Forget About Me: 10th Floor

This is the second chapter in Forget About Me. I hadn't really thought of this as an opportunity for re-formatting, outside of the "pissed off about lack of indents" consideration, but I find myself going over my writing before I put it up and fine-tuning it a bit, which I hadn't really done before. This particular story I had rewritten a few times, or at least gone over and corrected most of the major spelling errors, and I still find things that I'd like to improve upon. I wonder if, Lucas-like, I will never stop attempting to improve my work, and will eventually add a transexual Martian who gets us into the cr-aaaaziest situations.

This probably is not the most conducive introduction for the tone of the story. From now on, I'll keep that in mind.

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10th Floor

I walked slowly down the steps, one by one, hearing their old-world wooden creak every time they were asked to support my weight. I held my left hand with my right in a childhood-spawned reflex in an attempt to stop the constant sting by constantly touching it. It never worked.
As I descended into the darkness, the door closed behind me, and the small hydraulic arm attached to the frame slowed it down enough that instead of a slam, all I heard was a soft click as the door was shut. I stopped for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and once I could see enough to keep moving I continued down the stairwell.
When I finally reached the bottom, I could hardly see anything at all. I started feeling around the walls for a light switch. My hands ran across something hard and cold, polished and somewhat gleaming even in the blackness. After searching a bit longer, I found the switch and, once I’d turned on the harsh blue of an old, seldom-used fluorescent bulb, I saw them. Bathed in the stretched, freezing blue-white light was a wall covered in firearms, all hung neatly against an exposed wood rib-work wall. They occupied two of the three walls in the small cubicle the stairwell paused in before continuing to the next floor, the third containing the door to the top floor.
I decided to stop and admire the collection before moving on. These were all the weapons of the people that De’Sang picked up for grifting or mugging in New Orleans and forced to join his organization. I wondered idly for a moment if there would be… yes! My little Glock Special sat on the bottom row, next to three empty spaces for weapons obviously not confiscated yet. I also noticed that three or four empty places were dispersed throughout the assortment of firearms. De’Sang wasn’t all bad. Once he kicked you out, you got your weapon back and were free to go. For a moment, I felt a pang of regret that I was being kicked out. Maybe this was a kind of test. Maybe if I went up on the roof and waited for long enough, they’d come back and I would have passed the test. I’d maybe be allowed back in.
If I thought there was any truth in it at all, I might have done it, even just for a little while. I don’t know why I thought that. I hated working for De’Sang, and moments before I was happy about finally being free, but I suddenly couldn’t shake the idea that I should go back up and wait for someone to come and get me. Eventually, after staring at the wall in my own thoughts for a while, my old thoughts came back to me and I reached for my Glock, ready to get this over with.
Then, just before my fingers touched it, I saw something else. Something beautiful. A .44 Magnum hung just next to it. Chrome finish, black polished handle, my dream pistol. I considered it for a moment, weighing having the weapon of my dreams against the bad juju from taking someone else’s and leaving mine behind (once again, delivery-boy for voodoo priests… it rubs off on you.) before deciding to treat myself. I tucked the gun into my belt, which needed to be tightened before it would support the pistol’s weight, and felt the reassuring bulk of it as I straightened up. So far, this was a pretty good severance package for a crime organization.
I turned to continue my descent down the next flight of stairs to the ninth floor, when I almost hit my head on the sloping bottom of the first staircase. Where the ground should have fallen away into another staircase was a wooden palette, nailed and screwed into place, totally barring any passage downward. I tried to pry it up, but the boards held fast and the thing didn’t budge. If I’d had some kind of pry bar or a tool to break through, I could have broken through, but as all I had was the pistol, and I didn’t feel like trying to shoot through wood, my options were limited. I stopped for a second trying to think what to do next, when I remembered the door on the other side of the kiosk. I walked over and pushed the door open easily, then walked right back into the room. Something had caught my eye just as I had left.
Above the door, in white, a symbol was drawn in extremely drippy and watered down paint. It was the voudon symbol for luck, sort of a cockeyed crosshair with two x’s drawn into each of the four partitions of the circle. It was drawn in white, not in red, so it wasn’t a call for luck, it was a declaration of luck. A wish for luck to whoever read it. De’Sang was wishing me good fortune in my life ahead as a final good-bye.
Again, the pang of regret, but this time I just ignored it and moved on. My new pistol in my belt, good juju from ending my career with De’Sang so amiably, and the pain in my left hand starting to go away, I pushed the door open again and walked into the 10th floor.
Through the small window in the door I could see a room that seemed to comprise the entire floor, rather than it being partitioned off into separate rooms or offices or cells. The studio room was dimly lit in the blue glow of Louisiana moonlight, cluttered beyond belief with hulking shapes shrouded in shadows and sheets. Once I was through the door and could see the objects with more clarity, I saw that they were piles upon piles of all manner of junk, stacked up to the ceiling in some places. I saw small little walkways left between them to offer easy movement from piles to other piles, I could only assume.
After spending about 10 minutes in the gloom and the silence of that dusty little room, breathing in the dry air and listening to the deafening silence, I decided I’d try my first impulse to wait and see if De’Sang came back for me. I’d go up there, muster up some courage, and if DeSang still didn’t come then I’d be no worse off. I turned and looked for a handle on the door, but there was none to be found. Judging by two small holes bored into a patch of unweathered wood across the middle of the door, I figured the exit latch had been knocked off some time ago. There was nothing left to do, so I turned to head towards the other side of the floor, hoping for another stairwell to lead me to freedom.
I couldn’t tell you where he came from. I had spent ten minutes there and nothing, I had turned and nothing, and the moment I turned around he was there. It's that simple. He wasn't and then was there. He was a bent old man, and his pale, pale skin glowed dusty in the moonlight coming through the windows. He had white, scraggily facial hair, oversized ears, and was largely bald. I could see his ribcage and, because he was so stooped over, his spine stretched the flesh of his back. He looked at me with large, blue eyes. Accusing. Angry.

“Mine.” He said, simply.
“I’m sorry?”
“Mine.”

He moved his head slightly, and the blue of his eyes flickered white as he looked around the room quickly, as if taking inventory of the trash piled up around him. Chairs and tables, chess sets and toy trains, fox furs and tiaras, bricks and rebar, old bottles and boxes of broken glass. He didn’t appear nervous, just honestly concerned, almost rationally concerned, that his possessions were about to be stolen.
He must have had things stolen by others that DeSang dismissed through this place. It’s understandable. He was nervous because, as I am the first to admit, I’m not the least criminal looking of all the people in the world. I rarely shave, so I have a nice five o’ clock shadow that no working class man would have. I didn’t take good care of my teeth when I was a kid, so they’re yellow to begin with, not to mention the upper and lower bicuspid I’ve lost over the years. I dress poorly, I’m rude, and I don’t bathe too often, so the overall effect of me is not one of immediate trust.

“Listen, I’m not trying to steal anything. I’m looking for another…”

I don’t even hear the last word come out of my mouth, it’s so loud.

The little man screamed so loud and so long I thought my head was going to explode. His scream at an inhuman volume he continued to yell at me, all one syllable. Leaning up against the wall, instinctively trying to put as much space between the source of the cacophony and myself, and try to pry my eyes open through pure will. It was apparently instinct keeping my eyes shut as well. Instinct knows what’s best for you, even when you don’t.
The little man was now standing, for all intents and purposes, straight, with his neck jutting straight out at me like a dagger, and his face looking right into mine. His eyes had grown to the size of softballs, expanding along with the rest of his head, and his jaw, wide open from his continuous bellow, dropped just below his sternum, big even for his oversized head. As I watched, his head continues to grow, the eyes looked less and less at me and more darted around in a frenzy, and his frame, which seemed to small at first, seemed to become more threatening, stronger, somehow.

I wish I could say that it looked cartoony. That the sight of the old man with a head as large now as his body was comical, even pitiful to look at. But I could have stepped into his mouth, and the sound emanating from him was enough to burst my eyeballs from my head had I not run right then and there.

Hoping to escape the sounds, I tried to put the most solid mounds of garbage between us. Anything to alleviate the ridiculously loud bellowing that still had not stopped. I ran for the other side of the room, and as I looked back, I saw him, still screaming and not even looking at me, pick up a pool cue from a nearby pile and hurl it at me. It narrowly missed my head, and when I looked up again after the cue had passed over me, I could see him coming after me, throwing whatever he happened to pick out of the rubble, regardless of weight or size. A bowling ball, one of the boxes of broken glass, what seemed to be the carcass of a dead dog, a couch. Anything he could get a hold of came flying in my direction almost as soon as it was in his hand.
A thrown box whacked against a support beam above me, and shards of glass rained down from above. I covered my eyes as best I could and cringed as the tiny, glittering blades nicked and scratched every bare piece of skin. I felt myself trip over something wet and slick, and I fell forward at far too fast a speed for anything good to come of it. I turned in midair to take the fall better, and ended up landing flush on my shoulder before the back of my neck collided with the opposite wall of the floor.
I blinked widely, shaking the spots from my eyes. I could see flickers of the little man’s grossly malformed figure hurtling through the rubble at me. He was coming obscenely fast, and I had little time to think what to do. I hoisted myself up onto my feet by grabbing the handle of the door and hefted a nearby chair, preparing to…

The door?

I spun around and, hardly noticing the darkened red “EXIT” sign above the door, jumped through the stairwell that waited just beyond the door. Not waiting to see if I could brace the door and maybe overpower the little man, I leapt down the stairs, thinking as long as I could keep moving, he wouldn’t be able to catch me. I plummeted down the flight of stairs and, when I saw the next flight boarded up exactly like the one above it, I didn’t stop to think what that might have meant. I simply turned and went right through a door on my left, hoping to get far, far away from the little man’s screaming.