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Movement to my left caught my eye, and I saw that the maintenance man was dragging himself along the floor towards my feet, leaving a wet trail of blue-black offal on the tile as he came. There were more of them lurching around the corner… a lot more of them…

"No shit." Was all I could manage. We ran.

We were in the middle of our second semester at State when it all started. At first, like a lot of people I guess, we thought it was a hoax. Sort of like that Blair Witch thing or something. We were too busy attending "kegers", smoking weed and macking on the ladies to worry about just another Hollywood scam.

But that was before Phil…

Phil was the third roommate in the modest college pad we shared. I had known him from my first year at State and had moved in with him and Chris at the start of my second year. It didn’t take long to figure out what a mistake that had been. Phil was the type of guy who was a lot of fun to hang out with on the party scene, but wore thin pretty much immediately when you started to really get to know him. Especially after you lived with him for a little while, you realized that he was pretty much just a selfish, manipulative little man who would probably sell out his own grandmother for a quarter bag of weed.

That fact was brought home to both Chris and me in a series of highly irritating events, which culminated in Phil stealing the majority of my food right out of my bedroom while I was away on Christmas break. Suffice it to say that we both had come to the conclusion that he was a prick, and we planned to find our own place and leave him to his own devices as soon as we could….

But not even Phil deserved what happened to him…

It was a Saturday, I think. Chris and I were watching some B sci-fi flick and sucking down some Captain Morgan and Coke. Neither of us had seen Phil in a couple of days, but that didn’t really concern us, as we both kind of went out of our way to avoid him anyway, and he often came and went via his bedroom window on the ground floor.

"We should smoke a bowl." I remember Chris saying, clear as if it was yesterday.

"I guess. I’m pretty fucked up already though…" I replied… but the decision had already been made. Chris was on his way down stairs to Phil’s room, where we knew the stinky weed could always be found.

I remember thinking he was taking an awfully long time to come back. I had heard him open Phil’s door, and it had been quiet for several minutes since then. But I was pleasantly drunk and I knew that Phil sometimes hid his weed in an almost always failed attempt to keep us from using it, so I figured that was probably why Chris wasn’t back yet…. The scream dispelled that theory in a heartbeat…

"Jesus fucking Christ! Jesus… shit Phil… Phil WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOU—" It wasn’t a joke… I had never heard Chris, or anyone else for that matter, speak in a voice like that… like he had just come face-to-face with something unimaginably horrible that his mind simply would not allow him to accept… and then the growling started. All of us, at least all of us who are still alive, have heard it a million times by now, but back on that Saturday I was hearing it for the first time. That gurgling, murderous, half-animal, half-human growl that they make when they’re close, when they think they’re about to feed… I very nearly soiled myself when I heard it that first time.

But somehow, drunk and scared shitless as I was, I managed to force myself to my feet and stumble down the stairs… not really wanting to, but knowing that I had to find out what was going on. I smelled him before I saw him… the stench that they can’t reproduce for you in all those B horror movies… the stench of the dead… only he wasn’t dead…

Chris plummeted backwards out of Phil’s room onto the floor just as I was approaching the door. His face contorted in a rictus of fear that stopped me dead in my tracks… I don’t think he even knew I was there. His eyes were locked like a vise onto something still in the room, something I couldn’t see yet, and they were wider than I would have thought it possible for a man’s eyes to be without actually popping out of his skull. He had his hands stretched out before him like he was trying to keep something at a distance, trying to push even the thought of whatever it was that was in that room as far away from him as possible.

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