You run to the 4th Street parking ramp. In the fading light, the garage’s 70 feet of brick-and-cinderblock bulk looms, a phantasmagoric dreadnought let slip upon the sleeping city with a cry of havoc. The masonry parking levels are a hideous exoskeleton; the elevator tower is the spine of the beast.
Inside the yawning expanse of concrete and cars you know you’ll find your prey. He’s fast, you think, but not fast enough. You know that if he ran into this cavernous sanctum of vehicular rest, he must have had a reason. He must have a car.
You jump over the sharp tongue of an exit gate and run up the parking levels against phantom traffic, along the route the shadowy stranger would have to take to escape you. You don’t so much run as you swim through liquid darkness made seascape by the faint reflections of lightless chrome and the inky black of steel-belted rubber and tire tracks.
Cement posts like the ribs of a whale pass by, giving the view out the sides of the ramp the flicker of a cartoon. Giant level numbers painted in clownish colors pass you as if marking your depth. One. Two. Three. Your feet thud against concrete. Your breath is hard and hot against your own face and all you hear is the sound of your own motion.
And then the darkness yawns and swallows you. You’ve reached the top of the ramp, with still no sight of your prey. The night’s vivid void overwhelms you for a moment as you stop; your lungs scream for air and your muscles just scream.
Then the first brightness in minutes shatters the dark, blinding you. Headlights flare, swing, and pin on an entymologist’s needle of halogen rays. Your body takes over and you dive to the right. The brightness swerves to follow your motion; you stumble to your feet and try to run back into the giant belly from which you just emerged.
Instead the stain of oily rainbow at your feet takes over and you slip. You grasp for something, anything, to keep on your feet, and your hand finds the oversize steel tube railing at the top of the ramp walls. It’s too slick, though, both the rail and the ground, and your momentum carries you over the edge. The headlights are eclipsed, swallowed back into the dark beast as you plummet in a silent arc.
Gravity plays its short game with you and spits you out onto the ground with a crack that you recognize as your head bursting like the Zapruder film even as the darkness claims you for its own.
THEEND