In the darkness behind her hands, she saw the roses.
The smell of summer, the canopy of trees, the way the shovel cut the earth, tossing dirt along the edge of the garden, the sounds of slicing, cutting my fingers on the wild rosebushes near the barn, the life and brightness of petals, of blood, the taste and smell, watching as it dripped down my fingers, feathered around my shirt sleeve, watching as it grew and bloomed on my body, my body the garden, remembering the rose garden never ended it never—
A wet moan, then silence. There was a crack, and the sound of a blade being pulled from something heavy. The door buckled under the next thump, a body slapping against the wood grains.
Charlotte’s eyes snapped open and she pressed her hands in a prayer.
Two footsteps fell outside the door.
Tap. Tap.
Charlotte was relieved to hear screaming outside the door. The taps stopped, footsteps crashing into a run that faded down the hallway. A distraction for the time being. Her throat burning, she crawled out from the sink and stood carefully. She turned the tap on and bent under the faucet, still hearing the muffled chaos outside the door. The water tasted warm and grainy, like licking a piece of limestone. After she turned the tap off, she could hear movement inside the bathroom. She whipped around, holding her knife at chest level.
“Who the fuck is there?”
There was a sob from the shower. Charlotte pulled the curtain aside. In the tub cowered a dark-haired woman.
Kaitlin.
“Please don’t kill me please don’t kill me, oh God please don’t kill me…”
Charlotte lowered her knife.
“What are you doing in here? The rules say no hiding.”
Kaitlin was curled in a ball, her knees drawn up below her chin. Her dark hair looked wet. She sobbed violently. Charlotte noticed her fingernails were torn to shreds, traced with dark blood.
“I can’t go out there. I can’t kill anybody. Why do we have to do this!?”
Charlotte put her knife on the sink counter and sat on the edge of the tub. Shreds of wood from Tom’s collision with the door spotted the linoleum like scattered straw. She turned to Kailin.
“Because if you don’t, they will kill you in here, like a trapped animal. They will kill you, because this is the way the world is now.”
Charlotte’s voice dropped.
“And we allowed it to get this way.”
Kaitlin pulled in one long sob, exhaling with a bark. Charlotte locked eyes with her. The helplessness in the room was another presence, insidious and needy.
“It’s everyone for themselves here. If you want to survive, you have to fight.”
Kaitlin nodded, sniffling wetly and began to move out of the tub. Charlotte stood and picked her knife back up, the handle cool from its recess. She grabbed the doorknob and paused.
No sound from the other side.
She pulled the door open, hearing nothing but her own breath and the gentle aftershocks of Kaitlin’s whimpers.
Tom’s body was face down outside the door, his back torn open. Among the branches of muscle, his vertebrae glittered in the pale hallway lighting, like new railroad tracks. Kaitlin let out a low cry, the sound clattering over her teeth in a hurried exit. Charlotte looked at his body, disconnected from her own in a haze. All aboard for the Number 3 Train to the brain stem! Charlotte bit her lip to keep from laughing out of pure horror. She thought of her own spine, and the way it twisted in the valleys of her back.
What will it look like when it’s torn out of me?
They stepped over the body, into the humid hallway. Kaitlin reached out and touched Charlotte’s hand. Charlotte turned to her, the smell of sweat and death rich in the air. Kaitlin’s eyes were hollow, peering from the black ringed sinkholes in her skull. Charlotte felt a rush of coldness at Kaitlin’s sick, wide smile, as comforting as a clown’s in a horror movie. She had changed from bathroom to the hallway, like she had put on a mask.
“Everyone for themselves,” Kaitlin said softly, gesturing toward Tom, sweat beads shining like jewels on her arm. Her eyes were wild.
Sick with fear, Charlotte managed a weak nod. They split off toward the hallway.
From her hiding place behind the bedroom door, she watched the Gorgeous Man sing as he pulled his knife from Jason’s temple. The blade was slick with brain matter, matted and muddy like the bottom of a pond. The struggle hadn’t been much. Jason wasn’t as graceful with a knife as he was with a shot glass. The Gorgeous Man had cornered him in the bedroom and handled him like a matador, elegantly swinging his hips back and floating his arms as Jason clumsily jabbed his blade toward him. A few minutes into the performance, without dropping his arms, the Gorgeous Man delicately turned his wrist and struck, burying the blade in Jason’s skull.
“Bullseye!” he screamed, twisting the handle, the blade making a sound like a man sucking a juicy peach. Jason’s right eye closed, his lips drawn up like he had put on a pair of headphones with the volume all the way up. The Gorgeous Man swayed as he cranked, dancing as the knife twisted more easily, lubricated by blood and brain.
“Another one bites the dust. Ohhh another one and another one—”
Involuntarily, Charlotte let out a cry. His head snapped toward the door as Charlotte slapped her hands over her mouth. In one motion, he pulled the knife from Jason, the body flopping to the floor. She could see the Gorgeous Man through the crack, his eyes blazing through the hinge like blue searchlights.
He wiped the blade on the leg of his pants. Raising it in front of his chest, he slowly walked toward her.
“It’s still warm, it’s still warm, darling,” he whispered, his lips curling in an awful, snarling smile. “It will feel so nice, so nice when it slices you open…”
His eyes rolled like sharks in the surf. He was now pressed against the slit of the door, his lips moving quickly, spitting as he spoke faster and faster. Charlotte hitched her breath, trapped.
She barely had time to move as he shoved the blade through the opening, blood and brain drying in light strokes along the edge, just missing her face.
“In a second it will be so warm in you, it will be so warm and feel so good, come out and get a taasttee…”
Years ago, when the door had been made, a factory worker noticed a tear in the grain. Deciding against scrapping the door, he had marked it as complete, turning it face down on the delivery truck. This tear was deep, creating a valley in the door with one slope taller than the other, and razor sharp. After it was purchased by a real estate company, a sign was placed over the disfigurement, and it was forgotten. The sign had been taken down recently by the Agents as they removed any reminders from the time before. And that factory worker? He died nine years ago of a heart attack while sitting in lunchtime traffic, his Italian club rancid in the sunlight, filling the truck cabin with a salty, oily smell.
Because of his laziness, that fat bastard saved Charlotte’s life from the Gorgeous Man.
She slammed the door forward, knocking the knife out of his hands. He bellowed as the wood connected with his head. The tear in the door bit hungrily at his forehead, devouring the fleshy wrinkles from his surprised expression like a thick piece of cake. His blood and hair smeared across the grain. The Gorgeous Man screamed and fell to the ground.