The Last Handful of Clover - Book 3: The Stone in the Stream

3.46 A Ship on the Sea of Madness

June 16, 4:15 pm

Nothing she had seen over the last horrific day had prepared Morgan for the living nightmare that unfolded in the studios of KUTV.

The past few minutes had been like something out of Dante, and the screaming, the terror, and the blood that had been shed in the short time it took her to escape from the twenty-first floor would stain her memories forever.

That is, if I survive at all, she thought, trying to catch her breath on the rooftop.

Less than twenty minutes earlier, blocked from the stairwell door by the violence that erupted in the studio lobby, she had been forced to flee deeper into the offices. She quickly found what felt like safety when she barricaded herself into the room with the dead body of her cameraman, Stan. For a precious few minutes, she had felt safe there from the horror outside.

But, as she was beginning to understand, the evil that was stalking this city would not be kept out by high floors, or by locked doors.

She'd forgotten about Phil King, the detained anchorman, who was also locked in the office, and when she burst in he'd been staring out the window, as if in a trance. Even before Morgan had fully regained her breath and calmed her pounding heart, Phil's head swiveled unnaturally toward her. The grin on his face looked like something out of a comic book, or some creepy movie effect. And as he had done in the studio, the anchorman screeched in a high-pitched voice. He smashed a fist through the glass of the high rise window, and in a flash the smoke that was curling outside was sucked into the room, and the hot air of the city blasted Morgan back against the door. Phil ripped a jagged shard of glass from the window, slicing his hand to the bone in the process. But he didn't seem to notice the blood spraying across the desk and walls as he brandished his new weapon and advanced upon her.

Morgan barely remembered doing it, but she'd somehow picked up Larry's heavy, green glass desk lamp, and smashed Phil across the face with it—once, and then again, barely avoiding the bloody shard of glass he was swiping madly back and forth. Her attack had been puny, but it had been enough to knock the anchorman off balance, and he fell back into the broken window. A spine of glass pierced him under the right arm, emerging like a dagger near his neck.

Despite all the howls and all the blood, it wasn't enough to keep him at bay. But it was enough to give Morgan a chance to bolt out of the room and into the hall. Phil was on her tail in seconds, but was quickly distracted by Martha Gillespie, who was mutely and strangely standing in the hall, listening to her colleagues being slaughtered back in the reception area.

Phil had lost his glass knife, but he'd picked up the green lamp. He plowed into Martha, and both of them crashed so hard into the wall of the corridor that the drywall buckled. Morgan only stayed long enough to see Phil wrapping the cord around the woman's neck and brutally smashing her head into the broken wall. Morgan didn't know if the strangulation or the head injury would kill her friend, but she knew that there was nothing she could do. Martha was dead.

On auto-pilot now, Morgan bolted for the rear stairwell. It was on the far side of the building, and when she got there she was surprised to find the door hanging open. This stairwell was as black as the other, but fearing that Phil was close on her heels, she didn't hesitate. She plunged into the stairwell and surprised herself by heading up, rather than down.

Where do I think I'm going? she wondered, in a panic.

Within seconds, she knew she'd made the right choice. There was a noise rising through the stairwell that sounded like the souls of the damned suffering in the pits of hell. Perhaps she'd heard the sound subconsciously, even before entering the stairwell, and that was why she was dashing upward, toward light and salvation. What awaited her on the roof could not be as horrific as what was happening on the lower floors.