Unknown Means by Elizabeth Becka Page B

Marissa once and gotten away. He wouldn’t do so again.
    The hallway stood deserted, stretching a hundred feet in either direction, but only ten paces away a door slowly closed. Evelyn thrust the metal door open, hitting the wall with a bone-jarring clang. The stairwell. She looked up, then down, saw no one, and stopped to listen for footsteps.
    Nothing. Not even the sound of a door closing.
    She moved, tripping down the steps so quickly that only one hand on the banister kept her from falling, and even that couldn’t last. After two more landings, she slipped on the edge of the bottom step and knocked her left kneecap so hard she thought she’d dislocated it. With her footsteps temporarily quieted, she heard the small-est sound of movement, like the footstep of a cat or the brush of a shirtsleeve against a doorjamb. He had slipped through a door, away from the stairs.
    Then she was up and moving again. On the second floor, she checked the hallway for her assailant, nearly flinging the stairwell door into a man in scrubs with a cart full of medications.
    “Watch where you’re going!”
    “Sorry.”
    She flew down another flight, rails slapping against her right hip, and entered the lobby next to the emergency room. A nurse sat behind the counter, listening to a rail-thin and obviously inebriated woman talk about stomach pains. She looked only slightly more interested when Evelyn ran up, panting. “Did a man just run through here?”

E L I Z A B E T H B E C K A
86
    “That’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened tonight. Nobody’s been here but me and Miss Wilson for the past half hour.”
    “Yeah,” confirmed Miss Wilson. “When’m I goin’ to see a doctor?”
    Evelyn returned to the stairwell. Another flight took her to the basement. She plunged through the final door and knocked her shins into the front fender of a cherry red BMW.
    Both hands on the hood steadied her enough to look around. A parking garage. Considering the average sticker price represented here, a parking area for doctors.
    You would have thought doctors would have demanded better lighting. Weak fluorescents hung over the main driving aisles, and the corners of the garage disappeared into shadows. It smelled like stale exhaust and leather upholstery. And it was silent. And she was unarmed.
    She heard a noise from behind the door, the perfect spot for a predator to sit and wait—the slight swish of cloth on cloth, like a man’s legs when he walked, or two arms skimming the body as they raised a strap overhead.
    Too late, she began to turn, her hands instinctively coming up. He slipped the noose over her, dropping it around her neck, and tightened. She felt his body pressed up against her back, his breath in her hair. He smelled of oil and stale Doritos.
    Her right hand and two of her left fingers were caught in the strap, and she used them to push it away from her neck. The mesh fabric bit into her palms. She wouldn’t make it—her windpipe still sucked air, but eventually her arms would tire, and then her fingers would simply be crushed along with her throat.
    A piece of advice came back to her. When throttled, she had read somewhere, breathe through your nose. You will always get enough air through your nose, no matter what happens to your throat. It hadn’t made sense to her at the time, and it didn’t now, and in any case she lacked the discipline to try it. Her mouth struggled to bring in air, no matter what her brain said. She needed to breathe! Now!

U N K N O W N M E A N S
87
    She kicked at his shins, to no effect. Her foot glanced off its target and hit the BMW’s passenger door. The car’s alarm began to peal, a deafening sound in the enclosed space.
    She braced her elbows against his chest, using his own body as leverage to hold the strap away from her throat. A flash of light appeared to her right. Her brain had begun to shut down, to let unconsciousness seize the moment. Her view narrowed until she saw nothing but