Part 2

Continued from the earlier post below...

I drove home, and pulled into my usual spot.  I could swear that I saw something move behind the big Cypress tree to my left... but I had been seeing so many things since I left work an hour ago that I just wrote it off to stress and a busy work week that had freaked me out.  I got my stuff gathered up and I headed upstairs.  On the stairs, everything changed.  As soon as the security door closed behind me, I heard this loud heavy breathing, like a dragon with asthma.  The lights in the stairwell began to flicker.  I hastened my walk up the stairs and set my bags down to find the keys.  I got my keys out of my pocket and just then the lights went out completely.  I fumbled with them for a moment, until I got one in the right position.  The breathing sound was getting closer, moving up the stairwell.  The key I had didn't work in the deadbolt, so I jammed it into the door handle and unlocked it.  I carefully grabbed the next key on the ring and threw the deadbolt over and swung my door inward.  I grabbed my bags and fell inside, kicking the door shut when I cleared.  I flew to my feet and turned the deadbolt, handle, and wuss-chain for the element of sound if nothing else.  Locks can be picked but breaking the chain isn't a quiet thing.  I leaned against the wall for two or three minutes, listening.  When I heard nothing for several minutes, I gathered the strength to put my groceries and other things away.  I twisted the cap off a beer and sat down at my computer desk.  I was about to drink the first deep gulps of my beer when a sound came from my balcony that chilled the blood in my veins to ice.  This had happened only three times in my life, once the first time seeing Friday The 13th part one in the theater where Jason comes out of the water at the end.  The second again, first time in the theater in Jaws where Ben Gardner's head comes out of the underwater hole in his boat, and the third was in college when my girlfriend gave me "The News."  This was the fourth time.  It sounded like an anaconda wrestling with a wild boar on my balcony.  It sounded like it was pushing at the sliding glass door, and though I knew the door was locked, I knew that kind of door could easily be pushed off its track.  I staggered across my living room and grabbed what I could from my "mostly decorative/functional by necessity" weapons wall on my way to my bedroom closet.  I had nowhere else to go.

I ran to the back of the walk-in closet and had the most absurd thought under the circumstances... does running into a walk-in closet violate some cosmic law?  I remember I laughed out loud as I was running.  Hysteria was beginning to set in. I reached the back and turned, my Gil Hibben Raptor in my right hand, my Gil Hibben Raven in my left, and my custom cut Klingon machete clenched firmly between my teeth as backup.  It was right then that I heard the sliding glass door slide slowly open.  There is no way to describe the terror I felt, our worst dreams and movies seem to pale into insignificance when a real, stark raving horror wraps itself around you and completely paralyzes you.  I felt this and was able to summon the last strength to assume a death-pounce crouch and I waited.  I waited for a half an hour, waiting to die basically, either galvanized by fear or fighting like a wild man.  I was hoping for the latter.  I know how to bleed myself, quickly and relatively painlessly, if need be.  I was considering this as an option as the time drew up around the hour mark.  I finally decided that death was something to be experienced to its fullest enjoyment, since we only get one and it's arguably the last entertainment we might ever get.  I decided to go out and meet whatever had been following me all night with blades in my hands and a primal scream in my throat.  I walked to the front of the closet and pushed the door open.  I saw nothing in the bedroom.  I walked slowly into the hallway, still nothing.  I carefully edged my eye around the corner to look into the living room.  You're not going to believe what I saw there.  Sitting there, right in the middle of my living room, drinking a beer, laughing and pointing at me, mocking me, it was the weekend!  Woohoo!  It's the WEEKEND!
:D

The evil that follows me...

The moment I left work today I felt like something was watching me.  You know that feeling, where you just know someone or something is right there, looking at you, but you can't see it.  Like being in the jungle, at any second there could be two or a thousand eyes on you.  I shrugged it off, got in my car, and drove across the street to buy some stuff I needed.  As I was walking through the parking lot, I thought I could just see, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow moving between the cars... following me.  I walked into the store and the feeling subsided.  Now it was just the drones of society looking at me, and they were benign at best, pathetic at worst.  The difference between a genius and a mindless drone is simply one of perspective.  And it was this perspective that turned me into everyone else's mindless drone, out buying some stuff.

I found myself in the electronics department on my way to checkout, as I needed a phone card to add minutes to my cell.  I wasn't looking forward to that, though, the last three times I had tried to add minutes from a prepaid card failed and I was forced to spend around an hour and a half each time on the phone with some guy in Pakistan to get it worked out.  I was beginning to believe that for every minute I wanted on my cell, I had to spend one minute on hold while my friend Ranjeek entered more information, thank you sir, please hold...  As I was walking out of the electronics area, I saw that I was going to pass by the customer service counter.  An overwhelming rage overtook me at that moment, and I felt like I was watching myself from a third person point of view.  I felt the "watched" sensation that I had experienced outside again, full force.  Only this time, it was me watching.  I walked up to the clerk at the customer service counter, carefully placed my phone card on the counter, turned it around so it faced the him, and slid it forward.  Like a striking snake, I grabbed him by the collar with my left hand and slapped him in the side of the head twice with the package of thick-sliced bacon I had been holding behind my back in my right and screamed "Is this going to work, you filthy swine?"  He tried to lurch backward but I had him, and he fell sideways trying to tear my grip loose.  "Swine!  You mother-raping bastard, do you know someone named Ranjeek?  Answer me!"  I raised the bacon again, and stared deeply into the terrified clerk's soul.  It was actually the quiet that warned me that I was drawing a crowd.  The sight of a man being publicly beaten with bacon is something that many people simply cannot handle.  I lifted the clerk up off his knees from his attempts to grovel out of my grasp and brought him up to meet me, eyeball to eyeball.  "If this doesn't work, I'll be back."  "Wh-why w-wouldn't it work, sir?"  The clerk seemed genuinely confused, so I thought I should take a more reasonable track with him.  "Do you want me to go through that, right here in front of the Tracfone aisle, in front of all these people?"  I screamed... raising the bacon again.  He said nothing.  I let him go and he slumped to the floor, frozen in terror.  I held his petrified gaze as I pushed my cart through the rabble of onlookers I had attracted.  I could tell that he'd never be the same.  There was something in his eyes that said he'd been changed forever, and he'd never enjoy bacon ever again.

To be continued...