Free The Four-Night Run by William Lashner

door.
    Nothing.
    He banged again, harder and longer, feeling the reverberations in his injured arm, banged until his right hand was numb from banging. He leaned against the door and felt a wave of weakness fall through him. He closed his eyes and thought of sleeping, and his knees buckled and he barely caught himself. And then he heard a sound. From inside the building. A shuffling, growing louder, coming closer.
    He banged again and shouted, “I’m looking for Donnie. Donnie Guillen.”
    Slowly the door opened.
    A face appeared out of the darkness.
    “Mr. Scrbacek?”
    “Donnie, thank God. I need . . . I need . . .”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I need . . .”
    “You’re bleeding. Let me call an ambulance.”
    “No ambulance. No hospitals. No one can know where I . . . where I . . . They’re after me. They’re . . .”
    “Mr. Scrbacek?”
    And then he fainted, J.D. Scrbacek, fainted right into the ruin that was 714 Ansonia Road.
    If you were looking from across the street, you would next have seen an unsettling sight. A man in a bloodied raincoat, lying on the doorstep of an all-but-abandoned house, his body half inside the black doorway, his legs on the porch. And then you would have seen those legs slowly disappearing, dragged into the building inch by inch, until their entirety was inside, and the door was closed, and everything was again as it should have been on Ansonia Road in the heart of Crapstown. Dark, deserted, despairing.
    Desolation.

SECOND NIGHT

11
    S QUIRREL
    Scrbacek dreamed his clothes were being stripped off his body until suddenly he awoke to find his clothes being stripped off his body. He opened his eyes to see a score of hands clutching at him, shouted out from the pain in his arm, and fell hard back into unconsciousness.

    He woke again from the pain twisting inside his arm and called out into the darkness. A woman with a broad face and a great halo of blonde hair appeared over him and smiled as she stroked his brow with her hand. He knew then, with all certainty, that she was an angel and he was dead. She disappeared for a moment, and he felt a stinger slip into his arm, and the angel came back and stroked his brow, and he grew light, and the pain eased, and he rose sweetly back into unconsciousness.

    For a period of time, the length of which he couldn’t fathom, he slipped in and out of a dream state. His constant companions, whether asleep or awake, were the sound of intense muffled conversation from somewhere distant and the dank smell of deterioration.
    A sharp pressure on his chest jolted him to consciousness, and he found himself lying naked on a mattress, covered from the waist down by a blanket, doused with light from a bare bulb inside a cone hanging overhead. A hunched little man with spectacles, big ears, and too many teeth, was twisting a piece of Scrbacek’s chest between his fingers.
    “Three,” said the man, a stethoscope draped around his scrawny neck. He sucked air through pursed lips and leaned close to the piece of flesh between his fingers. “Interesting.” The little man raised his other hand. Light gleamed off the short curved blade of a scalpel.
    Scrbacek tried to sit up, but a weight of dizziness pushed him down onto the mattress.
    The hunched man pulled his hand away with a loud intake of air. “He’s awake.” He took a step back and squealed, “Someone come and hold him down. He’s awake.”
    Scrbacek could feel the pain in his left arm but only at a far remove, as if he were somehow floating above the wreck that was his body. His left arm was bloodied, a long strip of gauze was wrapped tightly around his right hand, his chest was mottled with bruises. He tried again to sit up against the dizziness, pushing with his right arm despite the pain in his palm, and this time he succeeded in lifting his upper body. Slowly he looked around.
    He was on a bed in the middle of a small, seedy room with stained yellow wallpaper. Holes had been