Thread: Monster [ Burke x Arianna  ]

The stairs would offer an impossibly long trip, at first uneventful and thick with the echos of her desperate panting and frantic clattering footsteps. It would not be until she had fled three flights that the heavy metal door she'd exited from smashed open and chipped the cinder brick behind the doorhandle, the flecks of composite sprinkling over the floor as loud and telltale as some kind of excitable chirping locust. The door's trimphant swing inward went off like a gunshot, and the unmistakable click-clack of claws on cement followed a few exploratory huffing sniffs of the air. With a low, feline mrowl the beast stumbled down its first flight of stairs, pausing, a few bizarre stabalizing footsteps, and then another crashing over-eager lunge brought the thing a floor closer. It sounded frustrated, and continued again, stopping mid-flight this time and then hurrying on without pausing for another floor. Then she heard it stop again, slow its progress, listening intently, hurrying and slowing with the rythm her footsteps made. When she would wind the flat surface of a landing, the thing would seem to cease moving. Then, when she hit the loud stairs, it would follow suit, as if to disguise its progress. A terrible job it made of that, every heaving breath and hungry roar of its stomach perfectly audible, even over the painful thudding of Alexandria's own heart. But concealment did not adequately justify its erraticism, nor the trouble she heard it have managing the stairs. Every time it reached a new level she was positive it loomed directly over her shoulder, close enough to touch, but no confrontation ever came, its own setbacks and delirium elongating the chase excruciatingly. Finally she reached the ground floor, and in letting the door slam behind her did not hear it immediately reopen, as the expectation would doubtlessly be. The lobby would be deserted, and the harsh, blinding, somehow inadequate emergency lights bathed walkways with white and left the corners and walls black. The furnature that had, in daytime, looked so harmlessly and haphazardly angled, now threatened to conceal any number of enemies laying in wait. There would be no question in her mind that her life was in danger, even beyond the harrowing menace that was even now stalking her every warm footstep on the stairs and along the rug leading toward the door she now approached. That was perhaps the worst part of it the frantic knowledge in the back of her head that this clawing, ravening beast was likely the least of her troubles, and escaping it now only meant waiting for yet another attack. There were emergency exits, three in fact, but these ran down corridors hidden behind glass doors that housed the on-site janitorial staff and security heads, and were too far away to even consider chasing down. The most easily accessible exit was the main one, the front entrance, and it was in the chamber of doorways that house the buidling's intercom system and fuse box that David Gibbons stood, rattling the doorhandle and giving her a playful, quizzical look. That look, however, turned sour when he saw the look on her face, and a good many years of arriving just before or just after something terrible happened jerked at pieces inside of him not every man has. He knew the smell of danger, the taste of it, and danger knew him back. Long time acqaintences, the murky black that followed true death had been content to allow him witness to its deeds. Tonight it wanted him, more than anything else. His age and size made him a no-brainer target, far preferential over the lean, young, fast, fiery Lexi with all cylanders firing and adrenaline flooding her veins. The door clicked open by Alexandria's hand before she knew she'd done it, and the familliar touch of cologne brought nostalgia and the comfort of friendship in a helpless, longing rush. His face paled, the blood in his skin sprinting to the vital organs inside him in a last-ditch effort to protect against surface cuts. His colon and urinary tract emptied at once on the off chance that a greivous blow to his intenstines might burst his bladder and leak toxins and wastes where they shouldn't go. She could look up into his face, those seconds stretching unnaturally and groaning against the strain - she could see that he had a clear view of what was coming, knew its shape, recognized mortality. He could not waste time in looking at her. Dust particles hung in the air between them, unmoving, Alexandria herself hyper-aware of everything in her presence, and the yellow of his teeth flashed when pink-red lips parted to mutter, Run. and swung the light woman into the bar stretching horizontally across the swinging doors of the building. You would imagine these doors to open inward, but metal strips requiring pressure to open allowed easy acess from either side, no real reason existing to limit their acessability from either end. She would be thrown soundly, his arms closing around her middle and lifting, tossing, throwing the weight of his legs and lower back into a twisting lurch, one last feat of strength from a man who had once seemed immovable and wise beyond threat of victimization. The haunting knowledge in his eyes as he connected with her one last time was total, her feet off the ground and sailing quietly to the door, the two frozen in a tableau of missed opportunity and desperate pleading hopelessness. Their eyes met with a longing you might imagine more typical of soldiers in a field of war, or between two rock climbers trapped in an icy crevasse, realization striking them both that one of the two's situation is unsalvagable. She would see his overcoat whirling behind him, carrying through the momentum of his hurling effort, witness the new sweat pushing out onto his forehead, watch the forlorn emotions whisper through their connecting gaze, and the inevitable glowing yellow eyes of whatever it was that had hunted her. Its attention was all for him, the greedy split fangs closing in on his shoulder at once, six inch long claws sinking into his hips, pointed black feline ears twitching with excitement, and then darkness, David himself sucked down to the floor and yanked into the rapidly folding rug to disappear into black. He would scream only once, and fall silent, the knashing of teeth and ripping of clothes overcoming all, a sick sucking noise escaping the doors as they swung closed at her feet. Her landing would be hard, bounce her first on the muscle tissue of her narrow behind, and skip hard against the space between her shoulderblades against the rough concrete. She would continue mere inches off the ground before landing a third time to scrape roughly, and stop, the noise inside fallen away while halogen lamps beamed sadly at small patches of tile inside.