As the Fog Rolls In

The lights were low at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle on the night of October 14th, 1990. Being a Sunday, there hadn’t been much going on across the Bay Area, and the newsroom was mostly empty. The day had been a slow one, with only fresh-faced reporters stopping by the Old Chronicle Building to file fluff pieces to fill up the pages and earn their places in the eyes of seasoned veterans. Although, while Sunday was always a quieter day, the newsroom was especially empty this particular week. A strange, flu-like illness had taken a hold over the Chronicle, keeping home about half of the staff in the process. Lethargy and migraines were the leading symptoms, and while those weren’t extreme, they were, apparently, highly contagious. So much so that one of the only people left in the office by 9:30pm was a man by the name of Brian Greene. An unassuming man, the flu had proven highly advantageous to his daily work tackling the crime beat. Brian preferred the quiet hum of the air conditioning to the usually incessant mumblings of the reporters who worked in the cubicles around him. He normally stayed late as it was, but the lack of whispering neighbors made his night even more focused. His only friend at the office that night (and any night, for that matter) was Stu Barker, a janitor who’d been with the paper for six years. While the pay wasn’t fantastic, the job was steady enough to provide for Stu’s wife and kids — plus, the hours gave him ample time to work on a novel he was writing, which he’d hoped to have finished by early 1991. He might’ve even reached that goal, if not for the arrival of the thing that night.

​

Moldy bits of stale deli sandwiches wafted outward from the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle. As Brian worked away at a piece he was polishing, the old Macintosh Plus he used started to give him problems. Keys were sticking, the screen was flickering in and out — nothing seemed to work the way it should. He made a note to stop at Circuit City over the weekend to poke around and see what they had. Above his head, the hazy, chartreuse lights of the office began to droop and dim, signaling that Stu the janitor was starting to make his rounds. Brian hardly ever clocked out before Stu got to work, so the lack of lights hardly bothered him. Honestly, he preferred this. The peace and quiet. The stillness of the normally bustling cubicles. Click-clacking keyboards and whirring phone calls only served to distract and make the writing process harder. And without a home computer or typewriter, Brian had nowhere else he could go to write. Though, it’s not like crime in the city changed dramatically day to day. Sure, there were muggings and break-ins and murders and bombings. But nothing was too different on a regular basis. Each new day brought the same people doing the same crimes and that was that. Brian never really had to do any investigative reporting — a crime would happen, the cops would list off every detail about it, and Brian would type up a report at the end of the day. Why work on a mystery somebody’s already solved? he always said. With everything that happens, it wouldn’t make sense to keep updating the public with information that might change in a matter of hours. Besides, it gave Brian (and his editor) time to throw something good together, rather than regurgitate whatever the cops told him.

 

Tonight’s article centered around more yuppie murders, a trend that Brian had seen an slight uptick in over the last few weeks. Didn’t bother him though. Weirdos in suits, they always seem to have some issue with one another. Serves ‘em right. As Brian took a break from triple-checking his meticulous notes (copied directly from the latest police report), he wondered what the rest of the world was doing on such a crisp night. The trees had just started to molt, and he’d noticed a significant crunch under his heels when he walked from the train to work that morning. His cheap yellow Casio watch beeped. 9:45 pm. Were people enjoying an evening walk this late? Brian didn’t know how anybody at the Chronicle managed to carry a social life with their line of work. Did reporters have interests? Would they be out for walks? Or cooking with a loved one? Maybe they were still on the job too, going over information with a police contact or interviewing a schmoozy politician at The Dog Bone Pub. Did anybody have home computers? Or personal fax machines? Regardless of the night or the weather or the time, these questions constantly swam through Brian’s head. They bounced around when he tried to sleep and when he tried to eat and when he tried to do anything. Well, almost anything. Writing let him think about other things. Like how happy he was being alone. And how happy he was to work late nights. He especially liked thinking about how he didn’t talk to people. Who knows what it would be like if he said something stupid and ruined everything. No, it was best to be quiet. 

​

“Keeping that nose to the grindstone, Bri?” Stu shoved his cleaning cart through the double doors into the newsroom, parking it directly underneath the painting of EiC Laurie Logan that looked out over the office. Alannah Myles’ ‘Black Velvet’ blared out of a boombox Stu balanced on the top of his cart.

​

“Yeah, just writing about more yuppie murders. Seems like there's more and more of ‘em every day.” Brian turned to his left and glanced out the long wall of windows that overlooked Rumboldt’s Steakhouse. The blinding neon red lights from its facade had momentarily gone out and flashed back on, diverting his attention.

 

“Aw jeez, why’re they killin’ each other now?” Stu asked, his voice getting tangled up in the music drifting down the hallway. The cubicles he was working in were filthy, but he mostly just swept up leftover pieces of lunch or spilled coffee grounds. 

​

“No clue. The cops haven’t given me anything to work with, aside from the fact that there were some dead yuppies. There was something in the press release about the ‘unusual manner’ of their deaths, but that’s it.” 

​

“‘Unusual manner?’ What could that mean?”

​

“I don’t know. Sometimes it means that it has something to do with a serial killer or a weird sex cult stuff, but they haven’t given me anything this time. Not even the coroner’s report.”

​

Stu stopped his sweeping and leaned on the handle of his broom.

​

“Hmm. Weird.” He went back to sweeping and then moved into the editor’s offices. Brian and Stu’s conversations always went like this. A couple exchanges here and there about this and that and it was over. Just how Brian liked it.

​

After a half an hour of writing, Brian decided to throw in the towel and call it a night. The sound of Stu’s vacuuming was starting to get to him and the clanging of the air vents was taking away from his work. As he began to pack his notebooks into his satchel, he heard a thunk echo down the hall from where Stu was working. 

​

“Stu, you ok?” Brian yelled. The whack of the smack had echoed down the hallway and crept into Brian’s cubicle. The only answer he got was a warped rendition of  ‘Enjoy the Silence’, bumping out of a broken boombox Stu had set up with his stuff.

​

“Stu? You there?” 

​

“Stu’s a little busy right now. Can I help you?” The voice was high-pitched and close to a whisper, coming from both right in front of Brian and all around him. The lights went out with a light pop and he spun around in a panic, tipping his satchel over in the process. There wasn’t anyone around.

​

“Who was that? Is that you Suzie?” Nothing was out of place by the editor’s offices or any of the cubicles. Brian sauntered over to the swinging doors that led out to the rest of the building and peeked his head ever-so-slightly outside. Stillness answered him. 

​

“Hmph, must be Stu,” he mumbled, scanning the halls for signs of life. He turned back to the newsroom, expecting to see Stu walk back down the hall, laughing about the prank he just pulled. Instead, what Brian saw sucked the wind right out of him. Just outside the big windows, floating right in front of the neon crimson Rumboldt’s Steakhouse sign was a woman. She had strawberry blonde hair, wore a light tan suit, and was wearing jet black three inch heels. Her head was cocked slightly to her left, but he couldn’t see what she was looking at. The woman was smiling, and it looked like there was a faint glow around her, though Brian assumed that was from the lights of Rumboldt’s behind her. 

​

“Now, Brian. Did you really think we’d let you keep writing your little murder stories about us? You know, we’re trying to keep a low profile.” Brian finally looked into the woman’s eyes, noticing subtle hints of scarlet mixed with silver. Her mouth didn’t look like it was moving when she talked. 

​

“I’m… just writin’... what… they tell me… is news?” He found himself struggling to focus on anything, with each passing thought blurring into the next. The lightness in his head made it feel like he too was floating.

​

“Yes, well, ‘they’ have been taken care of. That just leaves you now, doesn’t it? You thought you were so clever, didn’t you?” The woman’s grin grew, stretching further than Brian thought smiles were supposed to go.

​

“Pleathe…i’m juth a reporrah…” His lips became numb and weak, the mouth giving out as he stared deeper and deeper into the woman’s eyes. 

​

“It doesn’t matter what you think you are. All that matters is what you will be.” The woman opened her mouth to reveal a blindingly clean set of teeth, normal but for two canines that protruded out from the upper lip. As Brian’s eyes closed, numb from the feeling in his head, he heard the sound of breaking glass and a loud shriek, before everything faded to black.

 

One hour earlier

​

The teensiest hint of sizzling steak that wafted from the kitchen at Rumboldt’s Steakhouse was all the men needed to get rowdy. Nubs of cigars and half downed glasses of whisky lay across the tables, as if their impatience manifested in the form of some unruly child. Their ties were loose, either from the way their necks bulged as they yelled across the room or from their own forceful yanks. Sport coats had fallen onto the floor, knocked from the backs of chairs by frenetic arm waving and the incessant need for the crowd to stand up and cheer every time they heard Jerry Rice score on the handheld radio someone had brought. Spilled drinks and partially devoured bits of hors d'oeuvres were scattered all over the floor, a minefield for waiters who were just trying to do their jobs. Noon to 1am operating hours meant the men had to leave at some point — but the associates at Ticker Banking had rented out most of the rooms in the hotel Rumboldt’s was attached to. Not only would this make it much harder to get them to leave before one, but the unfortunate proximity of the hotel bar meant that the men had already destroyed their livers before even entering the steakhouse. 

​

Alicia Warnock had to watch this chaos unfold as she patiently waited for her food to be served. She spent most of this time picking at her cuticles and teasing her already pristine hair, not knowing whether she’d make it out of this pigsty alive. Her thoughts kept drifting back to her hotel room just a few floors up and the warm bath she wanted to wash the stench of old and man from her skin. Work as a more senior financial advisor required that she be there, and, for one reason or another, it turned out she was the only woman brought on the trip. Whether this was for the sake of optics or because of that weird flu going around or (least likely) because Alicia was genuinely valued didn’t matter to her. All she could focus on was the growing ache in her stomach from the lack of dinner. Geoff Dackor, a leading partner at the firm, had asked the restaurant to bring everyone’s meals out at the same time as a way to show unity; though, what he really wanted was for everyone to sit and listen to him drone about the past year’s worth of business and explain the plan was for the next quarter. However, Alicia noticed that around 8:55, just before his speech was supposed to start, he’d been found passed out in an armchair with a mostly empty bottle of prosecco. As her eyes wandered around the room, looking for some semblance of calm, she sighed and started fiddling with her utensils.

​

Alicia wasn’t really sure why she had expected the weekend to go well. There was a part of her that was excited to have been invited on one of these trips; but there was another part of her that knew she wasn’t really wanted. She took a glance over at the poor wait staff to try and gauge how they were doing. Some poor kid was put in charge of the table at the back of the steakhouse (the one just by the podium) and he seemed to be on the verge of tears. Alicia wished she could do something to help, but when she began to stand up and say something, the waiter scampered off to get ready to bring out the food. 

​

Since dinner was on the company’s dime, Alicia had ordered a rare steak coated with porcini butter and garnished with diced scallions. To best enjoy that meal, she’d selected the smoothest red available to her: a Beringer Cabernet Sauvignon, served just to perfection in a short, stout glass. The world around her slowly melted away as Alicia gave in to her food and allowed herself to become engulfed in the sensations around her. Her knife glided right through the perfectly prepared piece of meat, and she slowly lifted a small portion of it to her lips to begin to chew. As her teeth punched through the top of the carved hunk, the steak released a wave of carefully selected juices that erupted within Alicia’s mouth, dousing every taste bud with a sweet, savory flavor that washed every worry away. She reached out and grabbed her glass of wine, slowly swishing it around, and took a long sip from the bowl. Alicia closed her eyes, tuning everything around her out, and became absorbed in the rich palette she had created in her mouth. 

​

That’s when she heard the crash.

​

Geoff Dackor woke up from his nap around 10:15 to the smell of something burning. In his tipsy haze, he couldn’t tell if it was an intentional scent echoing out from the kitchen or a small fire that’d broken out. His lap was damp with something that might’ve been piss or prosecco and his glasses had slipped off of his face as he slept, so the surroundings appeared closer to a grey haze than any distinguishable shape. His arm slapped around looking for the frames, and when he finally realized they weren’t in the armchair, he dropped down to the ground to search around there. His arthritic knees cracked and popped as he moved himself out of the chair. When his knees reached the ground (after what seemed to be an interminably long time), he noticed that he was lying in some darkly colored liquid that had started to pool in the carpet. Shit, did I really just piss myself? The fuck is this? Unfortunately for Geoff, old age had progressed his color blindness much further than he had ever wanted it to and distinguishing piss and wine took more than just a quick glance. The glasses would help make clear whatever had happened to the steakhouse, but it’d most likely take a smell or taste test to clarify what the hell that liquid was. As he wasn’t in the mood to do either, he shrugged it off as a symptom of his own drunken stupor. 

​

After crawling around to the backside of the loveseat, Geoff finally found where his glasses had landed. Must’ve tipped my head back a lil too far for them to land here, he thought as he slid the frames up the bridge of his nose. His eyes adjusted to the haziness of the room and the gravity of what’d happened finally set in. Something that looked to be fire had engulfed the kitchen, spreading outwards into the main dining room. The sturdy oak tables that were usually arranged in clean rows around the perimeter of the restaurant and in tight clusters at the center were now completely tipped over on their sides or broken in pieces and scattered all around him. Various lights were out; some were smashed in with shards of glass sprinkled underneath where they had originally been housed, while others were intact and sporadically flickering when they could. Plates, silverware, and glasses were all smashed to bits, while most of the steaks lay intact, just in various piles spread out over the room. Geoff was having trouble figuring out what had happened and where everyone had gone, but that changed with the squish he felt when he decided to take a step away from the armchair. Just beside the seat, off to the right just a little bit, sat a hunk of pink flesh.  

​

It wasn’t very clearly defined, this hunk of flesh. It was still slightly warm, with shattered bone fragments and shredded tissue that made it hard to determine whether or not it was a piece of rib cage or the remnants of someone’s tattered leg. As Geoff raised his head to see what else he’d overlooked, his eyes widened and he felt a lump form in his throat. Clumps of skin and the sinewy remains of internal organs were strewn across the floor, dyed a darker shade that Geoff assumed to be a violent shade of red. The shreds of body parts looked as though they’d been ripped with the precision of a butcher. Each slice of flesh was torn in thin strips, like the point of the wreck was to cause as much carnage as humanly possible. He stumbled away from the chair to get a better look at what he’d missed, but the shock of it all left him feeling sicker than anything. He vomited up most of the prosecco (must’ve been piss in my lap earlier) and tried to hobble his way towards the kitchen. For whatever reason, the flames hadn’t spread out into the main dining room and remained contained within the confines of the state-of-the-art kitchen. The waitstaff was nowhere to be seen either, though little scraps of white dress shirts sat soaking in piles all around the dining room. 

​

“Hello? Anybody out there?” Geoff yelled, hoping for some sort of response back. His answer came in the form of a rap on the head with the force of a train. Then nothing. 

​

Nobody noticed Brian didn’t show up to work the next morning. The staff had already been slimming over the past few weeks from the flu (or something, Ke’Andre hadn’t cared to look into it), so it wasn’t like this was unusual. What was unusual was the discovery of Stu the janitor’s body splayed on the pavement outside the front doors. Maureen from editorial was the first one at the office, and as she hopped out of her station wagon, the shock of seeing him caused her black coffee to crash to the pavement in spectacular fashion. It seemed like ol’ Stu had had enough of the menial night shift, and lept right out of the 22nd story window to his sweet, gravelly death. Ke’Andre came in early too, just beating the cops Maureen had called, and he got a glimpse of Stu’s gnarly, mangled corpse. The torso was twisted in a way that his legs were completely backwards from how they were supposed to be, like someone had taken a G.I. Joe and spun the leg joints all the way around. His neck was an accordion, crumpled and snapped to the point where Stu’s head was much farther from the spinal cord than it should’ve been. Strangely, there wasn’t any blood splatter or guts spilled out onto the ground, but the police ruled that those had been pulverized in the fall. Police presence was small, but Ke’Andre assumed it was due to whatever had happened at Rumboldt’s the night before. The 6am news on KGO-TV was sparse on details, but everything pointed to signs of a grease fire gone wrong.

​

“Jesus, did you get a glimpse at Stu this morning?” Sharon asked Ke’Andre, standing on her tip-toes to peek over into his cubicle. Business had gone back to normal very quickly, and Stu’s death turned into another piece of gossip cycling through the newsroom. Stories for the afternoon dailies were due at 11am and everyone was working to ensure things moved smoothly.

​

“Yeah, I got here right after Maureen found him. He looked awful.” Ke’Andre glanced over to the shattered window Stu had jumped out of. A thick piece of terry cloth was stuffed into the newly made hole, and it shook miserably every time a light breeze flew by. The construction crew that renovated the Old Chronicle Building promised that each window was built using bulletproof glass; partially because they wanted to see if it would work in a commercial skyscraper, partially because of the death threats certain writers had incurred over the years. 

​

“Whaddaya suppose did him in? The job? The wife?” Sharon had a habit of asking Ke’Andre questions right when he was in the middle of trying to get something done. 

“Who knows. I never really met the guy. I’m always out of here around 7 and I don’t think he started his shift until 10. Did you know him?”

​

“Nah, I tried making small talk with him at a party a few years ago but we didn’t have anything in common.”

​

“Hmm. Too bad then. Hopefully the paper covers the family for all of this.”

​

“You know they won’t. Remember what happened to Larry Orloff?” 

​

 Lawrence Orloff was a long-time movie critic at the paper, publishing his first review in the spring of 1957 with a blistering critique of ‘12 Angry Men.’ He’d gone on to build a reputation as something of a stick in the mud, convincing the city that “the only good movies were shlock” (a direct quote). Surprisingly affable, the short, balding man would take a 5pm walk daily, where he’d grab a hot dog in the park and play a quick game of chess with anyone willing to take a break from their day. In late 1983, on one of these walks, Larry was shot in the back by the stray bullet of a cop in pursuit of a stolen Camarao. Paralyzed from the waist down, he’d asked the Chronicle for some financial support for him and his family, hoping that his many years at the paper had made an impression. Ownership refused to give him a single penny. Larry Orloff died from a heart attack while still recovering in the hospital. 

​

“Yeah, but Stu’s dead. Larry asked for help and got nothing in return, that’s why he died. Stu’s family can’t do anything to fix a dead man.” The weight of the situation slowly dawned on Ke’Andre, and he wanted to do anything to move on. “Hey, did you hear anything from Brian today? He’s usually here around the same time I am and I didn’t see him at his cubicle.” 

​

Sharon shrugged. “Nope, his desk looks the same way it did yesterday: cluttered and booooring. Might be even more disorganized than usual though.” Indeed, Brian’s cubicle looked pretty much intact from how it’d looked the last time anyone had seen it. His beat-up old Macintosh sat defeated on a spindly-legged mahogany desk in his cubicle, surrounded by a mess of half-written manuscripts and scraps from the sandwich wrappers he’d forgotten to toss out. The cubicle itself was largely undecorated aside from a cheap ‘Doonesbury’ wall calendar and a tiny Jade plant in the back corner of the desk. 

​

“I wonder if he’s got that bug that’s been going around. Got ten people over in politics this week. Only Lou and Mei have come back since they had it.” Sharon leaned back and saw executive editor Edith marching back towards them and slinked her way back into her chair.

​

“Anywaysiguessigottagetbacktothissuperimportantarticletalktoyoulater!”

​

Ke’Andre turned back to some economic reports he was supposed to be studying, but found that all he could wonder about was the lack of blood around Stu’s body. Why wouldn't he be drenched in blood and guts after a fall like that? The thought was all consuming for a few minutes, worming its way into the depths of his brain and planting its roots. A bomb went off in his head, scattering shrapnel in every which way: Why was his body twisted like that? How did he smash through the glass? Did Brian see any of this? How did the cops not notice last night? Weren’t they next door? Ideas spun around all at once, brewing a perfect storm that was slowly building to one hurricane of a migraine when… suddenly… the thought was gone. Almost as if it’d never been there in the first place. 

​

Ke’Andre found himself out of breath and on the verge of passing out, but there was no sign of what sent him into this tailspin. He poked his head over the top of his cubicle to try and see if anyone else was feeling the same way. Nothing. Everyone was working normally: typing up stories, yelling on the phone, fighting with their editors; no one had noticed something had happened. Ke’Andre brushed it off as a lack of sleep, and found his fascination with the incident of the previous night replaced by a growing desire for more coffee. 

 

The woman with the strawberry blonde hair got dressed and ready for work like always. Her tan suit had made a statement yesterday, but there were only so many times in a week she could show off. She picked out a simple white blouse with ruffled sleeves, a black pair of jeans, and the same three inch heels she always wore. Not that she wasn’t already tall enough. But to see the people around her cower in her presence made each and every day worth it. The woman added a black jacket as well, if only to keep her white shirt from getting too messy. Work didn’t start until 8, but since she’d woken up so early, she figured it was time to make dinner. Unlike yesterday, the woman had plenty of time to fix something substantial. 

​

She left her bedroom and headed to one of the spare rooms in her condo. Unlike most people on the Bay, the woman had retrofitted one of her rooms to act as a cooler/freezer for many of the treats she brought home from a hard night’s work. Rather than leave fresh food lying out and getting disgustingly warm, she preferred her leftovers cold. Who among us likes rancid blood, she often wondered. The woman swung the door to the freezer open and started to poke around. Men without limbs and torn out chests stared back at her with empty or missing eyes as she fished around for something that seemed filling. A man without a torso (probably broken off in transport) caught her attention. He might not have been enough for a full meal, but there was no way she could leave him like this. Too much time in the freezer and they’d start to look unappetizing. She dragged him out to the living room, snapped off the head, and just started drinking. The cool, sweet blood flowed straight from the man’s head like a freshly squeezed lemon into her mouth, reinvigorating the woman and making her feel renewed for the night ahead. As she continued to sip from her drink, she turned around and looked at the guest she’d brought over from her stop at the newspaper. There had been a single light on in the newsroom that was visible from the street below, and as she was leaving Rumboldt’s, she stopped by to see if she could pick up some dessert.

​

A man sat motionless in the dark grey armchair she stuck in the back of her apartment. He hadn’t moved since she brought him in, though that was by design. Her hypnosis left the reporter disoriented and delirious, just the way she wanted a new familiar to be. Or at least, her first effective familiar. The first one she’d tried to indoctrinate had lost his mind, believing that he too was a vampire. He’d run off into the night, never to be seen again — though the woman was sure he’d been following her and performing copycat crimes on his own. Wanting to begin her newest relationship with a fresh start, she eased back a bit on the cloud she’d slipped into the reporter’s mind. As the man awoke, he caught a glimpse of his surroundings and began to snap up out of the chair. 

​

“Where…where am I? What’s happened to me?” he asked.

​

The woman flashed a toothy grin, letting some of the blood from the head drip down her chin. “Hi, Brian.”