To whatever fans I have left: Well, I'm back with this at least. Remember when I said to expect a lot more updates in the future? Yeah...I'm pretty sure I'm an idiot. I don't know just how often I'm actually going to put things up here. I'm really sorry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The two stainless steel doors slid open with nary a sound. Healthy, pure white light flowed out of the lift into the hallway, spilling across gnarled rusty walls and grated battered floor. It made a small area of comfort, a tiny haven in this world of sickness and decay.

There were several seconds of silence and stillness, and then a shadow blocked the spilling light. A brown-haired, hazel-eyed head peeked around the corner of the doorway, looking back and forth. Finally Rachel stepped out from inside the elevator and into the hallway of Lion Height's fourth floor. She held the flashlight in her left hand and the tire iron was hefted in her right. One finger pressed into the soft rubber button and light shot out of the torch's end, splaying itself against the wall. Rachel turned it back and forth.

The hallway was a copy of the first floor, complete with an inky material blackness, except for one thing. There still existed the gap in the grating, but it was moved - to her left, in the direction she had come from on the floor below. This left only one way to go; onward to the right, into unknown territory. She would have checked her map, but her route was already decided. She tried to check for drops of blood, some sign that Desales had been here, but it was a lost cause. Her surroundings were far too macabre not to devour such detail.

Each hotel room, again, was locked, until she came to a turn in the hall. It continued until it ended with a door - like the one she had found boarded up four floors ago - except that this one wasn't boarded up. This would cause Rachel to beeline for it, if the knob to room 404 had not turned so smoothly under her grip. This snapped Rachel out of her brooding state of alertness, eyes straining and ears perking, as she knew any room obvious to her would probably be the obvious solution to a wounded and desperate police officer. She slipped inside excitedly, sure she would find Desales inside.

Judgment error in room 404: Desales not found. Rachel couldn't see her in the first room, nor any side someone had been in. "Officer Desales?" she said quietly, knowing her voice would travel in the empty world, but got no answer. With wilting hope she passed through the bedroom looking for her, and then the bathroom. It best expressed her desperation when she whipped aside a shower curtain just to see if the police officer was hiding in the bathtub - which she of course wasn't. Rachel moaned and fell against the wall.

Rachel turned her weary feet to the doorway and heard the crumpling of paper. She stepped back and looked down - lying on the bathroom's tiled floor, not quite flat now that she had taken her foot to it, was a sheet of ordinary paper with something scribbled on it, apparently torn out of a notebook. Picking it up, Rachel found she could read the scribbling, though the ink was smeared. It looked like it was written by a left-hander with a slow-drying pen who apparently didn't much care for the neatness of their work.

MOTHER-FAIR SURE,MB WOMAN OR PREG? (NOT NEED VIRGIN)

SOLDIER/FIGHTER/COP/JUDGE/VIGILANTE/FATHER MB

PRIEST/JUDGE/LAWMAKER/MAYOR MB/FATHER MB

VICTIM-ACCUSED CRIME, MB INST. VICTIM CRIME, LOST IN COURT / MUST RES. THIS MORE

Rachel blinked slowly, then brushed at the words with her finger. After the keys in the first aid kit and the traffic lights, she wasn't going to discount any message she found - even if comprehension didn't go along. She licked her lips. "Maybe...mother, sold-"

That was as far as she got before the air was split by a scream. Rachel jumped about a foot in the air and crumpled the paper to her chest. Stuffing it into her pocket, she tore out of the bathroom and then room 404 altogether. She looked around frantically, panic rising, and another scream came. In the hallway, she could tell from where it came - the door at the end of the hall, the copy of the one boarded up on floor one. Somewhere it registered in the back of the writer's mind that the scream was unfamiliar, definitely not in Desales's voice, but she tore the door open anyway and flew through.

The transition was jarring - the hallway had been dark, rusty and bloody. This corridor was a hospital room in comparison; well lit and a dull colour. It was not bright and cheery by any stretch of the imagination, but it was infinitely better than what had come before.

Rachel had little time to admire the scenery before a man - presumably the source of the screams - came tearing around the corner. It wasn't Desales, obviously, nor was it Ernest Bradley - who would have no reason to be in the hotel, but what of the world made sense anymore? - a dark haired man wearing a white muscle shirt and jeans. He slammed against the wall and fell to the floor, scrambling backwards on his hands. He was attempting to escape what came around the corner after him.

Rachel's breath caught in her throat when she saw it. She had seen the monsters earlier in town, of course - back before the hotel had transformed from simply abandoned and spooky to bloody and hellish. They were bizarre and deeply disturbing, alien in construction, not scary because they appeared dangerous so much as that they were so unnatural. Those monsters to the one she saw now, were as a delusional but subdued maniac to aviolent psychotic.

It was shaking and thrashing, as if it were having a seizure, but lurching with a deliberate intensity. Its arms seemed pinned to its torso (front or back - she couldn't tell), as if they had been melted into its flesh, but it seemed like it was trying to free them with furious yanks and tugs. It had pulled hard enough to snap its bones as its shoulders were torn apart and splinters of bone jutting upward through the wound. Its legs were bowed and bent, hideously deformed. The head was practically split in two by the huge, open mouth, with overgrown hideous teeth like knives pointing out in an unbelievable and seeming random array. If it was a human head, it would have to be bent back; the mouth was almost pointing straight upwards and she could only see one oversized, furious eye rolling around the room. A chain dangled from its groin - if it was supposed to be as if attached to its wrists, she again couldn't see if they had been secured in front or in back. The chain was long enough to drag on the ground, snapping as the creature's stumblings threw it in random directions. Most prominent of all was that every square inch of its flesh was torn and shredded and bloody, like it had been flayed alive. This wasn't like the Whip-Arm, where the "blood" was discolourations of its flesh. This blood was real - leaving a smeared red trail on the floor behind it, dribbling out of the ruined skin of its entire body.

And it lurched and stepped over the man, who fell backwards off his elbows to the ground and threw up an arm over his face and screamed. And it was twisting in some wholly impossible way when the gun in Rachel's hand kicked with the sound of an explosion, and the thing was pushed back as a .32 slug tore through it. Rachel held the gun like a vise in both hands, unable to move except to yank on the trigger, paralyzed so that she couldn't even scream, couldn't even close her eyes. The gun bucked and snapped backwards again and again, empty casings being spat out the side. One brushed by her hand and burned her skin - she didn't notice nor care. A third bullet slammed into the chained thing and splattered red blood - real blood, not a comic book black gunk - onto the wall behind it, and it began toscream. It was a high, screeching, inhuman sound, like metal being torn apart by a giant's hand, and its head whipped back and forth as it did so. It started trying to free its hands again, bone snapping as unstoppable force hit immovable object.

Rachel wasn't there. She was somewhere far away if she still existed at all. Her body still was there, depressing the trigger on the semiautomatic over and over, but she had left it. She was at the back of her skull with her knees pulled up to her chest and her hands over her ears, eyes shut. She wasn't there. She didn't have to see, hear, feel this. And because she wasn't even looking at her gun and was yanking the trigger and was just a body doing the same repetitive action over and over, some shots smacked into the wall instead of the creature and she ran out of eight bullets before the creature died. The gun clicked empty and the chained thing, the screaming wailing screeching bleeding thrashing stumbling thing took just one step and suddenly Rachel moved - falling a step back and ripping the magazine out of the gun, throwing it to the floor and pulling the second one and slamming it into the gun and loading a shell into the chamber - and fired. One-handed now, gun barking and jerking as lead smashed into the demon's body and it finally fell. It would be impossible to know just how many bullets it took to kill because Rachel had emptied her gun before it fell to the floor, a lifetime after it appeared in the form of a few seconds.

How long the scene was frozen after that, though, is impossible to tell - half an hour, or maybe half a second. But eventually the man broke the silence by pushing himself off a wall to his feet and bringing a heel down on the back of the creature. Bones snapped, but it didn't move. The guy turned to Rachel with a look of shock, face frozen in a state of unreality. "You saved my life," he said, haltingly.

Rachel's eyes latched on to the man as if she had only just again noticed he was there. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out. The gun dipped - slightly. "Uh..." she mumbled, voice low.

"No, I..." Now that he wasn't a blur, Rachel had time to see more of the man than just his clothes and hair colour. His most obvious quality was that he was absolutely overloaded with muscle. He was obviously a weightlifter, with arms like tree trunks and shoulders that swallowed up his neck. He looked like he could grab her at each end, raise her over his head, and break her in half. His white muscle shirt (soaked in places with sweat) barely contained his torso, its tightness and moisture combining to outline every muscle on his chest and abdomen. Besides his muscles, he looked like a rather plain twentysomething-year-old. The shirt and jeans were ordinary, though his shoes held a striking similarity to her own. He had a watch on his left wrist and his short black hair was messed with sweat. His face in particular seemed pink from running, but as the flush faded it left some red behind around his slightly bloodshot eyes. "I mean that," he continued, "I owe you. And I don't say that lightly."

"Uh..." Rachel took a step backwards. "Don't...don't worry about it. I..."

The man's eyes held hers for a moment, probing, peering at her like some laboratory specimen, then dropped.

"Of course." He muttered the statement darkly, complete in and of itself. His expression turned foul and he started past her. "Wouldn't do to havemy favour now. Doesn't matter that - "

"Hey!" Rachel finally managed to spit out. The man, who was at this point past her and heading for the door by which she entered, turned and looked back at her. His eyes were stabbing, accusing. Rachel's mouth went dry and her voice disappeared for a second. "Uh...who are you?"

The man stared at her for several seconds, and Rachel began to hopelessly feel the familiar sense of fear and panic well up inside her; like an icy hand dragging a finger along her intestines, leaving them numb and cold. But before she could make a paper-thin excuse to just take off, he spoke. "You don't know who I am?" He sounded surprised.

"Uh..." and yet he still stared. He liked to just stand and stare at her. Everyone in this damned town liked to stare at her. "N-no, no, I never..."

She was starting to shake, slightly. She thought back to Bradley, and how she had run away from him - an ally in this nightmare, one with a revolver and apparently enough ammunition to waste. That had been one of her worse panic attacks, but she was starting to think the one brewing right now was going to be pretty bad.

The man blinked. "Well, that's not a problem. Don't worry about it." His eyes couldn't help straying to the dead monster lying on the ground. His eyes narrowed slightly, darting from the bloody corpse to the gun in her hand back up to her face. "My name's Scott Carson. That was...well, if it weren't for you, I'd be dead." He stuck out his hand.

Rachel's eyes darted from her lock on Scott's face to his hand, which appeared somewhere around as broad as a tennis racket. "Uh-huh...uh...y-yeah." Her slim white digits disappeared within his grip. Their hands hung there motionless for several seconds before Scott started shaking her hand while hers remained limp. "Uh - I'm Rachel Jones - just..."

Scott dropped her hand. His mood looked sour. "So," he said, voice sharpened, "you know what's going on here?"

She shook her head. "N-no. I just drove into town and crashed my van - I have no idea what's going on."

"Just like you don't know who I am."

Rachel could just stare at him for a second. It was all she could do to keep from descending into a full-blown panic attack - by now the icy hand was reaching up from her intestines, beneath her ribs and through her lungs up into her head, leaving her entire body as cold as the snow outside. "I...I guess..."

"Hmm." Scott crossed his arms. "Well, neither do I. In fact - I just woke up. That is to say...I passed out. That was before...well, before allthis." He waved a hand at the surrounding walls. Though they were bare, Rachel assumed he was talking about the blood-encrusted rusty walls just a door away. "I was doing my exercise routine at home when everyone disappears and these - monsters, I guess, show up. I live near the hotel, and it was the first place I thought of going."

"Not the police station?" asked Rachel in a voice that sounded tiny in her ears.

Scott paused for a second. "No. It's...a ways away. I was...afraid of getting killed by one of those things." He nodded at the fallen creature. "Anyways, I was taking shelter in one of the rooms - 404. Then I got..." He frowned, put a hand to his head, "...I don't even know, but it was bad. Like a spike going through my head - a huge blast of pain. I passed out, went out and the hallway was all - well. You just came from it. I went this way for another couple of doors and then...well, you know what happened next, I think."

At least he had taken his eyes off her. Rachel blinked when he mentioned pain going through his head, her memory jogged. "Hey, uh, Carson..."

"Yes?"

"I'm looking for someone - a police officer. You didn't - did you see her? She might be hurt..."

"Police officer?"

"Uh - yeah. She's about this tall - " Rachel held out a hand at a level roughly equal to Desales's height, "and has short, bleached hair? Uh, brown skin - "

"Officer Desales," interrupted Scott. He looked grim.

"You've seen her?"

"I know her. This town's not so big. But I haven't seen her today, no."

"Oh." Rachel wilted for a moment. She started moving, heading in the direction that Scott had come from.

"You're not going to find her there," said Scott, arms still crossed. Rachel stopped and turned, but avoided his eyes. "I went down there - you'll get into a couple more rooms, then a locked door. There's no other way."

"Oh," said Rachel again. She pushed past Scott again, heading in the direction she had come from.

"What's your hurry?"

"I - " Rachel caught his eye again. His expression looked stormy. "I just - I'm looking for Desales, I was going..." she trailed off.

"You're heading out into some pretty dangerous territory just to find your cop friend."

"Well, I..." Rachel couldn't see what the problem was. Obviously there was something too subtle for her to pick up with her underdeveloped social skills and she was just standing there babbling like an idiot and - "I figured that - I dunno - I figured she might protect us, or...or something."

"You seem to be able to take care of yourself," he said, pointing to the pistol still in her hand, "and I can watch your back. Why would we need to find her? She's a cop, I'm sure she'd prefer we didn't risk our lives."

"I...I..."

"All you'd need is someone to watch your back, Rachel. I can do that." Scott suddenly took two big steps forward, bringing his face right up next to hers. He was at least five inches, probably more, taller than she. His eyes were narrowed and his mouth was a thin line. "Unless you don't want me watching you for some reason."

Rachel's mouth opened and closed uselessly. She couldn't talk.

"Maybe you should go look for your friend Desales," breathed the bodybuilder.

Rachel couldn't move for a second, but after a few seconds Scott raised one broad hand and pushed the writer on the shoulder, hard. She staggered back a few steps, staring, before slowly turning and slinking out the way she came.

Scott didn't move. He watched her go.

"Okay," Rachel mumbled to herself, back in the elevator, "where does that leave us?" She put a hand to her chin and her face contorted in effort. "Not on this floor...but the blood shows she did push the button at one time. So she must have been here and found it was a dead end...came back, wiped the blood off her thumb and went to..." Her finger hovered a few centimeters from the button.

Suddenly there was a loud sound from above. Rachel looked up - and then stepped backwards quickly, eyes wide as a rusty grate dropped out of the ceiling and slammed down over the elevator's closed doors. Her eyes darted over the brown metal and then to the elevator buttons, but a solid plate of metal covered them completely - obviously deliberate, as the entire rest of the grate was simply bars of metal forming a grid. Rachel stepped forward and tried to pull the grate upwards - it didn't budge. She looked upward and couldn't even see where the grate had come from.

There was a bump, and the elevator slowly started to lower. A grinding, mechanical sound rattled the walls, much different from the almost inaudible hum of earlier. Rachel suddenly felt very vulnerable, looking around at the walls around her. She gave a glance up at above the blocked door, spying the numbers through the bars of metal that would light up depending on what floor she was on. The numbers remained dark.

"So," mumbled Rachel, hands wrapping around the rusty grate. She just had to sit back and watch where the elevator took her. She didn't want to, of course...but what could she do? She was entirely at the mercy of outside forces. They held all the cards. She was nothing but a puppet. The gun, the wall, the elevator, she was just a...

"What the hell am I thinking?" Rachel said to herself. She blinked and shook her head. There were no outside forces. She wasn't anyone's puppet. The world had just gone fucked up, period. It wasn't as if...

"Get a grip, Rachel." This was a life or death situation. She was a shut-in whose physical training consisted of pacing her apartment or creeping out into the 2 AM world to buy food at a twenty-four hour supermarket and pay at the self-serve counter. It was a wonder she was alive at all. Her greatest and perhaps only advantage was her mind. She had to keep thinking logically. If she allowed herself to-

The metal shuddered around her and the elevator stopped descending. Rachel quickly took her hands off the gate so that they wouldn't be caught when it raised, but it never did. After several seconds of watching the grate Rachel began to get a paranoid feeling, as if someone was watching her, behind her. Rachel knew it was ridiculous - she was in an elevator, after all, and it wasn't as if there were any alternate entrances. She didn't have enough room behind her to lie down, let alone for someone to sneak in. In seconds, though, the feeling grew and became overpowering, and finally she turned around.

The back wall of the elevator wasgone,as if it had never existed. It opened up into yet another brown and red splattered room, with low ceilings giving a feeling of being underground. The room itself was unlit, but the elevator's soothing soft light spilled outwards. Rachel cautiously advanced into the room, hazel eyes rolling back and forth as she scanned her surroundings.

If she had to guess, she'd say it was a kitchen, but after the recent change of scenery about the hotel it was hard to tell quite for sure. Spattered, rusted metal counters ran up and down the room, with various tools too degraded to identify from a distance strewn about. Dishes and the like littered a counter near a rusted sink on one side of the room, while a radio/tape player - presumably for the staff to listen to while they worked - was plugged into the wall opposite. There were twin doors to the room - both in the corners at the far end of the room, one in the left wall and one in the right wall. Pipes - some over a foot in diameter, others as thin as her wrist - jutted out of the walls at random, turning sharply. At the far end of the room, directly across from her, a huge chunk of unidentifiable meat sat on a counter against the wall.

Rachel's eyebrows shot up when she saw a bloody meat cleaver still stuck in the mess.

"Hello…" said Rachel, slowly stepping forward. Her eyes didn't leave the cleaver - a device designed to chop through meat, not like her tire iron, something she could actually use to defend herself - and had just reached the first of the rusted metal counters that ran up and down the middle of the room when she heard something from her right. It was soft, but identifiable - a hissing, a crackling. It was static, and it was coming from the radio.

Rachel's head snapped to the radio, eyes widening, and was frozen in shock for a split second before there was a sound of sliding doors behind her. She whirled in time to see the entrance to the elevator - the one with no doors she had seen, where it simply had appeared to be a removed wall - closing rapidly. She bolted for the closing portal - more important than the cleaver, she didn't even know if she could open them from this side - but they closed long before she got there, plunging the room into total darkness. Rachel slammed against the now unseen doors and bounced off without so much as budging them.

The crackling of the static was very obvious now, with a sort of high pitched whining warbling its way into the sound. Rachel blinked in the darkness and scrambled over to the radio, one hand slapping around at her waist and feeling for her flashlight. She found the wall and her hands hit its smooth exterior.

The radio was too big and ungainly to hold in one hand and so she stopped looking for her flashlight. She picked the tape player up and held it outwards, arms outstretched. She could feel the electrical cord bumping against her calves. She made a sharp turn, cord wrapping around her body, and pointed the radio in different directions, trying to discern where the source of its static was coming from. She turned again, shifting her legs, and pulled the plug out of the outlet. The cacophony of whines over crackling static stopped immediately.

"Oh,shit..."hissed Rachel as she frantically untangled the cord from her legs and dropped to her knees in the total darkness. She ran her hand down the cord and found the plug, holding it in an iron grip as she felt around on the wall for the outlet. "God,where..."

From behind her, hinged squealed as a door opened. Rachel stopped moving, stopped breathing, holding absolutely still in fear of being heard by whatever had entered.

In the darkness it was as if her hearing had been doubled. She could detect a sort of stretching sound, like stiff muscles or joints being worked, coming from the direction of whatever had entered in an unending repeating rhythm. Overtop of that was the rustling of fabric, not loud but definitely there, as whatever was causing the stretching sounds was wearing heavy cotton. Occasionally there were sharp, shallow, and wet-sounding intakes of breath as, presumably, whatever it was breathed. There was a short sliding sound as something shifted on the tile floor of the room, and then whatever it was began to move. Feet - or whatever it had in place of feet - slid along the ground at a deliberate, plodding pace, and after a second there was a high, painful gasp.

Nothing in the sounds denied the possibility of being human. In fact, all the sounds could very well be those of another badly hurt person, or even Desales - something about the gasp suggested a female, at least to Rachel - but she didn't think so. The radio was spewing static at a rate perfectly coinciding with its arrival. Rachel didn't want to consider the possibility that the radio detected monsters before - it just didn't make sense, it was wrong,and something about that disturbed her on a very deep level - but when it came down to the line she accepted it instantly. She couldn't hold on to her feelings in a life or death situation.

A cacophony of clatter suddenly leapt up from somewhere in the room as several metal bowls, utensils, and god knows what else fell the floor, presumably pushed by the unknown newcomer, causing Rachel to twitch sharply as her body tried to run or fight or dosomethingto save her from the danger she was blithely putting herself in. With another high, painful gasp some more metal objects were swept off of the counters and ringing off the floors and each other. It was moving around the room - maybe even looking for her. It had already gone by, according to her memory, the sink and the cleaver in the time-

The meat cleaver.She didn't have any other choice. There was something in the room looking for her, the elevator was gone to her, and even if she got out through one of the two doors in the room there was no guarantee she would find anywhere safe to hide. She couldn't stay crouched in the darkness forever. Her guts curled as black-brown fear ran through them, but she knew it was the only thing she could do.

Rachel slowly stood, doing her best not to make a sound, as the unknown newcomer shuffled and clattered its way across the room. The cleaver would be to her - right. Yes, to her right at about the middle of the wall or so - she had to do this right. She had to turn on her light to find it, and she had to get it in as close to no time as possible. As soon as her light went on, it was going to come right for her.

Rachel slowly lifted her flashlight as the newcomer made another pained gasp not very far from her left. The sound brought a twinge of fear in her insides but she forced it down. Slowly she turned the flashlight in her hand until she felt the rubber button under her thumb, then pressed down, praying that her memory was good and that she wouldn't miss.

In a sense, she didn't, but she did. The circle of bleaching white light shot out and illuminated the lump of bloody meat, but nothing else. The meat cleaver was gone. Rachel's heart stopped, but even as it did she spun around in time for light to shine brilliantly on the blade of the cleaver clutched in the monster's hand as it was swung at her.

Rachel threw herself backwards as the heavy blade cut the air less than six inches in front of her face, but even as she did and the light bobbed and darted and never covered the thing's body all at once she took in the sight. For a second it looked as if it was a very tall person, but that illusion was quickly dispelled. The cleaver was clutched in a thin, bony hand connected to a slim arm leading to a naked female upper body. The skin looked healthy at first glance but after further inspection showed a mottled dark look that wasn't quite normal. It also looked underweight, with ribs outlined against the flesh behind hanging breasts that swayed as it moved in its drunken gait. The collarbone strained the skin in sharp angles under a body head, looking like little more than skin stretched over a skull. Its thin lips were drawn back from clenched, grinning, shining teeth and the eyes, bulging from the bald head, were glaring in anticipation and eagerness. At the waist the woman was connected to a vaguely man-shaped creature, clad in soiled and ruined clothing that the woman seemed to grow out of. Its hands and feet were bare, each with elongated and angled digits. Stringy black hair concealed most of its face, but visible were short straight hairs surrounding an open mouth from which teeth jutted crookedly in their gums.

Rachel took several steps backward and slammed into one of the metal counters as the female gave a high, warlike scream and swung the cleaver again. Rachel desperately moved to the side as quick as she could while keeping her front towards the monster, one hand feeling her at the edge of the counter. Finally it dropped away and she jumped backwards, drawing the smooth cold pistol, pointing it at the creature, and pulling the trigger.

click. With a sudden rush of despair Rachel remembered the thing she had shot on the fourth floor while Scott lay at its feet. She remembered firing at it until it was dead on the ground while she had no idea when it had died. Most importantly, she remembered that she had picked up two magazines of bullets and used them both on the first thing she had seen, and now the gun was absolutely useless.

The thing dashed forward - male bottom clawing at the ground with both hands and feet, propelling it with formidable speed - and swung at her again, and Rachel could only barely duck to the side as it cut a bloody gash in the air. She remembered her tire iron, but didn't dare - she couldn't possibly get in arm's reach of that thing. She had never killed anything with the tire iron without getting hit at least a couple of times in return, and this was not just a clumsily wielded two-by-four or a millimeter-thin blade. If she got hit just once in the head or neck, she would die instantly, or almost instantly. Even if she didn't, or got hit in the torso or a limb - she may not die instantly, but even if she got the bleeding under control she'd lose the use of whatever limb got cleaved and basically be too hurt to go on and defend herself, which was a death sentence with the town as it was. There would be no one coming to save her. Attacking it with a tire iron would be suicide.

The cleaver, its blade giving an absolutely brilliant shine in the light of the torch, swung at the side of her head again. Rachel was still sliding with her waist to the counter, moving down it as fast as she could while still keeping an eye on the monster, but even then she could only barely avoid it. The absolute point of the rectangular blade, the furthest corner, pierced her skin just below her left temple. It dragged along her skull, drawing an icy red line all the way to her eyebrow before losing contact with her head. It wasn't even a hit - it wasn't even a graze. If the (pseudo)woman's arm had been a half inch longer it would have gone through her skull.

Suddenly Rachel felt cold cement through the back of her shirt and realized that the counter went all the way to the wall, and that she was trapped. The female half of the monster gave another scream of hunger and bloodlust as the male half swung itself forward and the female brought the cleaver down in an overhead downward swing. Rachel barely dodged to the side and threw herself onto the counter, knocking countless metal things to the floor and not even noticing the sound. She pushed herself off the other side and landed on her back among the bowls and utensils. A fork drove its tines through her shirt just above her waist and a centimeter into her flesh. She didn't feel it. She scrambled backwards as the monster - what little she could see with the flashlight's beam whipping about chaotically as the hand just propelled herself along - used the male's ropey gnarled arms to grab the edge of the counter and throw itself on top just to jump off on her side and land with all four of its limbs on the floor. The female half never took its gleaming eyes off of her and its face never lost its wide, wicked, teeth-baring smile.

Rachel tried to throw herself to her feet, slipped, and ended up in a twisted crouch. The monster threw itself forward, male mouth opening and closing as saliva leaked out of its lips, hands and feet gripping at the floor with their long, spindly digits. It moved so fast - Rachel barely got to her feet just as it reached her, and the female half clutched at the male half's hair with one hand as the other swung the cleaver sideways. Rachel threw up her arm in a pitiful means of self defense and the flashlight shone on the monster in all its full glory. Crazy shadows jumped about its face.

And then they dropped away as the cleaver connected with the flashlight. It yanked the flashlight effortlessly out of her hand and propelled it across the room, soaring majestically over two counters and smashing into the wall before it even reached the zenith of its flight. It hit the floor and winked out, plunging the room into absolute darkness. Rachel didn't even think, just throwing in whatever direction would get her away from the monster. She hit another counter, threw herself over, and landed on the other side - on her feet, this time. She held herself absolutely motionless, frozen as she strained her ears to the utmost.

Somewhere to her front and right, the female half of the monster screamed its scream. There was a shuffling of feet, first stationary and then moving across the room while keeping a roughly equal distance in front of her. There was a metal-on-metal scraping sound, presumably as the cleaver's blade dragged on one of the counters.

Rachel had never been more powerless in this town. She could feel ice-cold sweat on her face, running down her neck, trickling of from under her armpits, soaking her back...she could not kill it. She could not escape it. If it hit her once, she was dead. And now she was blind.

By now, the blood from her most recent head wound had run all the way down her cheek. Most of it continued to trickle down about her throat, but one drop advanced all the way across the bottom of her jaw to collect on her chin. Rachel swallowed, and it dropped to the floor. Finally Rachel's feet began to move, sliding soundlessly across the floor.

The sounds were starting to come in her direction, now. She could now identify a low, guttural breathing that was most likely the male half of the creature. Rachel slowly came in contact with the wall - or rather, the pipes coming out of the wall.

The creature was still coming in her direction, but she couldn't move fast enough to avoid it without making noise. The best she could hope for was that it would change its trajectory (for no reason) or somehow pass by her (which there was no room to do). Rachel could feel its presence - a black aura of death hovering in front of her, coming for her.

Her hand closed around the pipe, probably a just slightly thinner than her forearm, in a simple plea for something to hold on to.

The pipe shifted.

There was a female gasp, probably six feet or so in front of her. Rachel ran her hands up and down the pipe. It was long, maybe a metre or so, and wasn't connected at the bottom. Its connection to the wall was loose and could possibly be pulled out by a strong individual. But Rachel was far from a bodybuilder - someone like Scott or Desales might be able to do it, but she was just -

The monster, suddenly so very very close, probably close enough to hit her with just a couple of steps to gain momentum, gave out it high warlike scream, and Rachel felt liquid terror flush through her guts and up through her spine and to every extremity of her body and the knowledge, the indisputablefactthat she was about to die, the shining metal cleaver would punch through her skull or go into her throat and leave her choking for air as her brain shut down screamed itself in her head over and over and blocked out everything and repeated in her ears and flashed in front of her eyes -

And she grabbed the pipe in both hands and tore it out of the wall with one movement that she just combined into the two-handed swing out into darkness that smashed into something like a sledgehammer. She felt something distinctly move and deform under the pipe, the feelings reverberating up the metal into her hands. The female half of the creature gave a screaming howl of pain as Rachel already brought the pipe back for another blow, smashing something else in the angel of death coming to kill her, that would kill her.

She heard something shift in the floor in front and took a step backward as there was a grunt, her mind instantly leaping to the conclusion that it had swung the cleaver where she had been. But the pipe was far longer than it could reach, and Rachel could hit it before it could hit her. She clutched the pipe hard and swung it over her head and downward, its end hitting something soft and crushing it as the female screamed in pain again. There was no pause or hesitation before swinging it again, low to the floor this time, and heard the male half grunt as she knocked or shattered something out from under the creature and felt rather than heard it hit the ground.

She brought the pipe overhead and downward again, smashing the thing at her feet with incredible force. With the gurgling choking from below she raised a foot and slammed it down on the creature again and again, the heel and steel toe crushing flesh and bones and sinew. And slowly she came to realize she was howling short cries through clenched teeth as she pounded the corpse with feet and metal, totally unaware of how long she had been slamming this dead thing in blindness.

The pipe she had raised suddenly just dropped. She could barely keep a hold on improvised weapon as her arm went limp and the end landed in the pulpy remains. With every drop of energy from her body gone Rachel's legs gave out and her knees hit the floor. She barely managed to slump into a sitting position against the wall. She drew her knees up against her chest and used one arm to wrap around her legs as she buried her face as much as she could.

She never let go of the pipe.