Coffee Part 4

I stood up and went to my colleague's desk, both hands behind my back so that she wouldn't see the blade. She looked up at me with an expression of faint curiosity and paused typing, red fingernails poised over her keyboard.

I stumbled, feet clumsy and dragging. Sweat dribbled into my eyes, stinging them, and I wiped my forehead with a sleeve.

The wrong sleeve.

Her look of mild curiosity transmuted to fear as she saw the letter opener in my hand, and she defensively folded her arms across her chest.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

"I'm... sorry," I answered, haltingly, and then I slashed her throat.

I felt revulsion welling up in me as I felt the resistance of skin and cartilage under the dull edge of the blade. Blood started to run down her neck, but in thin trickles only. She made a strangled scream and grabbed my wrists, but her petite body made her strength no match for mine, even in my weakened state.

With a grunt I reversed the blade so the serrated edge was pressed against the wound. As a mixture of panic, revulsion and disgust swirled inside me, I began to saw.

Her struggles didn't last long. Dark blood pulsed in thick, slow streams as I cut through her jugular vein, and her strangled screams became a wet, thick noise. At the edges of the cut her blood became frothy, brightening to crimson as she sucked air through it.

When she died a terrible death rattle emerged from her cut throat, a long and rasping gurgle that reminded me of a blocked drain. I dropped the letter opener and staggered backwards, a sense of eerie disbelief colouring my perceptions.

Her front was plastered in blood and her desk was a scarlet nightmare. Even her keyboard was full of blood, the neat angular channels between her keys like the drains in an abattoir's floor.

My computer beeped.