Rotten Eggs

The stench of rotten eggs filled the air and roused her out of her sleep. It was faint, distant, but it wafted through the open window with such an intensity that she felt no choice but to pull the covers off of herself and sit up, her body shivering against the sudden cold of the autumn night. She was still hardly awake, her vision bleary and her limbs heavy with the remaining fatigue of her workday, but she was up all the same, her brain already following the set routine of figuring what breakfast might be, and then about what she might do this morning because it was her day off and she had no plans. Maybe go visit Jessica upstairs and see how she is, see if she’s up for anything. That’s when she registered that there was no wind tonight. That was when she finally registered the screaming.

It jolted her awake instantly and sent jolts of almost shock up her vertebrate. She pushed herself up from the bed and to the open window, into that rotten egg smell, now closer, now pungent, and she leaned out of the window and looked first to her left, then her right, and that’s what where she saw it. Some kind of jumping blue light that was closing in down the alleyway and toward her apartment. The metal grating of the staircase above her rattled and drew her eye as someone descended them. “Do you hear that Claire?” Said the woman from upstairs, Jessica, in that high shrill voice she got when she was scared, like when she heard about some new gang that was kicking around and just had to tell Claire about it.

Claire, for her part, just nodded as the screaming came closer. More people from the building across were opening their windows, some closer than others, and they could see it clearer. Their screaming joined in the choir in short order. Claire still couldn’t see it, but she could smell that rotten egg smell better than ever, and the scream that followed it, oh dear god it was awful. So high and so clear and so very full of panic and pain and horror that she hardly even noticed the nights cold dissipating into an uncomfortable heat.

It was closer again, closest now, until the jumping blue light was right under Claire’s vantage point, giving her the best view yet of anyone else. She looked through the grating of the stairway and saw it. The blue light was not jumping, but flailing. It was the source of the odour, that horrible stink of rotten eggs, and it ran under the grating and past it, dragging something long and slender behind it that rattled against the ground, and that told Claire and Jessica all they needed to know. All about why the other people were still screaming for the fire department, for the cops, for anybody at all to help.

The screaming thing was a man, and he was on fire.

The women did not scream or move because they couldn’t do either. The capacity to do so was lost at the sight of that man, that poor man, swinging himself around, patting at himself in some doomed and desperate bid to put himself out, to make the pain stop. The smell and the screaming became fainter as the light grew more distant, running out of the alley and around a corner.

Jessica was the first of the two to move, shaking Claire and shouting in her face “Call the firefighters!” before breaking away and hurrying back up the stairs she had come down. Claire leaned back inside and quickly began scurrying over her bed, dropping in the other side on her back when her sheets had gotten tangled around her scrambling limbs. When she got herself corrected, she picked up the phone and got to the first 1 of 911 before a new sound assaulted her ears. The sound of a car. She carried the phone with her to the window, just catching a glimpse of the blue Silverado as it zoomed down the alley and out the other end. It disappeared around the corner, and, for just a moment, Claire was confused about what she had just seen, but it came to her almost immediately.

The burning man.

He wasn’t screaming anymore.

Quickly, she ducked out of sight and began peeking around at the other windows. Empty of people. Looking up, she did not see Jessica through the grating. She was alone in her eavesdropping. She heard voices that were muffled by the distance, but that was quickly broken up when she heard truck tires squeal and saw headlights rounding the corner again. She watched from her vantage point as the Silverado sped back the way it had come, dragging the burning man behind it as laughter and hollering and blaring music rang out all over the alley. She watched them drag the burning man, who was silent save for the scraping of his flesh against the asphalt, all the way to the other end and disappear around another corner. The smell, however, did not disappear. In fact, it was the most pungent it had been since she had been forced awake. When she looked down through the grating, and along the length of the alleyway, she understood immediately why the smell hadn’t left, and she vomited out of her window at the sight of it.

The burning man had left a trail of gore behind, and that gore was still burning that bright, electric blue.

The next morning, police came around and asked questions, and Claire told them what she saw. She asked them not to tell her anything further about it and they agreed, thanked her for her cooperation, and left. She did not sleep well again after that night, though she did sleep. She dreamt too. Dreamt of that burning man, not screaming, getting onto her apartment. Following her in a blue Silverado. Dragging her behind it while she left a trail of electric blue gore behind her.