Current Floor:

  Y

  The Dilemma:

  The last thing Andy remembered was going to bed drunk with an opoid-dependant woman named Tracy. Since his wife died, Andy hasn’t had too much joy aside from raising his daughter, Abby, and the occasional night out. The babysitter offered to keep Abby overnight, so Andy thought what the hell, he deserved it. But when Andy woke up the next morning, he found himself on the ground floor of a windowless building with Tracy, who was withdrawaling from opiates, and only Polaroid pictures serving as clues to their escape.

  Previously:

  Tracy and Andy made it to floor Y through a stairway that appeared in Andy’s original room. Andy wasn’t sure if the room had changed, or the wall, so he stayed near Tracy for fear of losing her in another shift. They found a nurse’s station where Tracy found many drugs and cured her withdrawal symptoms, stuffing bottles in pockets and handing some to Andy for him to carry. Andy realized, for the first time, that he had accidentally hired Tracy as a prostitute the night before they woke in the building.

  Inventory:

  Andy:

  Tenuate, 26 pills left.

  Morphine, 28 pills left.

  Amytal, 28 pills left.

  A wicked hangover.

  Nicotine withdrawal.

  Shame.

  Tracy:

  Xanax, 24 pills left.

  Morphine, 25 pills left.

  A pretty decent fucking high, she’ll admit.

  Perhaps some sexual feelings toward Andy, likely just a fart.

  I put a hand on the counter and rubbed my head again. The flickering lights were really hurting my eyes, and I wished the Tenuate would hurry up about kicking in.

  “Someone knew you needed drugs.”

  Tracy nodded her head. “God. God knew, and my savior provides.”

  “No, I mean …,” I laughed.

  “Got ya,” she said, poking my chest. I noticed her smile gave her a beauty unburdened by the malady of drug addiction, but I also knew the smile was brought on by drugs.

  “The Polaroids in the boxes,” I said. “You remember?”

  “Sure,” she said, and she was looking at my chest now, where her finger still touched me.

  “They told me where I could find drugs for you. They said if I didn't, you would die.”

  “Felt like I was dyin,” she said, biting her lip and letting her hand fall.

  “Right,” I said. “The papers also said things like, 'Subject Unicorn’—that's you, Subject Unicorn, and I'm a horse, I guess—‘Subject Unicorn is not showing signs of development yet, and … and the moon is far’. But on this genie guy's papers, it said the moon was near, that the subject was showing early signs of development.”

  “You sound like a fuckin tweaker, man. That Tenuate hittin already?”

  It was not, in fact, hitting. “I don't know if you fucking fully comprehend what's going on here,” I said, waving a hand to the dim, corrosive light of the hallway. “Someone took us. And judging by the size of these two floors alone, they took a lot of somebodies, and likely a lot of somebodies did the taking.”

  She waxed interested listener, finger to her mouth. “That's a lot of somebodies.”

  “But why would they take me and a whore?” I said.

  “You could drop that noun,” she said.

  “Did somebody close to you die recently?”

  “Nope.”

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  “Then what?” I said.

  “We gonna look for a way out or keep talking about bullshit?”

  We walked on, down the hall, and as I stepped into a patch of darkness between fluorescent bulbs, I felt like a spaceman who'd lost the cord connecting him to the ship. And I thought for a moment I saw a tall something there in the shadow, something long and clawed that creaked like a tree in hard wind as it moved boned hands and boned limbs, and a smell like mothballs and fish, like twenty dead cats, and a freezer, no saliva, bone dry, seeped into me, not through my nostrils, but my stomach. Its mouth open just slightly and a tusk patient but wanting moving in the darkness between us to touch my shirt, to tug on it so soft and unfelt, the kind of movement you make only to inspire hormones in prey for flavor or a feeding of another kind, like psychopaths playing with food and gaining sustenance from fear and reaction alone.

  Psychopaths do not require food.

  The bones barely rattled. I jumped away, bumping into Tracy who did not curse, but clawed at her temples in the same moment as me, and we both stood there in the shadows, foreheads together, kind of swaying there and muttering pain under our breaths like the mentally ill, just hu-huh-huh, “Hurts.”

  The tusk of the creature was ever near, but unseeable.

  “What—“

  “What is it?”

  I tasted silver and I salivated, though I was very thirsty, and something seemed to swim inside my head, and push buttons, and sharp currents jumped from nerve to nerve, and my stomach felt at first sick, then it flipped with the excitement of going over a hill at top speed in a car, then it felt heavy and full.

  Something was rummaging. Finding buttons and pushing them. I jerked back again, cracking my head into Tracy's. She screamed and fell to the floor, out of the shadow and into the light, her nose bloody.

  And then it was gone again, the rummaging and the button-pushing and some vague images of Abby crying with an American Girl doll tucked under and arm.

  “What the fuck?” Tracy said.

  “Did you feel that?” I said.

  “Your head knocking into me? Fuck yes.”

  “No. The … the thing,” I said.

  I turned my head to where it had been, knowing, and yet in complete denial of the fact that something had indeed been there for a moment, but now was gone.

  “This place is getting to me,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s not shit,” Tracy said as she stood, wiping her nose on her shirt which was now badly stained with both blood and the coating of morphine.

  My eyes landed on the milky curve where her bare abdomen met her jean shorts. I turned away. And saw a figure down the hall, lying just outside the fluorescent reach of an open door's glow. Something real, something that could help. A person.

  I ran for it, pills rattling in pockets, hoping that maybe this was some ransacked facility, that this was a former or current employee that could tell us where we were.

  I heard a small whine escape the man.

  “Hey!” I said. “Thank God! I have a daughter and I gotta get out of here—we gotta get out of—“

  But as I approached and saw the pink flesh of his long ears, the blue-green veins sticking up like varicose worms threading through red pulsing arteries, a slick sheen reflecting the fluorescent rectangles, the fin of his hand reaching sluggishly onward, away from the room where a rabbit sticker waved from the doorknob, I realized this was no man, or at least, it was man no longer.

  I took a step back. Tracy sidled up next to me.

  “Uh-uh!” she said, jumping behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders. “Hell the fuck no! Kill it, Andy. Stomp his Easter bunny zombie ass!”

  What was it the documents had said? Something about 'Subject will not remain this creature long. The moon nears.’

  The moon. Nears.

  I grabbed Tracy's arm, pulling her around the fleshy rabbit-man's naked, sprawling form. In the room, I saw the tossed boxes, and … a pack of green and white cigarettes right beneath the diseased light of the moon in the top corner of the room. It was huge, bigger than a man, taller than the ceiling, and somehow still fitting inside. I stepped past to get out of its sight.

  Wub-wub-wub.

  Tracy halted, jerking out of my grip.

  Wub-wub-wub, the moon droned.

  “My Newports,” she whispered reverently, pointing into the room, eyes flicking nervously from the rabbit-man to the cigarette pack beyond. I wondered why, of all else, she seemed the most troubled by the rabbit-man. I decided to use it.

  “Tracy, you see that fucking rabbit?” I said. The thing deflated with a soft whine and she flinched. “Don't fucking go in there,” I said. “That moon—“

  “Fuck that moon,” she said, though her eyes shined with its light and what I thought was some kind of buried fear-turned-anger. She inched forward, squeezed her eyes shut, then leaped into the room, leading with a loosely tied red Chuck Taylor, drops of blood falling from her nose onto the rabbit-man.

  I was left in the hallway with the slick, quivering flesh of the rabbit, the fluorescents, the pockets of darkness between, the wub-wub-wub pressing into my ears, and an unwillingness to follow Tracy. I wanted a fucking cigarette, too, are you kidding me? But Abby was at the sitter’s still, and God knew what time it was, and I didn't even want to admit to myself that days could have passed.

  How would that explain the hangover when I woke up in the box room? I kept asking myself. It was my only reassurance.

  I always got a sitter if I was gonna go out, and only on Friday nights, and her sitter was my cousin with kids of her own that all got into onesies when Abby stayed the night and they watched movies and drank soda and ate pizza rolls. Me and Abby had our own dates, going out to the movies, eating at Ihop, playing at the park even when it was cold and barren. Our park was Duncan, where the historical Governor Duncan's mansion was, and you could tour its preserved colonial-era walnut stair and cast iron everything with an appointment, and I'd taken Abby once because she kept bothering me about it.

  Abby was six. Six fucking years old, lost her mom just when she started forming those core memories so she was always bringing up these remembers? of Shelly that I was trying to forget—you know, because they were good ones.

  So yes, I went out on Fridays. I was single, had no intention of finding a new mom for Abby, not yet anyway, and sometimes I needed to tie one off and get laid. And that’s why I was here in this building, Abby's only remaining parent in some psychotic funhouse.

  I had to fucking get out. I could not afford to go running for cigarettes and get trapped by the moon in the room.

  “Woah, what the fuck?” Tracy said as she emerged from the room, giving the rabbit a wide berth. “Man, you gonna fuckin make it?

  Palms to my eyes, I rubbed tears away and made sure no more came before I looked up. “Fine. Still got a headache, and—um …,” I pointed.

  “What?”

  “Your head.” I tapped my forehead.

  Tracy looked around, her cornrows not quite whipping, but something like it. “What about my fucking head?” She lit a Newport. It smelled wonderful, but I couldn't take my eyes away from her. “You mean the bloody nose you fuckin gave me?”

  “No. Your forehead,” I said. “Have you always had that mark?”