I doubled back and rounded the same corner, heading back in the direction of the maintenance stairwell. 2 more stray zombirds whizzed by my head and I waved my right arm retardedly, attempting to blindly bash them out of the air like tiny zombie piñatas. I stopped myself short of hitting them, though, because I had a weird feeling that they may have been helping me. Lucky for me, they were going the same direction as I was, maybe even leading me somewhere (I hoped), so I put my head down like a 'roided fullback and stormed down toward the maybe-angry mob of tenants, determined to get myself into the stairwell, regardless of the fact that I really had no fucking clue as to where I was ultimately going.
The birds MUST have been on my side because they darted directly into the crowd of tenants, creating sort of a "parting of the tenant-sea". Even old Blind Mel jumped backward to avoid the undead aviators. Who knows how he saw them. Old bastard must have sonar. Makes sense. Everyone around here calls him an ol' bat.
I passed my apartment door. Weird. I really wanted to take a peek in there and see what kind of war was going on between the faceless men and the pigeon army, but hearing a brief couple of seconds of the chaos ensuing inside of there as I hobbled past the door deterred my curiosity. I continued on into the crowd.
I think some of the tenants were talking. Whether the word were directed towards me, or if they were just ABOUT me I'll never know. There was a lull of blended up sentences spoken, none of which I could make out, probably because my selective hearing was focused more on the beating of my heart and the sound the box was making as it was heating up in my arm again. I was just relieved that this group of people still looked human (well, at least remotely human, though some of them, like Tommy The Leper who dealt crack on his crutches, had been far from human for years). The box was sweltering against my skin to the point of actually starting to melt! Not FULLY melt, in a Wicked Witch of the East kind of way. It was more like an unsupervised film reel getting dizzy and deciding to stop its rotation, leading to a suicidal burning. Cause of death: projector. Small pinholes slowly opened up on the sides of the box's surface and intense beams of light launched outward as I was running, frantically shooting out the projected light in different directions. Some light splashed against the walls, some against the tenants themselves. I tried my hardest not to look anyone in the eyes as I bullied past them. I just looked down, trying to guard the box from any stray hands, glancing side to side, almost on beat with my footsteps. If I WAS crazy, and if none of these people were really after me or this god damned light-leaking box, eye contact would reveal my disheveled state of mind, and there's no doubt that someone would call the cops, and I would end up in the Napa state hospital. "Maybe that's where I need to go," I thought, "maybe that's where these pigeons are leading me. At least I will be monitored, and probably remotely safe." The thought of controlled medication for a sickness that can't be labeled scared me, though, and I really wanted to avoid being categorized as loony tunes.
The door to the maintenance stairwell was in my sights. Good. Only a few more people to barge through before I can take the next step towards escape. At this point, I felt deaf and my balance was off because of the blood that must have filled up my eardrums during that last headache. I knew I felt something pop when I threw up. I was confused as to why I was running. I was confused as to why everyone else wanted the box, if they even DID. I was confused as to how my TV knew to warn me, and how the pigeons may be helping me. I was confused as to why there were giant three-dimensional cartoons running rampant around the corner. And during my confusion, my left hand was getting barbequed by a melting, breathing box made of skin and bad memories.
I was a few steps away from the door to the stairs when a man in a wife-beater put his hand out in front of me, like a fucking second rate traffic cop, as if to halt me from going further. But his eyes were looking toward my waistline. I figured he was going to grab for the box, so, as much as it burned, I gripped the box tighter, curled it inward against my chest, and twisted my right shoulder to defend it from the outstretched hand.
"CALM DOWN! I can HELP you," said the man in the wife-beater. That was the first sentence I was able to make out as I ran through the crowd. "I know what you're going through," he continued.
I didn't know what to believe at this point. I looked him in the eyes. They were tired. Puffy. But confidence bled from his tear ducts as he stood his ground with his arm firmly stretched out toward me, his palm sideways now as if he was asking for my hand to escort.
Damnit.
More and more ingredients were being thrown into my pot of confusion. I stopped moving for a moment as the man held his hand out. I started to respond to him, I think. I don't remember what I was going to say. But it doesn't matter. I didn't get a chance to say it. I opened my mouth, but before the words could climb up my esophagus and base jump out of my mouth, the man's hand raised up and balled into a fist.
I didn't see a new hole melt open on the box, but it's only because I was staring at the man's raised fist. But there is absolutely no doubt that a hole DID open, because a beam of light tore through the air, under my right arm that was shielding me, and shone directly on the man's arm, which, now that it had been blanketed by the box's insides, was no arm at all.
The raised, waving fist is now a flesh-colored, enlarged appendage that bends in the wrong spots and houses thick, sharp hair follicles like that of a tarantula. There was still a hand connected to the arm, but the hand was more like a collection of bloated spaghetti noodles, compacted together in the SHAPE of a hand. The fingers varied in size, and each phalange had additional multi-knuckled noodles hanging limply off of it.
"It's the box!" I thought. "Holy fucking shit, the box can transform things!? How is that HELPFUL!? How is that POSSIBLE".
"I'm sorry, man," I desperately said to the man as I started to duck into the maintenance stairwell, "I didn't mean to. I didn't KNOW!"
"What are you talking about, Chadam?" the man said to me.
I managed to get the door to the maintenance stairs open a lot better than I managed to get MY door open earlier. I guess practice with panic makes perfect.
The box's light beams followed my every move, and the beam that was hitting the man's arm rotated with me and was now pointed at the knob of the stairwell door. Before I slid into the stairwell, I glanced back at the man, and looked at his arm, which was back to normal, and still balled in a fist, exactly as it was a few moments ago. I looked him in his eyes and quietly but suspiciously asked "How did you know my name?"
He stared blankly into both of my eyes. I don't know how he did it, because my eyes are so far apart its gotta be downright impossible to look me in BOTH eyes. But he DID do it. And he smiled.
At that moment I heard a shout from the opposite end of the hall, in front of my apartment door, which was now opened again and an entire flock of birds was leaking out in a steady flow, circumventing the man who opened the door and came out of my apartment. Even through the static of a handful of tenants cluttering my view, I saw that it wasn't Mr. Drips, but the crippled bum who I had seen getting arrested a few days ago. The same crippled bum that made me run out and get those extra locks for my door. The same crippled bum who, aside from Ripley, was the only person I believed…even if I didn't understand WHY I believed him, and even if his warnings were delivered in more mysterious ways than your average warning.
Well, his tendency to warn was still in full effect, because right when I asked the man in the wife beater how he knew my name, the bum shouted, "CHADAM!!! RUUUUUUUN!!!"…