The Trap (28 page)

All three duskers are maniacally trying to squeeze through the still-opening doors. They want her. And they want to get away from the glass elevator—it is an oven to them, filled with the
searing rays of the setting sun. Wisps of smoke curl up from their skin.

A bullet catches a dusker right in the forehead, snapping its head back. The next bullet punches a black hole into its Adam’s apple. The dusker is propelled backward, knocking against
another dusker. Both duskers fall out of the elevator, tumbling through the space made vacant by the shattered far wall.

Sissy empties the handgun at the last remaining dusker, but her aim, jostled by panic, is off. One shot hits a panel by the side of the elevator doors, and the floor elevator doors suddenly
freeze in place. But the opening is wide enough for the last dusker to leap out, howling with pain, its eyes scrunched shut. Slip, slide, gone. Into the darkness of the floor, scurrying along the
walls, finding shade, finding shadows, finding darkness.

It’s weakened. Not by a bullet—Sissy knows she missed—but by the blinding dusk light. Its time inside the elevator was pure torture, hellfire scorching the marrow of its bones.
But here in the darkness of this floor, it has found a haven in which to recover.

Sissy goes after it, loading a new magazine. Light is pouring through the jammed elevator doors, and she is able to see a leg dragging like a lizard’s tail, banging into stacks and
furniture as it scuttles away. The dusker is trapped now, caught in a corner where two bookshelves meet. It starts climbing up, frantic feet and hands gripping the shelves like rungs on a ladder,
leaving trails of melted flesh dripping from shelf to shelf.

Sissy cocks her weapon, aims—

It’s vanished.

She doesn’t dote on her missed opportunity. Or on her now-evident folly in going after the dusker. She simply turns and sprints for the elevator. The doors are still stuck halfway open,
but whatever damage her wayward bullet caused, it’s apparently had no effect on the elevator itself. She watches in dismay as the elevator disappears down the wall of the atrium.

A snarl behind her, deep in the shadows of the floor. She spins, half-expecting to see the dusker coming after her. But she sees only the line of mercurial lamps shining before her. Follow them,
she knows, and they’ll lead her right to the door on the far wall. Her escape.

But one of the lamps on the far end blinks out. It could be coincidence—the bulb going out right at that moment. But more likely, it’s the dusker darting in front of it.

Because the dusker has recovered now. Vision regained, advantage restored. Now cutting off her escape route. Sissy stops. Turns back around, races to the precipice of the atrium wall. She stares
down. Sees the glass roof of the elevator descending into the atrium. Her only other escape option disappearing by the second.

A howl from behind. Sissy spins around. Two beads shine at the edge of darkness—the dusker’s glowing eyes.

She doesn’t hesitate. Not anymore. She steps one foot out into the atrium and drops into the void. She falls, lands with a loud smack on the descending elevator rooftop. The glass roof
holds, even as she half-bounces, half-skids across its slippery surface, almost falling off the edge. She spreads out her legs, arms, holds herself flat. The atrium wall beside her rushes by, floor
numbers shooting up past her, as the elevator continues to descend. She raises her arms, gun clasped tightly, and aims up. First sign of the dusker peeking its head out to look down and she will
empty the gun into its skull.

And then the elevator starts slowing. Not even halfway down to the lobby, it comes to a stop. She holds her breath, fear clutching her throat.

The elevator bounces slightly under her. Bodies getting on the elevator, piling in under her.

She hears teeth gnashing, fingers scratching the glass walls with agony. It’s the dusk light. Its rays might be fading and weak to her, but to them the rays are blades of razor pain. A
small price to pay for the taste of heper flesh.

The elevator starts moving again. Upward.

And still, they haven’t seen her.

Slowly, she turns her head. Looks down from the corners of her eyes.

There are five of them. She sees the tops of their heads, flicking from side to side in a rapid, jerky motion. One of the duskers is smashing the elevator buttons with frenzied impatience, over
and over, deposits of melted flesh sticking to the buttons. They’re all in anguish, their flesh already beginning to sizzle, their eyeballs burning like pots of boiling water. Any moment now,
they’ll do what she suspects people do when heading up a glass elevator with great impatience and anticipation. They’ll look up.

But, as it turns out, they don’t need to. They smell her first. The whole back wall of the elevator is gone, and her odor is pouring in unimpeded like a waterfall.

As one, with terrifying speed, they flick their heads up. Their eyes meet hers.

They’re confused, shocked, slack-jawed, and in this small slice of time Sissy points the gun down—

One of them leaps through the space where the back wall used to be. Its hands slap down on top of the roof, its legs swinging up and over. As soon as its pale face crests over the roofline, like
the rising moon, Sissy is ready. She fires a round right into its face.

Its head disappears in an explosion of white spray.

Yet its headless body still holds on. Legs scrabbling for purchase on the elevator roof, its arms swinging at her. Claws, black and razor sharp, miss her face by millimeters. Sissy kicks out,
thumping it on the chest. The headless dusker falls down the glassy throat of the atrium, its arms still swinging, legs still kicking.

A smack from below. With such force, Sissy is bounced off the roof a few inches.

She flips herself on all fours, facing down. She aims the gun at the duskers beneath, is pulling the trigger. Then stops. If she shoots through the glass ceiling, it’ll shatter and
she’ll fall into their very midst.

But it doesn’t matter, because in the next instant a dusker leaps up. Its head crashes through the glass roof as if surfacing out of water. The whole roof shatters, splintering into a
thousand pieces and raining down on the duskers below. Sissy, screaming, falls into the interior of the elevator car, now really only a horizontal platform, without ceiling, without walls, still
ascending.

The force of the fall pushes her right through them. Her back
thunks
against the hard floor, dislodging the gun from her grasp. It bounces once off the floor, then falls into the
atrium. Walls of white-pale flesh tower over her; she’s trapped in the tangle of their legs, ankles, shins. There’s no way out. She’s penned in.

It’s strange, the things she observes. It’s not the obvious. Not the gleam of wet desire in their eyes, the dripping fangs, their cheeks wobbling wildly, smacking loudly against rows
of teeth. But she instead notices the vibration of the elevator engine humming against her back, the wall on her right rushing past her as the elevator continues to ascend. The glimmers of dusk
light slipping through the tiny gaps between their enclosing bodies. She is looking everywhere but at them because, she realizes with the slow-motion clarity of one knowing the end is near, she
doesn’t want her last vision to be of duskers.

She thinks of Ben.

And David.

Epap.

Jacob.

Gene. Her lonely Gene, her sad Gene, her unreachable Gene. Years ago, when she was only a child, she dreamed a dream. Of a boy she had never seen and did not know. She woke up and stared through
the glass dome at the starry sky. For the first time, her little girl’s heart felt its own emptiness. She never believed this boy was anything more than a figment of her imagination, and over
the years the memory of this dream faded. Until that day about a fortnight ago when she saw his stick figure walking toward her, a wavering, trembling dark line on the desert horizon, a mirage
gradually, miraculously, filling out and finding form. His bangs blowing in the wind, his teeth so white, his eyes so haunted and real.

She thinks of the dome. Her prison. Her home. By now, with dusk coming to a close, the dome has risen out of the desert ground. She imagines what it must look like now, with onyx dusk rays
beaming off its glassy, globular surface. She thinks of the pond inside the dome, its surface flat and still as a mirror, of the mud huts that sit empty and uninhabited, as they will for centuries
and millennia to come—

And in that last second of existence, she closes her eyes. She feels so terribly, terribly alone.

I
RUN INTO
the elevator lobby. Slam up against the glass door. Peer down the atrium. At first, I can’t quite comprehend what I’m
seeing. The elevator, stripped of walls and roof and reduced to a platform, is rising toward me, about twenty floors below. White-pale blobs swirling on the platform. And for just a millisecond,
there is a part in the bodies and I catch a glimpse of Sissy. Her face oddly placid.

The gun fires in my hand before I’m even aware of aiming or pulling the trigger. The bullet punctures a hole into the soft, pale mass, a meter from Sissy. The bodies ripple like a flag in
the wind; one body keels over and falls off the platform, down into the atrium, splattering when it hits the marble floor of the lobby. But the other bodies seem unaffected as ever.

I pull the trigger again.
Click.
The chamber is empty.

The elevator, still ascending, is now about fifteen floors below. Too far below to leap—from this height, I’ll likely bounce right off the platform and down the atrium to my death.
But there’s no time to spare. I bend my knees, leap out. Wind gushes through my clothes; my lungs ram up my throat. I plummet, arms pirouetting, toward the ascending platform.

SISSY

T
HE DUSKERS CAVE
in on Sissy. They hiss loudly, their rank breath whistling between their exposed teeth and fangs.

So dark under them, so cold.

Everything happens so quickly, afterward she will barely be able to recall what happened.

A gunshot. Then a falling blur. The shape of something smacking into the duskers from above. A sickening splat. Someone crashing to the floor. With such force, it causes the whole platform to
gong and hum.

The duskers domino into one another, plummet down the atrium. Leaving only one dusker on the platform, dizzy and concussed, temporarily out of commission.

Whoever just crashed down is now bouncing toward the edge, about to fall off.

Afterward, she will not know what possessed her to reach out. But still curled on the elevator floor, she snaps out her arm at the hazy shape skidding away.

Fingers wrap around her wrist. The shape falls over the edge, still gripping her.

And now she is being pulled across the platform. To avoid sliding any farther, she hooks her feet around the ankles of the disoriented—but quickly reviving—dusker.

Her face is pulled over the precipice, and she stares down the vertigo-inducing drop of the atrium. Fallen duskers lie far below, splattered on the lobby floor. Glass shards scattered
everywhere.

And Gene, his face directly below hers, his sweaty hand clasped in hers. Slipping out.

The dusker shakes its head, hissing. Its eyes turn to Sissy.

Sissy and Gene stare at each other desperately. “Help me,” they both utter at the same time.

H
ELP ME
,”
I
whisper through clenched teeth.

“Gene,” Sissy says. Her eyes do the rest of the speaking. They are pleading with me. Because she can’t hold me much longer.

A dark shape looms above her. It’s a dusker.

“Sissy!” I shout. “Let go of me.”

Still she holds on. Its shadow falls over her.

I let go of her hand. In that same moment, she flips over to face the dusker.

For a moment, I’m suspended in air, touching nothing but the emptiness of a vacuum. I begin to fall. With a shout, I grasp for something—anything—and my hand catches a thick
outcropping at the bottom of the elevator floor. I scrabble for purchase until my hands meet the metal framework of the elevator and I’m able to pull my whole body up and over onto the
elevator floor. Gravity presses down on me as the elevator continues to rise.

Sissy is holding the dusker by the cuff of its neck. She’s the weaker creature, but not now, not after what the dusker’s been through. Its skin and joints and muscles and bones have
softened under the burn of sun rays, and it is now more soft putty than hard bone and muscles. Digging into some hidden reserve of energy, Sissy slams its head into the wall that’s still
rushing down past us. And she holds it there, the skull that’s been softened by the sun into the consistency of an unshelled boiled egg. And even though the dusker fights back, flailing its
arms and trying to kick, Sissy doesn’t ease up one bit. She holds its head pressed against the passing wall, and like cheese being grated, its head is shredded into oblivion.

The elevator reaches the top floor.

Ping.

U
TTERLY EXHAUSTED
,
WE
crawl out of the elevator. To keep the elevator from descending and picking up more duskers
from the lower floors, we pull the headless dusker across the precipice. The body will prevent the doors from fully closing. For a while, anyway. Like persistent toothless jaws, the doors will open
and close on it, open and close, gnawing the gelatinous body. Eventually, they’ll ground the dusker to into a soppy mush, enabling them to fully close.

I look at Sissy. Her clothes are splattered with a white-yellow creamy substance. Dusker fluid. She is staring out the window, at the disappearing sunlight, her hair bejeweled with glistening
shards of glass. She looks ten years older than the day we first met at the pond. All the innocence beneath her skin has cauterized into hardness.

“Epap?” she asks.