Jenny Jorgenson was listening to Mozart - Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 as she made her way up the access stairwell from the garage with thoughts of Royce in her mind. She did not have to bed Joe today in return for his many favors—not least of which was this stimulating and rewarding career. It would take her until 5:21 to get up into South Baltimore to see her Latin Lover, then, she thought, will he take me in the foyer, carry me upstairs, or waltz with me over to the fireplace?

What a man!

Back to earth Jennifer, the nerds await your counsel, she reminded herself, as she turned the base of the sixth flight and found Bill Macy—probably the only decent man of the bunch—overwhelmingly dead on the landing. Bill’s belly was a welter of blood-soaked shirt, the polyester-cotton fabric turned into a kind of gelatinous crimson membrane. She knew that women were supposed to wilt right here, right now. But hers was the beyond morbid curiosity of the true intellect.

“What happened Bill?” she heard her spoken thought echo in the vertical tunnel of the hellish stairwell over the heavenly music ringing from her earplugs.

She could taste his blood in the air and amazed at the fact that he had died with a vantage on her ascent. She had just texted him—her only real coworker, the only one of the bunch that did not try to fuck her at every opportunity; the only one that Joe would not be suspicious of her texting—that she was taking the stairs from the garage below.

A pen was held in a death grip in his liver-spotted right fist. His left arm was held straight out to the side, the lax hand at the end of it soaked in the still-pooling blood beneath him. Jennifer gingerly rotated the still-warm left thumb back, without getting any blood on her pink silk lace blouse sleeves, and looked at the ink scrawled inside of Bill’s aged ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ forearm.

The unsteady print of old Bill’s message in the bottle that was his arm seemed to indict them all:

“Oh my God—and I’m an atheist bitch!”

She immediately panicked at the thought that she was listening to an online feed, then it occurred to her, that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had saved her shapely fight-fit ass from far, far beyond the grave.

“So, you sick fucks, whoever you are, have taste at least. Are you listening to Mozart while the world burns? Well suck my dick!”

Jennifer Jorgenson reached for the volume dial on her ear mike cord and cranked it up. A chill then sank into her belly as she imagined whoever had done Bill in coming for her, and she began running back downstairs, only to be reminded of her high heels. Kicking one off, and then thinking the better of discarding the other, she held that one in her hand and scampered down the stairs as fast as her stocking feet could take her.

Just before she hit the parking garage she was struck by the thought of her smartphone serving as a vector, pulled it out without checking the screen, and tossed it aside.

Her thoughts then turned to that crackpot genius Burreese, and she just had to curse him. “You are the perfect apocalyptic asshole Wonder Boy, and if I live through this you’ve got some amends to make.”

She could not hear a word she said, which comforted her, even as her ears began to hurt as the violin pitch rose only to be overtaken by the deep base notes of the greater stringed instrument. She sought to push that unlucky-feeling metaphor from her mind, tossed her purse aside, and hefted the ibis horn high heeled travesty of footwear that asshole Joe had insisted she wear to work—as well as to play—intent on making better use of it than he ever had when her insensibly shoed feet were in the air.

The fucking Agency is after me!

The entire world is going to be after you—get used to it.

Just get to Towson ASAP you diabolical slut!

Jennifer wondered if her stocking feet were making any noise on the rough concrete, and also if they were holding up, as she jogged to the Charles Street entrance and prayed to the only god she had ever known—Grandma Jorgenson—that those two cops that had ogled her as she entered had found some less deserving object for their violent lusts.

Please be raping some poor innocent bitch—I’ve got to get to Towson boys!