Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

His eyes were drawn past the mirror to the air vent beside the toilet. This was an old building, an old hotel converted to apartments, and instead of a window in the bathroom there was an air shaft covered with a cruddy metal grate. While sitting on the toilet, Todd often heard the intimate sounds of other tenants using their bathrooms, a bit of voyeurism that he found endlessly, disgustingly fascinating. There was also something distinctly creepy about it, that barely visible dark shaft in which anything could be hiding and peeping back at him. Sometimes when he went to the bathroom late at night, he envisioned a weird, spidery man who lived behind the grate, scuttling up and down the shaft or huddling only inches away as Todd sat on the toilet. Mr. Green.

He heard the outer door crash open. The fearsome thing that had been his mother entered the apartment like a violent wind, upending furniture and tearing everything apart as it ransacked the place looking for him.

Todd opened the medicine cabinet. On the bottom was a plastic margarine tub full of tweezers and toenail clippers, and there was also a small multipurpose tool with pliers and a screwdriver. Using the screwdriver, he knelt on the toilet lid and went to work on the screws securing the air-shaft grate. Musty warmed air blew in his face. At first he almost gave up-the screws were old, tight and thickly painted over-but he stuck with it and suddenly the yellow enamel cracked off like candy coating. The first screw turned.

The thing outside grabbed the knob and slammed into the bathroom door.

Todd flinched, fumbled, then got the screw off. The second screw was easier, and the third and fourth didn’t have to be removed at all-he found he could pry the grate open without touching them.

He stuck his head into the shaft and looked down. It was gross, black with greasy lint, utterly dark and forbidding. Not to mention deep-their apartment was up on the third floor.

The bathroom door was warping, cracking, sending splinters of wood bouncing off the walls. Any second it would give, and that would be it-there was no place left to hide. A hideously mangled blue arm snaked through a hole in the plywood and thrashed around in the close space, straining for him. It could just touch, its fingertips grazing his shirt.

Ducking and dodging, Todd grabbed an armload of towels off the shelf and stuffed them down the chute. He did the same with the towels on the racks, then with the thick, shaggy bathmat. Finally, he climbed up on the toilet lid and squirmed feet first into the tight shaft until he was completely inside, painfully dangling by his armpits.

The bathroom door smashed inward.

Todd let go.

It was over very quickly: a brief plummet down a furry chimney, then his body slammed through something soft with a loud, concussive bang-it was his towels on a sheet-metal panel that collapsed beneath him and tumbled him into the basement.

Todd came to his senses in a pile of gallon jugs of used fryer oil. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he was covered with sticky black fluff, but he was not in pain. Later, he would feel it. He had bottomed out in the big main heating duct that fed the building, the force of his impact popping all its metal rivets and collapsing the duct like a cardboard box. Beside him, the ancient furnace was shuddering, squealing as if mortally wounded, its flame snuffed out. The basement was filling with the stink of gas.

Though still stunned, Todd forced himself to move; he didn’t want to see what might follow him down that chute. He was nearly up the stairs when the gas exploded.

The force of it hurled him out of the basement like a powerful shove. He picked himself up, shrieking, “Help! Help!” as he ran down the building’s back corridor. He was facing an array of doorways: the restaurant kitchen, the utility room, the stairway to the apartments, the fire exit. He was surprised to see the exit door wide open to the back alley, and a trail of odd debris-shoes and torn clothing-strewn across the floor. That door was never supposed to be left open; Mrs. Mazola was a fanatic about that, just as she was about any kind of mess in her building. But Todd didn’t have time to think about Mrs. Mazola-all he saw was the open door to the outside.

As he rushed for it, something flew out of the stairwell and knocked him down. Crazy whipcord arms skinnier than his own wrapped around his neck, and a gaping, ravenous fish mouth sought his. In the sickly, strobing fluorescents, Todd recognized the overpowering perfume of his tiny landlady, Mrs. Mazola.

If he had been caught completely off guard, Todd would have had no chance against the rabid attack, but his blood was already running so high with adrenaline that his own panicked reflexes bordered on the supernatural.

Screaming, he dove with his clinging attacker straight into the sharp steel edge of the doorjamb, using it as a wedge to pry them apart. Already he could feel his thoughts blurring from the lack of oxygen. He tried to say, Lady, quit it! but no words would come out. The woman showed no signs of slacking, and Todd kept frantically thrusting her against the metal door flange as if trying to saw off an unwanted Siamese twin. The sharp edge gashed Mrs. Mazola’s purpled face and arm to the bone, smearing inky black blood all over Todd and the wall… but she just wouldn’t let go.

In a final, extreme feat of desperation, Todd lugged her over to the big industrial fire extinguisher. Todd and his buddies often dared each other to shoot this thing off in the alley, but they had never gone through with it. They were too terrified of the wrath of his crazy landlady. Little had they known!

Blacking out, barely able to think another second, Todd yanked out the extinguisher’s safety pin, grabbed the rubber hose, and rammed its nozzle down Mrs. Mazola’s yawning black gullet. Then he squeezed the handle.

The result was instantaneous-and spectacular: She broke off in a backward somersault, vomiting incredible billows of white chemical dust all over the room and vanishing in the cloud.

Without looking back, Todd scrambled clear and bolted through the red fire door to the alley.

“Can I trust you boys to behave?”

Todd and Ray warily nodded, squinting up at the bright blur of their interrogator. The light in their faces was blinding. Averting their eyes, they could see they were in a fancy public restroom with gold fixtures and black marble tile. Their butts ached from sitting on the hard, cold floor.

The man was wearing a peculiar helmet, a tall black tube with flat sides, crimped in back like a rudder fin, with a cross-shaped hole in front for him to see through. He asked, “What exactly are you two trying to do?”

“Join you,” Todd said. His tongue felt like a dead slug.

“Why is that?”

“We don’t want to end up like those blue freaks out there.”

“You say you came from a ship. What was the name of this ship?”

“It didn’t have a name. It was a decommissioned nuclear submarine.”

“Who else was on this submarine?”

“A lot of people. You want a list?”

“Was the Demon Lulu on the submarine with you?”

“Lulu? You mean Lulu Pangloss? What about her?”

“You know her!”

“We did. Until she became a Xombie.”

“You are minions of the Blue Fury! Admit it!”

“Sir, the last we heard of Lulu was that she was going ashore. We never saw her after that.”

“Liar! You are spies of hers! Why else would you have come ashore?”

“We were short of supplies, so the crew sent us out for more.”

“Weren’t you worried about Hellions?”

“Hellions?”

“Xombies. Exes. Maenads.”

“We couldn’t see any from the boat. We thought the coast was clear. We were wrong.”