Karen struggled to regain consciousness. Yet again. How long had it been since she ran out of poor, now-dead Martin’s back door? Half-naked and leaving all her clothes in the suitcase she’d planned to move in with… Her job! In all this time, however long it was, this was the first time Karen had given it a thought, perhaps at least in part because she rarely gave it a thought anyway. The investment banking firm where she did due-diligence number crunching that involved no contact or concern for other people was hardly…spiritually fulfilling. But Karen hadn’t even called in sick, and she did need to pay the rent…
Wait a minute… Pay the rent where?
She realized she still wasn’t fully conscious, didn’t even have her eyes open yet, and was struggling to piece together things that would have been immediately obvious otherwise. Frank…The apartment they shared. It was all over with Frank, who she’d left after finding him in bed with her best friend, which was why she had been at Martin’s in the first place.
She didn’t even have a place to stay…
Her eyes snapped open.
She didn’t even have clothes…
But there was someone with her. Someone who could help her! She shook his shoulder.
He rolled over…completely unnaturally. The mess that was all that was left of his face forced her, with great reluctance, to check the carotid artery in his neck. Nothing.
Irwin. She remembered hitting him with that heavy metal thing, remembered the little girl and her mother, remembered thinking she should ask for help…it was self defense after all…but then remembered a strong warning against doing so from the building she was still imagining was sentient. But that was ridiculous. She had to get out of this fucking storage space and get help! It was self defense!
Karen yanked his clothes off him, despite revulsion over Irwin and screams of pain from her own injuries. After struggling into his filthy clothes, she scrambled around her storage unit for whatever little she’d brought from Martin’s or anything in her boxes that could be of the least use. She at last made it out to the hall…on her feet…and started down the hall toward the front door. When the inevitable dizziness struck again, she resolutely clung to a wall and stayed on her feet.
The stairs were a nightmare. She cried from the effort, but she made it down. She could see the front door. She staggered over to it and swung it wide open.
“Finally!”
However appropriate that word was, she didn’t think she’d said it aloud. It hadn’t even been said in her voice. Blinded by the sunlight, she was confused. Slowly, her vision returned. She saw a teenage girl, who looked even more pathetic than she did, standing in front of her.
“Like, I thought this effin’ storage space would never open! I don’t, like, have the money to pay you but…please!…I really need my things.”
