The Shaft (50 page)

    Bauhaus sat there and tittered.

    'You look like shit, kiddo.' Blood antiqued his dentition.

    
You double
. Cruz neglected to speak.

    'You are a lot of fucking trouble, my laddie. You are death. Why pick me?'

    Now was the opportunity to declaim, to testify, to bring home to this bloated leech some of the agony he had paid out.

    Cruz could not locate a single word. He couldn't even make his facial muscles editorialize for him. He raised the Sig Sauer a foot from his ex-boss' veiny nose.

    Bauhaus had already lost command of most below-the-neck motor functions. He could still loll like a beached bass, and flop the aimless paddles of his hands. His stink was bovine, primitive, and his gaze was the zombie stare of a sheep watching the oncoming sledgehammer.

    'Shit punk.' A spasm twisted his head to the left. 'Gahhh.' His tongue was gray and inflated.

    Cruz thumbed back the hammer of the automatic. He wanted no secret codes, no confessions. He was not starved for a neat homily that could right his world at the last minute. He pointed the gun. It was all he had to do.

    'What are you waiting for?'

    Cruz swallowed. So dry, his mouth. That would be all the dope. Yeah.

    Dope. That was how Bauhaus looked - strung out to the max. Blood and brain cells were dying by the millions in there. His mind was slamming shutters. CLOSED: SORRY WE MISSED YOU. His head would burst like a cantaloupe from the internal pressure.

    Capillaries were rupturing in Bauhaus' eyes, making their sclera the red glass tint that Cruz remembered from the Corvette. Soon his vascular plumbing would fill his lungs with blood and he'd drown from the inside out.

    Bauhaus stared down the barrel of the automatic. That prissy, pissy, put-upon expression Cruz knew so well resurfaced.

    'You haven't got the dick.' Pink froth speckled his Ups. One nostril blew a languid bubble of saliva. 'Lame. Limp. Dead meat. You're a corpse… and you don't even know it.'

    A horrid phlegmatic noise convulsed him briefly. Then he grinned with bloodied teeth. When he laughed in Cruz's face, foam slopped onto his chest.

    Cruz shut his eyes and fired four times.

    

    

    Emilio instantly tried to kill the creature he saw. His snap of the riot gun's trigger was instinctual, a survival reflex. The thing on the receiving end demanded to be erased from the earth. The good, sane earth of coke royalty, drug addiction and murder for comedy.

    The 'Slugger' round blew a baseball-sized hole through the upper left tit and made a wide, messy exit. The northern casement behind it was noisily terminated and a sleetstorm of glass knifed into the room, followed by the equally cutting attack of the blizzard.

    The thing grunted. The foot-poundage of the slug knocked it back one step. It looked up at Emilio as though it had just been hit with a turd snowball. Pique misted all of its eyes.

    Emilio skipped simple shock, pumping and firing again. The buckshot round hit with the force of ten thirty-eight caliber bullets all at point blank range. Shreds of clothing and flesh erupted in a violent rearward spray. The hair on the back of the creature's head twitched and wet stuff hit the wall.

    Emilio could see through its chest, and it was still standing there. He saw the eyes, too many and in the wrong places. He saw the blood dipped switchblade, then the razor.

    Fresh hot blood began to issue from the pellet holes in the wallpaper. Blood leaked from the casement to mar the fangs of glass still depending from the frame. It steamed in the furious cold.

    Emilio shucked and fired for every step it took toward him, snarling an incoherent warcry. When the magazine ran dry the thing was reaching for his throat.

    Emilio felt his shoulders hit the corner, felt his trigger elbow knock the door shut. He had not been aware that he had been backing away. He did not back off from anything. Still thinking artillery would rescue his ass, he cross-drew the Bren Ten as one black claw vised around his neck.

    He snapped the trigger professionally, then convulsively, until the pain made him stop.

    There was no leeway to puzzle what this thing could be, how it could be, or how it absorbed bullets like hand lotion. Emilio did not know it. It seemed to know Emilio, though.

    Pain in his throat. His shoes were off the floor. He felt his neck muscles herniate, dark patches of his own blood blossoming beneath his flesh.

    His hand found the platinum razor beneath his shirt, jerked the special chain. His thumb levered open the blade and he began to slash into the rotten chest and neck.

    Spitting into one of its eyes would have been as effective.

    The face leering into Emilio's own was an inept quiltwork of components - nose, eyes, mouth - disrupted by a diagonal fissure. Topside the flesh was pale, mottled with liver spots. The eye was a murky green. The other eye was a turquoise color, poked into mulatto flesh. Another eye in the left cheek was bright blue.

    Emilio could only reach to the thing's neck, where his razor bisected the gray eye of an old woman. Vitreous humor spurted like snot. His vision was beginning to flower with snaps of bright yellow light. He tried to kick but could not feel his legs.

    In the dresser mirror he saw his own face turning maroon, eyes bulging whitely. He saw other portions of himself through the perforated torso of the monster holding him up against the wall.

    The switchblade, growing from the hand that gripped his neck, sniffed toward his carotid artery and began to press. The thing was hacking back with its own razor now, as Emilio's thrusts and death-dealing surgery weakened.

    An arm, baby-sized, snaked from the thing's chest cavity and arrested Emilio's razor hand, python-tight.

    Emilio felt himself opening up downstairs.

    
Fuckers
. The world was choking on fuckers all lined up to take from him. His whole life. All takers.

    Hydrostatic pressure unmoored his eyes. He saw, in the mirror, jets of blood shoot from his ears and nostrils. He died two seconds after he was blinded.

    The monster released its deathgrip on Emilio's neck, and began taking, and taking, and taking.

    

    

    As Cruz pulled the trigger of the automatic he heard powerful gunfire upstairs. None of his business. He had his mind and hands full just shooting at Bauhaus.

    ONE: Chiquita wobbling barefoot on the rail, just out of reach as she teeters, then turns the fall graceful by pretending it's a high-board dive.

    TWO: She falls, arms swanned, the whole descent more fearsome because she doesn't make a sound all the way to the concrete.

    THREE: He rushes to the rail, leans, follows her with his gaze, tracking her like a NASA dish all the way to splashdown. His mind tries to force his eyes not to look. It is impossible to turn away from-

    FOUR: Impact.

    The shooting above comes faster, panic fire, then stops altogether. The sound is submerged in the riptide echoes of Cruz's own gunfire. The shots are nearly simultaneous.

    Chiquita's bikini bottom, the only thing she is wearing, snaps apart when she hits. Her ebony hair spreads to corona her head. She lands face down, twisted; Cruz can see her naked ass from ten stories up.

    'You're probably wasted and stupid enough to jump off, Chiqui. Go on. I dare ya.'

    Bauhaus' damning gaze had dared him to shoot, and he did. Four times.

    When Cruz opened his eyes he saw Bauhaus cringing, his body trying to roll into a ball like a dung beetle. He was quivering, eyes gone in tight wrinkles of closure that leaked tears. His mouth was soundlessly agape.

    Four bullet holes formed an arc in the wall just above his head. They began to bleed.

    Shivering, his hands bunched beneath his chain, Bauhaus opened his eyes. Cruz was still standing there with the gun, and that was the worst scenario he could envision. It made him want to cry even more.

    'Bang,' Cruz said, and Bauhaus flinched as though shot in the ass.

    The red-lipped bullet punctures tore. Bleeding cracks in the wall stretched to connect with each other. The sound was mealy and meaty. Blood dripped to soak Bauhaus' winter coat.

    'You're not worth it,' Cruz said.

    He was not a killer. He was not to blame for the death of Chiqui, or anyone.

    'Hear me? You're not worth my time or ammo, Bauhaus.'

    Bauhaus was easing back into the wall. Being swallowed by it, as the cracks connected and sagged away. His eyes had rolled to whites; it was unlikely that he could even hear Cruz's big discovery as his head was engulfed.

    'Hey! You're not worth it!' His lips were peeled back. Bravery had rolled in too late, as usual. Now it did not matter.

    Bauhaus had cheated him one last time. When Cruz had finally worked up the spit to yell, Bauhaus was beyond hearing his comeuppance.

    Cruz hung around long enough to see the first coil of Kenilworth 's resident parasite loop around Bauhaus' midsection, to pull him into the wall like a hooked fish. The greasy dun-colored body slid and cinched. Bauhaus died with his mouth hanging open and his pants-full of shit. The drugs probably put him under before he felt much pain, or before the beast could bite.

    Cruz backed down the stairs and ran for the next landing. The flight impulse ruled his whole body, even atop the overdose of coke poisoning him.

    
Home free
, he thought as he barreled down the last set of stairs.

    Down in the eastern foyer of Kenilworth, the side of the building facing the street where Bauhaus' deceased hit man, Marko, lay entombed in snow, Cruz found that the doors and windows of the building had been forgotten.

    

    

    Mailboxes. A bulb on a dangling cord. No windows, no grate and no front door.

    There was no way out.

    After the creature with Jonathan's eyes appropriated Emilio's, it rose as erect as its crooked carriage would permit.

    The baby arm protruding from its chest relinquished Emilio's platinum razor for inspection. The arm withdrew and the head poked through the chew and swallow with its hundred teeth.

    The creature turned the razor over in its own razor hand. Amalgamating with this prize seemed superfluous. More than needed had been taken all around this time; more blood than the building could use, more of the extra new ingredient Cruz had willingly provided.

    Emilio's forehead bulged, puffy with black blood. When the creature pressed the razor's tip into the forehead, the gelid flesh split from internal pressure in one big squirt of red. The blade wandered through the flesh and decided to carve letters there.

    The narrow tusks in the baby face tore a hole in Emilio's shirt, then his chest. It began to worry morsels loose. Children need protein.

    So much was fading to vapor. The hand wielding the razor faltered. Blood trickled from the forehead to fill the eyesockets and spill downward.

    
EAT M-

    That was all it could remember.

    When the smaller head finished its last three bites of heartmeat, it withdrew into the chest. Tiny hands poked through to knot the shreds of jacket. Another parasite.

    There was enough lampcord in the room to suspend Emilio upside-down, for better drainage. Of what the building wanted to do next, the creature had no clue. It would return to its room, close the door, wait. It kept Emilio's razor; perhaps a use would occur.

    Vague recollections, also fading, saddened the monster. It wanted to go out into the night. To ride the trains again.

    

    

    Kenilworth Arms has never felt this way before.

    Tonight its gluttony has allowed it the perception of time's passage, from one second to the next. The amplified awareness is excruciating.

    For the first and final time, the building gains a notion of just how aged it really is.

    From the basement up… doors meld with their seams and blend into the walls, assuming a uniform hue in accordance with the paint used by the caretaker. Injurious glass is sneezed free of window frames, which then darken and unite the same way they did, by accident, in Elvie Rojas' apartment, early on. Settling cracks close themselves. Stray blood is giddily osmosed. Ruptured brickwork fuses whole again. The lines and details of decades of makeshift architecture flow into one another until there is an uninterrupted sameness to the surfaces.

    In moments the entire structure clenches, airtight.

    The errant black cat is nearly decapitated as it pads from an icebox door which slams by itself and fades out, embracing the featureless symmetry of the ground floor corridors.

    These hallways are now very hallway. Totally hallway, pure, unadorned.

    The elevator doors smash shut with the speed of clapping hands. The joins differentiating door from shaft and car from floor blur and are gone. Very wall.

    Kenilworth has forgotten most of its own third floor. Entire sections are blanked. There comes a vague, gnatlike pain impossible for it to register as the remaining tenants, running low on oxygen and beating in terror on walls that no longer have doors or windows.

    Presiding over this is the numbness, such a high, so dreamy.

    Kenilworth 's hallucinatory misremembrance of itself is only a dream. Parts of itself flinch or make ghost movements, just as people do when having a nightmare.

    It can feel the tapeworm, fattened beyond all precedent. No matter. It has provided.