The wooden arm did not raise when Drew punched his card. He looked at the ghastly garage owner, unable to shake the slime of loathing he always felt when having to deal with him. The smoke-filled glass booth and his sallow appearance made the old man look like a B-movie keeper of the crypt.
Drew lowered his window. “What now?”
“Don’t park in 13-D again.” The cigarette jittered between his lips as he spoke. His frizzy hair and teeth were colored a nicotine-stain shade of yellow.
Drew sneered, piggish eyes peering out from folds of fat flesh.
“Last warning,” the old man said.
“Or else what?”
The old man’s eyes constricted, lending his ethereal presence a hardness that gave Drew pause. He chain-lit another.
“Are you done playing police officer?” Drew thrust his plump wrist forward, putting him face to face with his Rolex. “Because I have a very important job to go to.”
“Last warning,” he repeated as he lifted the gate.
Drew shot forward and screeched around the corner, speeding up level B’s ramp. The Rolex read half past ten. He did not miss rush hour, but he thought that the perks of being promoted to Chief Financial Officer would have included a parking spot on top of sleeping in. The garage was packed by the time he got to Newark.
The traffic cone, as always, sat at the head of 13-D, the only vacant space adjacent to the walkway that connected the garage with his office building. He backed into it, flattening the cone under the Range Rover’s fat tire.
As he crossed the glass walkway he saw two teenagers in the alley below spraying graffiti onto the jumbled morass that decorated the side of the garage. They bolted at the sight of the old man limping around the corner, waving something silver in the air and yelling.
“Crazy prick,” Drew said.
The old man put the silver object in his trouser pocket.
Drew left the office late. He opened the door to the nearly empty garage where the echoes of his whistles mixed with a pattering sound like a running spigot. A strange, alcoholic odor filled the air. He stopped at the threshold, head cocked and eyes narrowed. Some wino must have sneaked in off the street and was pissing on his car before bedtime.
He turned the corner and saw no one. As he settled his obese frame into the driver’s seat a coarse slither caught his ear. In his side mirror he saw the old man crawling out from beneath his car like a corpse rising from a cairn.
Jaundiced skin stretched over his bony face as a smile split his lips. He held a pair of wire cutter pliers in one hand and drew a snub-nosed revolver from his pocket with the other, catching the weapon’s hammer on his belt. It clattered to the ground.
Drew’s heart skipped two beats and thrummed into overdrive. He slammed the door and stuck the keys into the ignition. The alternator screamed indecisively for an agonizing eon until the engine gurgled into life.
He shifted into drive and floored it.
The engine roared like a leaf blower as the car crawled forward. Drew stomped on the accelerator again. Empty, winded wheezes cycled through the cylinders.
Cold sweat dotted his face as he rolled down the decline to level C. He laid on the horn, hoping that someone would hear him. In his rearview mirror he saw the old man limping after him with the gun.
Drew ducked low, barely peering above the steering wheel as he kept pumping the accelerator. His nose was almost touching the speedometer and he watched the needle climb. Five . . . eight . . . eleven miles per hour.
He turned the corner onto level C’s plateau. The flat stretched endlessly.
Ten . . . eight . . . four.
He was two-thirds across when the old man rounded the corner and barely at a crawl when he came within twenty feet.
“Come on you prick! Come on!” Drew screamed.
The needle kissed zero as he crept into the turn. The old man was fifteen feet behind him, sucking wind and raising the gun. Drew’s eyes flitted frantically between the rearview mirror and the speedometer, catching glimpses of his own face, white and wet with terror.
One . . . four . . . six.
He rounded the sloping corner into another decline. Level B.
The old man disappeared from view, only to regain the lost ground on Level B’s flat. He lurched towards Drew, bringing the pistol up with an unsteady arm just as he was on the verge of petering out.
One . . . three . . . seven.
Drew screamed as he reached level A, throwing his body into the final twist of the corkscrew chase. Even at five miles per hour the Range Rover broke through the wooden arm. It rolled to a stop in the middle of the street. He crowed with hoarse laughter at the sight of a police car rounding the corner. He punched his horn and the police car turned on its lights.
The old man, standing in the garage, raised the revolver shakily. He pulled the trigger and a small blue flame shot out of the tip, lighting a cigarette.
Drew stopped laughing as he registered the piss-like patter and a strong scent of alcohol again. He saw the needle on the gauge next to the speedometer tipping towards E with the surreal swiftness of a clock being wound backwards.
The old man took a drag before dropping the cigarette onto the wet, dark line that traced Drew’s path out of the garage.
As the world fell behind a yellow curtain, Drew wished he hadn’t parked in 13-D.
—
Andrew Punzo lives near Newark, New Jersey where he attends law school. He wrote for Fordham University’s the paper and graduated summa cum laude with degrees in history and sociology. His short fiction has appeared in the anthology Mindscapes Unimagined (2018) and will appear in the anthology Crypt Gnats: Horror You’ve Been Itching to Read in the spring of 2019. Andrew is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys reading a wide variety of fiction.
A good horror story. I appreciated the subtlety and showing with imagery rather than telling.