See, no tricks up my sleeves, is what I try to make my face say. With his eyes scanning its every curve and line, I don’t think it’s saying it at all.
“You don’t want to go in there,” Marxx says, shifting his body to block my entrance. “We had to put those things and what they were living off of down.”
“Things they were living off of?” Aimes asks, repeating Marxx’s choice of words.
“Not all of the kids turned, and not all of the adults were killed,” he tells us softly, like a parent breaking bad news to a child.
My mind puts the pieces together again just as it had when Pinky was dropping hints, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it and that must have shown on the very curves and lines Marxx was staring at. Marxx reaches out, grabbing my upper arm while shaking his head.
“Not this time, Hells,” he tells me. “Don’t do it.”
His grip is tight. It squeezes my arm and I’m sure I will have bruises to remind me I had a chance to avoid all of this. He gave me an out, but he and I both know I won’t take it. Marxx tilts his head seeing the truth on my face. I watch as his eyes dim to pity where storms had been just moments ago. Dropping his hand, he sighs fully knowing I’m going in.
“Where?” Marxx asks.
“He thought of them as his. His twisted little head made him believe he was in charge of some saintly duty. If he were keeping notes, they would be in the boss’ room,” Aimes tells him.
“Side room; off from the lobby,” Marxx tells us.
“What? Don’t want to come to play with us?” Aimes asks him.
She meant it as a jest, a simple little taunt, and tickle. It doesn’t have that effect.
“I’m tired of your idea of games,” Marxx tells her. “One day, your luck is going to run out and there might not be anyone there to play hero.”
“Well good thing I have Suicide Barbie with me!” Aimes calls out as she walks past Marxx.
Her tone sets both him and I to wince, but for different reasons. Of course, in typical Aimes fashion, she leaves me to deal with his wince.
“I’m serious, Helena,” Marxx whispers. “One day, you might just find yourself all alone. I made a promise to myself a long time ago to keep you safe but promises have a way of failing the ones you love.”
I close the gap between us, embracing this man who I once thought of as colder than a winter’s frost. He stiffens when feeling my arms around him, but slowly he lets himself relax. He returns the hug. Cradling the back of my head with his hand to his chest, I can hear him exhale some of the tension he has let his shoulders carry. He winces when I tighten my hold on him and I remember the reason Aimes and I had set out alone.
“Guess Rhett landed a few good ones?” I ask Marxx.
He smiles at me, a halfhearted smile, but it is a smile and I haven’t seen one on his lips since we lost Chapel.
“I think we both did,” Marxx tells me.
“This makes you two back to the ‘I love you man’ stage?”
Marxx widens his smile. I think I can actually see teeth.
“Good,” I tell him. “I’d hate to see you kill the crazy bastard.”
I can feel his chuckle, but I don’t hear it. Even so, it’s wonderful. He and I have both locked our souls away in such a deep cavern and the sensation of his laughter loosens the shadows clinging to me. I may have found my figurative father, and some form of the word in a blood relative, but this man is more family to me than either of them.
“Hey, Barbie, you get lost between the porch and the lobby?” Aimes shouts to me from where she is waiting inside.
She has no problem trying to shoot me in the head, but walking into a room alone is giving her pause. Good to be needed, I suppose.
Marxx does one of the trademark pats on my back to let me know he is okay. I want to tell him the hug was more for me than it was for him, but you don’t tell a man such things. Instead, I let him slip from me and his smile eases away in time with his arms. Like a trick of the light, one head nod pointing inside, and our moment is gone.
Aimes gives me a wide-eyed look of it’s about time when I enter the lobby. Even with the door having been propped open, the smells are just as heavy. It feels as if you are breathing in death and not just walking in it.
The men have flipped the place in every sense of the word. Old plastic milk crates with their bright colors are lined along the hallway. Whereas once their purpose was to hold the many cartons of milk or juice for the children, now they are being used to hold the items deemed by the men as keep worthy. Looking at the completely random collection, Rhett must be the one picking the items.
Aimes is waiting at the door to what was once the office of the manager. Her eyebrows are almost arched into her hairline with her frustrated expression. In her mind, it’s been hours since she hatched this plan. In reality, her mind is a little lack at keeping time.
“If you are in such a hurry,” I tell her as I pass her into the darkened office, “you could have gone in without me.”
“We kind of have this thing of doing stupid stuff together,” she tells me, still perched against the doorframe. “Why break up a good thing now?”
I shrug with my face, spinning the blind’s lever to open the dust-covered plastic blinds. The sunlight slowly peeks into the room. Even it is a little hesitant to see what these rooms hold now.
I won’t say it out loud, but Aimes was right. This room has been kept how it was the day before everything happened. There is no murder scene or frantic rush of an escape here. The room is almost a time capsule of before things went wrong; when the nine-to-five was the mundane, and before Death took to the streets. There is almost a soft scent of perfume as if the woman who once called this office hers just walked out and will be back any moment.
“Why is it when we find someplace untouched, it makes it that much creepier?” Aimes asks me.
Her fingers trail along the pictures in their frames from different times in a woman’s life. The many degrees the woman has earned are also framed and hung in a modern pattern of blocking. It’s the picture on the desk, though, that is the most telling of who the woman might have been.
There, in a yellow bikini, she stands with her arm draped over the teen who called himself Pinky. The deep red lip prints covering his face match the red of the woman’s lips and the flush upon his cheeks and chest. They are standing on a riverbank with matching grins over a shared joke that must have taken place only moments before the camera found them. Pinky’s mother might have worked behind the front desk, but the woman who was in here looks to have been a different type of mentor.
The top of the desk has been kept stacked and neat, making it obvious to see what has been of use recently. The rest of the building stands like a stain of a memory, but this room has been kept like a monument of love. Pinky never even bothered to secure the last of the roses or birthday cards for his mother. In here, he has kept this woman’s office pristine.
Aimes has already started going through the tall, metal filing cabinets. She doesn’t hold the same sainthood for the woman as the teen did. Aimes is discarding the thick files on the floor; scattering the papers like leaves from a tree as they fall and blanket it. I know what we are looking for won’t be in there. No, those files aren’t personal enough to have interested Pinky.
Sitting in the plush, leather chair, I rock as my eyes roam the room. I’m trying not to see what is in front of me, but to see what isn’t. I scan past the walls holding their many frames and their time-earned haze. I ignore Aimes with her paper party of files. Spinning the chair some, I glance behind me to where the office plants are just now starting to droop on their wooden shelving unit. Looking lower, I see the many different long boxes used to hold whatever paperwork the woman needed to keep close at hand. The last box, the one closest to the wall behind the desk, this is the one which speaks to me.
It’s slightly slanted; just enough to touch its one corner to its neighbor, when the rest of the boxes sit stiff
and separated. I touch it with the toe of my boot. It scoots with the gentle pressure and continues to whisper to me as if I were a child for it to taunt. It works.
The box opens easily, but all that is within it is many different sizes of receipts. Not exactly the buried treasure I was hoping for, to say the least. My disappointment is creased on my face. I purse my lips, tilting my head to see around the box. What I find is a different stash of buried treasure.
The first box wasn’t taunting me to find out what was inside it, but what is behind it. A small black box tied with deep, purple ribbon sits in the shadows made from the larger boxes. Pulling it to the light, the ribbons come undone in my hand with how loosely they were tied. I can smell the soft wave of perfume drifting from it. Inside are photos of Pinky and the woman in many different poses and holidays. Nothing about the pictures scream anything other than these two people spent a lot of time together, but they still send shivers of loathing through my fingers as I shift through them.
“Pssst,” I call to my partner in pink.
“Find something?”
“Yeah. Why Pinky was a little creepy,” I tell Aimes.
Handing her the ribbon-wrapped box, I let her play through the innuendoes as I start my search again. Right under where the secret box was left, there is a black notebook. Its edges are torn and shredded. Many different patterns have been swirled across its cover with just as many colored pens.
Flipping through it, I read the many entries about the teen and the woman who worked here in his thoughts. He loved her, or at least as much as any teenager thinks they love someone. It’s filled with thoughts about their meetings and how he felt being around her. There is nothing proving anything ever happened between the two, but there is enough to roll my stomach with my assumptions.
The thoughts become darker as the pages slide away. What was once puppy adoration has turned into a thing of obsession. Like in a timeline, Pinky has dictated every act the woman ever did, every date she had, every man she smiled at, down to the very clothing she wore each day. It’s all described in great detail here in his thick block lettering of fixation.
In bold ink, he has written about his plan to make her his. He heard about a new drug. A drug that was created by an accident and how it turns people into mindless versions of themselves. If she were to receive this drug, he muses in ink, she would be his forever. He would take care of her. He would keep her safe and she would forget about all the other men in her life. There is a drawing that sets my blood to ice and I now know just how dark Pinky really was.
“Found something,” Aimes says, pulling me from the assumptions my mind is racing with. “Look. It’s a map.”
She hands me the many folded and creased sheets of paper. I don’t have to read it. I recognize the name from the notebook of delusion.
“Think this is it?” she asks me.
I nod as my stomach turns to knots. Aimes thinks she has found some missing piece to our possible future. What she doesn’t know is she actually found a missing piece to a forgotten past.
Chapter 10
“Lookie what we found!” Aimes is bouncing towards Rhett with her excitement.
The men are loading the back of my truck with the crates when we exit into the fresh air. For a brief flash, Rhett’s cold eyes brighten to match the lift of a smirk on his lips when he hears her voice. It fades though, just as quickly as it arrived, when a shadow of a memory clouds his face. If Aimes noticed either occurrence, she doesn’t show it.
“It’s a map to that fort thing Pinky Murdering Brewster was rambling about,” Aimes explains.
She clutches the piece of paper much like the children with their golden tickets to the chocolate factory. I guess, in a way, she just might be holding ours. That is, if we can all get along long enough to find the place.
Lawless holds the thin paper much in the same way as she had. I watch his eyes follow along the marked routes, as he mentally tries to find the place. If you really want honest directions to a place, don’t ask the gas station attendant. You ask a biker, a real biker. Back roads and unmarked short cuts are their thing, and watching the eyes light up on our bikers, I know finding this place won’t be a problem.
“This isn’t too far from here,” Marxx says.
His eyes have traced the same route as Law’s had moments before. They are both nodding as if some silent conversation has been passed between them. Rhett stands silently. He was watching the map with a different look of possibilities than Aimes and Lawless had held. All three of them seem to have a different flavor to their hope.
“What do they have?” Dolph asks my back.
I jump a little when I hear Dolph behind me. I must have made a noise to match since Law is suddenly so interested in Dolph and I. His hands are still holding the paper, but his eyes are only tracing the man beside me.
“Sorry,” Dolph says, but his smirk doesn’t convey the emotion. “So, what are they looking at?”
“Aimes maybe found a map to the fort the teen was talking about.”
“Think it’s legit?”
“The guys seem to think so.”
“Do you?”
I pause in our exchange with his question. Do I?
“If Pinky really thought it was, there would be proof. All we found was a notebook of his ramblings.”
I don’t explain any more of my riddle. I know what the notebook held. I have matched all of Pinky’s little secrets together like a rubix cube of dementia. People don’t fall into crazy. They are born into it and then pushed or led into their levels of madness. Like a science experiment, Pinky wasn’t just pushed; he was prodded and caressed. The owner of his descent is still waiting for him.
Turning to head back inside the blood-caked madhouse, I slide my blade from where it rests in its holder on my thigh. The wound from the teen is still searing me, mocking my attempt to be brave. Inhaling from my wince, I can feel Dolph waiting for me to ask him for help. He’s learned to not offer, and just like Law, he’ll wait right beside me until I ask, or his own conscience forces him into action.
“Want to come play?” I ask him, finally easing down his unrest.
He smiles at me with his half-smile of amusement. He knows how hard it is for me to admit I need help and he is just as amused by my style of asking.
He shrugs and his eyebrow seems to be connected to his shoulders as he says to me, “Since you asked so nicely, sure.”
I can’t help it. Something about his smugness ignites the battered girl inside of me, and before I can stop my tongue, I hear myself say to him, “Oh goody, I’m getting tired of being the only one brave enough to do the killing around here. Might be refreshing to see you do more than just watch my back.”
His smile doesn’t fade. It doesn’t even flinch. I’m becoming just that predictable. My ego and my tongue are known for their courtship.
“Whatever you say,” Dolph tells me, still wearing his smirk like a war badge.
With my temperament as of late, or as of always, he doesn’t ask any questions when I pivot from him. He doesn’t make one sound of curiosity as to where I am leading us when we enter into the thick darkness of the once laughter-filled building. I think he is even whistling under his breath as he follows me. There is a sick twist of irony that it’s “Mary had a little lamb”.
“Why that song?” I ask him, before I can stop myself.
“Dunno. Nervous I guess,” he honestly answers. “I keep thinking I’d get used to it. Always finding this kind of stuff, I should be used to it.”
“But you’re not,” I answer for him when he pauses.
His silence stretches. It seems to elongate the hall even more than it naturally is. The blinds have been opened in each room. It lessens the shadows some, but still, it’s a hallway from hell and all of hell’s victims are splashed against its walls.
“It’s not a bad thing,” I say, filling the void.
“What isn’t?”
I shrug, much as he did on the porch of
the place, before saying, “Not being used to it. It’s not a bad thing. Who knows, one day maybe we won’t have to see it anymore.”
I hear his chuckle of disbelief and its mixture of sorrow. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” he asks me with a lowered voice and a southern drawl.
“What? And not constantly smell like a slaughterhouse?” I ask with a smile. “You know you just can’t bottle this.”
“I think a few blonde celebrities tried.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. We are both stalling before going through this final doorway I have brought us to. He is stalling because he doesn’t know what is on the other side. I’m stalling because I do.
“You don’t really have to do it,” I whisper. “I can.”
“I don’t even know what “it” is,” he whispers back.
“The teen, Pinky, it was his idea for the kids to get the shot. He set it up to have it done here before the kids left to go on the field trip since it was technically a school. It wasn’t the first round. The gossip had already started about the shot being what was causing the madness in people. Pinky wanted it. He wanted her to change into what was being said people were becoming. He wanted it because he wanted her. So, he did it and now he has her, forever.”
Dolph is staring at me as I try to explain what happened here. His face takes on the different angles of his emotions as he listens, but he doesn’t stop me.
“He waited here. It was his idea for the older kids to be taken to the movies after their round. He didn’t want them or the extra teachers in the way. He encouraged the director to take the shot first. It was a way to settle the kid’s nerves. He really just wanted to be sure she’d take it. Then it happened. They turned. Most likely it was his mother who began to fight them. When she began to kill the turned, thinking only to save her son from whatever was happening, Pinky killed her. He killed his mother to keep his obsession safe.”
Dolph does make a noise of disgust now, but he still doesn’t ask me anything.
The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance Page 8