Kenn Crawford - Dead Hunt

“Anything else I can get you, Hank?” she asked.

“That’s all, Rosie,” he said, watching the cup fill. “When are you going to play some different music in here?”

“You know how it is. Damn radio signal doesn’t get past the mountains and the local station is all French. Parlez-vouz Francais?”

“What?”

“Exactly. So we play tapes…”

Rosie stopped talking when the sound of the screen door grunted against its rusty hinges then slapped shut. Hank was about to say something to Rosie, but his sentence was cut short by the look on her face.

“Rosie, are you Ok?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She stood frozen in place as the coffee she was pouring spilled over Hank’s cup.

Hank noticed the sudden quiet. Forks and knives were not clinking on plates. The handful of diners were not chatting. He turned on his squeaky stool and saw that everyone in the restaurant was staring at the door. He followed their stunned stares.

There, in the doorway, stood a young girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, holding a giant, blood streaked knife. Her shirt was half gone, her tanned legs were covered in scratches, too numerous to count, and she was covered in blood. She looked like she had walked to hell and back. The young girl stared at them silently.

“Are you Ok, dear?” Rosie asked in a shaky voice.

The girl blinked, looked at Rosie and mumbled something that sounded like “Don’t drink the water,” then collapsed to the floor.

Everyone rushed to help the poor girl. Everyone that is, except Hank. He didn’t move, his eyes fixed on the door behind the mysterious girl.

Lucy’s eyes fluttered open, and she found herself staring at a water-stained ceiling. A fluorescent bulb flickered. She could hear screaming and crying. Her eyes tried to focus. She turned her head to the side to see a woman lying on the floor next to her, a look of horror frozen on her lifeless face.

“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.

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.