Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (31 page)

The room of blood.

I breathed in deeply, trying to
keep my senses focused, my mind sharp, my heart rate under control.
I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to succumb to the black room
that nipped at my back. I was going to hold it together and find a
way out.

I turned around and faced the
void of the unknown.

“
Hello,” I
cried out softly. “I’m here. Whatever you want with me, please,
just show yourself.”

I sucked air into my lungs and
waited for a voice to set me free, for a shape to show itself.

Nothing happened.

Except there was a noise, in
the far corner of the room. The slick, sharp sound of metal on
metal. I thought back to when I was peering into the room the other
day and I couldn’t see anything in my mind’s eye except the three
operating tables in the middle of the room.

I also remembered Oldman saying
that the body chute opened up somewhere in the room. It was a long
shot, and a fucking terrifying one, but if I could get to the chute
and somehow get in it, it was at least a way out.

I swallowed hard, willing my
eyes to adjust to the dark, but with the room having no windows and
receiving no light from the outside, nothing happened. Everything
in front of my eyes was just black on black on black.

I stepped away from the door
and walked forward, taking slow, careful steps, my hands straight
out in front of me in case I ran into something.

I walked in as much of a
straight line as possible, trying to pull the layout of the room
from my memory. I wished I had paid more attention at the time, but
the truth was, even with Dex and Rebecca and Oldman at my side, I
had been scared as hell. I would have done anything to have them at
my side again.

And then there had been Dex,
running away from me, the Dex who was never him at all. His
doppelgänger. I could only hope that neither the real Dex nor
Rebecca would run into the doubles of themselves—apparently if you
do, you’re supposed to die.

And I hope I
don’t run into myself
, I thought, trying
to imagine how surreal that was. Of course, in some ways it had
happened before. Back in Red Fox, the skinwalkers took the shape of
me, trying to lure Dex in with a kiss. That was as fucking trippy
as it could get, not to mention aggravating, since Dex’s first kiss
with me wasn’t with
me
.

The thought of him though, the
thought of New Mexico and how far we’d come since that episode,
gave me a new kind of strength. I’d been through so much already.
We’d both fought against death and won. Now it was the last shoot
of our last episode, and all I needed was just to come out of it
alive. Fuck having the best episode—I just wanted to keep living my
life.

I walked forward, determined to
make it out.

I didn’t make it far.

I walked straight into
something cold and hard. I gasped from the pain, having hit my
hands at an odd angle, and immediately felt along the chilled,
slick surface, hoping it was a wall.

It wasn’t. It was the corner of
the body cooler. I nearly walked myself right into the morgue. I
shuddered, my heart racing, my legs threatening to give out on me.
I had to keep going; I had to get out of there.

I walked more carefully now,
feeling my way along the edge of the cooler, when I felt something
banging against it from the inside, a dull metal thud. I shrieked,
taking a step back, the blackness disorienting. There was someone
inside the body coolers. For a second I thought it could have been
Dex, for a second I thought maybe I should make my way back to the
doors and fumble through the dark to open one of the drawers.

But all it took was to hear
silence—silence punctuated by a click and the slow, metal groan of
one of the body cooler doors opening by itself—to know it wasn’t
Dex in there.

I waited, frozen on the spot,
until I heard a dull slap. The sound of bare feet hitting the
ground.

Someone coming out of the body
cooler.

Someone dead.

I turned, and in my panic I
started to run. I ran away from the sound, but only made it a few
feet until I collided with the wall, biting my tongue as my head
banged against it.

The world swirled in colors
behind my lids then the colors were erased by a dull red.

I opened my eyes to see a light
in the room, to see everything coming into focus.

The big, eye-shaped light above
the operating table was turned on.

Beneath it was one of the
tables, the one with the narrow moat around the edge.

The moat was red with a shiny
river of blood. The young body on the table was pale as ice, its
chest carved open like a turkey, flaps of skin out to the
sides.

Standing in the shadows, a few
feet behind the table, was a doctor. His eyes were cold and
lifeless, and focused on me, his mouth and nose covered by a blood
splattered mask. In his bloody, gloved hands he held a dull
scalpel.

I didn’t know if I could
scream, if I should scream. I just stared at the sight, my eyes
darting between the lifeless, massacred body on the table and the
sadistic doctor standing above it, that sharp scalpel wielded in
his hands like a weapon.

I heard the creak of one of the
body cooler doors opening again and my eyes slid over to it just in
time to see a young, naked boy stepping out of it, his chest
exposed, balloons stuck inside him, expanding and deflating with
each and every breath. When my eyes finally saw the big picture,
saw what was really there in the room, I let out a pitiful cry.

The wall opposite me by the
door I’d come through was lined with children. They were all naked
or half-dressed, all of them sliced open for me to see. Their
hearts pumped slowly, their lungs wheezed, the blood spilled out of
them and onto the floor, creating a stream of blood that was slowly
flowing toward me, pulsing with each ragged breath they all
took.

When I looked back at the
doctor, he was gone. In his place was the
bad thing
, standing upright
on two legs and hunched over the patient, his/her heart dripping
from the bad thing’s razor-toothed mouth. The patient on the bed, a
girl, slowly turned her head to look at me. Her mouth
moved.

“
Help
me.”

But I had to help myself.

I had to.

If it was the last thing I
did.

Somehow I broke free of the
terror, looking away just as the bad thing’s white eyes sought me
across the room. Using the light of the operating lamp, I ran my
hand down the wall as I scurried alongside it, desperately
searching for the door of the body chute.

I was almost at the far corner
when I saw a small handle. I put my hands around it and tried to
pull it open with all of my strength just as I heard a clatter
behind me. It was probably a mistake to turn around and see what it
was. But I did. It was the bad thing crawling across the room
toward me, the dead, carved open children following it and coming
for me with dead eyes and snapping mouths.

If I let the fear take over, I
would have died right there and then. No question. Fear wanted me
prisoner, for my limbs and organs and mind to just give up and give
in.

But I couldn’t.

I wouldn’t.

I jerked the door toward me and
it opened, assaulting me with a heavy gust of stale air. Wasting no
time, I jumped inside, a sloping concrete incline leading from the
room into the tunnel and quickly pulled the door shut behind me. It
was pitch black inside the tunnel but it didn’t matter, I couldn’t
think about it. I started running down the smooth walkway of the
chute, my feet echoing as I ran. I didn’t get far before I saw the
fuzzy grains of light appearing around me and heard the sound of
the door opening. I paused and looked behind me.

The door to the room of blood
was opening, light spilling inside the passage and the shape of the
doctor stepping into the tunnel. He shut the door behind him.

Everything went black
again.

I was sealed in the tunnel with
him.

I sucked in my breath,
surviving only on instincts now, and I ran. I ran as fast as I
could, occasionally tripping down the steps that were alongside the
path, or bumping into the cold walls. I kept running despite the
fact I had no idea where I was in the chute, no way to get out, no
light to see by. I kept running because I could hear the quick
footsteps of the doctor coming after me, hear his coat flapping as
he hurried.

He was Shawna’s father. I knew
that now. Was he trying to appease her, to make amends for
supposedly failing her, by trying to take my lungs? Was he really
the bad thing now, something that would feed off the hate and fear
in me?

Either way, I couldn’t get
caught. I had to keep going. I had to keep running.

Eventually though, when I felt
I’d been going forever, the sound in the tunnel changed. The
footsteps behind me had dropped off and the sound of my own body,
of my stride, of my breath, became dull, almost muffled. By the
time I was trying to figure out where I was, if I’d possibly run as
far as the post office, I ran straight into something hard.

I cried out, nearly falling
over, more from surprise than from pain. What the hell was this? I
stuck my hands out and ran it up and down the barrier.

It wasn’t really a wall; it
felt more like a bunch of wood planks nailed together.

I heard a noise behind me, a
scraping sound, and I knew that this was far from over. The sound
continued, coming closer, like nails dragging across a rough
surface.

The bad thing crawling on the
cement ceiling.

And I was stuck. Trapped. It
couldn’t end like this.

Suddenly, a pair of tiny, cold
hands grabbed my wrists and yanked me forward.

I cried out again, only this
time I heard something in response.

“
You’re so
close, so close, Perry.”

It was Elliot. He tried pulling
me further in, my arms disappearing through some of the barrier,
the rest of me pushed up against it. It took me a while to realize
that the whole thing wasn’t solid. It must have been the thing that
Oldman had been talking about when that teen went missing and they
had to block off the tunnel in some way.

“
Keep trying,”
Elliot yelled.

It was then I noticed the air
around me had grown grainy and grey with the gradual increase of
light. I still couldn’t make out anything, but I knew that I had to
start prying the boards away, that freedom lay on the other
side.

I was so close, as Elliot
said.

I began grabbing every edge I
could find, pulling the planks toward me until they either gave
away with the flying clank of nails hitting the ground or snapped
in two, and more dull light began to fill the tunnel. I kept at it,
my fingers raw and bleeding, all too conscious of the malevolence
that was quickly closing in on me.

Finally, with Elliot’s hand
yanking me forward, I found the small opening I had created and
dragged my body through it, landing on the other side of the wooden
wall in a heap. Elliot’s hands were at my arms, trying to get me to
my feet. By the time I got up, I saw him running into the distance,
toward the grey light, his silhouette disappearing.

I ran after him, my lungs
filling with fresher air with every step I took, the light
overtaking my eyes with hope until finally I burst out of the
tunnel and into a dirty, abandoned room covered with empty shelves
and mounds of dust, the late afternoon light coming in through the
intact windows that shuddered with each blast of wind. I’d never
been so happy to see daylight before, never been so happy to be
inside an abandoned building.

Knowing I still wasn’t one
hundred percent safe, I closed the heavy door to the tunnel behind
me, marveling as it camouflaged into the wood stylings of the wall,
then turned back around, looking for the door out and looking for
Elliot.

But while I could see the door
in the corner, looking rusted beyond repair, I couldn’t see Elliot
anywhere.

I took a few steps forward into
the middle of the room. I had to get out of there. I had to go back
to the school and see if Dex and Rebecca were alright. I had to do
all of that. But while I was crossing over to the door, I nearly
stepped down into a hole.

I stumbled back, catching
myself just in time, and looked down. A few of the floorboards were
pried up. Maybe it wouldn’t have normally been of importance,
except that Elliot’s hat was lying beside them.

I crouched down and picked it
up, turning it over in my hands. Then I peered down into the space
in the floor.

There was a large mail sack
sitting in there. I frowned and reached my hands inside, hoping
nothing was in there ready to bite them off. I pulled out the
burlap sack and started rifling through it.

Inside there was nothing but
letters upon letters upon letters. Curiously, every single one of
them had already been opened, some ripped in two, some neatly
sliced along the top.

I picked up a letter in an
orange envelope, closest to the top, and turned it over in my
hands. It was written in the faded scrawl of a child’s writing and
addressed to Mrs. Valerie Wolfe in Seattle, Washington, from Elliot
Wolfe.

I opened up the letter and
pulled the paper out.

It wasn’t very long and seemed
to be written in an ink that had almost all but faded, but I could
still make out the gist of it.

Dear mommy,

I hope I can visit you sooner
now. The doctors here say they are closer to a cure. We can’t speak
about it but we all know. My friends Sam and Phillip died the other
day. I think they were left outside in the cold here for too long.
It gets really cold at night. Please send me some slippers and
socks. Love Elliot.