LIFERS Chapter Twenty Seven

As the storm continued to beat the hell out of Martinsville, Jill sprinted past the cinema’s entrance way ahead of Nick and entered the alley at the side of the stores. Nick’s bulk, wet clothes, and obvious want for exercise, had contributed to his lack of speed as a full ten seconds elapsed before he limped around the corner.

‘Hold up … d’ya have … d’ya have to run so fast? I’m just about … to have a coronary.’

‘This rain isn’t going to last forever, Nick. We can’t afford to stop and waste time, we have to keep moving.’

Bent at the waist with his left hand rested against the cinema wall, Nick lifted his right. ‘Just give me a minute, until I catch my breath.’

‘Okay, but I’m going to see if I can find a way in round back while you recover.’

‘Sure, you go ahead; I’ll be fine in just a minute or two.’

Jill left Nick to get over his fifty yard jog and headed for the back of the stores alone. The first door she happened upon was no longer a door, or it was until it had been bricked over. She moved on to the second, or middle of the three where she found a rotted wood door with only a small padlock to keep out any would-be intruders.

She lifted the drenched poncho and pulled her gun from the back of her jeans and struck the padlock with its grip. On the third hit the lock dropped to the floor and the wind swung the door inward a few inches. She placed her sprawled-out black-painted finger-tips on the wet wood and pushed until its bottom edge caught the floor at around three-quarters open. And almost immediately, the damp, musty, odour of decay wafted from the room and reminded her of Chambers, but this time was just about sufferable. She turned the gun round and entered.

A total lack of windows meant her only source of light came from the open door behind. To her left stood a waist-high worktop; she felt along its length to find years of accumulated dust and flaked-off whitewash from the wall. To her right was a dining table with three chairs tucked under it and a fourth chair sat askew, as though someone had just left the table. She hoped that wasn’t the case. One spoon and a soup bowl rested at the askewed chair’s location. The bowl was empty but the dark stain of what ever its age-old contents were still remained. Above the table was a row of cupboards, all of which were empty.

On the wall in front of her a door led into the front of the building and Jill used both thumbs to pull back the hammer as she stepped toward it, but the crinkle of polythene underfoot stopped her. She looked to see a small, clear, plastic bag and bent to pick it up, she then wiped away the dust that obscurred the label and read it.

Untreated Human Blood
Amount: 500ml Type: O Rh Positive
Volunteer Donor
Single Use Only

The small, clear, plastic bag, soon found itself back on the floor as Jill stepped back and rubbed her hands on the wet poncho, but then her heel caught something on the floor. She looked to see a dog’s feeding bowl which still held its contents and something else that sparkled.

On closer inspection she found the sparkle to be a diamond ring. She knew she shouldn’t do it, knew she’d be sorry if she did, but she had to, she wanted to know. She laid the gun on the table and picked up the bowl and started to dig with the spoon to extract the ring, and that’s when she found the blackened, emaciated finger it was still wrapped around. She dropped the spoon back to the table like she would a sack full of agitated snakes and retrieved her gun, then shuddered off the creepy sensations and walked back outside.

As she got some much needed air, she couldn’t help but wonder what was keeping Nick. There was no chance of that lot finding him in this weather, unless he’d gone up to the town hall and banged on the door screaming and shouting at them. Had he actually had that coronary? Was he still in the alley, flat on his back? She decided to go check.

She reached the point where she’d left him only to find the place Nickless. This trip, and yet another one in the rain, had been his idea and he wasn’t even around to take part. She walked down the alley to stand on the corner by the cinema and shout for him, either he wasn’t within earshot, or her voice just couldn’t cut through the wind. She looked along the front of the stores to see if he might be trying to gain access that way, but again no sign. Soaked, cold, and totally pissed-off, she shook her head and turned to go back to the store without him.

She was careful not to look down at her earlier discoveries as she made her way to the door inside the small room. She pressed her ear to it but only heard the sound of the storm and her own throbbing heartbeat juiced-up on adrenaline. She pushed down the handle and the door opened with a soft, dry, squeak.

The room beyond could only be described as a spacious, dust-laden wreck, the large window, although murky, brought in enough light for her to see a wire-framed revolving display rack lay on its side in the middle of the floor with numerous empty glass jars and pages from old newspapers scattered around it.

The three walls, left, right, and now behind, were covered in wooden shelving, and every shelf empty. A serving counter stood before her and held a set of weighing scales with a dozen or so empty storage jars lined up along its front.

She went over to the window where years of dust obscured her view of the outside; she took a corner of the poncho to rub a spot clean about the size of a dinner plate and looked out for Nick, and there, directly across the street, was the police station. She dropped a heavy sigh and spared her friend Vicky a few long moments of thought, but once she felt the sting of tears, she swallowed the lump in her throat, turned, and left.

When she reached the smaller room she was greeted by the silhouette of someone in the outer doorway holding something up to their face, like they were taking aim at her. And as a silent blinding flash stole her vision, she raised the gun and pulled the trigger three times.

..

At the foot of the garage shaft, Gregg felt nervous and agitated at being in such damp surroundings, and that worried him. If this was a sign of the dire changes he had to come, he hadn’t expected them to start so soon. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and tried to create a small amount of moisture, but his glands couldn’t produce enough saliva worth swallowing. How long, he wondered, before total wipe-out?

Regardless of his situation, Gregg had a job to do, a job that could probably be his last, but he was determined to see it through to conclusion, whatever that might bring. He pulled the hat tighter over his head and made for the cinema.
When he arrived beneath the hatch he found his way out already open. A clear indication that Sheldon might well have come through there, but no indication of him being alone or not.

He listened for the sound of movement, or a cough, a sniff, a sigh, but his ears met with only silence. He climbed the steps and held out the hat on the short barrel of his gun just above the rim of the hatch, luckily, there were no takers.

He entered the cinema to feel the black void engulf his whole being and offer no sense of his surrounding dimensions, only emptiness, cold, black, emptiness. He shone the flashlight around the auditorium and flicked the widening beam across the viewing screen to see it in shreds, and that’s when the coldest of thoughts occurred to him. These people were kidnappers, murderers, and rapists capable of the most unpredictable atrocities he’d ever come across. But what made them more dangerous, even more unpredictable, was their total disfunctionality. Their once structured society had broken down, and, much like the screen before him, hung in tatters.

He walked to the top of the centre aisle and brushed aside a curtain to find two solid wooden doors. He pushed one open and entered the much brighter foyer of the cinema where he looked through the small squares of glass in the doors. Across Main Street and slightly to his left were the boarded windows of the building labelled Chambers. Again he thought about those poor souls swinging from their hooks, their faces bitten and torn from them as they no doubt struggled in a bid to escape the pain they were going through.

Gregg was dragged from his thoughts by someone shouting, he looked about but saw no one. Then on the second shout he caught the tone of the voice and realised it was Jill, which, considering their current situation, certainly wasn’t one of the best ideas she’d had of late. After a third shout, a fourth didn’t follow, so she’d either found him or given up.

Gregg turned to see a door across the foyer that stated the office and projection room lay beyond. He opened it to see a narrow stairway leading up into darkness, and a small room off to his left which had been ransacked, but more importantly, was empty. He climbed the stairs and headed for the projection room to find the place in just as much disarray as the room below, and again just as empty.

Satisfied that the cinema held no nasty surprises, Gregg left the projection room and headed back to the foyer where he stopped to look out at the rain. He scraped his tongue over his teeth and felt sure his thirst for what ever it was he thirsted for had started to make itself known. He wondered how long both the storms were going to last, the one raging outside, and the one raging inside. And would he have enough time for a rescue attempt on the girls before he became …? No, he didn’t want to think about that, having to shake thoughts like that from his head made him even more determined to see this through, and no matter if time was his ally or enemy, one way or another, he was going to succeed.

Gregg had no idea how long he’d been stood watching the rain when the sound of three, not to distant gunshots, snapped him back to reality. He pressed the hat to his head and ran into the auditorium and down the centre aisle to the hatch.

When he reached the garage shaft he shot up the steps and made his way to the shutter and hit the up button. Then, at around five-feet from the floor, he hit the stop button and stood in front of the fan heater to dry splashed water from the tunnels out of his jeans as he stared into the street.