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.
He screamed, half a moment later, as he dropped Mrs Spears’ head to the floor with a sickening
thump
. He reached up to grasp at the senior’s wrist with both of his hands and pulled as hard as he could, but Mrs Spears’ fingers only dug deeper into his fleshy cheeks, hooking around bone and sinew. Sprays of blood marred her pristine pale yellow carpet.
The man who had picked up Mrs Bell’s phone dropped it and sprinted down the hall. Nancy recognized him but couldn’t come up with his name. Someone from floor 6. He had a teenage daughter and his wife had died of heart disease. Fragments of information about him came, unbidden, into Nancy’s mind as she watched him grab Mrs Spears’ hand and try to pry the fingers out of Mr Bell’s face. The combined strength of the two men finally found the fingers retreating. Blood gushed from the holes they’d left behind. Mrs Spears wasn’t having any of it. She reached out with her other hand, grabbed Mr Bell’s hair to hoist herself up, and sank her bony old teeth into the man’s arm.
There was a
flump
beside Nancy. Terri-Lynn had passed out.
Mrs Bell, in a burst of what was either heroics or insanity, picked her phone up off the floor, ran down the hall, and started beating Mrs Spears over the head with it. The newly cannibalistic old woman didn’t even take notice. She continued to savagely rip strips of flesh out of Mr Bell’s arm, who had now collapsed, whether because of blood loss or good old fashioned fear, Nancy couldn’t tell. Without getting any closer to him, Nancy was quite certain that he was either dead or very close to it.
“You crazy old bitch!” Mrs Bell was screaming. “You crazy old fucking hag!” Again and again she hammered the phone into Mrs Spears’ head, flecks of blood splattering back at her with every swing. Finally, her prey having fallen to the wayside, the old woman seemed to notice that she was being attacked. Nancy watched with a dry mouth as her huge, empty eyes turned to Mrs Bell.
“Get away from her,” Nancy croaked, though her own feet were rooted to the spot. “For the love of god, get away!”
The skinny old hands grasped Mrs Bell around the neck. The man who’d been trying to help grabbed the old woman by the hair and tried to yank her back, but she would not be deterred. Mrs Bell dropped her phone for the last time and grasped at the hands that were now choking the life from her. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t suck in enough air for the sound.
“Look out!” Nancy cried with a gasp. To her absolute disbelief, Mr Bell sat straight up and began to reach for the other man. In a spray of blood so intense that it could have almost been comical, Mrs Spears dug her teeth into Mrs Bell’s face just as Mr Bell chomped down onto the other man’s throat. The carpet was painted a deep crimson.
Other people were running down the hallway now, jostling Nancy out of the way as they went by. Some were screaming, others shouting in horror and disbelief, some trying to help, others staring in shock. Somewhere in the distance Nancy thought she heard a siren.
Slowly, puppet-like, Nancy looked down at her friend, passed out on the burned section of the carpet, and found a purpose amid the madness. While others screamed and ran for help, or entered the apartment only to get caught up in the bloody horror, Nancy hoisted Terri-Lynn up over her shoulder and began to drag her out of the apartment. People ran by, screaming, but she paid them no mind. It was slow going, but she breathed deeply and pressed on, one foot in front of the other.
At the bottom of the stairs little Jenny Jeffries was peering out her apartment door like a curious little kitten. When Nancy looked at her, the girl’s eyes went wide and she pulled herself back inside with a slam of the door. Nancy stared after her for half a moment before pressing on.
Terri-Lynn’s feet dragged along the floor. Nancy’s strength was beginning to wane. She started, first, for her own apartment, before remembering that it was directly below the carnage that was going on upstairs. Instead she turned for Terri-Lynn’s. Two doors down on the right, she dragged Terri-Lynn to the living room couch, dropped her down, and stumbled back to the door to lock and bolt it.
There were more sirens now, of many different pitches. Ambulances, police, firemen, and possibly others as well.
Nancy dragged herself to the bathroom, flicked on a light, and peered at herself in the mirror. She blinked at herself for several long moments. No wonder little Jenny had taken off. Nancy had gone pale, as if her face had been doused with bleach, and her eyes were huge, hollow, and burning. She looked like a woman possessed.
From the bathroom window she saw the flickering of fire. She pulled herself away from the mirror to look and saw that the building across the road and one down was aflame. The firetrucks stopped out front and the firemen rushed to the hydrants. A woman stumbled slowly out the front door, her clothes and hair on fire. One of the firemen tackled her with a blanket, but as the flames began to smother the woman poked her head out and bit down hard on the man’s ear. With a flick of her neck she ripped it clean off of the man’s head. Nancy couldn’t hear his scream amid the rest of the din, but she could see it. At the other end of the road a car crashed into a news stand and the whole thing burst into a brilliant ball of flame.
Nancy turned, leaned over the bathtub, and vomited until she passed out.
She woke to a
thud...thud...thud...
somewhere nearby and a terrible sense of deja vu. For a few moments she didn’t know where she was, laying with her head against Terri-Lynn’s toilet, a retched taste in her mouth. It all came flooding back far too quickly.