The shelving units stay put, finally. I stagger backward and when my back bumps into the wall behind me, my body melts, sliding down onto the floor. My bare feet have smears of blood on them. In fact, I have bloody smears all over me. There’s a bloody drag mark all the way through the room leading to the back corner, Mike’s final resting place. There’s the blood-soaked strap laying in a heap on the floor too.

The exhaustion from not sleeping last night followed by such a horrendous day is slowly catching up with me. And yet, I have a lot to clean before I can leave here. First things first, I’ll clean the spots I know that people will see for sure: upstairs.

Standing up, I brace myself against the wall as the room spins. Exhaustion or shock? Who knows at this point. I push off from the wall and walk over to the strap. When I bend down to pick it up, my curiosity gets the better of me and I walk a couple of steps more. Peeking around the last shelving unit, I gasp when I see Mike in the corner.

The shelving units have crushed him against the wall in a very unnatural position. His head is bent at a weird angle against his shoulder, one leg is still bent up against the wall, while the other one seems to be pinned underneath the shelf. And his body is twisted in a way that even a yogi master wouldn’t be able to breathe.

I shouldn’t have looked.

Honestly, I shouldn’t have done any of this. I should’ve just gone to the police. Except they’ve never done anything except metaphorically slap his hands in the past which just made him madder. Even the restraining order was a joke. No. This was the only way to fix this.

I grab the strap as I walk away from the carnage in the corner, deciding that I will come back to this room if I have any time or energy left tonight. Otherwise, it’ll have to be another day when I can sneak down here.

I walk out of the room and lock the door before closing it. That will at least give me a minute. Chances are, most of the people who work here have lost their keys to these rooms. When I turn around and face the long tile walkway back to the stairs, there’s a lot of blood. And it’s smeared everywhere. There are even smudges of blood on the walls where he must’ve bumped on our way through here.

“Just get the cleaners and some rags. Something. Focus.” I desperately try to reign myself back in as the amount of cleaning ahead of me is daunting.

When I get back to the bottom of the stairs, what I saw on the floor down here is nothing. There’s drips and smudges down the steps and on the railing. I tiptoe in between the bloody spots, hoping that I don’t make more to clean, as I make my way upstairs. I can feel my stomach lurching, but I fight it back. I don’t need more to clean.

The puddle of blood on the floor where Mike bled out has started to congeal. It’s not bright red anymore like it was when it was squirting out. Now it’s much darker. I hope that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be harder to clean.

The clock on my computer says 9:43pm. I’ve got at least several hours of cleaning to do. When I open the maintenance closet, I immediately turn on the light. There’s a bucket and a mop on the floor.

Do I dare use that?

I don’t know as if I have much of a choice at this point. I grab the bleach from one of the shelves and drag the mop and bucket into the little breakroom. The bucket is too big to put into the sink, so I use the spray hose on the back of the sink to squirt water into it. I try to get the water as hot as I can while filling the bucket, but I didn’t let it warm up first, so I don’t have high hopes. I just need to get this done.

I dump a bunch of bleach into the water, swirl it around with my hand, and am happy to see that it took the blood off from my hand. I flip the water off and drag the bucket and mop over to the puddle on the floor. I immediately think that if I just start mopping and add more liquid to the puddle on the floor, that it’s going to make an even bigger mess. I sprint to the maintenance closet and grab a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag. I’m going to have to take this all home with me.

I shake the garbage bag open, inflating it with air, drop to my knees and start using the paper towels to scoop up the puddle of blood. As long as I don’t think of it as Mike’s blood, I can keep my stomach where it’s supposed to be instead of in my throat. Once I get the majority of the puddle blotted up with the paper towels and throw them in the garbage bag, I can begin the long arduous journey of mopping this place.

The edges of the puddle where the blood dried the most is the hardest to get up. It takes some scrubbing but I’m finally able to get it all up. After changing the bleach water a couple of times, and finding blood splatters in the weirdest places (the transfer to my co-worker’s phone must’ve come from my hands), it’s time to start cleaning the stairs and the basement floor.

I fill up the bucket with clean bleach water once more but when I get to the top of the stairs, I realize that there’s no way I’m going to get a full bucket down those stairs. Well, I can at least mop the stairs by soaking the mop head and then going down the stairs and mopping my way up, but that’s going to make the stairs very slippery. And I’m still in bare feet because I didn’t want to get any blood on my shoes.

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I’m stumped and it’s late, getting later and later the longer I sit here trying to figure it out. So, I can’t take down a full bucket, but what about a half full bucket? I race back over to the sink and struggle to lift the bucket up to the sink. When I tip it over to dump out some of the bleach water, the water splashes, getting on my clothes and on a couple of the decorative towels Viv insists we keep in the breakroom.

Well, those are ruined.

Maybe if I leave a bleach cleaner out on the counter someone will think that someone else did it by accident? I reach down into the cupboard under the sink and take out the spray bleach cleaner, setting it next to the faucet and the decorative towel that already has some spots turning lighter. It’s going to have to do for now.

I take the half full bucket back to the top of the stairs and see if I can lift it. It’s lighter but definitely awkward. There’s no way that I can take the mop and the bucket down together. I decide to just let the mop fall down the stairs and then struggle to carefully bring the bucket down. Step by step I slowly go down the stairs. My toe hits the end of the mop handle and I almost trip but catch myself with my elbow against the rail.

Once I’m at the bottom, I set the bucket down and get to work. I can feel the adrenaline beginning to wear off and the lack of sleep starting to win. I get the stairs and the floor clean, but I forgot a rag for the railing! C’mon!

Back up the stairs I go, leaving toe prints in the freshly mopped stairs, grab a rag from the maintenance closet and then head back down. There’s enough bleach water on the floor upstairs that I’m able to get the rag wet and clean the railing on my way back down to the bucket. Once I’m done and everything looks like it normally does, I decide to dip the rag into the bleach water in the bucket, ring it out, and then do another swipe of the surfaces. It’s a good thing I did it too because I found a random blood splatter on the underside of the top step where Mike’s head flopped.

After the difficulty of getting that mop and bucket down here, I decide I might as well clean the records room that Mike is in. I drag the bucket and mop over to the door and try to turn the doorknob.

It doesn’t move.

Damn it! I locked it. And naturally my keys are upstairs.

Forget it. I don’t have enough energy left in me to get the key. I’ll come back another time and clean that room. I still need to drag this stuff back upstairs and clean the mop and bucket so I can put it away.

It takes more effort than I realize to get the bucket back upstairs and then I run back down to get the mop and the rag. I glance around and everything looks like it should, thankfully, so I turn off the light when I reach the top of the stairs. I close the basement door behind me and start cleaning up the supplies I used from the closet.

I toss the rag into the garbage bag with the paper towels. I look down at my clothes. These will all have to be burned. Thankfully I have an old-fashioned burn barrel in my backyard left behind by the elderly lady who sold me the house. I start a pile by the exit with all of the things I’ll need to take with me.

I check my phone and desk for blood, check the chairs, the walls, the counter, even the edges where the grout meets the half wall to the break room. I think it looks clean. It’s not exactly bright in here but it’ll have to do for now. I clean out the bucket and the mop, place them back into the maintenance closet, double check that everything in there is clean as well, and close the door.

I try to slip my shoes back on, but the blood on my feet is slightly sticky still so my feet don’t slide as well as they usually do into these loafers. Great. I’ll have to burn these too. I really loved these shoes. I grab my purse and turn off the light over my desk. The clock on my computer says 1:24am. What a night and I still have to drive home.

Once I get outside the door and lock it behind me, I turn around to face my car.

And Mike’s truck.

Shit! What am I going to do with his truck? I don’t even have his keys or anything. They’re probably in his pocket down in the 2010 Records Room. They’re probably not even reachable the way he’s all crammed in there. I’m just going to have to let it go. Maybe he “took off with someone.”

A friend.

After work.

For a drink.

And I was the only one who saw him leave. Yeah. The police are definitely going to be knocking on my door asking questions because I’m the last one to see him.

I can’t worry about that right now. I have to focus on getting home and cleaning myself up. I pop the trunk, toss the garbage bag inside, and close it quietly. If there’s any neighbors awake at this hour, I don’t need them looking out their window seeing me doing weird suspicious things.

I slip inside my car and start the engine. The muffler roars to life and it’s now that I really wished I had kept up on the maintenance of this old car. I back out of my parking spot and begin the journey home.

And that’s when my body feels that it’s okay to start crying.

The stoplights are only blinking yellow lights now, which is good because the tears are making things blurry. I finally get home, wipe my face with the back of my hand and put the car in park. When I look up at the picture window facing the driveway, I see Squeaker sitting on the back of the couch waiting for me. She’s so sweet and if I weren’t covered in blood, I would run in and scoop her up in my arms, smooshing my face into her fur.

I grab my purse, drag my weary body out of the car, and lock the door behind me. I pop the trunk and grab the garbage bag too so that I can burn that first thing after work tomorrow. Every muscle in my body hurts. The adrenaline feels like it’s out of my system now because I can feel the slap on my face and the bruises on my chin. I can feel everything.

I open the front door and Squeaker jumps on my legs. “Hi girl! I’ve missed you. I hope your day was better than mine.” I ruffle the fur on the top of her head and then change my mind about petting her too much until after I take a shower. “Sorry girl, I’m a mess.”

I toss my purse onto the couch, set the garbage bag on the table in the kitchen as I make my way down the hall to the bathroom. I flip on the light and take a look at myself in the mirror.

“Bloody hell.”