Page 35 of Cream and Punishment
He held the door open for me while I hopped through, one hand keeping the donkey face from shifting and the other swinging for all it was worth. I needed as much momentum as I could get if I didn’t want to keel over three steps inside the lobby.
“Thank you,” I panted, turning the gigantic donkey head left and right looking for the elevator.
Max nodded in acknowledgement, breathing just as heavily as me, despite expending a million times more effort. His skin glistened with sweat. He laced his fingers behind his head and deepened his breathing, his powerful rib cage expanding and compressing, and his biceps on full display.
If my donkey jaw could move, it would’ve dropped to the floor.
It wasn’t until he angled his head and squinted like he was trying to see through the donkey’s cartoonish screen-eyes that I realized he’d said something. Possiblymanysomethings. And I’d stood there, staring blankly at him in a creepy donkey costume like I was setting the scene for a horror movie. LikeSaw, butHee-Haw, and my weapon of choice would be awkward silence.
Chilling, I know.
I snorted involuntarily at my sleep-deprived creative genius. “Hee-Haw.Classic.”
Max’s brow furrowed, though a smile spread across his face. “What?”
Oh,biscuits and cream, I’d said that part out loud. I really had to stop doing that.
“I was thinking about donkey serial killers,” I blurted, like a normal person. To distract from my rapid descent into insanity, I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder. “The elevator? Where is it?”
He stared at me for a beat, clearly not ready to move on from the “donkey serial killers” comment. Which was fair.
I was about to hop away like a good little donkey-bunny when he gestured behind me. “That’s it right there.”
I slowly spun my furry self around until I could get a gander at the scratched wooden door in the wall next to an overflowing bulletin board. Upon closer inspection, the door didn’t have a doorknob, and a barely detectable seam split it in half. Scuffs and suspicious stains marred it, and the floor indicator that should’ve been above it was a creepy metal arrow stuck between numbers one and two. The call button looked like a small hole in the wall, almost like what I imagined shooting a cement slab would produce.
“This?” I squeaked. “I thought this was a supply closet where they hid the bodies of people who were late on rent.”
“Honestly, that might be preferable,” he chuckled.
He pressed his knuckle into the bullet hole-like button. A horrible grinding noise filled the lobby, accompanied by the screech of metal on metal. Whirring might have happened in the background, but the sounds of death approaching were too overbearing to tell. The metal arrow above the door twitched until it finally dipped more toward the number one. The wooden door slid open, bringing higher-pitched grinding and screeching.
Max held his arm in the way to keep the door open, keeping an eye on the cursed contraption in case it decided it wanted a bite out of him. Which it might. “Still want to take the elevator? One flight of stairs isn’t bad.”
As someone who had climbed said stairs, I begged to differ. Besides, so what if it looked like a death trap waiting to snap its jaw around us? The building legally had to be up to code, right? And that included the elevator. No matter what it looked like. Or sounded like. Or whether it sent the icy chill of the grave across my spine. I could handleoneelevator ride.
I nodded resolutely, my donkey snout bobbing. “I’m taking it. You’ve carried me enough already.”
Whether he came with me was up to him and his sense of self-preservation. I’d collect my flip-flops and plastic bag currently stored in his hoodie pocket tomorrow or something.
I hopped past him into the elevator of death, cringing as it shook from my weight. Warm, stale air wafted in through my mask. “The complex doesn’t have a basement for me to plummet to my death in, right?”
He shook his head and laughed. “Not as far as I know. Only one way to find out, though.”
And with that, he joined me.
The inside of the elevator was even worse, shockingly enough. The buttons were rubbed free of paint, and the glowing screen that showed the floor number was cracked nearly beyond legibility. With a shrug, Max pressed the button in the middle, which would hopefully take us to the second floor out of the three possible options.
We exchanged uneasy glances as the door screeched shut, his resigned and mine hidden by a mask. With a nightmarish groan, the elevator shuddered upward.
“One floor,” I mumbled to myself as I leaned heavily against the dilapidated wall. “We just have to make it one floor.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than a new shuddering rocked the floor. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The grinding of metal on metal intensified until it rang in my earsandthe donkey’s.
And then everything went still.
thirteen
Thedoorsdidn’topen.
