Dead Hunt (16 page)

“Is that blood?” Lucy wondered.

She turned her head to look in the other
direction. Bright sunlight hurt her eyes as it poured in through a
giant window. A shadow moved in front of the light, blocking her
view. She couldn’t focus on it. Lucy couldn’t make out any details
of who stood in front of her like a giant eclipse.

She took a slow and deliberate breath.
Something burned in her nose. It was that smell. She knew that
smell.

The eclipse leaned down towards her, and the
smell grew stronger, that smell of death and decay.

She closed her eyes. Like a familiar old
rerun, she knew what would happen next.

CHAPTER 17 – The Mystery

Lucy’s eyes fluttered opened once more. Harsh
bursts of light painfully blinded her. She squeezed her eyes tight.
The sudden intrusion of light lingered as tiny colored specks
floated behind her lids, then slowly faded away. Lucy carefully
opened her eyes again, using her hand as a shield. The slits of
light slowly took form. The bright sunlight was held at bay with
crisscrossing boards.

“The window is boarded shut,” Lucy’s groggy
mind told her.

She closed her eyes until the floating specks
of colored lights dissipated again, then refocused on the slits of
bright light. The window was boarded up. Her mind raced for an
explanation. It was only two heartbeats before her mind found an
explanation and grabbed hold. The explanation raced through her
entire body in the form of panic. She bolted straight up. The
sudden movement made her head spin, or maybe the room was spinning.
She wasn’t sure.

She grabbed the blankets to steady herself
and looked around the room. The door was also boarded up. It was
comforting to know that nothing could get in, but that tiny level
of comfort quickly faded with the realization that she could not
get out either.

“Am I a prisoner here?” she asked herself,
her mind still racing. “Where is here?”

Lucy continued to look around the room and
then saw it, hanging limply above the door frame: a smashed video
camera. Images of the laboratory and Robin raced through her
exhausted mind.

“How did I get back here?” Lucy mumbled,
realizing her lips were parched. Next to the bed on a small table
she saw a bottle of water, a drinking glass and a video tape.

“What the…?” Lucy said as she leaned over to
reach for the video tape.

Dizziness grabbed her again, and she fell to
the floor with a loud thud. She lay on the floor, trying to collect
her thoughts as she stared up at the ceiling. A huge hole was
punched through the ceiling a couple of feet from the light
fixture. More horrifying images flashed through her mind. Piece by
piece the puzzle was coming together. As she lay there putting the
pieces together, her mind got stuck. There was a big piece of the
puzzle missing. She remembered, painfully, the events that led up
to her leaving this house and finding the little café, yet she’d
woken up back in the very same house.

“Did I dream the whole thing?” she asked the
empty room.

It gave her no more clues than what it
already had. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and
grabbed the water. She ignored the glass and put the bottle to her
lips and drank thirstily. After her third drink, she noticed the
tape again and grabbed it. On the face of the tape in black marker
was written, “Play me.”

Lucy looked around the room and noticed a
tiny camcorder sitting just below the window plugged into the power
outlet.

“It must be recharging,” she thought as she
gently rose to her feet.

Her legs still a bit unsteady, she staggered
towards the camcorder. Lucy succeeded in walking well enough to
keep from falling over, but bending down to pick up the camera
proved to be another matter entirely. Her already aching head
bumped hard into the boards that covered the window when she leaned
over to pick up the camcorder. She fell to her knees as another
dizzy spell buzzed in her head. She fell back to the floor, staring
once again at the ceiling. Lucy decided to stay exactly like that
until she regained enough of her wits and balance to make the
journey back to the bed.

With the camera in hand, Lucy crawled across
the floor. Crawling on all fours meant a shorter trip down should
she lose balance again. It wasn’t until she climbed back into the
bed that she realized she wasn’t wearing her own clothes. She was
dressed, but they were not her clothes. She wore an old,
button-down sweater that looked like something her grandfather
would wear. She slid her fingers between the buttons and felt her
bare breast. She reached for her shorts and discovered they were
missing, replaced by a baggy pair of pants.

“Who did this?” she thought as her heart
started to race again.

Lucy rolled up a sleeve to reveal plenty of
scratches, but no blood. She pulled up the pant leg. More
scratches, no blood. With a fright she realized someone had taken
the time to remove her clothes and bathe her while she was
unconscious. Another fear raced into her mind as she imagined
herself lying naked while somebody bathed her. A tear escaped her
frightened eyes as her heart pounded in her ears.

Lucy looked at the tape, wondering what it
was she was supposed to watch, and, more importantly, who made the
tape?

Her mind raced through recent memories of
what she did know.

Lucy remembered walking for what seemed like
days to escape this place and had awoken in what looked like the
same house. She was bathed and wearing somebody else’s clothes, and
she wasn’t sure she wanted to know who was responsible for that.
Lucy apprehensively flipped the tape in her hand as her eyes
continued to scan the room.

Her thoughts were getting clearer now, though
she still couldn’t tell the nightmares apart; it all seemed so
surreal. The nightmares that haunted her dreams overlapped the
nightmares she was positive she had witnessed with her own eyes;
yet it all seemed like one, bad dream. She was not sure which of
the nightmares that haunted her mind really had happened.

As Lucy looked around the unknown, yet
strangely familiar room, her eyes stopped at the foot of the
bed.

“What an odd place for a dresser,” she
thought, looking it over before settling her gaze on the hole in
the ceiling above it. “It wasn’t put there as a dresser. It was
meant to be a ladder.”

Still thumbing the tape, Lucy continued to
investigate the room. She tossed the tape on the bed and pushed
herself back to her feet. The tiny table next to the bed held no
other secrets, but at the far end of the room was a closed
door.

“A closet?” she guessed.

Lucy slowly inched towards the door. Upon
reaching it her hand hung suspended, inches above the doorknob.

Grownups smile when their young children say
there are monsters in the closet because grownups know there is no
such thing as monsters. It hadn’t been all that long ago Lucy
believed that too. Since then, however, she learned that monsters
were real. Not the giant Godzilla-like creatures or aliens from
space like you see in the movies. These monsters were different.
They were us, except that they were walking around dead and eating
people.

Who knew what monster was just beyond that
door?

Lucy failed to keep her hand from trembling.
It ached for her machete, but it was nowhere to be found. She
looked at the other door boarded securely, then back to the closet
door.

“No boards, no danger,” she thought. She
hoped.

Lucy lowered her hand and grasped the door
handle. The squeaking sound of the turning handle filled the tiny
room as Lucy heard the gentle click of the door latch being
released. Gathering her courage she pulled the door open quickly
and ran back to the bed like a frightened child. She dove with such
effort onto the bed that she slid off it and crashed hard onto the
floor.

“Fuck!” Lucy yelled as she pulled her elbow
towards her in pain.

She looked under the bed towards the now
opened closet. Monsters had not chased her out. Lucy sat up and
peeked over the bed. Still nothing came out. She stood up, her eyes
never leaving the door, then cautiously walked back to the closet.
Her heart pounded so hard she could feel her blood pulsating
through her shaky legs and trembling hands. She darted her head in
and out of the closet so fast it was as if she hardly moved at all,
but it was enough for her to see that the closet was empty except
for a row of clothes hung neatly on hangers. Mustering up more of
her failing courage she took a deep breath and pulled the rack of
clothes apart. She exhaled sharply in relief. It seemed silly once
she’d done it, but she had to check that monsters were not hiding
behind the clothes.

They were more of the same of what she wore,
non-descript sweaters that smelled as if they had been hanging
there a long time. She pulled her own sweater to her nose. It had
the same musty, unused smell. On the floor she noticed a bucket and
an old pair of shoes. She looked at her own feet. They were bare of
course, but her cut foot looked like it had been cleaned and
dressed by a doctor.

Lucy walked back to the bed, eyed the tape
and picked it up again. She knew she was supposed to play it, but
she didn’t know what she would see, or if she wanted to. None of
this was making any sense, and she wanted to get as many answers as
she could before watching this mysterious tape.

Lucy walked over to the window and looked
through the slits at the world outside.

“Well, at least there are no zombies,” she
said with a smile, then remembered that the door was nailed shut
from the inside. Her smile faded.

“Yet,” she added with a sigh.

Lucy spent a few minutes going through the
drawers in the dresser. Folded boxers and tartan socks told her it
was a man’s room, an older man at that, but who or where he was she
did not know. She shivered with the thought of an old man
undressing her and putting her in his clothes and doing God knows
what else while she lay unconscious on the bed. Staring aimlessly
at the top of the dresser her eyes slowly focused on the dust. It
took a few heartbeats for her weary brain to catch up. In the dust
she could make out scattered footprints. Somebody had used it as a
ladder to climb out.

“Well, obviously,” she said to herself. “The
door and window are nailed from the inside. How else are they going
to get out?”

It was then that she noticed that some of the
dust made a perfectly straight line, and a little behind that,
another shorter line. It looked like something a picture frame
would make, she thought, but where was the picture?

She looked around the room again and noticed
a small waste-paper basket in the corner that held a picture frame.
As she picked it up, the tinkling of glass told her why the picture
was thrown out; the smiling faces in the picture told her the
who.

“Robin and her father,” Lucy said to the
empty walls. “This must be his room.”

Lucy loved reading mystery novels and usually
figured out ‘who dunnit’ long before the book ended. Occasionally,
a book like Claude Bouchard’s Vigilante managed to stump her, but
she could usually piece everything together.

Lucy started to tick off on her fingers what
she knew so far to help her solve this mystery.

She was back in the lab on top of the
mountain. There was no doubting that. Whoever changed her clothes,
cleaned and dressed her foot knew what they were doing. That person
was also fully aware of the danger and had secured the room tighter
than Fort Knox. He had also left an escape route, which meant he
was helping her and not keeping her prisoner. Lucy knew it could
not be Heslin because, well, he was dead. If by some miracle it was
a different doctor that Robin had let in the house, then it still
couldn’t be Robin’s father because he would have thrown out the
broken frame, but he would have kept the picture. Tears threatened
to explode from her eyes as she remembered what Heslin had done to
Emma. She pushed the vision aside, forcing herself to concentrate.
She had watched all her friends die, all except Michael.

“Michael got bitten, so he is probably dead
too,” she thought, still fighting back the tears. “So that leaves…
no one.”

Lucy was back to square one. But another
thought squeezed itself into her mind: Michael had been bitten.
She’d seen the wound. But this wasn’t the movies, and these were
not real zombies. Sure, they were dead and ate people, and…ok, they
were zombies, but there was no proof that getting bit turned you
into one. Maybe, just maybe…

“It’s Michael!” she said triumphantly, not
realizing how much she was smiling as she hastily slid the tape
into the camcorder.

“Michael!” she repeated when she pressed play
and his face appeared on the tiny camcorder screen.

As Michael explained how he had tracked her
to the café and got her out of there, he did the strangest thing.
He started writing on a piece of paper. His talking never ceased,
though he wasn’t making much sense, talking mostly in gibberish.
Then he held the paper up to the camera.

“Say nothing. Remember the cellar.”

Lucy looked quizzically at the screen as
Michael talked about irrelevant things like trees, mountains, birds
and crickets. Her mind raced back to the cellar where she and
Michael had discovered the room behind the steel door.

“This is not making any sense,” she thought
to herself as Michael wrote another message.

He held it to the screen.

“I don’t trust her.”

“Trust who?” she thought.

Again her mind raced back to the cellar but
remembered nothing that would give her the slightest clue as to
what Michael was talking about. Michael was reciting song lyrics
now.

“What are you going on about?” she whispered
in her mind.