Story code: ST-000456
Part 2: The Breach
The static from the yellowed plastic speaker cuts out, plunging my kitchen back into a suffocating silence. I stand paralyzed, my right eye still pressed blindly against the rubber cup of the viewfinder. Down on the street, the sidewalk is suddenly empty. The man in the charcoal suit has vanished from my frame.
A heavy, metallic thud echoes from the depths of the building. It is the wrought-iron vestibule door downstairs slamming shut. The sound reverberates through the floorboards, traveling up the ancient wooden framing and straight into the soles of my slippers. He is inside.
Panic, cold and sharp, floods my veins. My agoraphobia is a delicate, fragile truce I have negotiated with my own mind: I do not cross the threshold of my apartment, and the terror stays out there. But now, the outside is walking up my stairs. I hear the measured, unhurried strike of leather dress shoes on the ground-floor tiles. *Clack. Clack. Clack.*
I drop away from the heavy camera rig and stumble backward, knocking over a stack of empty water jugs. I claw my cell phone out of my cardigan pocket. I don’t know who to call-the police, maybe, though the thought of armed strangers flooding my sanctuary makes my throat close up. I swipe the screen awake and stab the keypad to dial for help.
*No Service.*
A small circle with a slash through it sits mockingly in the upper right corner of the screen. I haven’t lost a cell signal in this apartment in seven years. I scramble toward the kitchen counter and snatch the cordless landline from its cradle. This is my lifeline, the number I use to order my weekly groceries from the corner bodega, my only vocal connection to humanity. I press the receiver to my ear. Dead air. Not even the faint, reassuring hiss of a dial tone. The developer didn’t just buy the building; he severed its arteries.
The footsteps reach the first-floor landing. They pause. He is taking his time. He knows I have nowhere to run.
I need to barricade the door. My gaze darts around the dim, cramped living room, landing on the heavy oak filing cabinet near the hallway. It is packed full of external hard drives-ten years of high-resolution photographs, tens of thousands of cataloged moments of a neighborhood that no longer exists. It weighs well over two hundred pounds.
I press my shoulder against the cold metal side of the cabinet and push. My muscles, atrophied from a decade of indoor pacing, scream in immediate protest. My shoes slip on the worn linoleum. I grit my teeth, tasting copper in the back of my throat, and heave with everything I have left. The cabinet groans, sliding an inch. Then another. The metal base scrapes a deep, jagged gouge into the floorboards. I shove it until it slams flush against the peeling brown paint of my front door, covering the lower half of the frame.
I am gasping for air, sweat stinging my eyes. My chest is tight, my vision narrowing at the edges. A panic attack is building, threatening to rip the ground out from under me. I force myself to focus on the tactile reality of the room. I touch the cold metal cabinet. I smell the chalky dust I just kicked up.
The footsteps begin their ascent to the second floor. *Clack. Clack. Clack.*
I rush back to my window. The glass is my only advantage, my only way to gather information. I grip the camera and angle the massive telephoto lens down toward the street, searching for his work crew.
The two men who were throwing Mrs. Gable’s belongings into the dumpster have moved directly beneath my window. They are dragging thick, four-by-eight sheets of plywood from the back of a flatbed truck. One man holds a heavy sheet over the front vestibule entrance, while the other raises a pneumatic nail gun.
*Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.*
They are boarding up the building. From the outside.
My stomach drops into a bottomless void. They are sealing the doors. The developer is inside here with me, and his men are ensuring that neither of us can get out. Why would he lock himself in? He must know I cannot flee. He is turning my fortress into a sealed tomb.
The intercom on the wall shrieks again, followed by another impossible blast of static.
“I hear you moving the furniture, Elias,” his voice crackles through the speaker. It is calm, terribly smooth, devoid of any exertion from climbing the stairs. “A futile gesture. The structural integrity of these doorframes was compromised decades ago. Termites and rot.”
How is he broadcasting through the wires? I stare at the speaker. He isn’t out on the street. He is standing in the stairwell. He must have spliced into the analog junction box in the basement before he came up.
The footsteps resume. He is on the final flight of stairs. The wood groans beneath his weight.
I step away from the window, abandoning the massive telephoto rig. I grab a smaller DSLR body off my desk, snapping on a wide-angle lens and flipping up the heavy external flash. If he breaches the door, I cannot fight him physically. I am weak. I am a ghost. The only weapon I have is documentation. I will blind him with the strobe. I will capture his face as he breaks in.
The footsteps reach the third-floor landing. They stop.
He is standing less than three feet away from me, separated only by an inch of rotting wood and my filing cabinet. I hold the camera up, my hands trembling so violently the lens rattles against the camera mount.
I brace for the impact. I wait for the thunderous crash of his shoulder against the wood, for the hinges to splinter and give way. I wait for the violence.
Instead, there is only a soft, metallic jingle.
A key slides smoothly into the bottom lock of my door.
My breath freezes. I have three locks. Two deadbolts and the handle. I installed the deadbolts myself ten years ago, ordering the custom cylinders online. Nobody has those keys. Not the old landlord, not the super who quit five years ago. Nobody.
The bottom lock clicks open.
Another key slides into the middle deadbolt. The heavy brass cylinder turns with a sickening, effortless snap.
“You have spent ten years watching us, Elias,” his voice murmurs, no longer coming from the intercom, but directly through the wood of the door. “But you forgot to watch your own locks.”
A third key slides into the top deadbolt.