* * * *
I didn’t have an explanation for what had gone on in the office, but then again, I didn’t need one. All I needed to know was that some Twilight Zone shit was going down, and I did not want to be in the middle of it.
Here’s the thing.
I’m not dumb.
As a journalist I’ve heard some pretty fantastical stuff during the course of my career, and as a child of the 90’s I’d grown up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reading all the Harry Potter books just like everyone else. My generation was the poster child of freaky occurrences and preternatural phenomenon.
You don’t have to keep shoving evidence in my face before I get the picture.
Conversations about “shifting” and “hunting,” coupled with glowing animal eyes and super fast reflexes?
If it looked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then guess what?
It was a probably a goddamned werewolf.
So I ran, and I didn’t look back. I ran until I hit the wall of elevators, and instead of waiting around for one of them to ding open and allow me entrance, I bypassed them all and took the emergency stairs instead. Now, I know in most horror movies this would be the point in which the bad guy would enter the stairwell and try to slaughter the heroine that sought safety there.
Turns out you can learn a lot from horror movies, because that’s exactly what happened.
In my haste to escape the office, I’d completely forgotten about the task force that had been let loose inside the building. I made it down two flights of stairs, tripping over my own feet in my desperate need to move faster, and faster still. When I made it to the third floor landing, I stopped so quickly I stumbled and fell back on the steps I’d just stepped off of.
On the landing before me stood a wolf.
It. Was. Massive.
Its head came up to my chest, and its paws were so big they could slice me open with a single swipe. At the sound of my sudden approach its hackles had gone up, so when I met it face to face it was already ready to go for my jugular while I was still reeling from the sight of it. It didn’t growl or bark. In fact, it made no sound at all. It just stood there, silent and ready, canines exposed and dark red tongue licking along its chops as if it could already feel my bones crushing between its teeth.
A man stood beside the wolf, decked out in all black tactical gear that matched his partner’s jet black fur as if they’d color coordinated on purpose. But the man wasn’t the one openly snarling at me, so I paid him no mind. Granted, the 9mm in his right hand was probably cause for concern.
But one disaster at a time.
I saw the wolf’s muscles tighten, and then it was leaping across the space that separated us. I cried out and threw myself out of the way, but it hadn’t been aiming at me. It had been aiming for the thing behind me. I turned just as the two collided, and to my rising horror it was the wolf who cried out in agony.
The thing on the steps just above me was a creature of fractured light. Its edges were too soft. More smoke than flesh. It was ever changing and stretching out of the corner of your eyes as it tried to form some semblance of a body. Its eyes were stretched, bottomless pits that sucked up all the light around it so that the space in which it stood was nothing more than a trembling emptiness where only silence should have been. I couldn’t make out a mouth at first, but as soon as the wolf made contact with the thing, the creature opened its jaws, shadow flesh clinging and ripping apart from itself to reveal a hungry, gaping maw that made something young and vulnerable in me begin to scream.
The wolf couldn’t pull away from the creature, in fact, the more it struggled the thicker the shadows grew, growing and crawling over the now whimpering wolf’s flesh, until it was covered in an oily sheen that seemed to breathe. A second skin with a mind of its own.
Soon the creature had an ally, and the wolf, now coated in chuckling shadows turned on both the man with the gun and me with hell blazing from its yellow eyes.
Cursing, the man in tactical gear opened fire on both wolf and shadow creature. I only stayed long enough to see that the bullets never hit their target, wolf and creature disappearing into the dark recess of the stairwell as if they’d never been.
I came down the stairs so fast I was essentially falling, and I leapt past the task force member just as something reached out of the shadows to his left and pulled him screaming in with it. He got off another shot or two that ricocheted in the stairwell, before I heard flesh tear, wet and thick.
Silence reigned but for the desperate little whimpering I couldn’t help but make as I continued my flight down the stairs. Now that I knew what they could do, what they could hide, I flinched at every shadow, muffled a scream at every creak of the stairs, or moaning sigh on the air.
Dimly, I could make out the sounds of gunfire and howls from lower floors, but I couldn’t focus on it right then. The only thought in my head was that I had to get out of the stairwell before whatever had snatched that man snatched me too.
So I pushed through the next door I came to, almost sobbing in relief when I fell into a hallway flooded with light. To my left came the sound of gunfire, and even as I watched the lights in the ceiling begin to flicker and go out one by one. To my right were elevators, and without further thought, I dove for them and punched the down button. I pressed the button over and over again, my breath hard and fast and my skin tightening in terror.
Each time I looked over my shoulder, the lights had gone out for yet another foot of the hall. In my eyes the hallway became the jaws of some great beast. Coming closer and closer and swallowing the world in its wake. In the darkness, all it left behind were those eyes. Some of them even blacker than the dark surrounding them and others the blazing yellow of the wolves.
The closer the dark came, the louder the growling grew; I didn’t know whether the four-legged animals were fighting for or against the shadows. All I did know was that pretty much everything in this building was willing to eat me at this point.
Three feet, two, it didn’t matter.
The black was moving faster now, and I pressed myself flush against the wall, my finger ripping at the elevator button and my voice rising on a scream.
Two feet, one.
The fluorescents directly above me flickered once and then died with a sigh, and all around me came the bloodthirsty howls of predators who’d just found their prey.
“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Everyone.”
—Gabriel Evans
Chapter Nine