I’d seen his effect at the airport. However, that was wide open spaces and probably five thousand people at best. Which, at the time, had been shocking. The fact that I was now describing five thousand dead as comparatively small was astonishing.
I looked at the ceiling, trying to listen for any sign of life in the floors above me. I blew out a breath. Baz had been right; I’d underestimated his power on a stunning level. Truly, there was nothing like him.
“I was always the least resistant to his venom, and I feel fine,” I said. “I don’t think this was an accidental containment issue. Let’s find the security room.” I pointed at the cameras on the walls. “We can see what happened and find Baz.”
“You think he’s okay, right?” Bree jumped over a body as she followed me towards the front desk.
“I think the only person who can hurt Baz is Baz,” I joked.
An eerie silence permeated the building. Which gave off an apocalyptic feel. That thought sent a shiver up my spine. If this had been accidental, what did that mean for a world with Baz in it, where one slight miscalculation produced a mass death event in minutes?
Behind the front counter was a single TV screen showing the walkway up to the entrance. However, there was a map of theplace that pointed us to the security room on the floor below. We made our way to the elevator, but all the buttons were not only caked with black-green liquid, but also melted. The plastic covers were warped and wrinkled in their sockets.
“Is that his blood?” Nemo asked. My eyes slid down to the floor, and I noticed we were standing on top of pinprick holes burnt into the bottom of the elevator car. As if acid rain had exploded inside. I grabbed Bree’s wrist and yanked us out. Nemo rushed out behind us.
“Check your shoes.” But whatever had been on the floor inside the elevator had already bled through, leaving no remnants.
“Fuck,” Nemo growled, staring at the floor in the entrance. We hadn’t noticed before that little pinprick holes had melted through the marble. That wasn’t good. It suggested that Baz had wandered around, bleeding.
“Come on.” I led the way to the stairs while plucking a handful of employee badges from the corpses.
“What do you think happened?” Bree asked us. We quickly went down the stairs.
“Nothing good,” Nemo responded, while I pushed open the security floor and found the way to the monitor room. The room was dark, with a wall of monitors flashing images from different angles of the building inside. On every screen, no matter how many times it switched views, there were corpses.
“I don’t see Baz,” Nemo said. Throwing the badges on the counter, I looked over the controls. The elevator showed there were a few floors underground beneath this one. If I were going to hold someone as dangerous as Baz, that’s where I’d put him. I looked back at the screens, noting which floors paired with which TVs.
“There are four underground floors, but none are here.” There was likely a separate monitor room for the undergroundlevels. I sat down in the empty chair and looked at the ground floor we’d come in on.
Grabbing the mouse, I shook the main computer awake, selected the right feed, then rewound it two hours. Sure enough, everything was fine. I slid the time forward, just until the receptionist looked at the elevator, burst up from her chair, and ran to the wall. She opened a glass cabinet and ripped an oxygen mask out. No one else was so lucky. I’m guessing the person at the front got extra precautions in case of trouble or attack from outside. There were other nefarious supernatural companies after all, and none of them played fair. Attacks weren’t considered uncommon between them. Not that I paid much attention to such things, but if you’re around long enough, you know a lot without trying.
Baz came walking into the camera's view. He gave the receptionist a little wave and said something we couldn’t hear. There was no sound. Then he twisted around in his boots and looked at the small crowd in the lobby. He walked up, shooting a finger gun at someone, and they dropped to the ground dead. Suddenly, everyone scrambled to get away. He chased them a few feet, but they fell within seconds.
That’s when he came back to the receptionist, who had hidden under the counter. Baz reached under the desk, ripped her out, and, of all things, began ballroom dancing with her. When his bloody hand held hers up, smoke spat up, and skin burned off. He reached up and flicked her mask off. She screamed, then slumped in his hold as he twirled her down the hall, dead, heading deeper into the floor.
The lobby camera kept playing, but nothing else happened. I fast-forwarded, and ten minutes later, Baz showed back up, jumping into the elevator.
“Did you see his hands?” Bree asked.
“There were bandages on his wrists,” Nemo said.
I clicked through the cameras until I found the elevator view on the next floor up, rewinding to the moment he’d hopped in below. Baz shot out of the elevator like he was running a sprint. However, he made it about thirty feet into the room before he tumbled to the ground. He stayed on his hands and knees a while and then climbed back up and walked around, terrorizing his victims in the meager time they remained alive.
From there, I cobbled the story together, one floor at a time. We watched his ascent, witnessing each elevator exit before he came back minutes later. Each floor showed him growing weaker, taking longer. Sometimes the elevator opened, and a minute would drag by before he came stumbling out.
“He’s getting tired,” Nemo said.
Tired was one way to put it. This didn’t look good. Finally, I found the top floor and rewound. Merely twenty minutes ago, he’d practically crawled out, stumbling around the hallway. The wrapping around his wrists was deep green, dripping onto the floor. He opened the only office on that level and disappeared inside.
“Is he still up there?” Bree asked. She was bouncing on her feet, ready to run. Her eyes kept darting to the door.
“Wait,” I said. A few minutes later, Baz came back out with another man. Baz kept pushing the man towards the elevator. The man smiled at him like he was entertained before the elevator doors swallowed them.
“He’s not affected by the venom,” Bree said in shock. After that, I couldn’t find them anywhere. I checked the timestamp and the floors.
“He’s beneath us,” I said, getting up. My eyes slid around the room until I saw a security badge. I grabbed that and abandoned the other employee cards.
“That was Damien, I just know it,” Nemo seethed as we burst from the room and headed to the stairs. “Did you see the way he looked at him?”
