by mike Evans
Rebecca was still reliving a Psycho moment and was yet to work out if the other person was male or female. It was only when the voice really hit her that she realized it was male. He, whoever he was, pushed his long bedraggled hair back from his face, leaving smears of blood across his cheeks and forehead, and smiled to ease her worries.
It didn’t work.
If anything it had the opposite effect, and Rebecca pushed her body further back into the corner while she tried to remember her best self-defense moves. The guy continued to grin, his dazzling white smile seeming far too bright against his dirty blood-soaked face.
“I have Mace!” she yelled—even though it was lie because her Mace was in her purse and her purse was upstairs. Still, she decided, it was definitely worth a shot if it meant not being chewed on a like a prime steak.
He lifted a hand and held it out in front of him, giving the universal two-fingered signal that suggested peace. “I come in peace, it’s all good, it’s all good. No harm no foul, right?”
Rebecca scanned him from head to toe, looking for any signs that he might be as crazy as any of the people that were down in the foyer. But barring the abundance of blood, his dopey smile suggested he was harmless.
“Spike,” she breathed out on a sad gasp as she remembered his terrified expression as the elevator doors had begun to shut and he realized that she was leaving him behind to save her own skin. There would definitely be some serious karma retribution for this, she decided.
“No, it’s Marley actually, but Spike’s a cool name too.”
“No,” Rebecca began. “Spike, I left him.” She let her body sag and then slide to the floor, realizing her mistake too late as her ass hit the still warm puddle of blood at her feet. She shrieked and jumped back up.
Marley looked over at the body and grimaced. “That’s whack, right.” His gaze shot between the body and Rebecca. “Did you do that?”
Rebecca nodded and then shrugged. She had done it, sort of, she decided. She had been holding him back, and deep down she knew that she could have grabbed another handful of his shirt to stop him from going headfirst into the wall. But she hadn’t.
“Dayummm, girl, you’re like a real-life Alice or something.” Marley grinned. “I definitely got in with the right crew.” Marley bobbed his head up and down appreciatively.
Rebecca opened her mouth to respond when the elevator came to a juddering halt and the doors slid open, the steady beats of Iodine Sky still pumping out of the speakers like the whole world hadn’t gone mad in the last couple of minutes. Rebecca dove out of the elevator and Marley followed right after. As the doors began to shut, Rebecca turned around and slammed her foot between them to stop them from shutting.
“Get me something to jam them with,” she ordered, her head turning left and right as she looked for something to use. “I don’t want it going back downstairs and bringing anyone else up here.”
Marley grabbed the red fire extinguisher from the wall and placed it between the doors as they began to close. The metal doors clanged loudly as they hit either side of the extinguisher and then opened up again.
“Clever, right?” Marley said with a huge grin.
It wasn’t the best solution, but it worked—at least for now.
“What now, Alice?” Marley asked, tucking his hair behind his ears.
“It’s Rebecca, or DC.”
“What is?”
“You mean who.”
“Who?”
“Who is Rebecca.”
Marley scratched at the scruff on his chin and smiled. “I have no idea who she is but if she’s anything like you then I’m cool to have her on our team.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “I’m Rebecca, dumbass.”
Marley smiled and then the smile fell and he looked even more confused. Rebecca waved a hand in the air. She hated timewasters.
“Just follow me,” she said on a huff and began to walk away.
“I would follow you to the ends of the earth, Alice,” Marley said as he trailed after her, a dreamy stare to his gaze. “You saved my life, mon chri. I would have been in some serious drama down there if you hadn’t been there. Your hand poised over the button, waiting for me to get in that elevator like an angel.”
Rebecca glanced over her shoulder, her face pinching in irritation and confusion. They passed Mrs. McReath’s stall and the older lady looked up from her knitting with a soft smile. Her smile turned to confusion and then to shock as she took in more and more of Rebecca’s appearance.
“Rebecca? Has something happened? Are you hurt?” the old lady called after her, coming from around her stall.
“Not really, but something definitely just happened,” Rebecca replied, her hearing picking out the sound of the elevator doors pinging open again. “You better come with me.”
“Who is this Rebecca chick that everyone keeps talking about?” Marley asked as he fell into step with Mrs. McReath. “I’m really hoping she’s as badass as Alice.”
“Who’s Alice?” Mrs. McReath asked.
“Ignore him. He’s an idiot,” Rebecca replied before Marley could say anything else.
They headed back into the studio where André was wrapping up the belly tattoo of Rebecca’s client.
He looked pissed off as he looked up, his irritation about Rebecca ignoring the five-minute cigarette break making him blind to the blood splatters on her clothes. That and she hadn’t brought lunch back with her.
“Longest five minutes ever, DC,” he bit out.
Rebecca rolled her eyes.
Mrs. McReath began to wrap the wool of her knitting around the needles.
Rebecca’s client covered her face with her hands, her pallor still a little green, and groaned. “I can’t do any more today.”
“And where the hell did Spike go?” André snapped, pulling off his latex gloves.
“Excuse me, sir, if I may?” Marley said, stepping forward. “Alice here just saved my life. So if you can find it in your heart to forgive her tardiness, I think she has a reasonable explanation for it.”
André frowned.
The woman groaned.
So did Rebecca.
“My name is Rebecca!” Rebecca yelled at Marley.
“Ohhhh, okay,” Marley said, and slapped his forehead gently. “I’m sorry, I get mixed up sometimes. My brain, man, it gets itself all wrapped up in something and then I can’t focus properly. I have no idea why.” He laughed and pulled a small tin out of his pocket, lifted the lid off, and pulled out a joint before closing the tin and slipping it back into his cargo pants. “So if you’re Rebecca, why did you tell me your name was Alice?”
Rebecca groaned again.
André stood up. “Who is this?” He waved a hand at Marley.
“This is Marley,” Rebecca mumbled.
“As in Bob?”
“Yes, sir, the one and the only.” Marley stepped forward and held out his hand.
André didn’t take the offered hand; instead he turned his attention back to Rebecca. “Where’s Spike?”
Rebecca squeezed her eyes closed at the question. Where was Spike? What could she say? The last time she had seen him, he was being eaten alive by…by what? By who? Some freak on a drug high? She had no idea what was going on, but the state of the foyer as they had arrived suggested that whoever, or whatever, was down there was slowly working its way through the building’s inhabitants.
“He’s, he’s…” She shook her head, a dizzy spell passing over her. “I need to sit down.” She began to stumble backwards, the floor her destination until Marley’s arms wrapped around her waist.
“Easy there,” he mumbled around his joint. He helped her into a chair and grabbed the first thing he found off the table, a latex glove, and began fanning her with it.
Rebecca took some slow breaths and let everything stop spinning. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” she said, finally looking up at André, her eyes filling up with tears. Guilt was bubbling away in her stomach. The realizat
ion of what she had done to Spike. The confusion of what was happening downstairs. It was all swirling inside her, a mass of self-loathing and hate.
“I’ll make you some tea,” André replied, his anger replaced by concern.
“I’ll take a coffee, if you’re making,” Marley asked.
“Coffee also. I have a feeling we’re going to need something strong inside us to get through what’s coming,” Mrs. McReath replied ominously, her stare fixated on Rebecca.
A long, drawn-out scream echoed through the hallways of the fifth floor and Rebecca bit down on her bottom lip to stem her own cry of worry.
“I’m guessing that has something to do with where Spike is?” André said.
Rebecca nodded.
Mrs. McReath put the remaining wool in her pocket and gripped the knitting needles tightly, her face no longer holding the look of age and weariness that Rebecca had been accustomed to these past few months. Instead the years had fallen from her shoulders and she seemed more able-bodied than they’d seen her act before.
Marley took another pull on his joint. “Hey, did you guys hear that?” he said.
André grabbed his baseball bat from behind the counter. “DC, is this going to break my probation?” he asked seriously.
“Probably,” she replied.
“Damn it. I was so close.”
He came back around the counter and Rebecca stood up on shaking legs. She ran to her purse, which was still hung up on the coat rack by her tattoo station. She pulled out the can of Mace she always carried with her, but now that it was in her hand, she realized that she didn’t feel any better. She looked at it, unsure of whether it would actually be any help to her or not. The man downstairs hadn’t seemed fazed by anything; she couldn’t see that Mace would bother them either. She grabbed her car keys at the same time and opened up the small utility tool that she kept hanging on the key chain, pulling out the largest item on it—a puny serrated knife that was better suited to carving her name in a tree than it was to…
She shook her head and stepped to André’s side, not wanting to think about what it was better suited to.
André nodded, his gaze going to Mrs. McReath, who was brandishing her knitting needles in front of her and looking serious about this entire thing. Marley stepped up to them all, a joint sitting between his lips and his hands shoved deep into his pockets like this was all perfectly normal, and the three of them turned to leave.
“Wait! What about me?” Rebecca’s client asked. She sat up and was holding her arms around her tender stomach, the burn of the half-finished tattoo finally worse than the sickly feeling in her gut.
“Wait here,” André said darkly. “Call the police, and lock the door after us.”
The woman nodded, the scream sounded again, and the group left the tattoo studio and headed back toward the elevators.
“You going to give me a heads-up, DC?” André asked Rebecca. “What am I walking into here?”
The music had finally shut off. Crazy Jake would normally have changed it by now, but this time, for whatever reason, he hadn’t. The thought only made Rebecca feel worse.
She swallowed before answering, noticing that the other pop-up stores all either had their doors shut or were empty of people. “I don’t know what to say. Spike’s dead.”
“Dead? As in he is no more? As in he’s deceased?”
“Well that’s one way to put it, but yeah, at least I’m presuming he is. I left him downstairs in the foyer. Someone attacked us, André.” Her words trailed off as she thought about the attack. “Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?” André asked. “How does someone sort of attack you, Rebecca? Surely they either do or they don’t.”
Rebecca sighed. “It wasn’t so much of an attack, but a—”
“But what?” André stopped walking and turned to Rebecca.
“If you’d stop interrupting me, I’d tell you!” she snapped. “It’s just rude to keep interrupting, man!” The stress of the last ten minutes was finally getting to her.
“Now who needs anger management classes,” André muttered. He checked over his shoulder and saw that Marley was offering Mrs. McReath some of his joint, and to his surprise, she was taking it. Rebecca’s next words snapped his attention back to her, though.
“He was eating Spike,” Rebecca finally said, glancing sideways at André. His expression didn’t change, though she noticed the bob of his Adam’s apple in his throat. “At least that’s what it looked like from where I was standing.”
André didn’t say anything for a long second, but eventually he replied. “Okay.” He began to walk again.
“Okay?” she repeated, confused, her gaze straight ahead of her where she could hear the bang of the elevator doors on the fire extinguisher. “Just okay, just like that?”
“Yeah, just okay.”
“You believe me?” she asked incredulously.
“Why would you lie about something so crazy?” André asked with a raised eyebrow. “You’re a crazy and sardonic woman, DC, but you’re not a liar.”
He sucked his lip piercing into his mouth and held his bat higher. He placed a finger to his lips when she opened her mouth to speak, and they all stopped walking. One by one they slammed their backs into the painted black wall behind them.
As they all waited quietly, a long, drawn-out growl and a muffled sob sounded out. Rebecca and André exchanged a serious oh shit look. Before anyone could stop him, Marley stepped forward and peeked his head around the corner. André reached for Marley, but his fingers only grazed the other man’s back.
Marley looked back around with a smile on his face. “Drama queens,” he chuckled, and stepped away from the wall with a shake of his head. “It’s only—” His words were cut short as a bloodied figure stepped behind him, his hands gripping onto the scruff of Marley’s T-shirt.
“Crazy Jake?” André and Rebecca called out.
“Hey man, easy on the threads.” Marley struggled to stay upright as the other person began dragging him backwards. “What’s the deal?”
Rebecca gasped and raised her puny knife, scoffing at the small blade.
Mrs. McReath gasped and took a step back away from the scene, and André, ever the hero, stepped forward.
“Let him go,” he drawled out, but when Jake didn’t respond and Marley was almost sliding out of his T-shirt, André moved around the side of Marley and tried to grab him and pull him away.
“It’s no good,” Rebecca mumbled loud enough for André to hear. She felt like she was reliving the Spike scene as the other man continued to grasp and claw at Marley, and Marley continued to hold him off for as long as possible while yelping for help.
André shoved Jake hard on the shoulder one last time, but when that didn’t work he took a deep breath and swung his bat at him. The bat bounced off Jake’s shoulder and he grunted in what should have been pain, yet only seemed like frustration at being interrupted. André swung again, and as the bat bounced off Jake’s shoulder for a second time, a loud popping sound could be heard as his shoulder dislocated. One hand finally let go of Marley and the arm that it was attached to hung uselessly from the socket, yet he was still grabbing at Marley with his other hand, a fierce growl erupting from his throat.
“Do something!” Marley screamed. “He’s going to rip my favorite shirt!”
André set his jaw, his teeth clenching as he swung another time. But this time he aimed for the back of Jake’s head in the hopes of knocking him out, and be damned with the consequences. No one knew what Jake would do if he got a firm grip on Marley. But by his aggressive stature, it wouldn’t be anything good.
The final hit ricocheted up André’s arms as it connected with Jake’s skull and he fell to his knees, his hazy and unfocused eyes looking up at André while his arms continued to reach out and his jaws snapped over and over, baring his bloodied teeth.
“Again!” Rebecca screamed. “Hit him again!” Sounding every bit the bloodthirsty woman.
André swung again, hitting the back of Jake’s head twice before he fell forward, his head making a soft thud as it hit the floor.
Everyone stood in silence as they waited for the impact of what had just happened to hit them all. Because André had just killed a man—Crazy Jake, their friend—and they had all witnessed the fact.
André turned to look at them, his eyes wide in both shock and fear and the adrenaline coursing through his veins at warp speed. His arms and face were blood-splattered, and though his grip was almost crushingly tight on the bat, Rebecca could see the soft tremble of his arms.
He swallowed, the bob of his Adam’s apple almost hypnotic. Rebecca looked away from his wide-eyed stare and tried to catch her breath. She looked down and watched a large drop of blood slide through the space between his fingers and drip onto the top of his shoe.
Mrs. McReath cleared her throat to say something, but then changed her mind and went quiet again. Her cloudy eyes were taking in everything, her mind already working out that they needed to get off of floor five and out of this building ASAP.
Marley grabbed a handful of his stretched-out T-shirt. “Dude ruined my favorite tee,” he whined, examining the torn material at the neck. He shook his head in dismay. “Sucks, man.”
Three.
NoPeaceForMom
“We need to get out of here,” Rebecca said, almost reading Mrs. McReath’s thoughts. “We need to get out of this building.”
Her eyes had followed drip after drip of blood from the bat, mainly because the alternative was that she either looked at André’s anxious face or the dead body by their feet.
Marley wasn’t even in her equation.
She wasn’t sure he was even in his own equation.
He seemed oblivious to the very real threat that they were all under, and she’d already decided that if she didn’t ignore him she would end up joining him. Because being in his rose-tinted world right now seemed a far better option than being in her blood-tinted one.
“We need to go,” she said again, a little louder this time, nodding her head as she fully decided on this option.
“And go where?” André asked, sounding frustrated and possibly in shock. He ran his hand over his shaven head, leaving bloody smears in its wake.