was a man; he turned his head toward them as they passed, but the movement was too slow for Nancy to really see his face, and then they were gone.

  The drive to the nearby Dairy Queen was a quiet one. Nancy ground her teeth the whole way, annoyed that the creepy man had freaked them out when they’d been having such a good time. He had probably just been drunk, she thought. Then again, he reminded Nancy irresistibly of the woman from the news video. She told herself that there was nothing to it, that his demeanor had just seemed coincidentally familiar enough to make her uncomfortable. The mental reassurance didn’t calm the racing of her heart.

  And, unfortunately, ice cream did not offer the escape Nancy had been hoping for. The women knew something was wrong the instant they stepped into the restaurant. Though the lights were on and the door was open, the place seemed to be deserted. While leaning over the counter to see if any workers were hiding near the drive-thru window, Nancy noticed a sundae container that had been dropped and left on the floor beneath the soft-serve machine. The ice cream had long since melted and was a sticky mess all over the floor.

  “Let’s just go home,” Terri-Lynn suggested. The nervousness in her voice was palpable.

  Nancy turned to her friend and tried her hardest to smile reassuringly, though she thought it came out more as a frightened grimace. “Just a sec,” she insisted, and then she leaned back over the counter. “Hello?” she called, tentative. “Is anyone there?”

  Terri-Lynn stood back near the garbage bins, glancing around with an uncomfortable and upset look on her face. She shifted her weight from foot to foot as though preparing to make a break for it at any moment.

  Nancy thought she heard something from back behind the kitchen. After considering for a moment she lifted a leg and began to slide herself across the counter.

  “What are you doing?” Terri-Lynn hissed.

  “Shh!” Nancy shot back with a finger to her mouth. “I’ll be right back.”

  Walking through the abandoned kitchen was strange and surreal. The fryers were still running, the fries in the bottom of the baskets burned black as coal. A burger was in the heating tray, waiting for the rest of the meal that would accompany it. A mop was propped up against the wall, having been slid across the floor between late-night orders.

  A whimpering sound was coming from what looked like a broom closet. Nancy turned the handle slowly, paused for a second to take a breath, and then pulled the door open. A young girl
, maybe sixteen or seventeen, was sitting on the floor. She had her back pressed up against the far wall of the closet, as far back as she could make herself go, and she was sobbing into her hands. When the door opened she looked up at Nancy with huge, glistening eyes. “Don’t hurt me!” she squeaked.

  Nancy tried her best to smile a warm smile. “I’m not going to hurt you, hon,” she assured the girl. “It’s okay, I’ll help you.” She offered a hand and after a few long moments the girl moved one shaking arm to reach for it.

  Nancy had enough time to process that the girl’s shoulder was bleeding through her crisp, white and blue work shirt when a shriek echoed through the restaurant. Terri-Lynn came hurtling toward them. Nancy stared at her with her heart in her throat and the young Dairy Queen employee shrank back into the closet. Terri-Lynn had tears brimming in her eyes and appeared to be holding back a violent gag reflex. She tried to speak as Nancy raised her eyebrows, but she could only gesture frantically toward the industrial freezer in the back.

  The young employee grabbed at Nancy’s hand as she began to walk toward the freezer. “I-I had to!” she sobbed miserably. “H-he attacked me! H-he bit my arm!”

  Nancy leaned far enough forward to glimpse the large pool of blood seeping out of the freezer’s open door and quickly turned away. She counted to ten and then decided not to look back. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see what the girl had done in order to protect herself. Instead she took the girl by the shoulders and focused on her eyes. “Where’s the phone?” she demanded. She tried to sound gentle and soothing, but she knew her voice was shaking. “We’ve got to call the police.” She took note of the blood that was still seeping through the girl’s shirt and added as an afterthought, “We should get you to a hospital.”

  The girl’s deep brown eyes widened and a wave of tears poured out. “Am I going to jail?” she cried. She looked like she was living the worst nightmare she could imagine.

  Though Nancy couldn’t honestly say that she knew how these things worked, she found herself pulling the girl into a shaky embrace, holding her tight and stroking her hair while comforting her. “No, of course not. It was self defense. It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  Nancy met Terri-Lynn’s frantic eyes over the sobbing girl’s shoulder. Though they had no way of knowing the extent of it at that moment, they shared a terrified look that indicated that neither of them really believed anything was going to be ‘okay’.

  Chapter Two

  Nancy woke the following night to a steady thud...thud...thud... somewhere in the building. For a groggy moment she thought she’d burned her supper again and groaned at the idea of her neighbors banging down her apartment door. Then she realized that she wasn’t on her couch, dozing through the evening. She was warm and cozy in her bed in the middle of the night.

  As she began to wake more fully, she sat up in her bed and reached blindly for her bedside lamp. The thud...thud...thud... continued on, a steady beat, and seemed to be coming from the next floor up. Fatigued, but unable to control her curiosity, Nancy pulled on a pair of jeans and a tank top and took a peek out into the hall. Mr Jeffries from the next door down was doing the same.

  “You smell smoke?” he asked Nancy. She took a deep sniff, and though it was faint, she nodded. Together they walked further down the hall and peered up the stairs to the next level. The thud...thud...thud... echoed down the stairwell.

  “Jenny, get back to your room, hon,” Jeffries called back to his daughter. The tiny blond girl was poking her head around the corner of their door, her big blue eyes tired but interested.

  “What’s that noise, daddy?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  While Jeffries turned to usher his daughter back inside, Nancy slowly ascended the stairwell, coming closer and closer to the noise and the smell. At the top she found Mr and Mrs Bell from 5-D. Mrs Bell was talking hurriedly into a cordless phone while Mr Bell rammed his shoulder into Mrs Spears’ door over and over again; thud...thud...thud... The smoky smell was stronger here, and Nancy noticed a few small tendrils sneaking out from above the door.

  “What’s going on?” Nancy asked.

  Mr Bell stopped for only half a second at a time, just long enough to spit out a few words in between rams. “Janet isn’t answering the door and we think there’s a fire!” Thud...thud...thud... “I know she’s home because I saw her go in earlier!” Thud...thud...thud... “She may have had a heart attack or something!” Thud...thud...thud...

  Nancy wondered why the old woman’s fire alarm wasn’t shrieking, but Mrs Spears was the kind of crotchety old woman who would have thought it below her to check the batteries on her own alarm; she would have expected some apartment servant to worry about that for her. Despite her distaste for the old woman, however, Nancy didn’t want to see her burn. She rushed to the doorway and put a hand on Mr Bell’s arm. “Together, okay?” she suggested. Nancy wasn’t a particularly strong woman, physically, but two shoulders had to be better than one. Mr Bell must have agreed because he nodded toward her and leaned back for another go.

  “One,” Nancy counted, positioning herself, “two, three!”

  The door must have been weakened from the previous onslaught because it immediately let out a sharp crrrr-rack! and gave way under the combined forces of their shoulders. Nancy tripped over her own momentum, and would have fallen directly into the flame if Mr Bell hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her shirt and hauled her backward. An extremely fluffy white cat streaked out of the apartment with a thoroughly unimpressed howl and took off down the stairs. Someone on the previous floor shrieked as it ran past. Nancy couldn’t help but scowl a little; pets weren’t allowed in this building and Mrs Spears damn-well knew it. For all the fuss she made about everyone else’s indiscretions, the woman was clearly no saint herself.

  The fire wasn’t large, but it was licking up the left side of the hallway wall. The smoke that had been sneaking its way through the top of the door was coming from an extremely ugly canvas painting of two white cats with big pink ribbons around their necks.

  Mr Bell ran off back to his own apartment and returned seconds later with a large blanket, which he desperately tried to use to smother the flame. Nancy, her wits a little more about her than the man’s, took off down the building hallway and returned with the nearest fire extinguisher. As she doused the flames jumping out around the edges of Mr Bell’s blanket, she heard a little gasp and a bang behind her. Mrs Bell had dropped her phone and had both of her hands up to her mouth. Nancy followed her gaze.

  Mrs Spears was at the end of the hall, face down on the floor and not moving.

  “Janet?” Mr Bell called. He rushed down toward her. “Janet, are you okay?” He dropped to his knees and rolled her over so that her head lay in his lap. Her hair, normally made up into a meticulous little bun, was apart on one side; long white strands draped down to the floor. Mr Bell put two fingers on her throat, waited a few seconds, and then moved them to a different spot. After a total of four attempts his shoulders wilted and he looked up to Nancy and his wife. “I think she’s dead,” he announced.

  Nancy felt a strange well of emotion rise up in her throat. She had personally despised the old woman, but she-

  Mrs Bell shrieked. Nancy jumped in alarm and turned to where the other woman was pointing with a shaking hand. Mrs Spears’ eyes had opened. Mr Bell stumbled back in his surprise, but he regained himself quickly and grabbed the old woman by both shoulders. “Janet?” he cried. “Janet, are you okay?”

  Throughout the building Nancy could hear doors opening and people shouting, a reaction to Mrs Bell’s scream. Terri-Lynn was one of the first to appear at the door in a night shirt, panting from a panicked sprint up the stairs. When she saw Nancy she ran to her side. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “I heard screaming and saw your apartment door open!”

  Nancy barely heard her friend speaking to her, nor the voices of a myriad of neighbors congregating out in the hallway. She was scrutinizing the situation, her heart
hammering wildly. “She...she was dead,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

  “Janet!” Mr Bell was still yelling. “Can you hear me? Are you okay? We called an ambulance, so you’ve got to hold on!”

  “Dead...?” Terri-Lynn questioned. There was clear confusion in her voice.

  “Mr Bell,” Nancy said slowly. She felt a sudden, strange upset in the back of her mind as she realized that she had no idea what his first name was. “Mr Bell, I think you should get away from her.”

  “Nancy? What are you-?” Terri-Lynn didn’t seem to know what exactly she wanted to ask.

  A man’s voice came from the doorway behind them. Another resident had picked up the phone Mrs Bell had dropped and was talking into it. Nancy didn’t turn to see who it was. Her gaze was fixated on her white-haired neighbor. Mrs Spears’ eyes were peeled back, staring directly at Mr Bell, and her fingers were starting to twitch. She couldn’t explain it, but something about the way she was staring at the man terrified Nancy.

  “Please, Mr Bell,” she said louder this time, and with a note of panic. Why can’t I remember his god-damned name?! “Please, let her go and come back here with us!”

  Mr Bell looked up, finally. He was clearly taken aback. “What are you saying, Nancy? She needs help!” He turned his gaze back to Mrs Spears just in time for her hand to reach up and grab him around the jaw. “What are you-? Janet?” His voice was muffled through her wrinkled skin. Mrs Spears’ fingers clenched.

  Mrs Bell let out another shriek, and this time it was a thing of nightmares. Terri-Lynn’s horrified trill joined in as well, and someone behind them let out a cry of disgust. Nancy could only watch in stoic horror, the scream trapped in the back of her throat, as Janet Spears’ bony fingers began to dig into Mr Bell’s face, pushing through his skin like it was butter and drawing blood from five distinct points.

 

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