“Fuck you—” he starts to tell her, but stops: the bad-luck door is locked. He pulls and pulls on it, then laughs hopelessly, his hand spasming to his pocket for a cigarette, which after two tries he fumbles to his lips.
But he can’t locate his lighter, has to hold the cigarette out to TJ for a light.
In her POV, Con’s pitiful.
She steps forward, her claw-finger extending now, but hesitates as his hand accidentally locates Nona’s keys in the lock above the handle. Already in the lock.
“I love you, Nona Pearson,” he says, fumbling furtively with the keys, TJ’s POV panning right just in time for Nona’s boxcutter (the previous clicking, evidently) to flash out of the dark-whiteness, down across her face, Hale sitting fast up from his bed, clawing at his own face, breathing way too hard. The sibling link evidently broken.
Vangelesti stands.
Hale steps off the gurney, away from Vangelesti, and collapses in an atrophied pile, holding his gut. Throws up nothing, which seriously aggravates his stomach condition. Backs his way into a corner hiding place.
Vangelesti rolls the wheel of Con’s missing lighter, though. In its flickering glow they gauge each other.
“She said your name was Hale,” Vangelesti says.
Hale forms his response carefully, with much concentration—“Who?”—an easy question to answer with a cut to Nona, in the now darkened hall. Breaking the key off in the door, looking through the small window. Staying too long.
She becomes aware of the boxcutter still in her hand: TJ’s blood is eating it away. Nona drops it, looks back in, and all we have to go on are reaction shots from the other side of the glass, wheels turning in Nona’s head.
She says “Shit” but it’s muted by the glass.
The blood is eating into her hand now, some just burning the skin, some doing the trick Hale’s did—burrowing in between the lines.
Nona catches her breath as it does, gets a series of quick and unwanted flashes of old footage: Stan falling earthward; a lemon being squeezed into a tall, clean glass; the demon tail exiting the top of the frame, leaving the roof of the house, the shingles where it just was.
And more, new footage: the demons in their lair or wherever, in some orgy of death, a near replay of the alien nest in the last Alien.275
One of them is looking into Nona’s intrusive POV somehow, Nona spasming in the hall, trying to rub the blood off her hand, her eyes rolling back white.
Still messed up, she manages nevertheless to stand, follow the wall, turn to run.
Con and Rush evidently already have, are in a wholly different hall by now, moving from emergency light to emergency light, Rush still wet with extinguisher foam.
They round a corner. At the end of this different hall is the freight elevator. Con slides to a stop, stops Rush too.
“What?” Rush says, pulling away, wiping lung-blood from his mouth.
Con is looking behind them, though. Some motion there, low to the ground.
“No,” Con says, and drags Rush by the shirt into the stairway.
After the door closes and it’s quiet again, the motion presents itself: Sandro wheeling hesitantly into a pool of emergency light, breathing hard, sheened in sweat. Watching the hall closely, he extracts his fingerless racing gloves from a fanny pack, straps them on.
IN the activity room, TJ is writhing on the ground, holding her face, resisting death just as she was in Hale’s flashback, when she was just Jenny, just twelve, just pulled under the three-wheeler.
Finally she gets still, and we go close on her skin, track up her body to her deeply cut face, remain there a while, long enough for her eyes to open.
Slowly, she stands from the flames, a Terminator shot.
Runs a finger down the gash in her face.
Skin is trailing off her now more than before, meaning she’s less human, more demonic. A black-reptilian brow-ridge even, on one side.
She starts walking to the door. By the time she gets there she’s running.
FROM a shot down the hall, the activity room door explodes outward, impacts the opposite wall at an angle, so it’s embedded, a motionless image (dust settling), which eases the slow dissolve into the stillness of the freight elevator, where things are unchanged: Hale and Vangelesti, staring at each other. Hale trying to stand, failing. Vangelesti offering to help but Hale not going for it.
“She’s coming,” he says, and she is, TJ: the freight elevator resolves itself in her POV. Through the steel Vangelesti is dim, hardly there. It’s Hale’s hunched-over signature that’s important for her.
The shot reverses as she approaches the door, pries her fingers into the crack—her blood eating into the surface of the steel—but the extreme close-up of the locking pin holds. Hale and Vangelesti watch it bend, though. It almost breaks before TJ stops trying.
Vangelesti looks to Hale and then back to the door, where he tries to remove the bent pin by faltering lighter-light. Finally he has to shake his head in defeat, though. He slides down a wall, turning the lighter this way and that, watching the flame.
“Does playing dead work?” he asks Hale rhetorically, but Hale isn’t listening. Is looking to their ceiling. Waiting.
It finally comes: a soft whump, a settling from above.
Vangelesti lets the lighter fade out, rolling it back on instantly.
Standing below the service door now is TJ, looking the predator in every way there is.
She’s staring at Hale.
Hale’s staring back at her.
“Jenny,” he says.
“‘Jen-ny,’” she repeats back in monotone, not quite an answer.
She looks Hale up and down, Vangelesti neglected, his POV studying TJ from the side.
She becomes aware of this, turns to him, annoyed, and there around her neck—still—is Cat’s ring.
Vangelesti looks from it to her.
Realizes.
“Cat,” he says, and steps forward, into the shot, reaching for the ring. To join her is the idea.
Meaning he’s not their angel.
BENT over a water fountain is Nona, her injured hand in the water. It works; she collapses. Starts to nod off then slams her eyes wide open.
“No, Noan,” she says, looking up and down the hall.
She stands again, wraps her hand in part of her shirt, and begins moving unsteadily on, having to urge herself: “Go go go.”276
Finally she reaches a recess of sorts. She steps into it, palms the radio that was in Rush’s pants for the ER scene. Her teeth are chattering.
She holds the radio close to her mouth, depresses the button, whispers into it: “Get out,” her voice coming from the control panel of the security room. No one’s there.
On one of the monitors no one’s watching is a stairway, Con and Rush passing, Con swiveling his head from his apparently talking shoulder to the camera, then running on. As if there were someone there to nod to.
His voice comes back after they’re gone, already breaking up, out of breath: “Where is she? Can you see her?”
Moments after them, in the stairway and passing fast enough that it looks like she’s almost on all fours,277 is the answer: TJ, unaware of the camera, already bounds ahead of it.
CON and Rush explode out of the stairway, into a hall.
“This it?” Rush asks.
Con nods, stumbles on. Overhead and pointing after them is a sign reading SECURITY.
“Shit shit shit,” Con says, pulling Rush around a corner. But Rush slips away, crashes into a wall. Tries to stand, can’t.
“Go,” he says, zero breath, coughing. “I can’t—”
“But it’s just … ” Con argues, sweeping his arm forward. Rush shakes his head no though, pushes Con away.
“It’s best like this, anyway,” he says. “Tell … tell my brother … ”
Con stands, torn, and finally shakes Rush’s hand in farewell, holds it. Looks away, behind them. Says it: “I’ll lie to him like no seven-year-old’s ev
er been lied to before.”278
“I know,” Rush says, smiling, his hand on the rail the only thing keeping him vertical. Maybe even the same wall he had the fake coughing fit on earlier. Similar enough that we get the idea.
Con backs away, his expression going slowly from reluctance to something more unadulterated, primal: in TJ’s POV, he turns to run.
TJ doesn’t follow immediately, but lingers on Rush’s wall, walking delicately on new legs—bent knees, long long feet, so she’s standing only on her toes. As if the tendons are tightening; as if she’s testing the ground. But her wings have yet to surface, are still buds. Bleeding now, burning the ground where she passes.
In her POV there’s no explanation for Con having stopped there in the hall. Rush’s coughing comes through though, so she inspects, inspects, leans down so close to Rush that they’re face to face.
She runs her long claw across the wall slowly, searching, Rush snaking around it, but just barely.
From an angle beside her, she looks up at the hall, at the sound of Con retreating, and moves effortlessly after him.
CON slides around another corner, pulls a bulletin board down behind him, runs on, covering much ground. His POV intent on the security sign.
Between breaths—or, with those breaths—he’s telling himself “I’m no hero I’m no hero I’m no hero.”279
He runs through an empty section of the hall and moments later TJ crosses the frame, running along the wall for a few moments after having made the corner, losing no speed.280
At the last possible instant before she’s on Con he sheds Metatron’s jacket and grabs onto the handle of the security room door. His momentum slings the rest of him against the wall—the toe of his motorcycle boot shattering the glass door it hits—but he holds on. TJ passes, digging into the wall, spraying off sheetrock.
Already turning.
Con opens the door—his nicotine gum inserted, keeping it unlocked—and then he’s in, removing the gum a nanosecond before the door is pounded closed for him, almost on him. All he has to do is reach up and lock it. Breathe.
Safe, he looks at the gum, smiles at the gum, romances the gum. Puts it back into his mouth.
But then the door is pounded again, once, twice, the lock holding for the moment, Con backing away nevertheless. Looking to the mic by the control panel.
He sits in Metatron’s chair, never taking his eye off the shaking door, then leans down to the mic—a male Stretch281 in the small hours of the night—and looks for Nona: “Where are you?”
FROM her comfortable little nook, Nona replies, whispering still: “Where are you?”
Con’s o.s. voice comes back: “Safe.”
“Your friend?” Nona asks.
After some radio silence, Con says it: “He was dying anyway.”
Nona shakes her head in something like grief, disbelief.
“Why us?” Con asks her. “There’s so many other people here … ”
“Maybe because we remember,” Nona says. “We know where she came from, who she was. That must be its … her weakness … ”
“It’s not like I was telling anybody … not like Gin was, at least … ”
“I don’t know,” Nona says, looking at her hurt hand, narrowing her eyes. “But I think I can.”
“What?” Con asks, Nona not answering. He comes back again, repeating himself: “Where are you?”
Nona’s POV focuses in on the sign directly in front of her nook. Below the floor designation is an arrow, with the improbable SECURITY by it.
“Three-C,” she says, reading. “Three-C.”
IN the security room the pounding on the door suddenly stops. As if in response to Nona’s location.
Con looks from the door to the mic, says it: “You think she can understand words?”
OVER TJ’s shoulder as she races down the hall is 3C, Nona’s nook getting closer and closer. The only sound is her radio, Con coming through: “Fuck … that’s my floor. She’s … get out! God … you were right … ”
TJ rounds the corner, ready to kill, but it’s just Nona’s radio balanced on the handrail.
She breathes a little deeper, a little angrier, gets a full, est. body shot: how little human she is anymore.
SOME number of floors up, Nona emerges from the stairs and turns left, the freight elevator doors torn open, the shaft open for floors and floors.
She steps hesitantly forward to look in and a bloody arm comes down from the ceiling, brushes her cheek. Trying to back away she almost falls into the shaft—does lose her flashlight (tumbling end over end down, est. height)—but at the last instant grabs onto the arm, pulls Vangelesti down from the ceiling, on top of her, saving her.
He should be dead, but isn’t. Just seriously fed upon.
“No,” Nona says. “Not you … ”
She drags him to the side, cradles him just as she cradled Egan in the original.
When she smoothes his hair back he opens an eye to her, smiles: in his hand is Cat’s ring.
“She’s not a little girl anymore, is she?” Nona asks.
“I know more about demons now,” Vangelesti creaks.
“She never was a little girl, really,” Nona says, continuing. “They just dressed one of their own up … in her. Whatever was left of her.”
“But she didn’t go for him … she thinks—” Vangelesti starts. “She still thinks that he’s her brother.”
“She won’t for much longer,” Nona says.
Vangelesti coughs up a mouthful of some vital-looking blood; Nona starts to wipe it off with her hand, then uses her shirt instead.
“It’s not you,” she says.
Vangelesti starts dying then for real, meaning he still has a little left to say: “One thing I could never … atheists … that God exists in us, so it isn’t really God at all, but … us all along—”
He’s cut short by a soft death, though.
Nona finishes for him, looking off into some middle distance: “So what about the devil then, right?”
She laughs herself into a quiet cry, holding Vangelesti, and her grief resounds down the elevator shaft, works its way into the elevator itself.
The lighter wheel rolls on and for an instant the walls are blood spattered, a slaughterhouse, and then Hale is looking up at the open service door, has been listening.
Nona’s What about the devil then, right? echoes impossibly, as if just in his head. As if settling there.
ON some other floor, Sandro wheels quietly out of a room. He’s sweating hard, but not panicked.
Too, his POV is following the SECURITY arrows on the ceiling. A candy wrapper catches in the spokes of his wheels but he calmly removes it.
In spite of all the music he makes it to the security door, knocks once, twice, and by the third time Con is at the joystick, trying to get a camera directed onto security, the camera down the way from Sandro whirring uselessly, scraping plaster dust from the ceiling, the monitor Con’s looking at showing ceiling, more ceiling. He beats on the control panel, all his joystick bravado gone, talks into the mic again—“Is she smart enough to knock, you think?”—but is just talking to himself, has to know that by now.
Behind him, high in the corner above the door, is the automatic peephole monitor he’s not aware of, looking down at an angle. Inset, it’s Sandro in his chair, knocking and looking down the hall. Getting fed up.
Finally he wheels out of the monitor, onto the one just down the hall, which Con has managed to point at the floor again.
Sandro waves wide in it; Con nods back with the camera, has his finger on the door buzzer when, in another monitor, TJ appears, galloping through. Toward Sandro is the idea.
Con loudly swallows his gum.
“Oh shit,” he says. Backing his finger off the buzzer.
On the monitor, Sandro pivots his head down the hall, starts wheeling backwards, his expression all about TJ being there.
In a practiced flash he about-faces and is leaning forward, racing, not loo
king back.
Moments after he passes, and moving significantly faster, is TJ.
SHE’S right behind the close-up of Sandro’s face in the hall, wholly comprising his b.g., like a comic book splash page.
Sandro yells with effort, for more speed—TJ faltering for the first time, from the three-wheeler injury rising on her leg—and the moment he passes the security door it slams open, into TJ, already off balance. She goes sliding, already regathering, and in that eighth of a second282 Con latches onto Sandro, pulls him out of his chair, into the room.
But the door is yawning wide, now.
Con reaches for it just as TJ makes her leap, and doesn’t have it quite closed by the time she impacts, moving fast, hard enough that Con reels back into the security room without anything from the forearm down. It’s cut off just below the elbow.
Sandro climbs the knobs and latches of the security door to the deadbolt, locks it.
Con’s stumped arm is a gurgling fountain.
He tries to cover it, is already in shock.
“Look, Ma,”283 he says weakly, smiling, holding his arm up, “I’m a hero,” and then slouches down, unconscious, bleeding out.
Sandro crawls over, tourniquets the arm as best he can—his hands are strong—flinches back hard when the door pounds in and keeps pounding in, TJ on the inset peephole monitor doing some serious venting, her blood seeping underneath the door, smoking, the door for sure going to give, already showing the shape of her right hand/claw,284 the hinge bolts straining.
Instead of cutting away from the action per usual, though, we stay with them, waiting for her to come through, end it.
FROM the outside the door looks even worse, weaker. In TJ’s POV Con and Sandro are one grey smear. The stress points of the door are showing too, as fine, marbled shadows.
She shoulders into it again and again, the cut in her face reopening across the left eye, the back of her leg falling apart, and when she’s just almost in, an o.s. wolf whistle stops her midlunge, and then a voice keeps her stopped: “Hey, good lookin’.285 Yeah you.”
Her POV sweeps around, the direction she just came, and there’s no one, but on the inset monitor in the security room, there is: Rush, still invisible to her, knocking loudly on a door, overturning a cart. Turning to run, lead her away. Save Sandro and what’s left of Con. Be their angel.
Demon Theory Page 21
