Ladies' Night by Jack Ketchum Page B

possible — even, god help him, likely — that it was already too late, that he had not survived what Susan had almost certainly become. But if that was the case, he still needed to know that, or he was going to go crazy not knowing. For that too he was guilty. He had no choice but to try.
    "I don't know how the hell you're going to manage that, partner," the big man said.
    "I don't either. But I can't stay."
    He was aware that practically everybody in the place was listening. Bailey got up and hauled himself painfully over to the bar. He poured himself another scotch.
    "I guess you'll need some company," he said.
    "Not yours. Thanks — but not with that shoulder."
    "The shoulder's done all right so far. It'll go three blocks more if it has to. You saved my life, asshole."
    "I thought that was sort of mutual."
    "Excuse me," said Phil. "But you got any idea how you're gonna do this? You remember what just happened out there?"
    "Let's sit down a couple minutes and talk about it," said Bailey. "See what you did and didn’t do last time. See what we can come up with."
    The women were at the windows. Their fingernails raked the table tops like someone clawing at the lid of a coffin.
    The owner shrugged. "Sick of this place anyway," he said. "I been here all night. Maybe it's time I head on home."

The Dorset

    There had been a fire in the Dorset Towers six months previously. An old woman was smoking a cigarette while cleaning out her clothes closet for the Salvation Army and dropped an ember into a pile of slips, bras and dresses. They began to burn. It was a small pile and consequently, the fire too was small. But the old woman panicked at the sight of smoke and began to run — out into the empty corridor to the elevator and took the elevator eight stories down the lobby. By the time the doorman managed to break through her apartment door — the door had locked behind her and he'd neglected to bring his master key — the fire had spread to the living room, and by the time firemen arrived flames were shooting out her bedroom windows.
    The apartment was gutted. But otherwise the only damage to the building was confined to the hall just outside her door, and that was mostly smoke damage. Few flames had managed to crawl beyond the cinderblock cubicle and the sprinklers had taken care of those. To the apartments on either side no harm at all was done, not even smoke — so solidly was the Dorset constructed and so isolated was each apartment from every other.
    At the time residents had cause to be happy with their building. Not now.
    Many had already died so quietly that, standing in the hall, a passerby might not have heard a sound. Not even as tables cracked under the weight of falling bodies or paintings came crashing off the walls or lamps or vases to the floor. Even the report of a .22 pistol was only a gentle pop pop pop as a woman on the nineteenth floor shot her entire sleeping family and then herself, splattering the foyer with brains and blood.
    Fireproof, nearly soundproof, the Dorset became a great beehive necropolis in which no cubicle held any connection to the other except that death was present in almost every one like a worker at its grubs in a feast that lasted through the night.
    ~ * ~
    Among the first to die was nice old Mr. Daniels, so well-loved by his wife that for supper this night of their thirtieth anniversary she had prepared his favorite meal — leg of lamb cooked Greek style, with oregano, mint and garlic. Never mind that the night was much too hot to have the oven on. Howard deserved it.
    She had begun to serve it before the change came over her and she lost control of the knife.
    She struggled against it — much harder than some of the others struggled. She loved him now just as she had so many years ago when he was a young career soldier and had saved her from the long winter of spinsterhood she already felt setting in.
    There was a moment when she wavered, neither