Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

“That’s right,” she said into the phone and gestured at Bush Mask. He went through the open security door and then walked down the line, pulling cash out of the teller drawers. “We got twenty people in here, and we want twenty people to go home tonight, right? One of them’s hurt already so we’re going to send her out. Play nice and she’ll be the only one. No. I’ll tell you what. You get us a touring bus. You know, something a rock band would like. You get the bus and you bring it up outside. Then you call us back. Bye.”

She nodded to herself, and headed back across the lobby. In the middle she stopped and asked, “What’s that smell?” She looked over the customers huddled below. “Somebody here shit himself?”

Finally, and with great hesitation, one man raised his hand. He kept his head bowed.

“Great. Well, we’re gonna be here awhile, folks, so maybe you need to go take care of your mess. And the rest of you, too. You need to pee, don’t leave it till you’re pissin’ on the floor.” She snatched the satchel from Bush. “Go out there and lead them to the bathroom,” she told him. “One at a time, got that? And don’t shoot anybody else, for Christ’s sake.”

The embarrassed man got up and walked uncomfortably across the lobby to a set of restrooms. They were locked but Erica was already holding out the keys. “They’re for employees,” she explained.

Bush Mask and the man went into the nearer bathroom. Wonder Woman went back into the vault.

When the bathroom door opened again, the man emerged first. He was wiping his sleeve across his face. It was clear that he’d broken down. He quickly sat and grabbed his knees as if he could hide from everybody. A few others raised their hands to be allowed into the bathroom. Bush Mask surveyed them all. Svekis raised his hand, too. The mask twitched, and Svekis heard him snort, no doubt amused that the old man he’d intimidated had finally broken. Thus it was that he let one woman into the ladies room and came back for Svekis while Wonder Woman returned to the vault and Hockey Mask watched the cops outside. “Come on, geezer,” he said, and all but prodded Svekis with the nose of the automatic.

Svekis got up heavily. He drew a deep breath, but kept his shoulders hunched, his head down. His rumpled London Fog disguised the solidity of him. He walked ahead of his captor, waited while the door was unlocked, then let himself be shoved inside. “Try not to mess the place any worse, huh?” Bush Mask said.

Inside were two urinals and a single stall. Polished chocolate brown tiles covered the walls and floor. The room reeked, the smell coming from the trash bin. No doubt the frightened customer had thrown out his soiled underwear. The window of frosted glass was wired inside and out. There was a vent in the wall past the sinks, perhaps the size of a notebook, and a narrow closet door behind which would be shelves of toilet paper, cleaners, and mops.

Svekis went to the stall and closed the door. He took off his coat and hung it on the door hook, then followed with his shirt and trousers. Even as he stripped down, the roar of transformation filled his ears and a redness rose behind his eyes, blood becoming like acid in his veins. His body creaked like a tree about to snap in a high wind, but distantly. He was falling away from it, into pure white pain. Ribs flexed and curved in, his muscles following, reshaping. It took every last shred of conscious control not to cry out. He doubled over in the narrow space, pawing at the metal wall. His senses plunged into shadow. In shadow he was reborn.

The tall old man hadn’t come out after ten minutes. Bush Mask figured he’d had a stroke or something, and stuck his head into the restroom. “Hey, let’s go!” he shouted.

When nobody answered, he went in. He had the good sense to keep his gun leveled at the stall. Nobody stood in front of the urinal or at the sink. Except for the broom closet, there was nowhere else. He walked to the closet and checked the handle. It was locked. He turned and saw that the slats had been removed from the air vent high up in the wall, but the hole was so small that nothing bigger than somebody’s head could have fit through it.

Under the door of the nearer stall, he could see the tips of the old guy’s shoes on the floor. “Goddamit! Whadja do, have a coronary on me? She’s gonna blame me for it, you bastard.” He kicked at the stall door. It wasn’t latched, and banged wide open, revealing an undershirt, boxer shorts, and socks beside the shoes on the floor.

For a brief instant he imagined that the old man had somehow flushed himself down the toilet. Instinctively he looked behind the door and found that the rest of the old man’s clothes were hung on the hook there. “What the hell?” he said. Where could the guy have gone, naked?

The wall switch by the door clicked. The lights went out. Fear drove him then. He backed out of the stall and up against the sink. Wan light came in through the frosted glass of the window, showing the darker wire within like strands of spider webbing. He held his gun ready. He sensed movement, started to turn, and came up against orange eyes glowing in the dark, and a solid form surrounding them that was furred blue-gray in the light from the window, a snout against his cheek, the smell of its furious breath like a color. Bright red.

He opened his mouth to scream, but a sharp crack resounded off the tiles and amid searing pain he felt himself flying through the air.

One of the women finally went to Wonder Woman and said, “Please, I’ve got to use the bathroom!”

“Well, then-” She turned about, realized that Andy’s idiot brother was nowhere in sight. “Great,” she said. She went over to Andy in his hockey mask, setting the second satchel-the one full of cash-down beside the guard. “Your brother’s screwing up again. Deal with him. Now.”

Shaking his head, Andy crossed the lobby in strides of anger. She was half-hoping he’d just shoot the idiot.

He skidded at the men’s room door, slipped, and fell onto one elbow. Scrambling up, gun in hand, he shouted, “Jesus!”

Gun at the ready, he shouldered open the door to the bathroom. She could see how dark it was, but instead of going in, he backed away, all the way to the wall. The hostages were all staring. She could not let this happen.

She hauled the guard to his feet, pushed her pistol to his cheek, then walked him to the restroom.

One side of Andy’s clothes was smeared in blood. On the floor lay a puddle of it that had leaked from under the door. She cautiously nudged the door open again. Lobby light slashed across the dark room, across the simian halloween mask of George Bush.

“God damn it,” she said. She let go of the guard and reached cautiously around the wall until her fingers found the light switch. She held her gun ready to shoot. “I told him not to…” The overhead light fluttered on. A headless torso lay in the middle of the room. There was blood in sprays across the stall, all the way to the ceiling. The mask, she saw now, was still attached to the head. The gun lay in the middle of the floor.

Andy started to babble. “That’s Markie, that’s-he’s dead, oh, Christ, what the hell, what the hell-”

She backed out into him, then grabbed onto him as much to hold herself up as to shut him up. “I don’t know what the hell. Who’d he take in here, who was the last to use the bathroom?”

They turned and looked at the crowd that was looking back at them. The horrified guard gaped, too. She turned and faced the manager’s cubicle.

The old gent, John, sat exactly as before. If anything he looked more rumpled, pale, and exhausted than half an hour ago. His head hung low, but he seemed to be watching from beneath his brows, as if too tired to face things head-on.