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What did Tina know that I didn’t?
Chapter 5
Freya
I could feel my head throbbing, yelling at me for what I must have done last night.
The faint smell of tequila stained my nose as I remembered that horrid shot that I had taken from Lacy’s flask, my stomach churning at just the thought of it. I blinked several times, my hand pressed against my forehead before carefully leaning out of bed.
My alarm was beeping rather painfully loud, its sirens wailing in my ear, reminding me that I would be late for work if I didn’t get moving now. So, regretfully, I slugged myself from the bed and into the bathroom to start my day. The cold tile flooring shocked me slightly as I got up. I practically had to dance around the floor to get to the sink.
After getting dressed and making a quick breakfast of granola and yogurt, I sprinted out my front door and trotted my way down the tiring seven flights of stairs, cursing as I reached the second floor when my legs stung in anger at me for wearing heels up and down these flights yesterday. The blisters forming on both of my heels tore at me, each step more painful than the last.
I still managed to get stuck in an hour-long traffic jam, which made me arrive to work precisely at 9:06, approximately thirty-six minutes late. Had I not been late yesterday, I might not have been as worried as I was about my tardiness. But even with the many consequences that I’m sure Mr. Thomas would taunt me with, my mind kept wandering back to Tina’s eerie warning from last night.
Everyone I met was so infatuated with the Ellisario’s, except for her. Well, and myself. But why wassheso adamant to keep me away from them? I couldn’t help but wonder if that was why she was so persistent about getting us to go to another bar. Why didn’t she tell me that she knew the Ellisario’s were meeting us?
What did she know?
I ran out of the taxi, not taking any second to scan the car in case I left anything behind, and scattered into the building, colliding into a wall of a human as my purse and phone flew to the ground, sliding to the other end of the room. A feeling of Deja vu washed over me, but I shook it off.
“I’m so sorry.” I stumbled to the tiled floor, trying to pick up my things scattered everywhere. From the corner of my eye, I could see my phone now, shattered beyond belief, as it slid the farthest from me.
My eyes soon became level with a stranger’s ankles, and as I looked, I noticed he was barefoot, his feet covered in dirt as if he were homeless. I eased my way upright to see the stranger I had rudely collided with, and my eyes widened immensely.
“You?” I said shockingly, seeing the potato sack of a man from the club last night standing before me. It was unmistakably the man that had grabbed me against my will. Though somehow, he seemed even more disturbing now.Sickly almost.
The tip of his nose was crumbling off like stale bread, and his skin was flaky and dry. His face was still a deathly color, eyes sinking deeper as if they were just sockets now.
His head tilted before he spoke. “We thought your kind were extinct.” He managed to choke out, a few teeth missing from his mouth as he spoke.
“What? Why are you following me?” I stepped back, my hands trembling out of fear.
“Excuse me, sir?” The building’s security guard managed his way over to us, his hand clutching his gun on his belt holster. “You need to leave.”
The deathly ill man disregarded him and inched closer to me, and as he stepped towards me, pieces of his face fell off like loose sand. The putrid smell of him lingered in the room. It was so horrid that it nearly had me gagging at the scent of it as a pungent whiff brushed past me. It reminded me of vomit and rotting meat that had been sitting in the sun for days, not that I knew what that smelt like personally. Though, I could imagine it was like this.
I pressed my index finger and thumb over my nose to shield myself from the smell.
“We need you. Can’t you see? They will stop at nothing until they have you. Even if they have to kill everyone to get to you.” His voice began to deepen irregularly as if he were using a voice changer, though I saw nothing on his person besides the oversized sack that sagged around him unflatteringly.
My brow rose in confusion. What kind of drugs was this man on? What type of disease did he have that made his body decay like this? Standing before me wasn’t merely a man but a walking corpse.
He continued to smell like death as if it had almost stained the air, and with every second that I could see his face, it began to sag inward, revealing the slight hint of bone beneath his fleshy skin. Even flies swarmed his head, probably intoxicated by its foulness.
The guard grabbed his wrist to pull him away from me, and as his skin touched the decaying man’s, the guard’s hand began to wrinkle and decompose like flesh drying rapidly.
I watched as the guard stumbled back in shock, pulling at his hand in fear, watching as it turned brown and flaky. Within seconds, it had traveled up his arm, curling around his neck and face until he was dead cold on the ground, shriveled up like a mummy as his skin crumbled like bread from impact to the tile floor.
I swallowed deeply, trying to register what had just transpired before me.
This wasn’t possible. This wasn’treal.
Looking plainly at him, I couldn’t convince myself that my eyes were not deceiving me.
The guard’s body just stared at me, only sockets in place of his eyes. The skin around his mouth had tightened into a string of what looked like leather as his mouth hung wide, revealing all his tinged teeth. The thin blanket of skin covering his arms and legs was now sand and bones, and even with all of this before me, my rational mind tried to grasp at straws.
People in the lobby began frantically screaming and running in every direction, but oddly, as my heart fastened to a speed it had never reached before, things suddenly went very still. I watched as the bodies of everyone blended into blobs behind the stranger.
