Before Anna could say anything else, Trooper Grace appeared in the doorway again. “It was my initial intention to repay you for your gracious donation with one of our ‘thank you’ baskets- a bottle of wine, a jar of Trooper Millie’s hot sauce, and a few coffee cakes. However, since you insist on traveling into West Akron to A-IX, I feel like this would be a more appropriate gift.” She reached around the side of the shack and held in her outstretched arms a shotgun.
Cole and Anna both shifted back nervously.
“Whoa... I don’t think that…” Anna drew her hands up to her mouth.
“If you are worried about our own security… we have plenty of these. In fact, we have more of these types of guns than any other gun. You have been a welcome distraction to our tribe. We have suffered many losses these past few weeks, and the recount of the Lost Word has boosted morale a great deal. And your donation will go on to help us spread our message. Please…”
“I couldn’t take this---”
“You cannot come back to visit us if you are dead.” Her words were sharp.
Anna looked over at Cole who returned her unsure glance. “Sure.” Anna said as she took the gun from her. “As long as we are welcome back to visit.”
Trooper Grace smiled. “Any time you wish, we look forward to seeing you again.”
Chapter 10
They arrived at the A-IX facility late morning. It was located in a nondescript building at the end of a formerly busy street. She had imagined a fantastical building with glass walls and chrome doors. In reality, it was a small grey 1-story stucco building with broken windows, situated between an old Dairy Queen and laundromat. In small lettering above the painted metal doors were the words West Akron Chapter A-IX.
“Huh… I imagined it differently,” Anna said as they walked up to the door.
“Looks like it won’t be hard to get inside,” Cole said as he walked up to the door and stuck the nozzle of the shotgun in the hole where the doorknob used to be.
“I don’t think you’re using the gun right.” Anna smiled.
“I asked you if you wanted to bring it and you said no.”
“Relax… it was just a joke.” She grabbed the door and cautiously walked inside behind him.
Inside there was what appeared to be a small waiting room. The black plastic chairs had been toppled over and were scattered throughout the room. There was a desk positioned behind a pane of broken glass, and a single door behind it. The televisions that were on the walls were ripped off and smashed on the floor. Broken glass crunched under their sneakers as they slowly investigated every corner of the room. There weren’t any papers in the filing cabinets behind the front desk or in any of the desk drawers.
“Looks like someone intentionally cut the phone line.” Cole said holding up the severed wire.
“I don’t think that we are going to find anything in here. Let’s keep moving.”
The doorway led to a long hallway with broken glass doors lining each side. Inside of each room was a variation of the same thing: a desk with no papers, a filing cabinet with no files, and severed phone and computer cords. At the end of the hallway was a steel door labeled ‘Stairway to B1: Authorized Personnel Only’.
Anna tried to open it but it wouldn’t budge. She tried kicking it, and throwing herself against it, but it still wouldn’t budge.
“Shoot it.” She pointed to the handle.
“What?”
“Shoot the door handle like they do in movies.”
“If I shoot that, it’s going to ricochet back and blow my face off.”
“I don’t think it will. Just try it.”
“You try it.” he snapped, and shoved the shotgun against her chest.
She grabbed the gun and stumbled back a few steps. “Ok. You’re obviously mad at me about something.”
“Ya think?” He turned and began to pace back and forth down the end of the hallway.
“It’s about the hat, right?”
“Yeah, it’s about the hat.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“You said that you were sorry, but that doesn’t undo what you saw. It doesn’t undo what I saw.”
“What do you mean... what you saw?”
“Pity. I saw pity in your eyes when you looked at me.”
“I---”
“Before I was just a normal guy to you… maybe I reminded you of someone that you knew before everything was destroyed… and we were just two cool and normal people heading out together looking for answers. Not anymore… now you know. You saw it. They cut my head open and began to poke around in there. And now you wonder if I’m normal or sane or sick---”
“I don’t think that---”
“Why not? You should wonder. I wonder every goddamn day if the things that I think and the things that I feel are my actual feelings or something that’s a result of what they did to me.” Tears began to fall down his cheeks.
“Hey---”
“And there was no real way of actually gauging if the things I was feeling were normal. There was no one left to talk to. And when I saw you… I thought that it was my opportunity to---”
“I don’t think---”
“Now I’ll never know if---”
Anna threw the gun down on the floor and it echoed down the hallway. “Would you just listen to me?”
He stared at her blankly.
“Yeah, when I took your hat off and saw that wicked scar I did feel pity for you… but only briefly. I guess you never heard about how people treated other people that had scars.”
“No.”
“They treated them as badasses. Scars aren’t something to be ashamed of… people loved to sit at a bar and tell the story of all of their scars. The stories were mostly skateboarding or playground accidents… sometimes it was car wrecks, or the rare fist fight. But we loved telling them.” She looked down at her right index finger and showed it to him. “See that?”
“Sort of.”
“I got a new set of kitchen knives that were supposed to be the sharpest in the world. My first slice into a lemon and right into my finger here. Blood was everywhere. I had to get four stitches.”
“So?”
“Scars prove that you have been through something painful and difficult and made it through to the other side. And people admire that. So yeah, I may have pitied you at first… but that turned quickly into admiration and intimidation.”
“Intimidation?” His demeanor began to lighten.
“Yeah. You clearly have seen some shit and you’re surprisingly well adjusted. My lemon scar is one of the biggest physical traumas I have faced. And I acted like such a big baby when it happened.”
“You think that I’m well adjusted?”
Anna laughed. “Uh, yeah.”
Tears began to stream down his face, only now they were tears of gratitude. He reached out and pulled her in close and squeezed her tight. “That’s all I ever wanted, all this time, is for someone to tell me that I’m alright.”
Anna returned the hug and then pulled him away. “So, are we alright now?”
He dried his face with the collar of his t-shirt and nodded. “Yeah, we’re ok. You must think that I’m such---”
Anna held her hand up. “Again, I don’t think that you’re a baby.” She bent over and picked up the shotgun off of the ground and handed it back to Cole. “You can have this back. We need to figure out another way to get downstairs.”
“Maybe we can use the elevator,” Cole said, pointing to the elevator sign.
“Pretty sure it wouldn’t be running…”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, running down the hallway to the elevator doors. “Help me pry these open.”
Anna dug her fingers into one side of the door and Cole dug his fingers into the other side. On Cole’s count, they both shifted their weight and the door slid open, revealing an empty elevator shaft. They leaned over and peered down into the blackness.
“Looks like another dead end,” Ann
a said taking a few steps backwards. As she scanned the hallway as if it would give her answers, Cole unzipped his backpack and removed a long silver flashlight.
Anna turned back around to suggest a way to open the steel stairway door and watched as Cole jumped down the shaft. “What are you doing?” She ran over to the ledge and looked down.
He looked back up at her having only jumped down about six feet, and smiled wryly. “You give up too easily,” he said and shined the flashlight in her eyes.
“And what are you going to do now, MacGyver?”
“I don’t understand that reference… but I have read enough spy novels to know that there is always a hatch on the top of the elevator that allows escape. Or, in this case, entrance.”
“How are you going to get up out of there?”
“Hopefully…” he grunted as he pried the hatch open and stumbled back with an oof when it popped open, “I won’t need to.”
A soft blue light filled the elevator shaft, and Anna shimmied her way over the side and dropped down. Cole dropped through the hatch first and held up a hand for Anna to wait as he peered out of the open doors. “Ok, I don’t think there’s anyone down here.” He motioned her to jump.
Unlike the first floor that was sectioned off into very small offices and hallways, the basement exhibited an open floor plan. There was a small glass landing outside of the elevator that had a steep set of glass stairs that led to the floor. On the perimeter of the large room were smaller rooms behind broken glass doorways. In each room were hospital beds with bright white linens, IV bag stands, and various pieces of knocked over and broken monitors and machines. Manila folders lined the floors but there were no papers in them. There were what appeared to be bullet holes in the drywall, and dried blood on the walls and on the floors. Despite the amount of blood splattered throughout the room, there were no bodies.
“It’s like there was a massacre in here.” Cole examined the holes in the drywall.
“Maybe it’s not blood….” Anna hoped.
Based upon the smaller rooms on the perimeter of the grand room, Anna and Cole had assumed that A-IX was some type of hospital. But the grid of tubes in the middle of the room that jutted all the way up to the ceiling gave a different impression. Each tube emitted a soft blue light that was the sole source of light in the entire room.
“All of the glass has been broken out of every single one of these,” Anna said as she walked through the aisles of broken tubes. “And there’s so many of them… what do you think they were?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Cole responded, stepping inside one up the tubes and looking up. “There’s so many of them.”
Anna stepped back and counted the rows. “12 rows down and… 12 rows back. 144.”
Cole walked over to a set of filing cabinets and began to pull open all of the drawers. “I don’t get it… It just doesn’t make sense. Not one… single… piece… of… paper.” He slammed the last drawer closed.
“We can gather one thing from this place: someone went to great lengths to conceal whatever used to be here.”
“That doesn’t help us though. This was the only thing we had to go on.” Cole sat in one of the desk chairs.
“Maybe there’s something else around here. We just have to look.”
“Do you really want to go poking around this part of town after what Trooper Grace had to say? I am not in the mood to run into any demons today.”
Anna laughed. “Come on… you don’t actually believe her, do you? Those people are out of their minds.”
“I don’t care who it is… if someone tells me there is danger somewhere… I heed their warning.”
Anna propped her head on her hands. “So, what do you suggest that we do now?”
“Go back home.” He answered almost immediately.
“Wow… you had that bullet loaded in the chamber, didn’t you?” Anna lifted her head in surprise.
“I just think it would be the best thing to do right now. Maybe we could regroup, figure out another plan. Maybe we overlooked something at your house.”
Anna leaned back in the desk chair and spun around a few times as she considered his proposition.
“I just have a bad feeling about this place.”
“Just because you have a bad feeling doesn’t mean we should pack up and leave.”
“We could go back to the doctor’s house. You could take a hot shower and wash the smell of the lake off of you.”
Anna shot upright in her chair.
“I could make, er… well, I could figure out how to make a pot of coffee. We could watch---”
“Alright, alright… you can stop drilling, you struck oil. Let’s do that.” She smiled and stood up.
Cole jumped to his feet and swung his bag over his shoulder and grabbed the shotgun.
They found the stairwell that had previously been locked was able to open from the other side. Before venturing out into the parking lot, they scoured the first floor one more time, investigating the bathroom and the closets. Anna even went through all of the pockets of the jackets that were hanging on the coat rack. She found nothing but receipts and loose change.
“Have you even had a decent cup of coffee in your life?” Anna asked.
“I have not. My mom used to call it the nectar of the gods but I always thought that it smelled like she was warming up mud.”
Anna laughed. “I think that’s everyone’s first impression of coffee. I was constantly wondering what the big deal about coffee was, so I tried a cup… and I hated it. But then I thought that it must be an acquired taste… so I tried it again- still hated it. And come to think of it… I still don’t like the taste… but it helps me cope with busy mornings. And because of that, I think I love the nasty stuff.”
“I look forward to not enjoying a cup with you. You will have to----”
“Stop.” Anna grabbed Cole’s shoulder. “Do you hear something?”
Cole held in a breath and cocked his head to the side as he listened. “Yeah… what the hell is that?” It sounded like wet bare feet slapping against the pavement. “Where is it coming from?” Cole asked between clenched teeth.
“There!” Anna pointed to a figure that took the shape of a pink, naked human but was barreling towards them on all fours. As it came closer they could hear it growling and gnashing its teeth. “Shoot it!”
Cole held the shotgun up to his face and took aim.
“Hurry!” Anna pressed
He closed one eye, took a long breath in and pulled the trigger.
-Click-
In a panic, he began to pull the trigger over and over.
-Click- -Click--Click--Click-
“No!!” He screamed at the gun.
Anna pressed her nails into his shoulder and firmly choked out the words “Run.” They pushed off the pavement and began sprinting with every ounce of energy that they had towards the car. Cole jumped into the passenger's seat, but before he could close the door the creature had tackled Anna from behind. The force of her head hitting the pavement had stunned her and she didn’t struggle to get away. Cole shuffled over the driver’s side and searched frantically for the car keys, which he soon noticed were hanging off of Anna’s belt loop. The creature let out a scream that sounded like a grown man attempting to scream like a little girl.
“Anna GET UP!” Cole screamed, but his screams were muffled by the boom of a gunshot.
The front of the creature's face was nothing but a bloody stump, and it dropped back down to its knees and then over to its side.
Rubber City Ruins Page 9