Kenn Crawford - Dead Hunt

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.