Page 105 of Installment Immortality

“I don’t know,” said Roz. “If something happened to me, the cats…”

“How long will the cats survive if we don’t do anything and the slime takes you?” I asked. “It hollows out smaller animals and abandons what it doesn’t eat in relatively short order. It can go through a rat in an hour.” Or a mouse, in less time, according to the account of the slime’s attack on my grandmother. “A cat might take it two or three.”

Roz stiffened, snakes writhing in agitation. “I’m coming,” she said. “You can stop saying terrible things.”

“I just need to swing through the office so I can reset the elevator, and we’ll head down,” I said. “Roz, you stand behind Malena. She’s going to shift and go corral Carl. Malena—”

“I got it,” she said, holding up hands that were already starting to twist into something between a lizard’s hand and something you’d expect to see on a horror-movie werewolf. The combination should have been silly. It managed, somehow, to be anything but silly, scales and skin coexisting in a terrible blend.

“Great,” I said. “Come on.”

We left the apartment in a ragged line, me at the front—which made sense, since I was the one with the keys to the office—Malena in the middle, and Roz bringing up the rear. We quickly became a line of two as Malena kicked off her shoes and scurried up the wall, keeping pace on the ceiling. I glanced up.

“That’s creepy, you know.”

She shrugged, which was impressive, given that her hands were still flat against the ceiling. “Tell it to the evolutionary pressures that decided I needed to be able to run straight up a sheer cliff face,” she said, words only slightly garbled by the size of her teeth.

“If I ever get the chance, I will.”

We reached the office, and I unlocked the door to let myself in and head for the breaker box on the wall. Three of the five lines on the office phone were lit up and flashing red. I glanced at them and winced. Hopefully, people were just calling to let me know that something was funky with the water, and so they weren’t touching or drinking it. Hopefully, this wasn’t me standing at the doorway to an outbreak that would wipe out half of the building and leave the dragons blaming me for the sudden drop in rental income.

(Even if Candy tried to blame me, William would probably talk sense into her. It was a sheer stroke of luck that I even knew what alkabyiftiris slime was: most possible apartment managers would have been as out of their depth as Malena was. Alkabyiftiris slimeis one of those things that sound incredibly badass and dangerous, but is actually ecologically fragile, and tends to prompt vigorous extermination campaigns whenever it comes into contact with a sapient population. Some people believe it may have been one of the inspirations behindThe Blob,and I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be the truth. When your existence is enough to inspire a horror franchise, you’re not going to have an easy time of cohabitation with the rest of the world.)

Leaving the lights to flash to themselves, I opened the panel on the wall and flipped the switch to reactivate the elevator, then slammed it shut again and hurried to the door as fast as my swollen ankles would allow. Looking out, I saw the elevator doors already starting to slide closed.

“Malena!” I barked.

She whipped around, following my line of sight to the elevator. Hissing, she scurried along the ceiling and shoved one clawed hand into the opening before the doors could finish closing.

Dinging in inanimate confusion, the doors slid back open.

“Good job,” I said, and waddled out into the hall, heading for the once-more-open elevator. Malena scurried inside, still on the ceiling, and Roz moved to stand behind me. “Everybody ready?”

“Are we allowed to say ‘no’?” asked Malena.

“Nope,” I said, and hit the button to take us to the basement once again.

This time, the immediate darkness of the basement was less “a bogeyman lives here” and more “be afraid, be very afraid.” I pulled my phone out and activated the flashlight, scanning to be sure Carl wasn’t waiting to seize us as soon as we stepped into the open. The light found a few pale streaks of slime, but nothing more immediately alarming than that. I lowered it, stepping back.

“Malena, Roz, you’re on,” I said.

They moved into position, Malena scurrying out onto the hallway ceiling, Roz reaching up and removing her glasses. She kept her eyes fixed steadfastly forward as she did so, asking, “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Absolutely,” I lied. There was no point in shaking her faith in me now, not when it was too late for us to turn back. She stepped out of the elevator. I stepped up to the threshold, where my presence would keep the doors from closing again. If things went unexpectedly sideways, my corpse would have the same effect.

Malena quickly vanished into the dark, claws scraping on the concrete, and then her voice drifted back to us. “What did you do, break all the bulbs with a broom handle? I thought a handyman would be more handythan— Oh, don’t you spit at me, you filthy bastard. None of this is your fault, but that doesn’t mean I want you spitting at me.”

She came scurrying back, eyes tightly closed as she retraced her steps, and I whistled, giving her something to follow to the elevator. She ducked gladly inside, huddling in a corner, and said, “Val? I need you to look and be sure he didn’t actually spit on me.”

I looked up. There was blood on her scaled hands, probably from the broken light bulbs, but nothing else gleamed like it was wet or slimy—or covered in spit. I exhaled, shoulders relaxing slightly.

“You’re fine,” I said. “We’ll get the doctors to look at your hands.”

“Thank you,” she said, huddling deeper into her corner, until it seemed like she was trying to compact herself into a black hole. “He’s coming.”

“You got his attention?”

She gave me a withering look. “No. He was spitting at me for fun.”

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