Authors: Mark Wheaton
The mastiff moved through the bare apartment. The wallpaper and carpeting had been stripped away, leaving what looked like an empty cinder block in the middle of an otherwise completed building. The dog trotted towards the kitchen where the cabinets had been pulled away from the walls. The space where a refrigerator would stand was also bare.
But the mastiff seemed interested only in the stove. It was a crappy model, probably thirty or forty years old, with broken knobs and aluminum foil under scorched burners. It wasn’t plugged in, but the plastic housing for the electronic display was cracked and didn’t look like it worked.
It didn’t have to. Ken grabbed the back of the stove and ripped it forward as hard as he could. The rubber having long molted off the metal legs, deep gashes were torn out of the linoleum floor as it was moved.
The electric cord had long been unplugged. The hose leading to the gas spigot had also been disconnected. The shut-off valve was perpendicular to the spigot, indicating it was closed. Ken reached down and gently turned the valve until it ran parallel to the spigot.
He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the gas.
The mastiff woofed a little, snapping Ken out of his reverie.
“You’re right. Thirty-nine more to go, eh, boy?”
As they exited the apartment, Ken used the heavy electrical tape he’d bought in bulk the evening before to seal the edges of the front doors. He had worried that the silver of the tape would provoke curiosity from passersby. But as he flattened it against the brown of the door frame, he saw that it was barely visible in the low light.
Perfect
, he thought.
The mastiff had already started down the hallway towards the stairs. It looked up as Ken pocketed the tape, but then continued up the steps to the next floor.
• • •
Though he wasn’t about to admit it to the kennel master, Leonhardt
was
drunk. In fact, he’d been drinking since he left the archive. When Becca called, it was like receiving a shot of adrenaline. He’d been shaking as he left the bar for his vehicle. Now, with Bones in the backseat, he was in a hazy mindset, as if driving on autopilot and praying that no one ran into the street ahead of him. He didn’t have much farther to go, his siren wailing as he flew through intersection after intersection, but there were moments where he thought he might fall asleep.
As he crossed East 106th, a cab, figuring it could beat the cop through the intersection shot out in front of him. Leonhardt slammed on the brakes, sending the shepherd tumbling off the backseat and into the floorboards with a thud.
“Oh, shit! You okay, Bones?” the detective barked, sounding genuinely worried.
The shepherd rolled over, shaking its head before hopping back on the seat.
“Don’t freak me out like that!” Leonhardt cried, flipping the bird at the cab driver as he passed him.
“Hello?”
“Your fucking partner just beat up the kennel master at the 13th Precinct and stole that working dog you guys had been using up in Harlem. Any idea where he might be heading?”
“Oh, Jesus,” groaned Garza.
“Seriously,” continued the lieutenant. “He apparently drove away like a bat out of hell. Figure we should rein him in, no?”
“Yeah.”
“This ain’t a sexual thing, is it?” joked the lieutenant.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Garza replied dryly.
“Well, see what you can do. You’ve got an hour before I go ahead and okay his arrest on sight.”
“Yep.”
Garza hung up and climbed out of bed. His wife, now awake, too, pulled the covers up over her.
“You’ve got to get a new partner,” she muttered.
“Yep.”
• • •
Trey almost laughed when he found the empty dog food cans and makeshift dog bowl down in the maintenance room.
“Bro, I gotta teach you something about covering your tracks,” he said aloud.
That’s when he saw the boots.
The subbasement was actually divided into three rooms: laundry, lockers for the maintenance workers, and the supply room where the workers left the tools of their trade. It was in this third space that a pair of boots were visible. But rather than standing upright, they were leaned over on their backs but not on their sides. Clearly, something was still in them.
The something was Mr. Byrd, his throat ripped out.
“Oh no, Ken. That’s…that’s it for you.”
Trey checked the body just to make sure there was nothing that could be done and then headed upstairs. He had no idea where to begin looking for Ken or the big black dog, but prayed he got to him before anyone else died.
• • •
Becca tried to keep busy in the apartment, but it was something easier said than done. She had turned the television on and off three times already. She’d called back Detective Leonhardt, only to get his voicemail.
She tried to read a book in her bedroom, but every time she heard someone on the stairwell or out in the hall, she would race to the door to look through the peephole. She never really saw another person until it was Ken.
She gasped, her hand reaching for the door knob. But then a sixth sense kicked in just as her fingertips touched brass. A second later, she saw the mastiff pad by behind her brother. It seemed to have grown, its massive head the size of a Halloween pumpkin. It stared straight ahead.
That is, until it reached the Baldwins’ apartment.
As if feeling Becca’s eyes watching it, it stopped in its tracks and moved over to the front door. Becca quickly moved away but saw its silhouette as it sniffed around the base. Frozen in place, the little girl kept waiting for the animal to move away, but it only seemed to press its head harder against the door. That’s when she heard the wood begin to creak under its weight. She didn’t think it would come off its hinges, but the sound was getting louder.
Taking a couple of cautious steps forward, she was only a few feet away when it began bashing its head full-force into the door. She knew she should be scared. She imagined that any sane person would run from the room and hide in the furthest closet of the furthest room.
But she found herself moving forward until she could reach her hand out and touch the shuddering door. The impact of dog skull on wood reverberated through Becca’s body. It felt as if the entire room was shaking due to a jetliner passing only a few hundred feet above the building.
She closed her eyes to listen, the moment impossibly surreal. There was no way a dog could hit the door with this much force, but Becca knew the clatter she heard behind her was the dishes rattling in the cupboards. She glanced back and saw the window panes vibrating with each strike as well.
She sank down onto her knees, running her hands down the door until she reached the base. The pounding came to a slow halt. A moment later, Becca felt the hot breath of the devil dog on her hand, followed by warm spittle as it licked her fingers.
She recoiled as blood-black saliva trickled down to her palm. She stared at it in horror as it seemed to move by its own volition, tracing a pattern across her skin. She wanted to wipe it off, but felt paralyzed. She had what she wanted to do, but then there was what her body was allowing her to do.
“Hey!”
Becca almost cried out, so surprised was she to hear her brother’s voice. It took her a second to realize that he was talking to the mastiff.
“Get away from there,” Ken ordered.
From deep within the animal came a terrifying growl. It was marked with a furious anger aimed squarely at Ken. Becca listened for Ken’s reaction, but she didn’t hear movement. Instead, he repeated his words. “Get away from there!”
The growl slowly subsided. Becca gingerly rose to her feet and peered through the peephole. She saw Ken standing only a few feet away, hands on his hips, eyes dark as night. The standoff continued only another second before Ken turned and walked away. She waited to see the head of the mastiff follow, but saw nothing.
Leaning back down, she looked back under the door. She expected to see the mastiff, but he wasn’t there. Now terrified, she eased back up to her full height, took hold of the doorknob, held her breath, and turned it. Swinging it wide, fully expecting the mastiff to be waiting inches away, she was surprised to discover the hall empty.
She finally exhaled a second later. When she took in her next breath, a faint smell wafted up her nose. She looked over at Mrs. Fowler’s door and saw the electrical tape wrapped around the frame. She walked over and took up a corner of the tape between her fingers. She tugged at it until she’d pulled the tape down four or five inches.
When she smelled the gas, her eyes went wide. She looked left and right, but didn’t see a soul. As Ken’s footsteps echoed down the stairs, Becca turned to follow.
T
he first 911 call was placed at 11:36 p.m. by an elderly woman named Ann Lobrano. A resident of Building 2, she reported smelling gas coming in through the ventilation ducts. The 911 operator was alerting the fire house on 3rd Avenue when a second call came in, this one from a woman in Building 5 just coming off her shift at the Metropolitan Hospital. At first, it was believed there had been some confusion as to which building it was in. But then the calls were played back and emergency responders dispatched to both locations in Neville Houses.
The first ladder (#14) unit was just clambering onto 1st Avenue when the next three calls came in. There was a second one from Building 5, but then came reports from Buildings 7 and 12. Just as this was being relayed, the floodgates opened. One call after another poured in until all the buildings of the Triborough Projects were represented.
“I don’t know,” one operator said, patching in her supervisor. “Starting to think this could be the real deal.”
The supervisor was about to reply when someone started screaming. He rushed over to her station, only to hear white noise on the other end of the line.
“What happened?!”
• • •
The explosion in Building 4 was felt twenty blocks in every direction and seen from as far away as Jackson Heights, Queens, an orange blossom of flame that flowered and died within seconds even as debris continued to tumble from the side of the housing tower. A steady stream of tenants had been exiting the buildings as word of gas leaks passed from apartment to apartment. After the explosion, panic reigned and a frenzied exodus began in earnest.
Detective Leonhardt had been in Building 7 evacuating people. The officer had smelled the gas upon arrival and had had a pretty good idea whose handiwork it was.
“Police! Gas leak!” he yelled as he pounded on the doors. “You’ve got to get out of there!”
When doors didn’t open, he hit them harder. Bones, excited by all the activity, barked like crazy and almost flew through a couple of the newly opened doors, forcing Leonhardt to yank him backward by the harness.
“Bones! Keep with me!”
The problem was, the shepherd was completely discombobulated by the heavy smells. The heavy stench of sulfur from the odorant added to the gas was going straight to his head. His prancing and shivers were attempts to clear his olfactory canals of the odor, but it wasn’t working.
Then the explosion happened. Screams echoed throughout the building to the point that Leonhardt thought it might’ve gone off in Building 7.
“What’s happening?!” an old man shouted, tears in his eyes as he opened the door to an equally panicked Leonhardt.
“Gas leak in the building. You have to get out of here.”
“No, out there!” the man pointed to his living room window.
Leonhardt dragged Bones into the apartment and peered out the window, seeing that the building affected by the explosion was a couple away. As he watched, several residents who had been staring up at the conflagration were now being peppered by chunks of wall and other detritus raining down from above.
“Oh, fuck,” Leonhardt sighed. He didn’t even want to think how many people might’ve been killed in the adjoining apartments.
He wheeled the shepherd around and saw the old man still standing in the doorway of his own apartment, his hands extended plaintively.
“What do I do?”
“Go outside,” the detective said quietly.
“But I’m scared.”
“Don’t think of it like that. Just like you were going to get groceries. Take your time. Go to the stairs and make your way down. There’ll be people down there to help you.”
The man nodded as if expected to, not because he understood, and turned to leave. Leonhardt followed him into the hall, but then shook his head.
“This isn’t working. No more knocking. We have to shut this shit down!”
• • •
The job was finally done.
As he stood on the roof of Building 3, Ken waited for the second explosion. He knew it wouldn’t be long in coming. The fire in 10 started by the first explosion was working its way through the walls and ceilings. However, Ken wasn’t sure if it would soon encounter the sealed room on the seventh floor or the fourteenth first. The seventh was closer, sure, but as smoke poured out of windows on the eleventh and twelfth floors, he thought the intensity of the blaze had directed itself upward.
It would be an interesting experiment.
The second explosion, it turned out, wasn’t much of an explosion. Rather, it came in the form of a fireball that blasted out windows across the sixth floor of Building 2. It was truly something to see. Shattered glass exploded outward from each apartment as what looked like an orange comet raced around the inside of the floor, a flaming wrecking ball setting alight anything in its path.
Ken didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so beautiful or surreal. He looked back to the courtyard to wait for a third with the calm of someone watching the sky for falling stars. It was then that he heard the mastiff growl. The animal had been sitting a few feet away, its nose in the air as if merely taking in the rarefied scents of a cool evening. Ken turned to the stairwell and held up the bloodstained garden trowel he’d used to tear out Mr. Byrd’s throat.