The CaNerdian

Blackout at Cherry Estates: Part VI

Michael was standing at the edge of an abyss. He rocked on his heels, waves of vertigo crashing over his mind. He put out a hand to steady himself and stifled a yelp of shock. His fingers brushed against Catherine's jacket.

At his touch, his girlfriend looked back at him in concern. "Are you all right?"

Sweat beaded on his brow. "Fine," he breathed. "Fine. Just lost my balance there. It's so dark, you know?"

Catherine put on a brave smile. "Tell me about it." She nodded her head towards the front of their tiny column, where Pat and Ashley had broken stride to wait up for them.

"Come on," Ashley said. "We just have to find the stairwell, and it's a straight shoot up to the roof hatch."

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Blackout at Cherry Estates: Part V

They moved like kindergarteners, all linked hand-to-hand, Pat in the lead, Michael in the rear, Ashley and Catherine squeezed in the middle. Pat held his flashlight out before them, cutting into the darkness like Moses parting the red sea. Ashley still had her can of pepper spray on hand, but she kept that to herself. The incident with Mrs. Watts had left her cautious. Ashley had no way of telling how the darkness, the bizarre warping in physics, the sheer ominous presence was affecting the minds of her companions. She felt certain it was responsible for her headache though Pat had dismissed her worries as stress-induced paranoia. As they crept their way along the corridor to the basement, Ashley's head throbbed painfully in a warning signal. Danger ahead, danger ahead, danger...

Still, this seemed like the only logical course of action. The sooner they got help from outside, the better.

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Blackout at Cherry Estates: Part IV

Pat slowly withdrew his hand from the impossibility that had drawn itself over the threshold like a curtain. He held his fingers up to himself tentatively, as though he were apprehensive they would fall off or sprout tendrils or something. But nothing happened.

It was Catherine, rocking back on forth on the floor, who broke the silence first. "Are we in Hell?"

Pat seemed to seriously consider her query. "I don't think so. We'd remember dying. Wouldn't we?"

Catherine cupped her hands over her mouth and let out a strangled sob. Michael, her boyfriend, knelt beside her and took her in his arms, though it seemed he was deriving more comfort from her than the other way round.

Pat paced away from the door carefully. "Anyway, I don't think Hell would look like my workplace." He chuckled bitterly, then winced. He touched his head gingerly, where the cuts from Mrs. Watts' nails still were weeping blood. "And it feels too real to be a dream."

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Blackout at Cherry Estates: Part III

"Mrs. Watts?" Ashley called once more, in spite of her growing surety that the old lady was in no condition to answer. If she remained in the lobby at all.

The throaty, raspy breathing that had answered Ashley's calls grated like a cement mixer full of nails. Ashley took a step back, unconsciously, and reached under her desk for the pepper spray that was her only form of protection. She tucked it into her pants pocket, her head throbbing a warning pulse against unseen danger.

"What in hell's going on?" Pat, the caretaker, shone his flashlight around, trying to illuminate the outline of Mrs. Watts on the leather bench. What the beam of light found instead was a hunched, animalistic figure, teeth bared in a hideous snarl. The old crone was clawing at the air, eyes bloodshot and unblinking in the glow of Pat's flashlight. She bunched herself into a ball of compressed sinew and flung herself at the runty caretaker.

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Blackout at Cherry Estates: Part II

Monica Ellis had always had an irrational fear of the dark. At least, that's what her friends called it: irrational. To her, it seemed perfectly reasonable. For starters, it meant being unable to see where you were going. That meant – at best – stubbed toes, bruised kneecaps, jammed fingers, or all of the above. At worst...well...who could honestly say with complete confidence they knew what lay waiting in every dark space?

Take the hallway at Cherry Estates. Monica knew, with relative certainty, that it was about fifteen steps from the elevator to the turn, and then forty steps from the turn to her apartment door. But there was no way in hell she was going to make them shuffling along in the eclipse that had engulfed her home.

Sometimes her neighbours would leave their bicycles outside their doors, anticipating a green-friendly commute first thing in the morning. The building manager, Ashley, had warned them off from doing it because it was a fire hazard, but people rarely listened. Other times the housekeeping staff would leave extension cords in a tangled mess, either through carelessness or laziness.

Nope. Monica wouldn't take a chance on it. Aside from these obvious pitfalls, who was to say there weren't any flesh-eating zombies waiting to take a chunk out of her arm the moment she strayed into the unknown?