The Vertical Marathon Read online

It was just a feeling. Intuition.

  They ran down a staircase, panting.

  When they turned into the hall, they saw it. A double door. A semi-circular sign with numbers splayed on the top like a fan.

  An elevator.

  They sprinted towards it. They chests were bursting, and their legs were wobbling, but they didn’t notice.

  They finally reached it, gasping. The boy looked at the only door in the hall, then up at the sign.

  He saw that the floor they were on was 1. The bottom. The highest number on the fan was 40. The highest floor was one after that.

  G.

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. All this time, he had been going the wrong way.

  A red dot lit up when he pushed the button to summon his escape. He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to see someone, anyone, come charging at him.

  The little girl, breathless, kept bouncing giddily as she watched the needle glide from right to left, towards them.

  The boy wondered why no one was coming for them. When he escaped, they had made a lot of commotion. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of hitting, a little blood. Still, no alarms sounded. No one was coming after them.

  Why had nobody tried to stop him?

  The elevator dinged, and it told him everything.

  The door opened so quickly that all he could do was grab the girl and yank her away from it.

  There was only one person standing in the elevator. It was a man in his early forties wearing black slacks and a deep blue dress shirt. His hair was a sun-kissed brown, curled at the ends. He had a friend posture, a fatherly face. Everything about him was welcoming, except his lime green eyes.

  One of his eyes glared at them, gleaming with the excitement of winning the whole pot in a poker tournament. The other eye had a chip in the iris, making the fact it was made of glass all the more obvious.

  Both the boy and the girl recognized him at once.

  He was the man that had brought the girl here.

  He was the man that kept the boy locked in the room until he needed him.

  He was the man that would make the girl angry, so angry, and then proceed to poke and jab at her.

  He was the man that would always strap the boy down so everyone would inject what they please and watch him foam at the mouth.

  He was the man that had left the girl to die.

  He was the man that had set up a camera when they tried to remove the boy’s heart.

  He was the man that they thought was behind it all.

  He was the man that they were running from.

  “Come,” he said, his hand raised to summon. “If you don’t, then I’ll have to send them to come get you, and I’d rather not have that much noise. It disturbs the other residents.” His eye twitched up, towards the patients’ rooms in the floor above.

  The girl took the boy’s hand as they walked into the elevator.

  “Good, children.”

  He pressed a button. Number 35 lit up, an ancient yellow-white.

  “I was surprised that you were able to do it,” he said to the boy.

  To the girl, “I was surprised that you didn’t do it sooner.”

  The girl looked up at him, pure hatred boiling over inside of her. Her stomach tightened, but it felt good. Like a hunger that was about to be satisfied, very soon. She ran her tongue over her teeth, and clenched her fists.

  “Don’t try it. It’s two against one. He’ll kill you.”

  She looked up at the boy.

  “Yes, he’s a very skittish animal,” he looked at the boy, “If you saw her, as she really was, not this little damsel ploy, you’d kill her. Like a cornered raccoon.”

  They continued up in silence, watching the pin over the door glide over the numbers like it was searching for a radio station.

  “No need to worry. There’s no punishment involved for this kind of thing. We’ll install some extra precautions, but other than that, it’s business as usual.”

  The boy grabbed at his chest. His heart was beating wildly, and he thought he might vomit.

  The man looked over to him. “Calm down. You didn’t close it properly, although it must’ve been good enough if you were able to run the marathon it took to get here.”

  The boy felt the slit on his chest through his papery gown. His fingertips ran over the staples that he had arranged over the wound in sporadic fashion like sticks casually tossed onto the floor.

  The man subconsciously rubbed his left hand, which was still numb from the anesthesia the boy had injected during his panicked attack.

  It was the same anesthesia the doctors had injected into the boy’s chest, a special formula that left him awake so he could see for himself how strange and misshapen his dead “heart” was. How utterly needless it was now his parasite had nearly completely taken over his body.

  He was mildly surprised that the boy was able to break free with seemingly such little effort when the doctor had slid the knife down the side of his sternum.

  It made him wonder what kind of drug they had been testing on the boy. Or if it was just one of his many wonderful, wonderful surprises.

  The girl glared at him vehemently, trying to melt his glass eye.

  She was the reason for the chip in his eye. Actually, the reason was the pick he accidentally stabbed himself with when she had turned out to be a little more...energetic than they’d thought she was and lashed out at him.

  That incident was about seven months ago, on her first day here.

  The memory of it amused him.

  For being so cool about his work, for being in such control of himself and his colleagues, he could certainly be a klutz.

  Several minutes later, they had passed floor 30.

  The boy was shaking. His eyes were wide, their whites glowing in eerie brilliance.

  The girl hugged around his waist, trying to get him to be still. Her eyes were starting to tear up.

  The radio needle above the door touched the number 33, and then the boy snapped.

  

  Five doctors and five nurses stood with two gurneys with six restraints each in front of the elevator.

  When the doors slid open, none of them were shocked by what they saw.

  The boy fell out first. He lied halfway in and out of the hall. There was his blood seeping around a pocketknife embedded in his chest.

  In the elevator itself, their boss was kneeling with his back to them, no doubt trying to hold back the monster girl.

  They didn’t have to see her to know that her teeth were a piranha’s, her eyes were golden almond-shaped pupil-less slits, claws had sprouted from beneath her fingernails, and that a long orange plume of feathery needles had replaced her hair and continued down her back in a soldiers’ march.

  They could hear her screeching.

  The rushed in, grabbed them, and placed them on the gurneys.

  They held on to the girl’s arms with all their might. Still she kicked and scratched like a toddler who didn’t want to go to bed. Her screaming tore up their ears.

  The boy was barely conscious.

  His head flopped towards the girl, with the doctors trying to hold her down.

  His vision started to fail. The scene of the girl’s struggle was still clear, but kept bobbing in and out of darkness.

  As they rolled him away, her screams swung from high to low in his clouded ears. It reminded him of an ambulance siren.

  Like the one he was rolled into two years ago.

  Two years ago, he was also strapped to a table. It was being dragged by blurry demons.

  They claimed they wanted to help him.

  He didn’t believe them then.

  And he was right.

  The siren was the only thing he could hear clearly. Or maybe it was the devil laughing, like he thought it was.

  There was a bump. It felt like an iron door had struck his back. It brought back some feeling, some thought to his mind.

  And it told him
to get out of there.

  Any way he could.

  So that’s what he did.

  The only way he could.

  

  The two people rolling him down the hall had witnessed his violent convulsions before. They knew how intense they could get.

  But they never expected the blood that had been pooling on the boy’s chest to suddenly seep back into the wound

  They never expected the sudden hemorrhaging all around his skin. Purple bruises began growing to softball size underneath the surface before cracking and allowing the escape of near black fluid that flowed about as well as chocolate pudding.

  And they certainly weren’t expecting the knife to be thrown out of his chest by a geyser of a mix of blood and the bile-like substance.

  

  The man with the chipped glass eye was clamping onto his neck, his fingers stained red. He had to fight to remain conscious.

  His colleagues surrounded him, either dead or dying themselves.

  The boy’s parasite had grown stronger. This was the first time he had ever known of that the he had actually let it break through the skin.

  He knew that they’d escape. Everyone would be rushing up here to try and rescue all of the others and himself.

  He cursed his misfortune. In all of his years here, there had never been such a massacre.

  Let them leave. Let them escape. They’ll die soon enough.

  But first things first.

  Dizzy, he got up to his knees and went to the nearest carcass.

  The girl had gotten to this one. Most of the flesh was gone on the front. There was no head.

  At least there was something left, unlike the very unlucky, very foolish doctor in charge of her that day.

  He calmly felt around until his hand felt upon some gaze. Using his teeth, he ripped open the package and wrapped it around himself the best he could.

  Yes, yes they’d die out there. No matter what little tricks they