by Morgana Wray
We traversed a small hallway. There were only three doors in the hallway. Sal stopped in front of one of them.
“What’s behind the red door? Is there something that isn’t legit back there?” My eyes focused on the chains that barricaded the sturdy red, metallic door.
Sal seemed a bit taken aback the second I mentioned the door. His hands seemed to roam and shifted closer to the rifle which was slung on his shoulder. I could have sworn that I saw his chest swell up like a blowfish. The tension between those shifty eyes of his was very intense. In a seemingly laid back manner he uncurled his fists and poked the keys into the keyhole of the door in front of him. The door which he was attempting to open had the label “Room 2” on it.
“You don’t have to concern yourself with that door. Just stick to your room and the other spaces. The red door-that's off limits.” Sal arched his lips, flashing a fake smile at me.
“Why is that? What are you afraid of us finding down there?” I smirked coyly. “You haven’t got anyone tied up in there, have you?”
“I am not into kink, old man! I wasn’t raised that way!” Sal snickered. “But if you must know. We have been broken into and had supplies stolen. I had to take some extra precautions. Hence, the chains on the door. Got to make things difficult for the thieving bastards.”
Sal had one more shot at unlocking the door with the last key in the bunch. It turned perfectly in the keyhole and the door swung backwards. We trooped in as soon as Sal sidestepped away from the entrance. The room was box-shaped and had no window. There were two sets of bunk beds in the room. Diane didn’t waste any time climbing into one of the beds. She creeped up the ladder and rested her back on the polka dot beddings on the mattress.
“This feels comfy. I just want to shut my eyes and fade away.” Diane spoke softly.
“You do that. You all deserve some shuteye. This is where our staff from out of town bed their heads. None of them turned up today. I am sure your guess is as good as mine.” Sal rambled on, gripping the door handle, as he hovered about within the gap of the half-opened door.
“Are you saying that they have barricaded the entire town?”
“That sort of makes sense now. If that is true then we are being quarantined. We must be on some sort of lockdown.” I rolled my eyes from side to side in awe.
Diane seemed a bit panicked now. She tossed and turned to her side and gripped the railings of the bunk bed. Looking down at me, she moved her quaking lips. “How long are we going to be kept here? This can’t be legal, locking us up as if we are animals, can it?”
“I am afraid that the government can enforce whatever safety protocols they see fit if it is deemed to be in the national interest. This outbreak that is making people sick. I think they think that it is a security risk. That seems to be why nothing is coming in.” I scratched the top of my head as I paced about within the confines of the small box room.
“If nothing is coming in. That must mean they’re not letting anyone leave either. They are keeping this disease boxed up in Rosewood. They might just be waiting for all of us to die from this sickness. They are just waiting us out, aren’t they?” Diane's eyes watered, as she struggled to cage her pent up emotions.
“That seems to be the general idea, kid! Now you’re getting it!” Sal grinned.
I shot him a murderous glance. He got the picture. He could see I was not pleased with his take on things. He soon slithered away and shut the door behind him. I was glad to see the back of him. He had taken his straight shooting tongue with him. He was too blunt. Too blunt for people that needed gentle handling.
“Ignore that conspiracy nutter. He thrives on situations exactly like this. No doubt it must be candy land for that goofy-eyed sod.” I shook my head disapprovingly.
“But he is right, though, isn’t he?”
“People don’t just turn mad and attack other people in the streets. Most of these guys have been sane all their lives. Its not as if they were a bunch of screwballs or smackheads binging on drugs before all this shit hit the fan. They had steady jobs. The people I saw you put down. They were doctors, lawyers and freaking players from the local rugby team.” Her eyeballs streamed with salty tears.
“I don’t feel safe. I don’t think any of us are safe.” Diane’s puffy eyes glared at me expectantly.
CHAPTER 11
I felt numb in the throat. My words just clung to my palate. There was nothing I could come up with to put Diane’s mind at rest. The kid was clever. Pulling the wool over her eyes would have gone down like a lead balloon. She certainly knew how to make her arguments. If we were to see tomorrow, I was certain that the kid would definitely make a good lawyer. She had the smarts for that sort of thing.
“Mack will keep an eye on things while we crash! You will watch over us won’t you, Mack?” Miss Maple flipped her groggy head back against the pillow under her.
“Huh? What?” I shrugged, wiping the stupor off my eyes.
“You will watch over us, won’t you?” Diane repeated what was said by Miss Maple, grinning widely at me. “Try not to fall asleep on the job.”
I nodded my head reassuringly and sat my backside on one of the empty bunk beds. I had not bothered to switch the lights off. I did not imagine that Diane would have appreciated that, especially after what she had been through. Waking up to a blanket of darkness after having a horrific encounter with real life monsters was more than enough to throw anyone right over the edge.
The ticking noise of the clock on the wall kept my mind slightly occupied. Every time it ticked I had a number pop up in my head. It was a bit like counting sheep except the ticking noise kept me alert. It kept me from dozing off. That didn’t mean that my eyelids did not slide down once or twice. I was human. The body would always try to claim what it had been starved of, eventually.
The clock struck two in the early hours of the morning. My head dropped lower and I was almost falling off the edge of the bunk bed when I heard some clanging. It sounded as if metals were knocking together. I immediately felt curiosity gnawing away at my dulled senses.
I jumped off the bed, slamming the top of my head on the metal parts of the bed above my head. It did not feel pleasant. I would have crashed into the floor if I didn’t have any self-control. With hands pasted on my temple, I yelped, “Ouch! This had better be interesting!”
I grabbed hold of the door handle and pulled it towards my chest very slowly. I was careful not to make too much noise. I opened the door enough for me to see through it. I saw the darkened silhouette of someone lurking in the dark. The drifting silhouette headed for the red door stealthily. Whoever it was did not want to raise any alarms. The obscure figure seemed very careful.
I heard some more fumbling with the chain and then the creaking of the red door, as it swung open. The obscure character slipped behind the door, shutting it ever so gently, as the character went on their merry way. Something didn’t seem quite right. I had to know what was amiss.
There was a reading lamp on a small table in the box room that I was in. I pulled the chord off the socket and armed myself with the reading lamp. I creeped in the darkness, taking very cautious and calculated steps towards the red door.
It had been shut and now it had been opened at a very odd hour of the day. That was enough to prompt suspicion. My heart drummed steadily in my chest as I approached the red door. I got to it soon enough. Hands flattened against the face of the door, I pushed it wide open.
True to what Sal had said, there were supplies in the rather large storage room but not the kind that a fabric spinning factory would need. I could see several racks of bottled water and bags of all sorts of grains heaped on top of each other. This wasn’t the thing that got my jaw dropping. There was a large cache of weapons on the floor. They weren’t just ordinary hunting guns. They were tactical assault weapons with very high firepower. This guy wasn’t messing around.
I couldn’t find the obscure figure. It felt as if the intruder had pulled a Houdini. It
was either that or I really sucked at routing out people. I soon became alert to the sound of dripping. The dripping was slow and constant. Constant enough for me to follow without foreknowledge of where the point of origin of the noise.
My legs felt a bit harder to lift. There was something gunky and sticky beneath my shoes. I pulled my legs up with much effort. I raised my foot up to my abdomen to discover some red, sticky stuff under my shoes.
“What?”
“This stuff looks like blood! It also smells like it!” I coughed, as I wafted the putrid stench that had rushed into my nostrils.
I almost shuddered at the prospect of actually discovering what I suspected I was about to stumble upon. My legs went all jelly-like beneath me and I fell to the ground, rolling awkwardly on the thickened trail of blood on the ground. I smacked my face against something stiff. It was something that was wrapped in tarpaulin. That part of the storage room was darker. I could barely see my own hands. I reached for everything that I could touch that was around me.
My hands pressed against what felt like a human face. The skin on the face felt a bit cold and frosty. My fingers soon ventured into a collapsed crevice in the skull of whomever I was touching. There was no doubt that the person I was putting my hands on was stone dead. The body also had a chunk of their skull missing. The trauma was definitely inflicted at close range. Someone put a bullet through the deceased person’s skull with a shotgun. The damage was too extensive to have been a smaller or less powerful weapon.
“A thief couldn’t have planted this. That son of a bitch is hiding something.” I muttered to myself, scrambling wearily to my feet.
I had lost the lamp. I wasn’t armed with anything other than my fists. There was this sick feeling of vulnerability in the pit of my stomach. I felt my way through the dark spot in the storage room, tracing my way back to where I had come from. I soon found my way back to where the weapons were. I reached to grab one when I felt something hard and metallic press against the back of my head.
“I see you have found Granny dearest. Rest her soul.” Sal's smug creepy voice drummed into my ears.
“I knew something was off about you! Did you put a hole in her brain? Did you shoot her cos you weren’t getting enough hugs, or maybe someone forgot to dose your sick arse with strong enough meds?” I kept my head bowed and spewed out some stinging words.
“Wouldn’t you want to know, you dum fuck! I have the gun! I ask the questions!” Sal gloated, pressing the tip of the rifle harder against the back of my head.
My options were very limited. He could definitely put a hole in the back of my skull quicker than I could move any muscle in my entire body. I had to use my head with this guy. He seemed unstable and not in a good way. Anything could trigger the wrong kind of reaction. He was crazy. He was a fucking hopping mad guy with a rifle pointed at my cranium. I did not need to be a doctor to know that a shot taken from such a close range would turn my brains into scrambled eggs.
“So your granny? Were you guys kind of close?” I rolled my eyes sideways to glean the position of his fingers on the trigger.
His face was slightly moved away from the rifle’s barrel. There was some raw emotion bubbling up to his face at the mention of the dead woman that had been wrapped in tarp. His hands shifted a few centimetres lower on the trigger. He would not have enough force resting on that trigger to take a shot. I had to make a move. I had to make that move pretty soon. I crouched down and kicked Sal in the softer regions where it hurts the most. He sang like a canary and I ripped the gun from his hands, bitchslapping the psycho in the face with his own weapon. I swung the rifle against his face again knocking him unconscious.
“You shouldn’t play with guns! You might blow off something you’re really going to miss, asshole!” I spat at his face before stepping over him.
I scanned the place for something to tie Sal up. Then I found some cable nailed to the side of the wall. The stretch of cable did not appear to be connected to anything that carried power so I yanked them off the wall. I quickly proceeded to find a chair. I didn’t need to look to hard to get my hands on one. I dropped the dead weight sleeping beauty unto a metal chair which I had pinched from the lunch room. I proceeded to hogtie the son of a bitch to the chair.
“Oh good! You lot are awake!” My eyes hovered over the knocked out crazy dude in the chair.
“Of course we are awake. We were hardly going to sleep through that racket.” Diane wiped her eyes.
“Why have you tied him up? What the devil is going on here?” Miss Maple crowed.
I cupped my chin in my jaw and winced a bit. Turning back to face Miss Maple, I pushed a brief smile up on my face. “Your friend here might have shot his own relative. There is a woman with half her skull missing and this certifiably Looney toons chap over here looks mightily suspicious.”
“Why? Because he has a gun? Since when did owning a gun or guns make someone a killer?” Miss Maple shifted her roaming eyes to the large haul of guns mounted on a rack.
“Since they start pointing the their gun at the back of my blooming head and skulking around in the dark at odd hours, hiding bodies!” I tore at my hair in utter frustration at Miss Maple.
I could have grabbed her by her arms and shook the living day lights out of her. She was doing my blooming head in defending that creep the way she was. I was livid. My eyes twitched tensely and it was a bit of a struggle to keep my temper suppressed. I managed to just about put my rage in check.
“Look what I found!” Diane flashed pills in my face.
“What are those?” Miss Maple interjected, wearing a surprised look on her flustered face.
“They seem to be antipsychotics and antidepressants. I recognize these pills. They are meant to keep schizophrenics sedated and less edgy. They sort of tone down the voices in their heads. No wonder our friend here seemed so distracted. He has been listening to those nasty old voices that should have been muted by what used to be in these pill bottles,” I sighed, unscrewing the cap of the pill bottles Diane had passed to me.
Diane almost burst into laughter. She was more awestricken than bemused so she held back the ripples of laughter from erupting unto her face. She focused her keen gaze on Sal and said, “He has been flushing his pills. Fucking unbelievable. We have got to keep him tied up and locked away until we can get someone to ship his crazy arse off to the Looney bin.”
“He needs therapy! Not imprisonment!” Miss Maple sulked.
“I am sure he does. But for now, he is a danger to us and himself. He needs to be kept restrained until we can get him medicated again.” I scratched my chin, placing an arm on Miss Maple’s shoulder.
Miss Maple seemed sad. Her eyes were dim with anguish. She definitely seemed to have some sort of sentiment brewing inside her towards that tied up nutjob. She paused for some heavy breaths and spewed out a few reflective words. “What if you are wrong? What if she was sick like everyone else out there? What if this was self defence?”
“Her blood? It wasn’t blackened like those crazies that we encountered earlier! And this woman has been dead for a few days now! There is no way that this was self defence! She was gunned down in cold blood!” I yelled and threw my hands about in the air in bid to speak some sense into Miss Maple.
The woman must have been completely off her rockers to even consider going anywhere near a guy like Sal with a barge pole. She needed her head tested. There might have been something malfunctioning up in her noggin. I pushed Miss Maple out of the red door. Diane didn’t need any such forceful encouragement. She shot past the red door quicker than a stray lightening bolt. There seemed to be this cheeky, prideful grin on Diane’s face.
She stood behind Miss Maple and cupped her lips in the palm of her hand. She knew she would have been thought of as being mean. The kid was very conscious of her actions. But there was little signs of regret on her face for what had befallen Sal. She just didn’t seem to like the guy from the get go so she wasn’t really fussed about where he wou
ld be spending the remainder of his evenings for the foreseeable.
As far as Diane was concerned, he was just another creep who had got his just deserts. She just wanted to be away from him and that was exactly what she seemed to be getting.
“Does anyone need some air? We should head out for some air! There were windows in the lunch room!” Diane's lashes fluttered pleadingly.
“Alright! But we can’t have those windows open for long! We don’t want to let whatever is out there inside, do we?” I croaked, tugging my collar with a single finger.
The three of us all sauntered casually through the hallway, trooping into the lunch room in a disorderly fashion. We picked seats randomly and helped ourselves to some drinks. I had picked up an AK 47 from the storage room. It hung by a strap from my bulky shoulders. After seeing that body in the basement and the horrible way in which the poor old lady got iced, I wasn’t prepared to be caught with my pants down and my genitals hanging in the breeze.
Nope, I had a loaded gun and I wasn’t going to be shy when it came to blasting those black-eyed crazies to ribbons. Miss Maple had a deck of cards in her hands. She prompted us to join her in a game. We were foolish to think we stood a chance of beating her. She won every single game, leaving us with massively bruised egos.
“You cheated! You must have hidden some cards somewhere!” I pointed an accusing finger in Miss Maple’s general direction.
“You would say that, wouldn’t you? If you feel that strongly about being cheated, why don’t you search me, big boy?” Miss maple threw her hands up in the air, winking suggestively at me.
“You’re okay. You don’t need to make that offer.” I gulped down some warm spit.
A haunting quiet soon stalked the room we were in. We all seemed a bit lost for words. Miss Maple shuffled the cards in preparation for another game. I just sat there and bit my lips in anticipation of yet another bruising defeat at her hands. I didn’t notice obscuring figures hover over the face of the open windows. I only heard one word seep through Diane’s slackened lips. “Spacemen.”
