Serpents Rising

by David A. Poulsen

  Owen’s unseeing eyes seemed to be fixed on the blood, as they had probably been, watching as the life flowed out of him onto a barren warehouse floor.

  I looked slowly at the closed door to the other room. I was shaking, shaking violently, and I couldn’t stop. I had to open that door and look in the other room. And I knew that if the killer or killers were in there, opening that door would be the last thing I ever did. Or I could find myself looking at more death — at Owen’s girlfriend Jen. Or Zoe. Or both of them.

  Yet even as those thoughts overwhelmed me, there was a part of me — of my mind — that seemed to be coming back. I was at least able to think, consider what I had to do. It was that part of my mind that told me not to touch anything.

  I raised an elbow and pushed on the door. It slowly drifted open.

  The room was empty. No, that was wrong. There were no people, alive or dead, in the room. But it wasn’t empty. I’d remembered the first time Cobb and I had been in the place, how Zoe had tried to make the most impossible of spaces into something at least a little orderly.

  This room was not orderly now; it was a shambles. Broken pieces of dishes and glass, a mattress that had been cut or torn into small bits of fabric and smashed coils scattered around the floor, a dresser with its drawers strewn around the room, clothing ripped into pieces … that was the room now.

  But I didn’t see bodies or even blood and for several seconds tried to make sense of what I was seeing. None of it felt real.

  Cobb. I had to get to Cobb, let him deal with this. He was the detective. He could try to find meaning in all of this — understand it.

  I had to get out of the building. I took two steps backward and turned. I went by Owen’s body without looking at him again. I stopped at the door, hesitating, wondering if there was something I should do before I left. I couldn’t think of anything. Without touching the handle, I gently closed the door, pathetically, like I was trying not to waken someone who was sleeping.

  I shook my head and began to walk, forcing myself not to run. And then I heard it.

  A sound. I wasn’t sure what. Muffled … a hiccup or sob … something … from over there. To my right. I walked as quietly as I could to where I thought I’d heard the sound. It seemed to have come from the place next door.

  The killer or killers? No, whoever had destroyed Owen wouldn’t be hiding from a lone, unarmed man. I was counting on that. If I was wrong …

  When Cobb and I had come here the first time we hadn’t looked in there. There’d been no signs of anyone having been there. Ever. Or at least since this incarnation of the building had come into existence.

  Yet I was sure that a sound, almost surely a human sound, had come from behind the door that was hanging from a couple of hinges. I pried it far enough open to allow me to look inside. Still nothing. And no recurrence of the noise, whatever it had been.

  I manoeuvred my way inside. It was dark but the darkness wasn’t total. I could see well enough to allow me to survey the room. Nothing to indicate it was, or had been inhabited by anything more than whatever crawled the ceilings, walls, and floors of an all but abandoned warehouse.

  I turned to go … and heard the sound again, not more than a few steps from where I was standing. It seemed to be coming from the vicinity of where I guessed the kitchen sink would have been located if the building had been completed. Just a space and some pipes were there. And below that several large pieces of cardboard leaning against the wall. No, not against the wall. They were leaning against some framing jutting out from the wall, meaning that there was a space behind the cardboard and below the space for the sink.

  A space large enough for …

  I pushed the cardboard aside in one motion and found myself looking at two people crouched down. My mind had been working overtime since I’d found Owen, and now it strangely remembered the scene in the movie A Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls aside his robe and shows Scrooge the two poor and starving orphans.

  There were two people in the space and they did look like the two people in the movie. But they weren’t orphans, at least not child orphans. I reached out my hand. Zoe was the first to take it and allow me to pull her out of the space. Then I helped Jen out of there and to her feet as well.

  There was blood over the front of the hoodie she was wearing and some on her hands as well.

  “Are you hurt?” I kept my voice to barely more than a whisper.

  She shook her head and I guessed she had gone to Owen in some kind of effort to help him. It was obvious that it had been Jen who had been doing the sobbing. And now as she realized that she wasn’t in immediate danger, the sobs became louder. I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned against me, shaking.

  “Come on,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

  I steered Jen toward the stairs with Zoe making sure she was right beside me. None of us spoke and Jen seemed to be regaining control. The sobs became intermittent.

  We reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. I raised my finger to my lips.

  “Let me make sure we’re okay before we go out there.”

  I poked my head out the door and peered around before stepping completely outside. I couldn’t see anything or anyone that raised alarm bells and the only sounds were from distant machinery performing some kind of industrial tasks.

  I stepped back inside. “Okay, my car is across the street. It looks clear out there so let’s go there together, get in, and get the hell out of here.”

  “But what about…?” Zoe’s eyes flicked upwards in the direction of her rooms.

  “We’ll deal with that once we know we’re safe and away from here.”

  She nodded and Jen grabbed my arm. She was still shaking. I wanted to say something reassuring but couldn’t imagine what might be appropriate in the face of what they had seen in the minutes just passed.

  “Let’s go,” I said and led them out into the daylight.

  We hurried to the Accord. Zoe and Jen scrambled into the back seat as I threw myself behind the steering wheel and we roared off. I spent most of the first few blocks looking in the rearview mirror and taking several turns and even a couple of U-turns to thwart any potential tails. But after ten minutes or so, I slowed it down and looked for some place to stop and regroup.

  I chose the parking lot of a Starbucks on 11th Avenue, just out of the downtown area. I turned to look at Jen, who had her head tilted back on the seat, then at Zoe, who was watching me.

  “Okay, I need you to tell me what happened. Cobb will want details, but give me the condensed version.”

  Zoe nodded, spoke slowly. “Well, I went off to talk to the people I’m going to stay with. Owen and Jen headed for the restaurant to have that breakfast and we were going to meet on the way back here. But in the middle of breakfast, Owen remembered that he’d left his ID at my place. He got so worked up about it, Jen told him to run back and get it and come back to the restaurant.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at Jen, who was crying again, this time silently and with her hand over her face. “When he didn’t come back she waited and met me and we went back together. They were going to help me pack up my stuff and be ready for when you got there to pick me up. But when we … went into … my …” she faltered. “You saw … what we saw.”

  “Did you see anyone else?

  She shook her head. “We freaked. Jen tried to lift Owen but then we heard someone coming so we hid. We thought it might be whoever had … but it was you.”

  I nodded and took a twenty out of my wallet. “Okay, go get us three coffees. The biggest they’ve got.”

  For some reason I figured coffee was the thing that would most help Jen right at that moment.

  “I have to call Cobb and see how he wants us to handle this.”

  Zoe nodded, looked at Jen, then hurried into the Starbucks.

  I pulled my coat off, reached back, and wrapped it around Jen, who was still shaking. I cranked up the heat in
the Accord, pulled out my phone, and called Cobb, hoping like hell he was out of his meeting at the school. He answered on the second ring.

  I only got as far as telling him Owen was dead and the girls were with me. He interrupted me. “Where are you?”

  When I told him, he barked, “Don’t move. Don’t talk to anybody. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  It was probably less than that but by the time Cobb got there, Zoe and I had managed to look after a few things. While the girls drank coffee, I had run across the street to a consignment store and bought a couple of changes of clothes and some towels I’d wet down in the store’s washroom.

  It was contrary to Cobb’s instructions but I didn’t think he’d object.

  Jen was relatively cleaned up, had changed, and was at least somewhat composed when Cobb pulled in behind me. Zoe and I were drinking coffee. Jen hadn’t touched hers. Cobb pulled open the passenger door and slid in.

  He looked at me, then swung around to look at each of the girls in turn. “Okay, first of all, is everybody okay?”

  The girls nodded and I pointed to the pile of bloody clothing on the floor of the back seat. “Jen came in contact with Owen. We got her cleaned up.”

  Cobb took some time to think about that, finally nodded. “Okay, I need to hear it again. From the beginning.”

  Zoe, as she had the first time, did the talking. Cobb listened until she got to the part where she and Jen were walking back to the warehouse.

  “What time was that?”

  “I think it was around two-thirty.”

  “Where did you two meet?”

  “In front of the motorcycle restaurant.”

  “Then what?” Cobb said.

  “We walked back to my … the place,” Zoe said. “Jen was worried that we’d miss Owen and I told her he’d probably be stoned or sleeping.” She looked hard at Cobb. “Who did that to him?”

  “We don’t know yet. Okay, you got back to the building, then what?”

  “We came in the back way, which is the only way in and out. I guess you know that.”

  Cobb nodded.

  “Then we went up to our floor —”

  Cobb held up his hand. “Let’s back up a second. Did you notice any vehicles parked on the street?”

  The girls looked at each other and shook their heads in unison.

  “I … we were like … talking. I don’t know if we were paying that much attention to what was on the street, you know?”

  “How about across the street or down the street a ways?”

  “Uh-uh,” Zoe said.

  “What about people? Anybody walk by?”

  “I didn’t see anybody.” She looked at Jen, who shook her head again.

  “Okay, you went inside. Anything look different? Sounds, smells, anything?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Jen?”

  “I … I didn’t notice anything.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “We were talking all the way up the stairs. Everything was all like normal. We got to my place and the door was closed. I pushed it open and Jen called to Owen. We didn’t see him at first, but then …” She looked down for a minute then raised her eyes to meet Cobb’s. “If those people find Jay before you do —”

  “We’ll find him,” Cobb said. He turned slightly to face Jen. “You came in contact with Owen. Did you move him?”

  “No … well, maybe his arm. I wanted him to get up. I thought …” She broke into sobs again and Zoe pulled her closer and wrapped her arms around Jen’s shoulders. I thought she’d done well to be as composed as she was for this long.

  Cobb waited, his jaw working up and down.

  Jen sniffed and sat up straight, making an obvious effort to regain control. A minute or so and she was ready to continue.

  “I think I moved his arm,” she said again.

  “Okay, then what?”

  “I wanted to hold him, to kiss his face, because by then I knew he was dead, but … I couldn’t. I couldn’t even —” The sobs came again and Zoe reached for her a second time.

  “Jen,” Cobb said, “no one could have done more than you did.”

  I looked at Cobb. The look on his face as he leaned forward over the seat, as if to be closer to Jen, was equal parts genuine sadness and tightly controlled anger.

  “Did either of you go in the other room? The back room?” I asked.

  Cobb looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “That room was trashed,” I said. “Stuff thrown around, everything kind of torn apart.”

  Cobb said, “Like the killers had been looking for something.”

  “We didn’t go back there,” Zoe replied. “I pulled Jen up to her feet and told her we had to get out of there right away in case the killers were still somewhere in the building or maybe coming back.”

  “And that’s when you heard me coming.”

  Zoe nodded. “Which is when we hid in the place next door. When we were in there we could hear someone looking around in my place but we didn’t know who it was or even how many people it was. And we were afraid if we tried to run they’d get us and …” She looked at me. “We didn’t know it was you. Thank God it was.”

  Cobb turned to me. “Okay, your turn.”

  I wish I could say I was the ideal, very observant witness. I was not. Truth is I was as shaken as the two girls had been by what I’d seen on the third floor of that warehouse.

  I went over it all again, and other than describing in more detail the destruction I’d seen in the back room, I didn’t add much to what we knew.

  “When you looked back there, did you get the feeling they were searching for something, as opposed to, say, straight vandalism?”

  I thought about my answer, trying to recall what I’d seen. I nodded tentatively. “I think so. There wasn’t crap written on the walls or anything. It just looked like everything had been either torn apart or thrown around.”

  Cobb looked at Zoe, who responded without hesitation. “I’m not exactly a neatness freak but that was where I slept most of the time. It didn’t look like what he’s describing when I left there this morning.”

  Cobb didn’t say anything for a few minutes. It looked like he was gathering his thoughts. “Okay, here’s the deal. No one goes back there unless and until I give the word. The bad guys could come back there any time and we’ve seen what they can do. Don’t think they’ll take it easy with you because you’re females or because you don’t know where Jay is — if that’s what this was about.

  “We have to let the police know. I’ll go there and see if there’s anything I can learn, then I’ll phone the cops and tell them I just discovered the body. That’s probably going to tie me up for a while answering questions.”

  “Like why were you there in the first place?” I asked.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “And your answer would be…?”

  “I’m still working on that. In the meantime, can you take Zoe to her new place?” He looked at her. “Was the name of the people you’re going to stay with or their address, anything that might lead these guys there, anything like that around your place?”

  She held up her purse. “In here. That’s the only place I have it.”

  “Good. Then you’ll be safe. And Jen, the police are going to identify Owen. In fact, it’s probably best if I tell them who he is. That means they may come looking for you. Where have you and Owen been staying?”

  “At a shelter up in Renfrew. But we were probably going to be kicked out of there because they have a zero tolerance on drugs and Owen …” Her voice trailed off.

  Cobb nodded. “The cops might be able to track you there, which means you might have to answer some questions.”

  “Or she could stay with me,” Zoe interjected. “The Callaghans are really nice and I know they wouldn’t mind. They’re basically giving me a room in the basement of their house. They said I could stay as long as I want. And Jen and I could share the room … at least for
a while.”

  “Okay, that should work. Have you still got our cell numbers?”

  She nodded. “But that’s all I have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All my stuff, clothes, everything is back there.” She nodded in the direction of the warehouse.

  “Sorry, but what I said before still stands. No one goes near that warehouse.”

  “Which is why God invented Value Village,” I said.

  Jen was crying softly and Zoe put an arm around her. Jen looked at each of us through tear-filled eyes. “This doesn’t seem right. We’re all carrying on like nothing happened to Owen. Like he isn’t dead. But he is.”

  Cobb gave her a minute before he said anything. “You’re right, Jen. This stinks. But it’s not that we want to just forget about what happened to Owen. We don’t have any choice. These are very dangerous people and the first thing we have to do is make sure you two are going to be safe.

  “As soon as that’s looked after, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the people who did this to Owen pay the price for it. I promise you that.”

  Jen sniffed and offered a slight nod.

  “We better get started,” I said. “Mr. Cobb has some things he needs to get on with.”

  Cobb looked at me. “You okay with this or …” He started to reach for his wallet.

  “I’m good. It’s been a long time since I’ve been shopping with a couple of teenage girls. We’ll stop by the shelter to get Jen’s stuff, then make a Value Village run, and I’ll drop the girls at the new place.”

  “Buy Zoe a cell phone and a pay-as-you-go card. I’ll pay for it.” I opened my mouth to object but he held up a hand to stop me. “And there’s one more thing,” Cobb said. “We need to let Owen’s family know. The cops will do it too, but I think it might be better coming from someone else.”

  Jen shook her head. “There is no family. Owen’s mom put him in foster care when he was thirteen. He only saw her a couple of times after that and not at all in the last few years. He tried to phone her last Christmas. The phone was disconnected and he had no idea where she ended up.”