Dead Hunt

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.

His cloak and dagger bullshit was starting to play on her nerves, and that was when it hit her – cloak and dagger. Michael was purposely trying to be confusing with what he was saying. But why? Several realizations rushed to her at once: Michael had videotaped his message on a camcorder outside, where it was dangerous and not within the protective walls of the steel lab. Robin could have easily videotaped a message for him; this whole building was a one giant video camera. Lucy looked above the door frame at the shattered camera. Robin might be able to still hear, but she could not see inside the room; she could not see the messages Michael wrote.

Lucy realized that would explain the song lyrics and other nonsense he was now saying. Michael was stalling, allowing Lucy time to figure it out. Her mind raced back to the cellar and their conversation, when a question Michael had asked her jumped back into her memory.

“Can computers lie?”

“This one can!” Lucy repeated the answer soundlessly.

It was then that Lucy realized the effort Michael had gone through to protect her in this room, when all he needed to do was have Robin seal the lab. Michael did not trust Robin. That meant Robin was up to something. Michael knew it, and he was…

“Gone,” she whispered.

Michael had left her here. Her eyes started to tear as she looked at the tiny screen. Michael held up another message:

“Looking for food. Stay in the room.”

She watched Michael lean forward to shut the camera off, but he paused. He stepped back and whispered softly, “I can’t wait to see you in that hot tub.” The screen went black, but Lucy had already left it. She was at the foot of the bed and climbing onto the dresser. At five feet tall she could just barely get her head into the attic. She pivoted cautiously on her perch as she looked around the dimly lit space. She could see the giant hole in the wall which Paul had kicked in, but she could not see Lauren’s body.

“Michael must have moved it,” she thought. And with that thought came another: “Where did he put her? Where are the bodies?”

Lucy climbed back down and lay on the soft bed. She rewound the tape and played it again. A few more drinks of water and Lucy suddenly realized her little bedroom fortress did not have a bathroom. Then she remembered the closet. She went back to the closet, looked at the floor and saw the bucket. Next to it sat a roll of toilet paper.

“Water closet,” Lucy laughed. “Mikey, you have a sick sense of humor.”