"I'd rather not trust the elevators. Let's take the stairs," he said. They walked past the first bank of mirrors to the stairwell door. Tom opened it carefully and looked inside. It was clear. He turned to Dan and Phil and glimpsed the three of them reflected in the mirror behind them. In the harsh overhead light they looked like ghosts. Bloodless, like dead things.
They hit the stairs.
Elizabeth Has a Visitor . . .
Clarity had come immediately and with great force.
In the moment between awakening and her plunge off the bed she realized that the shape moving through the open window was a woman's, but that didn't matter in the slightest — she sensed the threat. Her dancer's body did not betray her. Her first leap off the bed took her halfway across the tiny studio apartment. She heard the bedsprings creak behind her beneath the woman's foot and heard the woman growl. By then she was at the door.
She'd double-locked it as always before she went to bed. With perfect economy of movement she threw the first lock and then the second and her hand was on the doorknob when the woman crossed the apartment from the bed to the door and slammed her from behind.
Cold damp hands fell across her naked shoulders and spun her around. She stared into its face, its lips split open in a dozen purulent lesions glistening pus and blood. The mouth from cheeks to chin was brown and cracked like dry mud. The eyes were rheumy yellow, not white, and shot with red.
The death mask that was Lydia smiled.
Her torn filthy shirt was unbuttoned to the waist. She felt cold, soft breastflesh press against her own as the powerful arms wrapped tight around her back. The mouth drooled against her neck.
She lurched back against the door so that for a moment there was a tiny space between them and managed to wedge her forearms up into that space, moving them up over the clammy graveyard coldness of the woman's stomach and breasts, up to the collarbone, shaking herself violently and throwing herself back against the door while the woman clung to her, sucking at her neck, the lips pulling back and mouth opening to bite, her arms finally rising up over the woman's and then the elbows striking down hard against her forearms, breaking her hold.
The rest was instinctive.
Elizabeth went for the eyes.
Her fingers pushed deep and curled toward her. The woman screeched and jerked away, her own backward motion clawing the eyes from their sockets so that they hung down her cheeks from long umbilical tendrils, twitching as she backed away. Elizabeth watched her — astonished — stared as the woman groped for them wildly and felt her stomach heave as she saw her paw the left eye off her face and watched it roll across the floor trailing muscle fiber like a grisly ball of twine.
She flung open the door and ran out into the hall, screaming in horror and relief from horror, tears bursting from her eyes like blood from a punctured vein, stumbling toward the elevator doors. Her voice echoed down the long hallway.
It did not go unnoticed.
All along the corridor doors began to open.
And even through her panic she recognized some of them. Old Mrs. Strawn from 222 in housecoat and curlers, an ice pick in her hand. The nurse in 226, Estha, in blood-soaked camisole and tap pants. Two little girls she often saw playing in the lobby, one in powder-blue pajamas and the other naked, peering out the doorway of 228, both of them covered with blood from chin to chest.
For a moment it was impossible to comprehend. An intruder — even this intruder — had been one thing. But this . . .
. . . she'd stepped into madness. She knew these people! These . . .
. . . women. They were all women.
Not a man among them.
Tom, she thought. Andy.
The Braun apartment was just next door.
The stewardess from 210 was moving toward her, naked except for a pair of red silk panties. Her shoulders and upper arms were scratched and bleeding.
Suddenly they seemed to be everywhere at once — in back and in front of her, by the elevator, by the stairwell door. Some of them nameless to her, strangers. Moving together with a slow confidence, arms reaching out to her, a dense web of deadly power. Mrs. Lyons almost near enough to touch, shuffling toward her, ice pick rising.
Elizabeth shoved her aside and heard her hit the wall behind her. She flung herself on Tom's door and pounded it with her fists.
"Tom! Andy! Sus . . . !"
She tried the doorknob. It was locked. She rammed it with her shoulder.
"Tom!"
Her own apartment was cut off to her now. The stewardess was blocking the way. The thing inside with the dangling eye would have been infinitely preferable. She slammed at Tom's door.
"Please! Help me!"
A cold hand touched her naked thigh. She whirled.
She slapped the little girl's hands away in revulsion. Her sister was beside her smiling, reaching for her, clotted blood smeared across her pajamas. Behind them the others moved steadily forward. She shoved the first girl back into the crowd, grabbed her sister's arm and flung her into them too, but their combined weight was nothing. And when they saw that she was going to fight they moved with lightening speed.
She darted to the right toward the stairwell door but they were on her in an instant, hands reaching into her long hair and pulling her to the floor. Suddenly they were everywhere — and she realized the full, terrible implications of her nudity. The hands slid out of her hair and raked long sharp fingernails across her cheek. Teeth sank deep into her thighs, her breasts, her belly. Old Mrs. Strawn's ice pick thudded into the floor an inch away from her neck.
She flailed wildly, kicking, pushing them off her body. Powerful fingers gripped her arms and wrists and pinned them to the rough carpeting but her legs were free and she fought furiously, her ferocity surging.
She felt a pang of agony and saw the nurse's teeth sinking into her inner thigh. She closed her legs over the woman's neck, locked her ankles together and jerked them up and down once as hard as she could, heard the neck snap, and rolled the body away from her like a broken doll. She planted her feet flat on the floor and pushed up into a backward roll and kicked at the two women holding her arms, missed the stewardess on the left but caught the other woman square on the chin.
She exulted in it. She had one arm free again.
She rolled forward again and on the downswing her legs fell across the shoulders of a middle-aged woman, which knocked her to the floor. She pivoted left and struck the stewardess twice in the mouth. The lip split but the woman held on. At the same time she felt someone bite deep into her side just above the hip but the arm had to be free never mind the teeth so she hit the stewardess again and kept hitting her until the hands dropped away, then turned and brought her elbow down across the neck of the woman at her side.
She sat up and pressed back against the wall and pushed herself to her feet.
The door to Tom's apartment opened.
She turned to run inside and saw Susan standing in the doorway.
Teeth grinding. Eyes rimmed red.
Smiling, stepping toward her.
She ran.
The stewardess was rising. Elizabeth rammed her and sent her flying across the hall, used the impact to spin herself toward the door to her own apartment She pulled the door open. An arm went around her neck and she turned inside it thinking fuck you, brought her knee up into the woman's stomach and heard the whoosh of air, broke free and stepped inside as the woman gripped the doorframe and Elizabeth slammed the door on her fingers, heard the shrill cry of agony with delicious satisfaction, opened the door and when the hand fell away slammed it again, threw both locks and turned around.
The woman's eye was still dangling.
She was down on the floor next to the bed, mewling like a cat, trying to find the other one.
"A little to your left," Elizabeth said.
She'd beaten them.
She walked around the woman to the open window and pushed it shut. She turned on the overhead light and went to the bathroom.
She turned on that light too.
Her face in the mirror was bruised and scratched and dirty. The bite marks were deepest on her thigh, her side, and her left breast high up near the shoulder. There was a surprising lack of serious bleeding.
She held the washcloth under the tap water and gently bathed the worst of it, smeared Bacitracin into the wounds and then walked back into the living room.
The woman had found her missing eye. She was fumbling with it insanely, trying to find a way to put it back again.
Elizabeth took her nightgown off the chair and put it on.
The woman seemed to sense the angry force of her. She sobbed and scuttled closer to the bed.
On a shelf beside the window stood a large Ming aurelia — her only potted plant. Elizabeth thought it was a shame to destroy it, but whether from relief or fear, she still was shaking uncontrollably. She needed to be calm and think, but she could not do that with the woman there and could not stand the mewling.
She wondered if Susan had killed Tom and Andy. My god.
The aurelia must have weighed thirty pounds. She lifted it carefully and moved over to the woman and let it drop.
The mewling sounds stopped.
She stared down at the woman's body and the scattered shards of pottery.
I'll have to clean this up, she thought. She guessed it could wait till morning.
Morning, she thought. And then what?
She shifted her gaze to the window. It was hard to think clearly.
She didn't know.
. . . While Andy Gets a Breather
A dull pain spread through his chest and throat, a lethargy in the pulse of his blood, a cold ache throbbing through his limbs. He was done with struggling. Her thumbs maintained a slow, even pressure on his throat.
There was a strange little man hungry for air inside him and all he could do was to let the man die.
He knew she was enjoying it. How his tossing and squirming had run slowly down and then stopped. She was looking at his face, taking her time, her head tilted to one side watching him as though she were curious about something.
He saw colors dance before his eyes and despite the pain saw how pretty they were, the blues and greens and yellows. There was an empty feeling in his stomach.
He wondered how long it would take this way.
Probably so did she.
He didn't think it would be long now . . .
~ * ~
. . . and never knew that it was Elizabeth at the door who saved him.
Susan heard the pounding and the shouting, the commotion in the hall. Her fingers loosened slightly. She listened. Then more pounding and someone calling names that were familiar to her. She dropped the boy to the crimson Persian carpet and went to the door.
. . . and his first breath of air was the most painful thing he'd ever felt in his life. It seemed to slide down his throat like a red hot poker. Even the awful wracking cough was a relief after that. He began to feel a tingling in his arms and legs, which amplified and distorted until his body seemed one great slab of pain.
He knew he had to get out of there. The physical SOS to that effect was overriding even his agony. He scrambled across the carpet into the bathroom, his breathing so loud to his own ears he was terrified she could hear him. Only when he got inside did it occur to him to wonder why she'd dumped him and how he'd got so lucky.
He locked the door.
~ * ~
To Susan the girl at the door was not Elizabeth. She was just a kill, someone who she clearly sensed was not like them. When the girl turned and eluded her she didn't mind. She quietly closed the door. And then went back to the other one.
Who was missing?
She looked in the kitchen. He wasn't there. She looked in the bedroom. He wasn't behind the bed or in the closet or hiding behind his dresser. She looked into her own room. He wasn't there either.
She began to laugh.
She knew where he was.
He was in the bathroom.
Washing his face. Taking a shower. Brushing his teeth. Shitting.
The bathroom door was locked and the light was on inside. She rattled the door handle. She heard a rustling sound and that made her laugh again because now there was no question that he was there and the door was flimsy, she could break it down easily. Flimsy. The word posted itself in her mind like an advertisement on a billboard. She looked at the door.
And then methodically began to kick it to pieces.
. . . And Daddy Gets a Gun
Halfway up the stairs they heard the screams and laughter and the sounds of struggle, of bodies falling and pounding into walls.
Goddammit! Right in front of the fucking door!
"Guns first," whispered Phil. "We got to change our plan here.”
“Bullshit!"
"You love your son? You want to live to see him?"
"He's right, Mr. Braun."
"You assholes! That could be Andy!"
"Unh-unh, Mr. Braun. Listen to 'em. Could Andy put up a fight like that?"
Dan was right. It sounded like maybe a dozen out there. Whoever was behind that door was struggling hard to keep on living.
"Whoever it is, Jesus, we should help!" His voice sounded almost petulant to him.
"Hey. You can be a hero or you can save your son. We need those guns," said Phil. "We can be back here in minutes."
Tom knew they were making sense and he also knew he was verging on hysteria. He fought for control, trying not to fall apart right then and there in the stairwell. He wasn't going to be any goddamn help to Andy if they went out there and got themselves killed, but to be this close was torture.
His connection to Andy was still alive and somehow he felt that that meant so was Andy.
"Okay," he said. "The elevators. It's faster."
They hurried back downstairs and hit the first floor landing at a run. Dan pushed open the door and they were out in the mirrored corridor and rounding the corner to the elevators when they saw the four young women in front of them. But by then they were moving fast and kept on moving, Phil taking one of them by the arm and stabbing her in the side then turning and hitting the call button, Tom backing the second to the mirror so that he stared at his own hard eyes as he stabbed her in the stomach. Dan was wielding the baseball bat like a two-handed sword, the last two women falling in front of him like grass before a demented reaper. One of them scrambled away from him on her hands and knees with her skull bleeding and Tom thought that it was the first time he'd seen any of them show that kind of fear. It was almost human.
The door to the middle elevator opened and they swung inside. Tom hit the button for ten. The door slid shut and then there was nothing to do but wait while the elevator ascended. The very normalcy was oppressive. Here he was, doing the same thing he'd done a thousand times, staring at the imitation brass of the wall surface, listening to the hum of machinery, waiting.
Everything's normal but us and them, he thought. Just another little ride in the elevator. Sweat beaded Dan's forehead. The bat rested lightly on his shoulder. Phil's fingers opened and closed on the knife handle. Clubs and knives, he thought. Back to basics.
They stepped out into the hall.
Apartment doors hung open all along it.
One had been pulled off its hinges and lay across the hallway.
There were traces of what looked like blood on its inner side. Garbage was strewn around — wrappers, cans, melon rinds. Near the elevator a section of wallpaper had been torn away, the pasteboard behind it bone-white. Someone had smeared the wall with excrement.
They turned the corner. In the laundry room — every floor had one — a man lay face up in the first tumble drier. His eyes and mouth were open, his hands were folded in his lap and he was covered with soap powder. They'd drowned two men in the top-loader washers, one of them wearing a bathrobe and the other only a pair of boxer shorts.
They moved down the hall to Sharkey's apartment. Dan was ready with his passkey.
&
nbsp; The door to 1034 was closed — but not locked.
Phil pushed it open.
They listened in silence.
He turned on the light in the living room and they walked inside.
They knew immediately there was no point calling for Sharkey. The smell was strong here, a salt-sweet reek and the smell of human wastes. They locked the door behind them and began to look for him.
The living room, dining area and kitchen were undisturbed. In the bedroom Phil went to the closet, reached up on to one of the shelves and removed a small pistol from beneath a pile of sweaters. Under another pile he found a box of shells. He felt around further.
"Shit, I can't find the Colt," he said. "Maybe he sold it." He loaded six bullets into the pistol and slipped the box into his pocket.
"Maybe he's got it on him," Tom said.
"Maybe."
"Mr. Braun?" said Dan. The black man was on his knees holding up the bedcovers which had dropped partly off the bed. The tip of the sheet was shit-stained and beneath the bed they could see a dark twisted form.
They pulled him out.
The face was bloated, blue and yellow. The belt from his bathrobe lay embedded in the swollen flesh of his neck and his fingers were frozen still clawing at it.
Phil looked down at him.
"Guy drank too much but he was never mean," he said. "It's a goddamn shame. You want to bet he figured he got lucky tonight? Nobody broke into this place. His door was open."
"Maybe that's where the Colt went."
"Maybe."
Dan patted the pockets of the bathrobe and peered beneath the bed. "He didn't have it on him," he said.
"Let's go," Phil said. "We got one gun. It'll have to do."
The elevator was still there open waiting for them. But this time there was nothing familiar-feeling about it. The air inside as they descended felt thick with a terrible promise. He heard a soft clicking sound and looked at Phil and saw him staring down at the gun and knew that he felt it too.