Stan came around to the front of the desk. He was a tall bastard, with a full head on me. "What the fuck happened here, Brody?"
I tried to get a handle on the situation. The hardest part was explaining myself in a way that didn't make me sound insane. "You have to understand," I said, then stopped.
"Understand what?"
I pointed to Peter's dead body. "He started it."
It was the best I could come up with. Alice started crying even harder.
Stan put his hands on his hips. "Hold on- you're admitting you did this?"
"Just Peter. Not Melinda, Peter killed her."
"He has their blood all over him," Ernest said quietly.
"No," I said, crossing the room. "Some of it's mine."
"Just stop where you are."
"He killed the cleaning lady," I explained. "I came in here to talk to him and I found him doing...something to her." I didn't want to come out and say he was eating her. I barely believed it myself, and I saw it happen right in front of me. "He ran at me. He tried to kill me, what was I supposed to do?"
The three of them kept their distance. Every step I took, they took two toward the door. "It's okay, we believe you," Ernest said. Alice began to sob uncontrollably.
"He was crazy! He fucking bit me!" I showed them my shoulder, the wound still bleeding, though not as bad as before with the blood beginning to clot. "Right here, look!"
Stan tried to force a reassuring voice. "We believe you, Brody, okay? You just have to calm down so we can figure this out."
"Fuck you, Stan, you don't believe me."
"Yes, I do."
"Oh, yeah? Then why are you still heading for the door?"
The three of them looked at each other. Suddenly Stan broke into a run for the door. Others from the office had begun to crowd in the hallway, and they waved the three of them over frantically. Alice and Ernest followed right behind him, running from me like I was a goddamn murderer. I chased after them, if only to stop them and slap some sense into them, but before I could reach them they made it out of Peter's office and into the crowd of onlookers.
Two assholes grabbed the door and pushed it shut just as I reached it. I crashed into the door so hard it rattled my jaw, and I tried to open the door but they held it closed. As I kept trying it I could hear them dragging a heavy desk over to barricade the door. "Stop," I shouted, "let me the fuck out of here! Don't leave me in here with them!" I banged on the door until I realized it was only making things worse.
After a minute or so the shouting on the other side of the door started to die down, along with Alice's crying. It sounded like the whole building had gathered out there to see what was going on. Among the concerned murmurs and arguing, I heard the very distinct, very worrying voice of Ernest calling the cops.
"Motherfucker," I whispered.
There was no way, absolutely no way in hell the cops were going to buy my story.
Oh, you say your boss was eating the cleaning lady? And then he tried to eat you? Yes, that's known to happen. What else could you have done but cave his skull in with a framed photograph of his family? An open and shut case of self-defense if I've ever seen one. Just sign here and you'll be on your way.
I would spend the night in city jail for sure. If they even bothered to post bail, I wouldn't be able to afford it. I lived in New York City, for Christ's sake, I had four dollars in my savings account. And then, when my case eventually went to trial, I had absolutely zero witnesses to back up my whack-job story of corporate cannibalism.
Character witnesses? Yeah, that'll go great. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm kind of an asshole. My last girlfriend broke up with me because she said I had a better relationship with a porn site than I did with her. My parents moved to California about ten minutes after I was legally allowed to fend for myself. The one friend I had left from college, the last time I saw him he called me "The worst thing about New York," which is, I think we can agree, pretty harsh.
As I stared down at Peter's broken eggshell of a head, I realized there was no happy ending in the cards, and that meant there was only one thing to do.
Figure out how to open that vent over Peter's desk.
His chair had been knocked against the wall in one of the struggles, so I wheeled it back over and used it to climb onto his desk. I tried not to step in Peter's blood, but I quickly realized it was a vain attempt to avoid it completely and just stepped in it as little as possible.
It wasn't until that moment that I realized how warm I was. The cold air felt so good on my face that even with everything that was going on, I took a second to cool my sweaty skin. From this new height I could just reach the vent cover. There were four little clips holding it up, one on each side, that simply had to be moved aside to remove the face of the vent. Easy. They were stuck a bit, but it was nothing a little wiggling and prying couldn't fix.
After I'd gotten two of them free, my fingers hurting from pushing on the thin metal, I paused for a second. It was quiet out in the office, too quiet after all the ruckus they'd been raising the last five minutes.
Then I realized why.
A new voice was addressing the people. It was no one I'd ever heard, in the building or otherwise, speaking in the kind of command presence authority figures were trained to use. Stan was answering their questions as if he were in charge, and not at all the guy who ran for his life ahead of the sobbing lady.
There was no doubt about it- the cops were already there.
Frantically I set to opening the vent again. The third moved easily, thank God, and I focused all my attention on moving that last clip. Through the door was the sound of a desk being pushed out of the way. I was almost there, damn it.
"Mister Tate?"
The cops were calling my name, but I ignored them and pushed on the last clip until I thought my thumb was going to slice open. Finally, it moved. I threw the vent down and felt the full blast of cold air hit my face as I reached up and clawed for a grip in the vent's aluminum insides, up on my toes and stretched as far as I could.
My foot slipped on blood. Before I could get a good grip I fell, hitting the desk hard before tumbling off it and to the floor, rolling to a stop a few, painful feet later.
I looked up at the three cops standing over me, their guns drawn and their faces intense. "I can explain this," I said. Peter's blood was all over my raised hands.
I have to say, this isn't how I imagined killing my boss would go.
CHAPTER THREE
The cops took one look at me and decided I'd killed Peter. Which isn't entirely untrue, of course, but it does miss some of the finer points of the day.
They had me roll onto my stomach and put my hands behind my back so they could restrain me. I was expecting the cold metal on my wrists- a feeling I've experienced one too many times- but instead they zip-tied me with a length of plastic and pulled me to my feet. I asked them why none of them had cuffs, but they didn't answer.
"Alright, Mister Tate, so what happened here," the first cop asked, turning me around to face the bodies. He was the oldest of the three and his chest said his name was Miller.
"Do you really want to know, or are you just buying time so you can haul your pussy out of here like Stan?"
He frowned at me, obviously not fond of the smart-ass act. Unfortunately it was the only one I had. "Oh, trust me, I really want to know," he said. A second officer, a young Hispanic guy who looked a day out of the academy, grimaced as he put his fingers to Peter's neck to check for a pulse, then did the same for the cleaning woman. It was obviously a formality, given their current state of, let's call it openness.
"You won't believe it."
"You'd be surprised," the other officer said. He was a bigger guy with a mustache. His name plate said Johnson.
I sighed and told them everything, starting with lunch and ending with my co-workers locking me in with two bloody corpses. They listened to every word, studying my face while the young cop- his name was Diaz- wrote it all down in a black notepad.
At the end of my story, Miller cleared his throat and said, "Do you have any needles or paraphernalia on your person?"
"I don't understand what you mean."
"Your eyes are red and the pupils are dilated. I'll ask you point-blank if you prefer- what are you on?"
"Did you hear a word of what I just said? Peter attacked me. He fucking bit me. I'm fucking bleeding here, so maybe that's why I'm not looking so hot to you?" Meanwhile, Johnson had moved behind me and was patting down my legs and checking my pockets.
"Sober people don't try to pry a grate from the ceiling and escape through the air vent."
I sighed again. "That was because I knew no one would believe me. And you don't believe me, so it might have looked crazy but I was right."
Johnson leaned around, held up a joint in front of my face and said, "So what's this?"
"That? That is...I forgot about that."
"You have the right to remain silent," Miller said, and all I could think was,
Not fucking likely.
CHAPTER FOUR
After marching me past the judgmental looks of my co-workers who were busy being questioned by a few other officers, Officer Miller shoved me in the back of one of three squad cars parked out front. By the time we left, Johnson and another cop had already been called away in one of the other cars, speeding off in the opposite direction in a hurry.
"Busy day," I said as Miller pulled us into traffic. Diaz and Miller looked at each other without answering. Diaz in particular was nervous about the comment, but he seemed like the anxious type anyway. He was new on the job and it showed.
The drive to the precinct was painfully slow. And I do mean painful. My shoulder was killing me. The bite was throbbing all the way up my neck and down my back. They'd done nothing but wrap the wound in gauze from an emergency kit in the trunk. Twice I told them I needed a doctor, but both times they told me someone at the station would take a look at it. The third time, Miller banged on the spit-stained Plexiglass and said, "Hey. Unless you're confessing, shut your mouth."
"When they figure out I'm innocent, I'm suing your ass for mistreatment," I warned. "You and the new guy over here." Diaz flashed that same, nervous look but Miller told him to relax and keep driving.
As we passed a church my head started to feel fuzzy. The city blocks blurred together into one, long stretch of concrete. "I'm not feeling too good here," I announced, but they didn't hear me. Their attention was focused on a scene unfolding to the right of the car, just around the corner from the church. Two firetrucks and an ambulance were in front of a pharmacy with their lights flashing. Paramedics wheeled a woman onto the street, her face wrapped in bandages that were quickly turning red. She was hooked up to intravenous fluids, which the medics were careful not to disturb as they loaded her into the back of their vehicle.
Whatever had happened to her, it seemed like she was having an even worse day than I was.
In fact, the further we drove the more it seemed like a lot of people were having their worst day. I watched as a mother pushing her baby stumbled off the curb and nearly knocked the stroller over. An old man asleep at a bus stop was missing his shoes. The owner of a camera store supervised three men sweeping up glass from the giant display window that someone had apparently shattered. We passed at least four stores that were closed "due to illness," some of them pretty high-end places that must have been losing thousands for every hour their doors were shut. Something strange was going on in New York, and an uncomfortable amount of it pointed toward the Red Flu everyone was going crazy about on the news.
"Holy shit," I mumbled.
I remembered something just then, maybe because of everything I'd seen, maybe because it was my first chance to sit and think since my lunch break. It was something Peter had said on Friday, the last time I saw him before he sent me that pissy email. He had leaned into the office and asked if anyone had aspirin. When Alice handed him some from her desk, she warned him he'd better not be getting sick.
"If I'm sick," he said, "you're the ones who should worry."
Was it the Red Flu that had made Peter lose his mind? On TV they talked about the extremely high temperatures patients were showing and how it led to confusion and delusional behavior, but it's a pretty far stretch from fever dreams to murdering your cleaning lady and eating her goddamn intestines like they were Pasta Carbonara.
Unless there was something they weren't telling us.
When I couldn't sleep, I watched a lot of TV. My favorite were documentaries about conspiracies and unsolved mysteries. Usually aliens or the occult, stuff like that. I remember this one show about the greatest medical cover-ups in history. There was the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, when they studied Syphilis by leaving people untreated. Agenda Twenty-One, the use of GMOs to shrink the population. Fluoride in the water to cover up chemicals. Cancer from cell phones. The CIA inventing AIDS. All that fun stuff.