Chapter 4
Shane wiped his thumb on the leg of his coveralls, cleaning off the blood. Then he looked over at Terrance’s locker. It looked normal from where he was, but when he got closer he saw that the lock had blood on it, too.
“What the fuck is going on?” he muttered to himself.
He dropped Terrance’s time card back into its slot on the rack. Then he pulled the rubber gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. He reached for the lock, took hold of it, tried to pull it open. The lock didn’t budge, but the blood smeared onto the fingers of his gloves, vivid red against the bright yellow.
Shane looked around the room again. Everything looked normal. He walked around the table to the door, reached for the door handle. And saw that the handle had blood on it too.
A little glimmer of feeling was coming to life in Shane’s stomach, where the nausea had been. But this wasn’t nausea, or anything as familiar as that.
It was worry.
Shane took hold of the door handle, jerked the door open. He stuck his head into the hallway and looked both directions, giving it more attention than he had on his angry march through a minute ago. The white walls and linoleum were glaringly bright under the fluorescent lights. On the floor, just in front of the doorway, there was a drop of blood. It was perfectly round and brilliantly red, so bright it almost seemed to glow.
There was another drop of blood a few feet down the hall, toward the ZapPow! lobby. A few feet past that, a pair of drops—little twin points of red. And the handle on the lobby door was likewise touched with blood.
Shane opened the door cautiously, looked into the lobby. The cartoon cutouts faced the front door, the Voodoo eyes glared down from the screen. But there was no sign of Terrance or anybody else, and the carpet was too dark to show blood traces.
He stepped into the lobby, nerves tingling. He walked to the circular reception desk, leaned over it to see if anyone was hiding there. Nobody was.
He walked through the tunnel and into the main floor area. The tables were still littered with red Voodoo cans. The chairs were still pulled here and there, disorganized.
“I’d have seen him if he went to the cafeteria,” Shane said to himself.
He walked to the elevator, at the right side of the room. There was a smear of blood on the call button. He pressed the button, part of his mind fascinated by the way the button light illuminated the blood smeared over it, making the red glow.
The elevator dinged, the doors opened. Shane stepped inside, turned to look at the buttons for the floors. A smear of blood marked the button for the fifth floor, at the very top of the building.
“Bingo,” Shane murmured.
He pressed the button, stepped back from the doors. The elevator went up, fast and smooth. It gave a cheery ding when it reached the fifth floor.
The doors opened, and there was Terrance.
In the dim emergency lights of the building, he looked almost like a silhouette, a dark-skinned figure laid atop a white leather couch to the right of the elevator doors. His work boots were propped up on one of the couch’s armrests. His right arm was draped over his eyes. His left arm dangled off the side of the couch, hand hanging just above the floor.
The sleeve on that arm had been pushed back above his elbow, revealing a tattoo of a pitbull’s head with the words “Oaktown Dogg Pound” written beneath it. And below the tattoo, wrapped around his forearm and held in place with duct tape, was a dark-colored towel.
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Zombie City: Episode 1 COMPLETE!!!
TerrorWhat would you do if all the hipsters turned into zombies? Shane moved to San Francisco to write, following in the steps of his Beat Generation heroes. Twelve years later he's pushing thirty, flirting with alcoholism, and not writing at all. His lif...
