Aviira flashed her light along the side of the building. The front entrance was boarded over with heavy two-by-fours just as it had been the other day. “She wouldn’t park out front and walk around the backside of the building, especially if she had a body with her. The way in has to be pretty close.”
“Must be a window or something,” Jirel said. He tracked his light along the edge of the building. Aiden must have walked in here under his own power,” he mused. “There’s no way Loretta could have even dragged him in here.”
Jirel followed the trail ahead with his light. The side of the building was lined with windows, all of which were boarded over. He considered the situation for a long moment and sighed. “You take a look down that end, I’ll take a look down this end?” he said.
She nodded. “Call if you find anything.”
“Yep.”
She doubled back the other way to check the windows on that side of the building. Almost all of them were firmly sealed. A few had places where the wood had rotted away or an animal had burrowed in, but there was nothing large enough for a full grown human to get through. She had just reached the last window on the row when a horrifying scream split the air.
Aviira spun towards the sound with a start. It sounded like it could have been a woman or a child, but either way, the sound was coming from definite distress. It was difficult to pinpoint the location, but it sounded as if it had come from the trees behind her.
There was the sudden snarl of some creature, and then the scream again. It made her think of a small child, and without thinking, she took off through the trees. Her flashlight led the way and she pulled her gun free of its holster with her other hand.
It occurred to her as she picked her way through the blackness that she might have made a mistake.
The edge of the trees cleared and moonlight flooded the grass in front of her. It shined off the blood in the grass and she followed the trail of it with her flashlight to a fox. The poor animal was still alive, but barely. Instinct brought air into its punctured lungs with a terrible rattling sound that reminded her of the last moments of Hazel Howard’s life.
The thought of what kind of creature had done such damage to the animal came to her mind just as she heard the snapping of a branch to her right. Slowly, she turned, and a Creeper stared back at her from the trees with bright white eyes that reflected eerily off the moonlight.
It lunged.
The thing had blocked her path back through the trees toward the hospital, so she took off at a run back to her left even though she had no idea where it would lead her. She slipped through the tree line and hoped that she was turning back in the right direction to bring her back toward the building. The darkness was so disorienting there was no way to tell which direction she was actually running in. The Creeper was crashing through the brush behind her, and for just a second she stupidly dared a look back over her shoulder. It was stupid because when she turned her head away from the direction she was going, she tripped over a thick branch and went flat out to the ground.
The pain in her chest was tremendous. Stars burst into her vision as she laid there on her stomach in the dirt, unable to breathe. When she finally managed to raise her head, the little girl she’d seen last time was crouching by her, touching her shoulder. Aviira could hear the Creeper rushing toward her, but the girl knelt down low and looked her right in the face and raised a tiny finger to her lips.
The Creeper cleared the trees and ran right past Aviira, single-mindedly rushing in the same direction it had last seen its prey. There was no way it should have missed her even lying on the ground. When it had finally gone and the sound of crickets had returned to the air, Aviira slowly pushed herself to her knees. Her shirt was damp with blood.
The girl tapped her on the hand and was holding out Aviira’s flashlight when she looked up. Aviira stared at the girl for a long moment and finally took it back. The girl pointed toward the ground a few feet away, where Aviira’s gun was lying in the dirt. She picked it up and sat down for a moment, not sure if she could get back to her feet just yet. The breeze picked up and it felt refreshing on her forehead, eased the pain just a little.
“What’s your name?” she said to the girl.
“Louise.”
“Did Loretta make that monster?”
A nod.
“She made lots of monsters out here?”
Another nod.
Aviira considered her for a long moment. Then, “How come I can see you?”
“You must be like me,” Louise replied. For a second Aviira thought she was going to say, “Dead,” but the girl said, “You must have some magic in you.”
“Maybe,” Aviira said quietly. “You know how to get in that building?”
Louise held her hand out. Aviira gingerly pushed herself to her feet and Louise led the way back in the direction from where the Creeper had begun to chase her. Aviira followed the girl through the brush and backtracked all the way to the edge of the building where she’d been looking for an entrance before the screaming had begun.
Just as she cleared the edge of the trees, she heard Jirel calling her. He came around the side of the building and when his flashlight landed on her, he sighed with relief.
“There you are,” he said quietly as he came closer. “I was looking for you, I thought I was going crazy.” His face turned to concern when he saw her. “What happened?”
“Creeper came at me,” she said quietly. “Didn’t you hear that screaming?”
He shook his head. “You?”
“No, it was—it was a fox, but I thought it was a person. I thought maybe Loretta…”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just tripped. It ran that way.” She pointed back behind her and when she turned to look in that direction, Louise was gone.
He frowned. “I found a way in.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
Jirel turned back and led the way back around the front of the building. Behind an overgrown bush that they’d obviously walked past more than once was a board that had mostly rotted away. He pulled the board to one side slowly and peeked in.
“Hold this,” he said.
She held up the board to one side for him to crawl behind the bush and through the window. She could see his light scanning the room once he got inside, and then he turned back and held the board open for her.
“Here,” he said, offering his hand. She took it and climbed inside. Once she had cleared the window, he let the board close quietly behind them. The darkness swept in around them and their flashlights did little to cut through it.
From a cursory glance around with their flashlights, they were in some kind of office. The desks and chairs, all ancient heavy wood, had all been pushed to one side of the room, but the indentation marks on the carpet from the filing cabinets still lined the walls. Construction materials and loose trash had been left all around, including a pile of plumbing equipment and piping. There was a path that had been worn into the carpet from the window to the door and tonight, there was blood in it.
“Looks like they had started to do something with this place,” Jirel said.
“Till someone showed up and chased them out, I’m betting.”
“I don’t like this,” she whispered. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
He stepped close to her. “We got this.”
She could just barely make out his face in the glow from their flashlights. She nodded and took her gun out of its holster. He led the way out of the room, keeping close to her as she followed behind.
The hallway was just as dark as the office had been. They paused for a moment to listen for any sort of sound, there was nothing but the eerie sensation of being inside a hollow metal tube. There was a drip somewhere that bounced off the walls, making it impossible to tell exactly where it was.
Aviira shivered, but it wasn’t from the temperature. “It hot in here to you?” she whispered. For being an abandoned building, it was unbelievably warm even
for the dead of summer.
“Yes.”
She turned her light to the floor, sweeping both ways to pick up the trail they had spotted. Muddy footprints and blood continued in a path to their left. She nudged Jirel with her elbow.
He turned his flashlight to the front and she kept hers on the floor to follow the trail as they continued down the hall. It took them around a corner and then down a set of stairs that descended even deeper into the building.
Somehow it was even darker in the basement. It was unnervingly quiet. The dripping noise seemed to be following them as they moved down the empty corridors and it felt even warmer than it had been upstairs. As they went to turn the next corner, though, Jirel grabbed her arm and froze.
“Stop,” he whispered.
She did as he said, hand tightening on her gun. For a moment she wasn’t sure what had gotten his attention, but then she heard it: scraping. Dull, methodic, rhythmic. Like feet being dragged on the concrete floor.
Jirel leaned around the corner and flashed his light down the hall. He saw the Creeper illuminated in the halo of his light just before the thing tripped a motion sensor light at the end of the hall and blinded them both with unbelievably bright white light.
Aviira instinctively squeezed her eyes shut against the brilliant light and felt Jirel push her backwards. She heard his gun fire as she took a misstep and went sprawling, her reflexes a little too slow from her injuries to catch herself.
She spent a moment longer on the concrete than she wanted, and when she pushed herself up, she could barely see from the blaze of white light that was suddenly filling the hallway. She swept her hands in front of her for her gun, and came up with it as she pulled herself to her feet. As she turned, the burn was beginning to fade as her eyes adjusted, but she still had to shield her eyes as she cocked back the hammer on her gun and followed Jirel around the corner where he had pushed her back.
The corridor was empty. Her breath caught for a moment, and she turned back the way she had come, thinking that she had maybe gotten herself turned around somehow.
“Jirel?”
There was nothing. A feeling of panic rose up in her like bile, and she forced herself to swallow it down as she turned around the way she knew instinctively that they had been going when Jirel pushed her away and fired…at what?
The air was stifling and she was almost having a difficult time believing that what she was perceiving in front of her was reality. Jirel must have taken off running for some reason—after the thing he fired at, maybe. Hands gripped tightly around her gun, she started down the hallway, carefully peeking in each room as she passed it. There was no sign of Jirel, and no trail of blood on the floor.
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck
At the end of the hall was a closed door. A sign hanging askew from one remaining stud read “Staff Only.” After giving a look back down the hall where she had come from, she pushed the door open.
The light faded on the other side of the door to the normal glow of a fluorescent light. She was in what appeared to be a viewing room with a large window on one side that looked into a room with an enormous brick oven that took up the majority of the room. The door to that room was ajar.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Aviira, come in.”
***
Jirel pushed Aviira away from him in a moment of pure instinct, and then fired at the Creeper at the end of the hallway even though he could barely see it in the blinding light. He heard it fall to the floor, and he turned back around the corner immediately. He was certain Aviira would be pissed that he played the chivalry card and pushed her out of harm’s way.
“Sorry Vira, I—”
She wasn’t there. The hallway where they’d just been standing was completely empty. He shielded his eyes from the bright light, thinking maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.
“Vira?”
His voice echoed even though he had spoken at a normal volume. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and he turned around again, keeping his finger on the trigger. The Creeper at the end of the hallway was collapsed in a heap of gangly misshapen arms and legs.
Then the scraping sound started up again. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He pressed himself up against the wall to keep his back from showing to anything behind him. The sound drew closer, but it sounded like it was coming from both directions.
A Creeper turned the corner where he had shot the first. It halted and acknowledged the one on the floor. Jirel raised his gun at it, but as it lifted its head and sniffed the air in his direction, he saw something out the corner of his eye on the other side of the hall.
“Shit.”
A second Creeper had turned the corner on the other end of the hall and blocked him in on both sides. Jirel stood there for a moment before turning his head back to the first Creeper and firing off a shot at it. It fell like dead weight, but the second Creeper had already lunged by the time he turned back and shot at it. He took off running backwards and attempted to re-aim at the thing, but it was coming at him so quickly that it was nearly impossible to get a good shot.
His second shot made such an echo that he did not hear the creature behind him until he collided with it. The breath shot from his lungs and his gun fell to the floor as he practically fell into the arms of the Creeper he had been running from in the first place.
He was certain that he was a dead man.
The Creeper grabbed him by the throat and tossed him to the side as though he weighed but a few pounds. Jirel hit the floor with such force that he actually slid on the concrete. His ears were ringing from the blow and he could feel wet blood on his neck, but he managed to get a hand on his gun and turn onto his back.
Surprisingly, the creature was not interested in him at all, which no doubt saved his life. The two Creepers were struggling with each other, clawing and grasping and biting the other. He couldn’t help but watch for a moment until he raised his gun and fired, requisitioning a bullet for each to but the miserable creatures out of their prolonged misery.
When they had both fallen to the ground on top of the other and the hallway was still and quiet again, Jirel sat up and put a hand to his neck. It came away bloody, but he knew he had gotten away lucky.
It was so silent in the hall again that when he heard the shattering of glass and the firing of a gunshot, his heart leapt up into his throat in alarm. He grabbed his gun and leapt to his feet, taking off at a sprint in the direction of the sound.
“Vira!”
***
Gun leading the way, Aviira stepped into the room. Aiden Dannels was tied to a chair in the middle of the room, gagged with duct tape. Behind him was what she surmised to be a crematory, and it was lit. If it had felt warm in the other rooms, it was unbearable now. Loretta was smiling at her from the side of it.
“I had a feeling you were more clever than you looked,” Loretta said.
Aiden raised his head, noticing Aviira for the first time. He was bleeding profusely from the side of his skull and his clothes were stained, but he looked generally unharmed besides.
“Yeah, for some reason people say that a lot,” Aviira replied. She took aim at Loretta. “Get away from there right now. Celeste.”
“You look terrible.”
“No thanks to you.” She moved a few steps closer. “I’ll only say it one more time. Move.”
“Where’s your partner?”
Aviira fired off a round into the wall just above Loretta’s head. The woman flinched as brick dust flew into the air.
“All right,” Loretta said, raising her hands up into the air. She started to make a roundabout path towards Aviira. “You’re just going to arrest me now, is it? Just like that?”
“Not my job to decide what to do with you. Just to make sure you can’t kill any more people.”
“People like you?”
Aiden made a sudden noise and struggled against the chair. Aviira swung around just in time to see a Creeper come crash
ing through the glass between the crematory and the viewing room behind her. She fired even though she was unable to get a decent aim in time, and her bullet found the creature’s shoulder, but it still collided clumsily with her and knocked her to the floor.
Her vision went blurry as pain reached up into the back of her head and grabbed her by the brain stem. The bullet she’d fired into the Creeper had at least knocked it off course, and it had landed next to her rather than on top of her. It gave her an extra second to pull herself together and fire again, though rather blindly.
She pushed herself up to her knees and let the world stop spinning before looking up again. The Creeper was twitching on the floor next to her, and just for good measure, she put another round in its skull.
Loretta was gone. Aviira stood up, stumbling a little as she tried to correct her balance, and glanced back at Aiden. She couldn’t just leave him, but Jirel was still out there somewhere in the hall and had no idea Loretta was on the run. She ripped at the duct tape over his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to—”
He didn’t argue. “Go, just go!”
She turned and ran back through the door, pushing herself even against the pain that was slowing her reflexes. Her brain was screaming at her to stop, but the adrenaline was overriding it, and she took off at a sprint down the hall and back up the stairs.
Even as hurt as she was, she was still faster than Loretta. The woman was just rounding the last corner before reaching the office where they had come through the window when Aviira caught up to her. She fired off a haphazard shot in her direction, and the bullet ricocheted off the door that Loretta was attempting to open. The woman flinched and hit the floor, giving Aviira just enough time to tackle her as she made it into the dark room.
Loretta’s panic was making her uncoordinated, but she still managed to somehow kick Aviira’s gun out of her hand as she wrestled with her on the floor. The pistol fell to the carpet with a dull thud and Aviira flinched with the anticipation of it firing, which gave Loretta a free moment to squeeze out from under her. Aviira reached up and grabbed her by the ankle, and Loretta fell to the floor again. She turned back and, rather like an angry cat, shoved Aviira onto her back, then straddled her with her legs and gripped her hard right where the shade had set its claws into her.
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