JACQUARIOUS

August's hand pressed firmly against my shoulder, the click of his weapon sounding behind me. "Run, kid."

I whirled around, just as a metallic pistol emerged from the small of his back, sleek and silent, and rose to face the shadowy blur creaking toward us.

Bolting for the door, I winced as three more gunshots thundered over the creeping buzz of U.S. & The World—as a singular bullet struck the light switch, erupting in a shattering bloom of sparks that glinted to death as darkness, fractured and unclean, fell in brutal cascade.

I reached the door, the shadows of the room recoiling to red, a heinous and arterial red—light hemorrhaging into the architecture itself as every umber scraggled into withering limbs, gaping holes of sinister umbrage.

The walls pulsed.

The air dripped.

And then the hammer flew, streaming through the air with predatory grace, striking the side of August's skull and crunching into the bone.

His gun clattered to the floor; his head slammed the tiles; a thin garland of blood unfurled beneath his ginger hair.

The door flicked open at last under my grip, just as the shadowy figure turned to me.

I bolted from the room, the corridor pitching and swaying beneath me. The heat of the lights distorted every surface—the walls, the floor, my hands. Breath escaped my lungs in staccato gasps.

Footsteps clanged behind me.

Whoever that guy was, he'd taken down August...and he was coming for me next.

I reached the end of the hall and slammed my weight into a bookcase. It screeched across the floor and toppled, collapsing into the passage behind me with a roar of wood and metal.

I gulped. It wouldn't be enough to stop him, but perhaps it would slow him down.

I scrabbled along the wall, fingers frantic until I rattled over a chromed doorknob. I grabbed, ripped backward, plunged into a stairwell and bolted down the steps.

It seemed only an instant before I'd descended to the floor below, fidgeting with the lever that shuttered the dark hall—Crap! It's locked! I yanked, twisting with all my strength.

More footsteps echoed out above me.

The steel handle refused to budge, its adjoining keypad flashing an impassive red until—

Click!

The keypad flickered green, the door swung wide, a pair of bronze hands swept me inside as footsteps struck the stairs mere feet behind me.

The door latched behind me.

Panic scraped up my throat like claws.

The figure of darkness behind me slammed at the vertical window separating me from the stairs—or, more accurately, separating us from the stairs.

I whirled to face my protector, the grim look in his eyes the only confirmation I needed.

"...August?"

Pale faced and bruised at the temple, his breaths came in haggard waves as blood still traced lines down his neck. He held his phone in one hand, his access badge in the other.

"How? How did you...make it here...so fast?"

The attacker slammed against the stairway door behind us.

"Been working here for years, kid," August growled, dabbing at his temple. "Now let's beat it." He dialed three digits into his phone, 9-1-1­. Then he clutched my wrist—and together, we fled.

We doubled around the corner and passed the photo lounge. Each light above us flared and dimmed, the final gasps of dying stars. The walls around us sneered with melancholy—breathing, convulsing. The floor vibrated, as if trying to shrug us off its back.

August thrusted me around another corner and sprinted out behind me, just as the figure in black burst from a copy room in blurring motion.

Bleeding light faltered along his mask, a rounded contortion of stretched latex the color of aged skin, falsely smooth.

He lunged, grabbed me, threw me.

I struck the wall headfirst, the world snapping sideways; I saw stars, then blood, then nothing. I slid down, smearing a trail of blackness across the dented plaster.

August lifted his gun again, but the masked man drove the blade of a paper cutter through his shoulder. The crunch of broken flesh tore through the air in time with August's scream, blood spraying the wall as he slumped, pinned like a corpse in a painting as the handle lodged itself deep beneath his collarbone.

The figure in black knelt to the ground, retrieved August's gun...and turned toward me.

The throbbing in the back of my head blurred the fingers of the night as they crept through the windows, as August's free hand reached to grab the attacker by the throat.

The man turned and ripped the paper cutter from August's shoulder before slashing his hand away and kicking him to the ground.

Frayed nerves screaming from the back of my skull, I pushed myself to my feet and darted away, staggering on my left leg, my arms catching against the walls.

The hallway was too narrow...or I was too wide—or the universe was folding itself in every wrong way.

A gunshot ricocheted off the tiles beneath me.

Another tore into the frame just beside my head.

I turned the hallway's final corner, eyes frothing a deep crimson haze; I was met again with the towering glare of an implacable stairwell, then backed into another heavy filing cabinet, this one limned in rusting edges.

I shoved it with all I had left. It rocked. Tipped. Then plummeted down the steps like a coffin kicked into a chasm.

There, I thought. Let him chase the echo.

I stumbled across the room, slipped under a desk as the masked attacker rushed past.

He ambled down the stairwell and out of sight. I backed away from the desk, pushing my way against the wall behind me as something clicked.

A handle.

A door.

What?

I ripped at the edge, pulled it towards me, fell inside and slammed it shut.

Heavy gasps heaved in my chest. The scent of bleach and Clorox wipes flitted through my nostrils.

No...my brain reeled. Not another supply closet...please...

Silence reigned, the stillness of the room issuing a stifling decree. It settled over me like a shroud, lungs burning, heart thumping. I knelt, crumpled onto the cold floor, tried to make myself disappear.

I felt it before I saw it. Not footsteps, not gunfire—an unfolding. Something bloomed in the dark.

I raised my head.

He stood in the corner.

Not the man in the mask. Not exactly.

He was too tall and too thin—a willowing silhouette crooked and listing, a marionette left to rot. His face was a smear, features there and not there, shifting beneath the surface like oil drenched in skin. And his chest...

He raised a hand. One long, bloodless finger traced a line down the middle of his sternum.

Then he dug in.

The sound was soft, delicate, syrupy. He sliced himself open.

Blood—black and luminous—poured down his front. It hissed on contact with the floor. He stepped toward me, his chest yawning like a second mouth.

Then he knelt.

He cradled me.

Not roughly. Not cruelly.

Tenderly.

This isn't real...this isn't...this...

I tried to push away, but my limbs wouldn't obey. My head lolled into the crook of his arm. His blood soaked my clothes, slid into my pores. The serrated edges of his chest brushed against me, their surface like a pair of lips chapped in spikes.

The walls around us trembled, peeling into strips. Layers thinner than paper flayed themselves from their scaffold, revealing cotton jowls that hung like drapes of meat. The floor groaned.

"It's never going to stop," I whispered, the words flying at their own accord. "It's never going to stop."

A distant wail began to crawl in from the outside.

Sirens? The police?

Then it rose.

Bent.

Warped into something shrill and shrieking—a howl too high to be human, the wail of a leopard screeching blood through my eardrums. It came from the walls. From the floor. From inside my head.

The creature holding me pressed even tighter, the melted sinews of its cheeks inspissating to softness.

Teeth retraced; eyes melted; a new face emerged...

My mother's face.

"Baby," she whispered. Her voice trembled with warmth. Her hands dripped with blood. "Baby, it's alright. You're safe now."

The words echoed, shivering through walls that were no longer walls—they'd unspooled, sheets of flesh pared from the bone that bled openly around us, peeling into ribbons of red and pink that wavered at my terrified gaze.

My mother rocked me.

Her eyes wept black. Bloody ink moistened the floor.

"Baby..."

I opened my mouth to scream, bones slacking at my jaw.

Mom placed a knuckle on my lips, then dug inside them—ripping wide. Her touch was smothering, warm; the tips of her fingers split apart, sanguine threads of cleaved pulp that curved into a bed of claws.

The rawness of her exposed palm chafed across my teeth, scraped my tongue, clogged my airway—a skinless glob, its ends sharpening as she found the back of my throat.

Ever more pointed, ever more barbed, the flesh crusted into sickles, forcing through the raw nerves of my windpipe as the roar of a leopard ricocheted through my ears with vengeful resurgence.

"Mom," I begged, the words curdling inside me. "Mom...please..."

Thorns stabbed through the back of my neck. Blood spurted all around, spouting against the shadows of my mother's sunken face, steaming into the air as the world around me screeched in shrill, unrelenting tones.

It's never going to stop.

It's never going to stop.