I raced through the fire doors and into the stairway which I could tell was used only occasionally by smokers, likely in the bitter cold winter months.  My footsteps echoed loudly in the dark, dusty concrete chamber as I leapt down half of the first flight of stairs.

Turning, I took several more steps, then, hand on the railing, vaulted from the midway point of the flight I was on to the midway point of the flight below.  Every second flight had an open concept access to the lower flight, allowing me to do this regularly on my descent.

I figured, hurdling and skipping half of each flight, I was buying myself precious seconds.

I was at least ten flights down when I heard the hurried footsteps of my pursuers entering somewhere above, likely back up on the sixty-second floor.

“He’s heading down,” I heard a gruff voice say.

Another voice, softer, higher pitched, spoke, likely into a radio.  “Hal and I are pursuing him down staircase C.  Get over to that exit on the lobby level and start heading up for the intercept.”

In the time that I heard these words, I was able to descend another four floors and was just passing the fifty-second floor.

Hearing the security guard mention the express elevator, I tried to remember if I’d seen Mr. Sweatypants getting into one of the express elevators or one of the regular ones.  The two express elevators, as I remember from my ascent, serviced the concourse, the lobby and the fortieth through seventieth floors.  The other two elevators, as I recall, went to every single floor in the building.

Mr. Sweatypants hadn’t taken the same elevator I’d ascended on, which had been an express one, and which had taken about two minutes.  But had he taken one of the “all stops” elevators?  If so, that meant it would take him perhaps ten or more minutes to get to the bottom.

It was a bit after 1:40, perhaps a bit too early for mid afternoon breaks; but perhaps not too early for smokers needing to sneak outside for a quick early afternoon butt.  I was hoping for a lot of those -- regardless of whether or not my quarry was on an express elevator -- because for every single floor the elevator had to stop on, it bought me precious seconds.

I launched myself down another half dozen floors, trying to imagine where the stinky elevator car might be; I allowed myself to become amused at the poor idiots who got onto that elevator car with my overly sweaty friend.  Knowing full well that my sense of smell was at least a dozen times more sensitive than the average persons, I still pitied anyone who got in that close proximity with him, particularly in such a confined space.  Short of someone with a bad head cold or infected sinus, it was likely unbearable to be that close to him for more than a minute.

I recalled the slight garlicky tinge to his sweat and marveled at how, despite how awful a person’s garlic breath could be, how much worse smelling that garlic coming out of a person’s pores were.

It was difficult to contain another series of shudders, even as I continued to launch myself down another half dozen flights in as many seconds.

As I was running, another flash from the night before hit me.

Screeching brakes.  A car door opening and closing.  But all of this from somewhere behind.  In front, a canine beast, filled with anger, with blood fury, running.

I was in pursuit.

I raced through the damp dark alleyway, a human voice calling, shouting something indistinct somewhere behind me.  A warning, a shout of anger was all I had time to interpret in it.

Ahead of me was all that interested me.

The other wolf was getting away.  And quickly.

I had to press forward.

Had to keep moving.

Then I felt the piercing pain in my hind leg before I heard the echoing blast of the gunshot.

And more out of surprise and shock, I tripped, rolled, bounced off the alley wall.

This was the clearest, longest flashback yet.

I wondered about this flashback -- wondered at how inspired by existing stimuli they might be.  As I’d mused before, I didn’t have much recollection of my time as a wolf, and often attributed that partially to the fact that it helped me maintain at least a modicum of sanity, particularly given the circumstances.  I mean, how difficult would it be for the average person to accept the fact that, during full moons, he would uncontrollably morph into a lupine beast and run around on all fours, hunting small animals, stalking the night?

Get what I’m saying?

I still think that part of what keeps me somewhat grounded and normal is that fact that with my changes comes a blanket amnesia.  A learned forgetting of the incident.  And it’s not that I think that running around as a wolf is all that traumatic.  In fact, quite the opposite is true.  Over the years I have had several great momentary sensory flashbacks that are among the finest of my experiences.

Did you realize, for example, that the calm cool evening of a full moon actually smells different than a night without a full moon?  Or that you could actually hear the sound of snowfall in Central Park?  Yes, muted, and well below the sounds of the background traffic and other city noises.  But it’s there, however indistinguishable from human perception.

So it’s not necessarily the experience of being a wolf that my mind is protecting me from.

It’s likely the change itself.

I can only imagine the extent of the excruciating pain that comes with the complete metamorphosis from human and into wolf form.  Or from wolf form and back into human.  I mean, just think of the difference in the simple things, such as size, bone density, skull shape.  With such a dramatic modification in my very being, there must also come a phenomenal pain, unlike any a normal human would ever experience.  Perhaps, of course, the pain a woman’s body goes through in child birth might come close, given at how dramatically her vaginal opening expands to allow passageway of the baby.

So take that actual human known experience and pain, and multiply it to an entire body expanding and contracting to such an extent that it biologically changes into a completely different mammal.

That’s how I imagine the metamorphosis from human to wolf and from wolf to human might be.

And why I’m quite thankful not to have that experience in my memory.

But in any case, I often wonder if those temporary flashes into my time as a wolf are inspired by stimuli in my regular life.

It seems, for example, that the flashbacks I’ve been having about my previous night as a wolf have tied in quite tightly with things going on today.

When I’m running fast, or pursuing something, I’m having flash backs to running as a wolf.

I laughed at myself; Pseudo-Freudian that I was.

Nearing the thirtieth floor -- I could tell by the numerals painted in bright red on the wall beside the fire doors leading back into the proper office area -- I figured it had been going on at least two full minutes since I’d started my descent.

My pursuers were still both in the stairway, evidenced by the sound of their shoes on the concrete stairs and their labored breathing.  I thought, for a moment, about the guard who they had radioed to start heading up this stairwell to intercept me, and wondered why another guard hadn’t been sent up to something like the 30th floor or so to intercept me sooner.

But then again, I was just a run of the mill intruder.  Building security was likely just going through the motions of assuring confidence in the building clients -- they were riding the office of a pesky intruder.  There hadn’t even been the mention, at least not in the call I’d overheard, about even a theft or assault.  I mean, it’s not as if I’d been walking around the 62nd floor waving a machine gun at people and firing random shots.

No, I was a somewhat harmless intruder.

So, while they’d put on a show for the benefit of their clients, they weren’t going to be setting any record books in terms of calling out the troops.

On the flip side, they likely weren’t going to just give up pursuing me.  After all, you never knew when what might be thought of a harmless intruder could turn out to be a deranged killer, or a terrorist, or who knows.  And I doubt that any one of these “polyester police” would want to be the one that decided to call off the chase, particularly if I turned out to be an actual threat.

After all, these were the strongest “cover your own ass” times we’d ever known.

Despite that, I was still a bit surprised, in fact, that there were still three of them chasing me -- the two about a dozen or so floors above me and then the one supposedly heading up to intercept.  There likely only needed to be the one chasing me down and the other coming up to intercept.  But who was I to judge?

Speaking of three, I still hadn’t heard the third guy, the one they’d radioed, enter the stairwell below me, and wondered if perhaps they’d called him off.  But I’m sure I would have heard them radio him if that were the case.

But then again, with all the echoes in here, and all the heavy breathing, not only from the two guys coming down after me, but from myself -- particularly with all the vaulting and leaping and landing I was doing -- I might very well have just not heard someone else come in.

Rather than worry over it, though, I assured myself that I would certainly be able to detect some indication of someone coming up from the stairwell below -- if not the sound, then perhaps a scent.

Sure enough, after descending another ten floors, I heard a set of fire doors below slamming and the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairs.

I kept moving as fast as I could for the moment, trying to figure out what I was going to do.

While I could easily put the guy out of commission, I wasn’t in the game of hurting an innocent civilian.  Yeah, I know, he’s a security guard and there’s always the possibility of taking some lumps in his daily duties -- but he wasn’t a “bad guy” and despite my own personal needs here, there was no reason to inflict any sort of pain on him.

The other thing, of course, was that he likely carried a gun, and would have it drawn.

And as skilled as I have become at hand-to-hand combat, and as strong as my constitution has become to heal from my wounds, I’m not one to knowingly walk straight into a situation where a gun is going to be pulled on me.

Yes, despite the fact the character in my novels faced bad guys with guns as part of his daily routine, it was all a convenient fiction.  Personally, I wasn’t a fan of them, not was I at all comfortable with the thought of having one pointed at me. 

Up until this point, of course, I don’t think I’d ever actually had a gun pointed at me -- unless, of course, you count that still blurry and unknown incident from the night before that had come to me in a series of puzzle pieces of flashback; the end result, of course, had been that bullet lodged in my leg.

Obviously, I’d not only had a gun pointed at me in the past twenty four hours, but I’d also been shot by one.  At least most of the memory of that occurrence was still repressed somewhere in the recesses of my mind.  And I certainly wasn’t looking forward to having a similar experience in human form.

As I neared the 14th floor, I stopped running and just listened.  The two pursuers above were now quite a bit behind.  Not moving nearly as fast as I, there were likely at least 20 stories up.  The guard below, not as tired since his chase had just begun, was moving pretty quickly by the sounds of things.  If I had to guess by the approaching intensity of his echoes, he was perhaps half a dozen flights below me.

I waited a few seconds, seeing if any of them said anything to one another on their radios about not hearing me running any longer.  They said nothing, just continued to huff and puff as they ran.  The sweat and cologne odor from the guard approaching from below finally came up to me.

Okay, I figured.  Now was the time to slip out of this stairwell.  Time was precious, particularly since I wasn’t just trying to elude these guards, but, more importantly I was chasing an elevator down.

I carefully opened the fire doors to the fourteenth floor, peeked into the vacant hallway, then slipped out and gently closed the door behind me, ensuring it closed with the gentlest of clicks.  From this side, it didn’t sound like the latch closing was loud, despite the soft echo of it -- but you never knew.

My pursuers were likely huffing and wheezing so loudly that they couldn’t even hear their own footfalls.  But you never knew.

Walking as quickly as I could without looking like a fugitive on the run, I headed over to the stairway at the other end of the hall.

I entered stairway B -- labeled in the center of the door with a slightly smaller and less dramatic font but in the same color that the stairway floor numbers had appeared on the other side of the fire doors.

Back out of sight from the office area, I resumed the combination run-leap-land technique which I had gotten quite good at.  Hey, who needs to wait for an elevator anymore when you’ve perfected a routine like this?

I was down the dozen plus floors without further incident, but my detour had added perhaps as much as an additional minute to my time getting downstairs.

As I came out through the fire doors and out into the lobby, again slowing down to a quick walk so as not to alert anyone, or perhaps get the attention of the guard likely stationed at a desk near the front of the lobby, I knew I hadn’t beat the elevator down.  The fresh scent of Mr. Sweatypants was still strong in the lobby -- but I could tell that he’d already been through here.  Despite the mingling scent of several dozen people in the area, his pungent odor spoke clearly to me.

He’d already been through here.  But, hopefully, only a few moments earlier.  It hadn’t taken me more than perhaps four or five minutes to make it down the stairs, not at the speed I’d been going.  And, even if he’d been on an express elevator, there was still the possibility of one or more stops delaying his own descent.

I followed his scent out the lobby doors in time to see him sliding his sweaty bulk into the back seat of a Cadillac that was double parked on the street in front of the building.  

“Not again,” I muttered, seeing the sweaty stinky hulk close the car door.  This would be the second time today these gangsters had gotten away from me in a car.  As good as I was at following a scent, it was virtually impossible to track someone in a moving vehicle.  I mean, if Mr. Sweatypants had gotten onto a motorcycle or moped I’d at least have a chance of following his “open air” scent halfway across the city.  But he was getting into a closed vehicle.

I had time, of course, to lunge at the vehicle.

But to what end?

With the back car door open, I detected the scent of gun oil, not from the gun I knew Mr. Sweatypants was carrying, but from at least one other gun inside the vehicle.  The scent of one of the other men from the alley earlier today was also in the car.  And the scent of a new person, this one a smoker.

So, launch myself at a car filled with armed gangsters?

I wasn’t the smartest person in Manhattan, but I wasn’t stupid enough to attempt that.

Perhaps ten feet from the idling Cadillac, I was determined that I was going to do my best to track this vehicle on foot.  If there was a smoker inside, perhaps he would crack one of the windows open and I’d at least have a chance of tracking the car as it moved across the city.  But as I was doing this, Mr. Sweatypants glanced out the window and stared right at me through the tinted glass just as the car had started to inch away.

It was obvious that he recognized me immediately.

He muttered a single word that I couldn’t distinguish to his colleagues in the car, and the vehicle stopped.

Mr. Sweatypants opened the door, training his gun on me and said.  “Get in.”