The darkened hallway ended in a large expansive room with windows opposite the space from a natural rock wall. The rising sun was now visible outside through the smashed-out windows spaced every four feet apart. It wasn’t much but they now had at least some light.
The roaring sound that had raised Hank’s hackles was caused by dozens of small waterfalls flooding from multiple holes and cracks in the ceiling. The dark water cascaded into the indoor swimming pool Jeb had mentioned earlier. It must have been fed from a natural source, probably why they’d kept the wall its native rock.
In the amber glow, Hank could just make out the water’s surface. He grimaced at the sight of the raw sewage, thick as sludge, floating on the surface.
“Stay away from the edge,” Jeb warned. “You do not want to fall in there. Believe you, me.”
“Really, no kidding,” Hank started to reply sarcastically, but was suddenly overpowered by the heavy odor of urine and excrement.
Jeb chuckled at his discomfort and when Hank flashed him a look of irritation the old sheriff suggested, “Try breathing through your mouth and not your nose.”
Hank composed himself and then the old sheriff explained, “This used to be the base swimming pool. Mostly a toilet for the homeless population now.”
Hank fought the vile stench permeating his nostrils and the bile creeping up in his throat.“This is… this is…” struggling for words, coming up with only, “…just awful.”
Jeb swung his light so it illuminated a stairwell on the back wall. The metallic stairs were little more than a twisted skeleton in the rotting corpse of the building.
“Let’s try upstairs,” Jeb said, moving towards the stairwell. “Those rail bums are probably on one of the upper levels.”
“Right behind you,” Hank replied and then gagged again from the smell.
As they clambered up the metal stairs, and away from the light, Hank could hear Jeb wheezing in the darkness above him.
With Jeb still on point, they exited the stairwell and moved in tandem toward the center of the building. The farther in they went the more they had to depend on their flashlights.
On the second floor they passed a bowling alley nearly dissolved into paste. Jeb swung his flashlight over the remnants of a half-dozen lanes.
Past the bowling alley was a large open room with several rows of decayed movie seats. “This used to be the theater. There was both a movie screen and a stage. They had it all back then. Yep, this place was really sumthin’.”
Hank finally managed to swallow the last of the bile that had collected in his throat and answered. “Yeah … something alright.”
Hank swung his light inside. He didn’t see any evidence of a movie screen but he could just barely make out a stage in the darkness. Despite the giant homeless toilet on the first floor, Hank had to reluctantly agree. With Jeb narrating the tour, it wasn’t hard to imagine young servicemen, nurses, and scientists in this mountain retreat.
They climbed five more floors in the darkened stairwell. They reached the seventh floor and immediately apparent was a flickering light from deep in the bowels of the labyrinth.
Jeb must’ve seen it too for he asked. “You wearing a vest?”
“No,” Hank answered matter-of-factly.
“Better stay behind me then.”
It was against Hank’s nature to let others go before him in harm’s way but Jeb was wearing the vest so Hank wasn’t going to argue.
Jeb moved toward the fire up ahead, its flickering flames transforming the old sheriff as he went. Hank noted the older man was now walking heel-toe and checking each room before passing in front of the doorframe. What happened to the old timer? He’d obviously been a really good cop at some point.
Slowly, methodically, they closed on the room with the flickering light. Stalactites, formed by leaks in the ceiling and dyed rust red, framed the entrance. And inside the room the floor was covered in moss and knee high grass. It was as though they were stepping into a primeval cavern, and not another room belonging to a dilapidated building.
In the room’s center, beneath a hole in the ceiling that beamed down morning sunlight, an old woman in her late-fifties sat in a lawn chair next to a burn barrel. All the holes in the barrel made it look like a colander, the fire flickering orange through the holes. The woman was so overweight that Hank guessed if she got up, the chair would have stuck fast to her large behind. She wore a drab scarf over her head and a long coat. One thing that didn’t add up though, was that her clothes did not belong to any homeless person Hank had ever seen; they were too clean and appeared relatively new. He couldn’t see the woman’s face because she was sitting with her back to them. She was facing the wall where an old television set sat on a milk crate. The TV was on; its screen filled with static resembling white snow.
Hank moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jeb and asked, “I thought you said this place doesn’t have any power?”
“It don’t,” Jeb grumped back.
Hank followed the cord with a flashlight. It snaked through some patches of grass but the plug wasn’t plugged into any outlet. It was just lying there on the floor.
Must be one of those battery-operated jobs.
The television’s volume was turned up so loud Jeb had to shout over the static to project his voice to the center of the room. “Ma’am, HavenPort Sheriff’s Department.”
Nothing.
Hank could feel the heat from the burn barrel. The fire was really hot. Hank was immediately concerned for the woman’s safety. If he could feel the heat from where he was standing then she must be roasting alive. Or worse, her clothes would catch fire at any moment.
They moved closer and Hank could see the woman wasn’t actually watching the television, but doing something with her hands. And really going at it too. So much so that Hank was surprised she didn’t fall over in the rickety lawn chair.
As they closed in Hank noticed the older sheriff was so focused on the old woman he wasn’t double-checking the multiple entrances to the room. Hank gave each entrance a quick scan. As vulnerable as he felt he also tried to keep it real. After all, this was obviously just a middle age woman sitting by a burn barrel trying to stay warm.
Jeb signaled with one finger for Hank to circle around to the left so he could come in from the right. Both men had their hands on their pistols but neither of them had drawn. Hank still couldn’t see what the older woman was doing in her lap but he could now see her heavily made up face. She wore so much make-up she almost resembled a circus clown. Her eyes stared straight ahead, vacant, and an un-flicked cigarette dangled from her open mouth.
The whole thing was pretty damn creepy.
Hank had circled far enough that he could finally see what she was doing with her hands. The woman had a serrated knife in her right hand and she was madly sawing away on her left wrist. Not just superficial ‘pay-attention-to-me’ cuts either. Hank vomited in his mouth but immediately swallowed it back down. The bile burned in his throat.
Jeb must’ve seen the knife at the same time for he yelled, “Knife!”
Both he and Jeb pulled their guns at the same time and drew a bead on her. “Drop the knife! Hands in the air!” they ordered overtop each other.
The woman did not seem to hear them. It was as though she were in a world all her own.
“Wanda?” Jeb asked, his voice tinged with disbelief. “Wanda Parker?” Jeb and Hank exchanged glances. “What are you doing?”
At this, Wanda stopped flaying her wrist. She slowly turned towards Jeb and asked, “Are you going to kill the doctors?”
Jeb blinked away his shock.
“They’re not real, you know.” She then raised her voice, angry, “Don’t you get it? None of this is real.” With that said, she dropped her arms to either side of the lawn chair and lowered her head, resembling a puppet with cut strings.
Hank slowly holstered his gun.
“What are you doing, Hank?” Jeb asked in a harsh whisper. “She’s still got the knife.”
Hank could see the woman was still breathing. He knew the clock was ticking if they had any chance of saving her from her self-inflicted wound. “We can’t just let her sit there and bleed out.” He began walking towards her with his palms out. To Jeb he asked, “You got her?”
“Yep.” Then Jeb raised his voice loud enough for her to hear, “Wanda, please, if you can hear me, don’t you move or I will have to shoot.”
When Hank got within two feet of her, she began to growl, a deep, animalistic growl, resonating in her chest. At first it was low and rumbling, but as he took another step it rose in pitch. Hank didn’t think human vocal cords were capable of making such inhuman sounds.
It was all so macabre.
Hank was only inches from grabbing her by the arm when Wanda sprang to life with impossible speed. She lunged at him with the knife; the chair stuck fast to her bottom as predicted.
Trained in spontaneous knife defense, Hank would have loved to tell his wife later that he had side-stepped the woman, grabbed her by the wrist, snapped the knife out of her hand with a wrist lock, and took her down in a straight-arm-bar-take-down maneuver. The reality was that Wanda moved so fast it scared the crap out of him. With a curse his right leg jerked reflexively into a front kick.
By some miracle he got lucky. The toe of his boot kicked the knife from Wanda’s hand.
It didn’t stop her from tackling him though.
Hank never believed in possession until that very moment. He outweighed the growling woman by fifty pounds and yet she threw him around like a rodeo bull on crack cocaine. Hank wasn’t exactly sure what Jeb was doing but one thing was for certain, he wasn’t helping.
After a few moments of getting knocked around, Hank had had enough. He kicked out the back of the woman’s knee and sent her sprawling face down to the ground. The chair popped off her butt like a cork and when she tried to get back up, he dropped a knee down on her back.
As she bucked violently under him, he risked a quick glance at Jeb and cried out, “Jeb , throw me your cuffs.”
It took Jeb longer than it should have to unsnap his pouch and toss him a pair of handcuffs. The good news was Jeb’s cuffs were in serviceable condition and didn’t have any spurs on them. The bad news was Hank cuffed one wrist easily enough but when he went to cuff the woman’s other wrist he realized only a few strands of uncut tendons connected her left hand to her forearm.
She began bucking underneath him again and Jeb yelled, “What ‘er ya waiting for, cuff her already!”
“Cuff her to what?” Hank barked right back, “Her hand’s practically fallen off!”
“Just cuff her high on the wrist. I’ll call for EMS.” Jeb reached for his radio and cued his radio, “Dispatch, dispatch, this is Sheriff Sutton, come-back.”
Only static.
“Ophy, it’s Jeb. I’m in the Rakewell building, seventh floor. We need the medics ASAP. Repeat, medics, Code 4!”
Still no answer.
Jeb’s radio dropped to his side. “Dammit. Concrete’s blocking the signal.” After thinking for a few moments, he finally added, “Hank, run downstairs and get to my rig outside. Use the truck radio and call for EMS.”
As the crazy woman’s bucking finally began to subside, Hank removed the scarf from her neck and tied a tourniquet around the bloody stump. As he did so he asked, “Why don’t we just carry her down?”
“Six flights of stairs, while she’s bleeding out? No way. Best if I stabilize her here until the paramedics arrive.” Jeb took his place on Wanda’s back and ordered, “Go.”
Hank rose to his feet, “Okay, but loosen the tourniquet when it gets too tight.” He stopped at the door. Before stepping into the darkness he activated his light and danced it across his palm just to make sure it still worked. “And Jeb, one more thing. Keep checking your six.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“There may be others and this place is creepy as hell.”