Free Mask of Flies by Eric Leitten Page B

Camry
in a desolate parking garage, crossed the street, and walked under an
archway, into the park that overlooked the falls. He was about a
half-a-mile from The Trapdoor, where the woman headed to jump.
    How
do I wake her up? Rick ran down the path that led to the
fall’s precipice; he must have looked almost normal in the athletic
gear lifted from the 24 hour gym.
    The wind blew a thick
plastic bag out of an overfilled trashcan towards Rick. He stopped
and stuffed it into his pocket. Simple
enough to work and maybe the woman will return to her senses.
    A buzz, which sounded
like a remote control car, sounded from the main road. The whine grew
louder and echoed in the silence of the park. Rick looked towards the
main drag for the source; he saw a vagrant riding an oversized
electric wheelchair, parallel to his path. Then, the wheelchair
disappeared into a line of pine trees, 50 yards ahead. Rick pressed
on.
    The cataract drew
closer. It frothed with white water, looking like a giant curtain of
wool. Rick could see the observation deck that overlooked The
Trapdoor. Then he saw a shrouded figure emerge from some shrubbery in
the opposite direction. He crept towards the trees, confident he went
unseen.
    Whether Russell
controlled the woman, or she was simply suicidal, Rick planned to
leverage the element of surprise to his advantage and intervene. He
moved amongst the trees until he was behind the cloaked woman, her
cloak a bloody sheet.
    It’s
now or never .
    He inflated the bag
with a breath and crept towards the walkway, where she stood. Again
the whine of wheelchair was heard, louder and closer. A sudden flash
of metal ruckus slammed into Rick, taking his legs out from
underneath him. He tasted blood in his mouth and heard a familiar
voice over him.
    “What’s gotcha
down, big fella?” Russell chortled. Not the polite auditor seen at
Oak Leaf, but the legless wretch from Rick’s nightmare. With the
façade of his gentlemanly disguise exposed, he was unabashed baring
his true colors. “Did you think you could run away from me,
asshole, and leave me with the mess to clean up?” Russell backed up
and rammed Rick with the thick tire of the wheelchair.
    It caught Rick in the
rib. “Fuck you!” Rick struggled to move. The side his face and
hands where scraped bloody, and his knee rang out in pain. Looking up
at Russell, he saw nothing but the uncanny resemblance to the
auditor.
    Russell leapt from his
chair onto Rick, and bared his pointed black teeth.
    Struggling to avoid
being bitten, Rick clutched the plastic bag underneath Russell’s
neck. He pulled the plastic bag over his attacker’s head and
wrapped it, airtight.
    Russell thrashed,
breathing laboriously. His fists flailed down upon Rick, and pulled
at the bag, but he couldn’t get Rick to loosen his grip.
    Rick rocked forward
with his hips and fell back with momentum, crushing Russell’s head
into the concrete, again and again. Black ichor oozed out from the
bottom of the bag onto Rick’s hands, and the shortened body on top
of him wilted.
    He shrugged off
Russell’s body and stood; he saw the cloaked woman perched on the
guardrail. A sudden gust lifted the bloody sheet, exposing pale,
naked skin beneath. She looked up and brought down her makeshift
hood; her face swollen and bloodied.
    Before Rick could say a
word, the battered woman released a rancorous laugh, and red dots
emerged from her mouth and ears, and accumulated into a buzzing
swarm. A feculent smell emitted from the woman’s body before it
went limp and fell backwards into the river, slipping underneath The
Trapdoor, certain to be invisibly pushed over the falls. The red
swarm slowly dissipated.
    He turned around in
disbelief. Her skin, her
wounds—she was already dead. Tears welled up in his eyes
when he realized that his memory of killing the woman was true. He
needed to run, to disappear, once again killer and now madman.
    There wasn’t any sign of Russell
or his wheelchair. No denying that