by Terry Yates
“Colonel Potts seems to think that we’re well protected here. Besides, who knows if there’s even a full moon tonight?”
“I just don’t feel that confident about anything around this place.”
“I’m with you there.”
FranAnne finally looked up into Kyler’s face. “I’m just not sure I can go through all of that again. Better soldiers than me have died at that thing’s hand. I don’t know if I can handle it if it gets into the place.”
“You’ll do fine,” he told her, now looking down at his hands. “Plus, you’ve got to remember. You led us to this place.”
“I was running for my life.”
“But you still got us here. You shot the chain off of the lock.”
“On the second try.”
“Well, I would’ve wasted a whole clip trying to shoot that chain. Bottom line is that you got us here. That’s it. That was your mission, and you completed it.”
FranAnne looked up at him and smiled. “Thanks, Doc.”
Kyler waved her off, and then stood up. At that moment, Shelly entered the room.
“There you are,” FranAnne exclaimed, wiping, what looked to Kyler, like a tear from her eye. “I thought you might’ve fallen in.”
“No, I’m fine,” Shelly lied. “Just…you know…in the bathroom.”
Shelly tried to keep the right side of her neck from the both of them, but especially the doctor. Doctors were used to noticing things and she sure as shit didn’t want him to notice Marcus’ bite.
“How’s my little girl?” she asked sitting down on the cot with the baby, and gently rubbing her hand across the little girl’s back.
“So far. So good,” Kyler replied. “I think if she made it through…well, what she’s made it through. She should be okay.”
“Well, you’re a lot more chipper than you were when you left,” FranAnne told her. “Do you know something that we don’t?”
“No…not a thing,” Shelly answered.
Shelly picked up the sleeping child and laid her across her lap, stomach down.
“Isn’t she beautiful? Shelly asked rhetorically.
“She’s gorgeous,” Kyler answered.
“You know what I think?” FranAnne started. “I think both mother and baby are beautiful.”
FranAnne immediately began to blush. She hadn’t expected to blurt out something so overt, but neither the doctor nor Shelly seemed to take notice.
“Thank you,” Shelly said softly, smiling down at Kayla. “We’re gonna be a family after all.”
Kyler and FranAnne exchanged puzzled glances.
“Are you feeling okay, Shelly?” Kyler asked, nervous that she might be slipping into dementia.
Shelly looked Kyler in the eye. “I’ve never been happier, Doctor, than I am at this very moment.”
“Great,” Kyler said, “I probably should give you the once over since I’ve got you here.”
Shelly stiffened at the mere thought of the doctor touching her. She didn’t want him to see the bandage or everything would be ruined. He would ask her where she got the bite from and all hell would break loose from that point on.
“Please, Dr. Kyler, I’m not feeling well.”
“All the better reason to check you out,” Kyler said, moving to the cot on which Shelly was sitting.
“No!” Shelly screamed, startling both Kyler and FranAnne. Kyler, for his part, jumped backwards, tripping over the cot behind him, and falling to the floor, both legs sticking straight up into the air until finally rolling over and getting to his knees.
“So, I take it you don’t want to be examined at the moment,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.
FranAnne had also jumped when Shelly screamed, but she only went back a few feet.”
“Jesus, Shelly,” she said. “The man’s a doctor and you just had a baby. It’s a doctor’s job to check out new mothers.”
“And what would you know about that?” Shelly asked her, smiling a sardonic smile.
“Shelly…” Kyler said, standing up again. “That was…”
“It’s all right,” FranAnne told him, a hurt look on her face. “She’s just having us on.”
“That’s right, Doctor Kyler,” Shelly sang in a saccharine sweet voice. “I’m just having you two on. But I’m still not up to a checkup right now.”
Kyler and FranAnne watched as she rocked and sang to the baby, now seemingly oblivious to the both of them.
“And we’re back,” Kyler thought to himself.
CHAPTER 50
“Are you sure this is the right hallway?” Sam Fong asked.
“Positive.”
“There’s nothing here.”
“Thank you for that assessment, Mr. Fong.”
Sam and Locklear had tried to retrace Shelly’s steps, but to no avail. They ended at a darkened dead end. It was the only dead end on this floor that was dark. It looked to Sam like the overhead lights had been tampered with.
“Whomever it was, disappeared then reappeared right here,” Locklear said, moving up to the wall and running his hands along it. “But I don’t know how.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t some sort of weird shadow or something?”
“No. The first time I thought I saw two shapes, the second time, only one…and it looked like a woman. I just can’t be sure, though.”
Sam watched as Locklear played with his lower lip while continuing to scrutinize the wall. Sam moved up next to him and ran his hands up and down the wall, but found nothing. There wasn’t a place for anyone to disappear to. It was solid white tile.
“Well…it must’ve been some sort of optical illusion on the video, “Sam told him. “I see them all the time on the hospital monitors. They’re double exposures.”
“I guess you’re right,” Locklear said, running his hands over the wall. “But I could almost swear that I saw something.”
Locklear harrumphed and turned to Sam.
“This place is full of mysteries, isn’t it?” Sam said.
“I work here, Mr. Fong, and I couldn’t tell you a hundredth of what goes on here,” Locklear answered.
“What do you think goes on here?” Sam asked curiously.
“I don’t know. I used to constantly wonder about it, but I finally gave up. They pay my wife and me pretty well. I’m sure much of it is hush money.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Oh…eleven years, I think. Yes, Lauren was only a couple of months old when they hired both Ariella and me.”
“And neither one of you knows what the other does?”
“No, that’s one great thing about nerds, Sam. We take things seriously. If someone tells us to keep our mouths shut, we do.”
Sam guessed he was right. Every MENSA member that he had ever met, all seemed to have the same sense of humor, which to him, was along the lines of Donald Rumsfeld.
“Why don’t we see if Col. Potts has managed to find out anything?” Sam suggested.
The two men began to walk back down the hallway. After a few missed lefts and rights in the corridors, they heard the sound of a showerhead.
“We weren’t as lost as I thought,” Sam told Locklear.
As they passed the locker room, they heard someone singing. It was a man. By the sound of the voice, Sam guessed that it was Gringo Boots. He would look in to make sure, but if it was Gringo, he didn’t want to see something that looked like Bigfoot’s hairier brother bathing itself. That thought made him glad that he was Asian. Not much hair, and that was fine with him.
The two men tiptoed past the locker room because Gringo seemed like one of those guys who liked talking to people while he was stark naked, and they’d both just eaten. Next, they moved past the laundry room where they heard several voices. Two of them to be exact. Sam and Locklear peeked around the corner to see Opal and Wilbur Munn folding their laundry. Still in her nightgown, Opal was ranting about something. Neither Sam nor Locklear could understand her, nor did either of them really wa
nt to. Sam had just seen her four days ago when she’d entered the hospital with a broken hip, usually the death knell for an eighty-six year old. The staff had been shorthanded that day so Sam had helped her into the…for lack of a better name for it…the emergency room. She had been sweet, kind, and had hardly been a bother to anyone. She had been the stereotypical little old lady, but since her encounter with the werewolf, she had become wild-eyed and crazed. It was as if her body had mended, but her mind had drifted into parts unknown.
They watched as the lady continued to rant almost inaudibly. Wilbur just nodded his head, every once in a while throwing in a “yes” or a “no” or an “I didn’t know that.” Her skin was now pastier than before and her eyes bigger than ever. She would shake her head at him and point as she continued on. But after a moment, she stopped suddenly and turned her nose to the ceiling. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Before Sam or Locklear knew what was going on, Opal’s eyes flew open and she quickly turned her head and looked straight at them.
“Shit!” Sam gasped, before taking off like a scalded cat down the hallway.
Locklear found this most childish. Sam was acting like a kid who had caught peeking in a neighbor’s window. Childish. Immature. Infantile. He watched as Sam sprinted around the corner and out of sight. Locklear shook his head in amusement. He was just about to laugh, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He spun around to find Opal glaring up at him with those abnormally large brown eyes.
“I can smell you!” she screamed after Locklear, as he rounded the corner close on Sam’s heels.
CHAPTER 51
It was almost nine o’clock and most of the group was now in the sleeping area gathered around a flat-screen television that hung on a wall. There were several chairs in a semi circle around it. Even though they couldn’t get any stations to check on the possible damage that the two hurricanes did to Miami, they had all pretty much given up on being rescued that night, there was a DVD player and two DVD’s that Zack Olsen had found.
“We have “Hitch”, he said looking at the DVD’s, “or…the remake of Night of the Living Dead.”
“Hitch!” screamed the crowd in unison.
Kyler and Zora, both sitting on a cot away from the TV, chuckled as Zack put the disc in the player, then sat down. The doctor looked around the room. They were fairly jovial for a bunch who had expected to get rescued that day and hadn’t. Michael Blum was sitting front and center, his leg in a chair. Kyler wished that he could get some plaster on that thing. Zack Olsen, remote in hand, was sitting on one side of him while Sam Fong was on the other. Zack had put Rob to sleep on a cot just behind where Kyler and Zora sat. Gringo had found a robe somewhere and was wearing it. Most of them had pretty much guessed that he was probably naked underneath. Sylvia Morrison sat next to Gringo while Locklear and Ariella sat on one end of the semi circle. FranAnne sat next to Shelly who was holding Kayla. Kyler was still spooked by her outburst. Lauren O’Hearley, after a good once over from Kyler, sat cross-legged on the floor, looking up at the television, with Joe curled up in front of her. She stroked his head with her fingers and smiled. If there was anyone who had adjusted to the life that they had been living for the last three days, it was Lauren. She almost looked as if she were at home in her living room, her parents behind her, and her dog on the floor with her.
Kyler looked around to see who was missing. He knew that Opal and Wilbur Munn were still in the laundry room, and he hadn’t seen Potts, Hawkins, or Sgt. Cohen since lunch in the commissary. He figured that they were probably somewhere around the front door keeping an eye out for Nicholas Klefka, and he was grateful for that.
Just as Will Smith’s face lit up the screen, Kyler’s stomach began to rumble. Oh no, he thought to himself, please don’t let Zora have heard it. It only took a few seconds for him to get his answer. She was giggling. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her hand over her nose and mouth trying to suppress a laugh.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Why don’t you get something to eat?” she asked him.
“What…and miss one moment of Kevin James playing the goofy white guy? No way,” he shot back, his stomach rumbling as he said it.
“How can a person still be hungry after eating so much?” she asked, her Belgian accent sounding thicker now that she was tired.
“I don’t know. I’ve always been that way. I guess I’ll go have me some of FranAnne’s pie,” he said as he stood up. “Want anything, Laughing Girl?”
Zora shook her head no as she continued to suppress her laugh. Kyler smiled as he walked away.
He moved into the hallway, giddy with thoughts of Zora. She was everything that he could’ve possible imagined. Beautiful, smart, and that accent, God that accent would make a dead man sit up straight and take notice.
He walked into the commissary, expecting the lights to come on as he crossed the threshold, but they didn’t. The room was so large that in the darkness, it gave off a frightening aura. It reminded him of when he was seven years old, and watching his uncle coach the high school boys basketball team as they played their cross-town rivals. After the game, he waited in the locker room for his uncle who always made it a point of being the last person to leave the gym. As they were preparing to leave, his uncle told him to go and turn off the gym lights. Of course, he jumped at the chance to do something that made him feel responsible. He remembered running into the gym, but not being able to find the light switch.
“It’s on the other side of the gym,” his uncle had told him.
He went back into the gym and walked to the opposite wall where there was group of six or eight light switches all set on the same white light panel. He became nervous once he realized that, when he turned off the lights, he would have to run the entire expanse of the room, which looked as big as the Grand Canyon when empty.
As quickly as he could, he reached up and turned off each of the lights switches and began to run back across the arena as fast as his seven-year-old legs would go. He tried to keep his eyes focused on the small cracks of light that shown through the closed dressing room door, the whole time waiting for something to reach out for him in the dark. That was the way he felt at that moment. The dark, empty room echoed just like an empty gymnasium did.
He moved toward the kitchen, bumping each knee against a chair as he did. He made his way across the room, only bumping into the last table before reaching the service line. Kyler walked around the buffet counter, keeping one hand on the cold steel rails and using them to help him see his way to the other side of the serving line. When he reached the other side of the line, he could see ovens and microwaves. The only source of light he saw was a blinking green 12:00 on each of the microwaves.
He stood in the dark for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to his surroundings. After a few seconds, he began to search for a light switch. He had thought he’d found one, until he flipped it into the “up” position, only to hear the sound of a loud grinding noise that made him jump back three feet, only stopping when he hit a stack of three large, white cardboard boxes filled with canned foods. He had hit the garbage disposal switch.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” he whispered loudly, as she shook his whole body, trying to shake the goose bumps off of his flesh.
He quickly moved to the switch and turned it off. Ahead of him, he saw what looked to be a large, dark room. There was no door on it, so he guessed it must be where they stored everything. Next to the dark room was another room, but this room had a steel door, which was closed and cold to the touch. It must be a walk in freezer and he wasn’t going in there.
As he stuck his head through the doorway, he heard a sucking noise, followed by a slurping sound. He turned his head to the right just in time to see a refrigerator door slam shut. For a moment, he had seen a light that had immediately disappeared when the door closed. Kyler froze as a figure moved quickly toward him. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t do anything, but stay glued to the spot as the figure appro
ached him. He could see that the silhouette was tall and its ears were pointed. He saw the outline of the snout, the teeth, the hair…everything. He knew at that moment that he was going to die. How had the thing gotten in, he wondered. Why was it hanging around the kitchen instead of roaming the halls for fresh victims?
The thing stopped no more than five feet from him. It reached its left arm out to the side. It was going to knock his head off with those claws. It was going to do the same to him that it had done to Nurse Walling, Burt Burns, Mrs. Olsen, and the soldiers.
“No Klefka!” he screamed. “It’s me!”
At that moment, a single dim, yellow, overhead bulb shone from the ceiling. Kyler continued to clench his eyelids shut. He knew that a light had come on…he could tell through his closed lids. Great. The thing formerly known as Nicholas Klefka could turn lights on and off. So what? He didn’t care if the monster could use a power drill, he was still going to be werewolf shit in an hour or two.
“Doctor?” came a high pitched shrill.
Oh good, the thing could sound like Samantha Gould when it turned. He paused. Samantha Gould? He opened one eye. There, in front of him, stood the tall, leggy model. With the one eye still open, he looked past her, but saw no one else.
“Mrs. Gould?” he asked cautiously. The lighting was so dim that he could barely see her face, but knew that it was her just the same. No one else in the world had that shape.
“I told you to call me Samantha, Doctor,” she said, moving close enough to where her face was out of the shadows. She looked at him curiously. “Why do you have one eye closed?” she asked.
Embarrassed, Kyler opened his other eye and chuckled stupidly. As her face became more visible, he saw that she was smiling at him. He noticed that there was something dark smeared around her mouth. Maybe her lipstick had smudged.
“What are you doing in here?” She asked him.
“Eh…still hungry,” he answered sheepishly. “High metabolism,” he finished, patting his stomach.
“Me too,” she said, moving uncomfortably closer to him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if she was smelling him. After a few seconds of this, she looked up into his eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was, so her closeness made him twice as uncomfortable.