Security(53)

“Yes,” Tessa says. “Yes.”

“You wanted to love him,” Brian says, “but you couldn’t. You couldn’t do that to him.” He nips her lower lip between his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” says Tessa, to Brian, to me.

They’re getting turned on again. It’s in their voices, but so is fatigue.

There is terrible fatigue in Jules’s voice, too, as the Killer comes toward her in the bedroom of Room 1801. She moans like a toddler in a nightmare. She’s wearing a brief silk nightie; it was white, and now it’s red. Jules didn’t help Justin fight; she sat in her corner, like this, and she moaned, like this, and when Justin could no longer fight, Jules still didn’t fight, as the Killer came for her and did all this damage. There’s a butter knife sticking out of Jules’s right ankle. The Killer did that to hobble her. He needn’t have. Terror has hobbled her.

So why does she fight now, as he reaches for her?

It’s three o’clock in the morning.

It’s instinct. This time it isn’t more torture, more bleeding. This time it’s the end. An animal knows. Jules bats at his hand with pointless, open palms. The Killer twists a fistful of her hair and pulls. Jules is dragged backward, through the bedroom. She is dragged past her dead husband, for whom she reaches, crying. It’s pathetic but understandable, her display. She has regressed to a state of primal reaction. The Killer pulls her to the bedroom’s stairs. Then thuds can be heard, and shrieks in time, and then they appear in the regular penthouse’s entryway, and then in the eighteenth floor’s hall. Blood leaves a path behind them. Jules is reaching for her ankles. Both of her ankles have butter knives through them. The Killer drops Jules against the door to Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. He goes to the door to the stairway, opens it, and doesn’t quite close it.

Brian and Tessa snuggle, speaking so low it’s hard to make out under Jules’s despondence, and Jules’s despondence is made that much more distracting by her attempt to collect herself. She’s trying to get it together. She’s looking around the hallway; she’s looking at the door to Room 1801 and crying anew, mumbling, “Justin, sweetie, sweetie.” She is red; all of her is red. Jules licks each of her palms and tries to scrub the blood off her face. Partly she succeeds; partly she blends it. She tucks back her hair and straightens her nightgown.

“I’m not knocking on their door,” Jules says. Her chin is high and proud. One might say “snobby,” if one weren’t, at this moment, madly in love with her. “You’ll have to knock, *.”

Jules’s bravery does crumble a little when the Killer swings the stairway door wide and stands forebodingly there.

But she speaks through the crumbling. It is lovely and dreadful. “Did your mother make you those coveralls? They’re nice. Very Sears.”

The Killer is slow in walking to her. He is patient, standing over her.

Jules spits at him. It only hits his shin—the wounded left—but it gets the point across.

The Killer raises his right hand, which holds his blood--lathered knife. He raps his knuckles on the door, four times.

Jules screams so loudly, the Thinker, on the twentieth floor, drops a king of hearts to cover his ears. “Tessa! Don’t open th—”

Even soundproof rooms have doors through which knocks must echo.

And if knocks must echo, the barest hint of a scream might do the same, no matter how efficiently the Killer was able to hack through Jules’s voice box and abort the rest of the message. He avoids the arteries again. He retreats to the door to the stairs and leaves it slightly open. Jules’s throat crackles like radio static.

“What’s—” Tessa is bolt upright in the bed.

So is Brian. “That sounded like your friend.”

Tessa’s shuffling clothes, putting them on while walking. She takes Brian’s undershirt by mistake. It’s white, what is colloquially called a “wife--beater.” Her nipples are pointed shadows underneath it.

Brian’s leaping into his pants. “Wait. Wait, Tess!”





CAMERA 62, 56, 19–13, 4, 13–14, 42, X





Tessa’s running down the spiral staircase while zipping up her skirt. She has no shoes. Brian’s buckling his belt at the top of the stairs—having shoved into his boots and pulled on his shirt—when Tessa reaches the deluxe penthouse’s door and wrenches it open.

It’s so bright in the hall, compared to the penthouse. Jules’s body tumbles backward, over the threshold, her crackling throat a slow flow of black blood, the hall light triggering a switch in the deluxe penthouse’s camera feed so that it’s no longer night vision, no longer green, black, and white. So that the Killer’s knife, when he emerges from the stairway’s door, gleams like an oblong ruby. And Tessa is bent over Jules, and Jules is whistling from the throat, and Jules’s mouth mouths the word “Run” over and over again, and Brian is almost down the stairs, but the Killer moves quickly, very quickly, knife high.

It is evidently not part of the plan to leave any survivors in the hotel.

I once instructed Tessa, while she and I were boxing, “If a man attacks you and he’s an amateur, yes, certainly, use a knee to the groin. But professional assault personnel wear a cup. If a man attacks you and he looks professional, then, Tessa, put everything you’ve got into a shin kick.”