Dead Stop (15 page)

She sprinted for
the kitchen, and prayed Harley and the snotty little dork could hold the door
long enough for what had to be done. The waitress remembered Big Earl had a
spare set of keys in his office. She also remembered Gladys was the only one to
have a key to Big Earl’s office as well, but a past exploit of that idiot Tomas
reminded her there was another way into there.

Now if she could
get one of the guys back there to step up.

“Benny!” she
yelled as she pushed her way through the door, “I need you to…HOLY SHIT!”

Marisa came to a
stop and gaped at the rear wall of the kitchen near the back door and hallway.

The entire area was
drenched in blood.

Chapter
Five: Downpour

Downpour -
Deke

“Holy Shit!”

Deke looked up
from tying the makeshift bandage on Stacey’s arm to see Marisa standing in the
doorway of the kitchen with a shocked look on her face. He could only imagine
what she was seeing.

The group of
them all sat on the floor around the janitor, Benny, bandaging him as fast as
they could under the veterinarian’s direction. Stacey had run and grabbed an
armful of rags from a storeroom, and now they were tearing them and tying them
around the little man’s legs under Rachel’s watchful eyes. They were all
covered in blood from both the janitor and the trucker who died to save him,
and the floor and walls were smeared in crimson from their former struggle with
the monsters at the door in the stuff.

“B-Benny?” The
tall waitress took a hesitant step further into the room.

“Oh, Marisa!”
Stacey cried, “They got Benny! He’s hurt bad! Real bad!”

“Oh shit,”
Marisa gulped weakly, and took another two steps closer. “W-what about Tomas? I
need him right now.”

“He’s dead!” The
little waitress got up and rushed over to grab the taller girls arm. “They’re
all dead back there, ‘Risa! Tomas. Arnold. All of them! These things were
EATING them!”

Marisa stared at
the smaller girl in horror for a second, then seemed to collect herself.

“Easy,
amiga
,”
she put her hands on Stacey’s shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “I know it
must have been bad, but we’re not out of trouble yet. Those bastards are in the
store, and they’re trying to get into the restaurant. Harley is holding the
door shut, but he can’t keep it up for long. I need to get into Big Earl’s
office to get the spare keys,
comprende
?”

Stacey gulped
and stared at her for a second. She looked half hysterical, and Deke realized
she had probably run to the other waitress for comforting. Instead, the smaller
girl swallowed hard and nodded.

Marisa started
to pat her on the shoulders then decided not to when she noticed the gashes on
the girl’s upper arm. Failing that, she turned to Deke with a look of urgency
on her face.

“It’s Deke,
right?” She used the hand she had originally intended to put on Stacey’s
shoulder to grab his arm instead. “I need your help with something. I know you
want to stay with Stacey, but I need you right now. Okay?”

“Uh…”

“You need him to
climb like Tomas did?” Stacey interrupted. Deke thought she appeared to be
recollecting herself with admirable speed, although she had a certain
wide-eyed, frail look that worried him.

“Yes. And we
need to hurry. Harley can’t hold that door much longer.”

“Okay,” the
smaller girl nodded again. She didn’t sound terribly happy about it, and Deke
didn’t want to leave her. But if those things were about get in here, then he
needed to do everything in his power to stop them…right now.

The young
redneck looked back at her as he let Marisa pull him down the back hallway.

“Come
on
,”
Marisa urged. “Once you’ve gotten these keys for me, you can get back to taking
care of her. But she needs you to do this, too. All of us do.”

“Right!” Deke
refocused ahead as the tall waitress pulled him past a couple of doors in the
rear hallway and stopped at the third one. “Let’s get on with it. What do you
need me to do?”

“That,” she
pointed at a fourth door set into the wall at the end of the hallway, “is Big Earl’s
office. There is a spare set of keys in the lap drawer of his desk.”

“So let’s get
them.” He headed for the door but Marisa caught his arm again.

“Wait,” she
ordered. “It’s locked and we don’t have the keys to it. It’s metal and set in a
concrete and cinder brick wall, so you aren’t going to be able to bust it open
either.”

“Okay.” He could
see she was telling it like it was. “So what do we do?”

“You,” she
emphasized, “are going to go through the ceiling and over the wall and drop
into the office.”

“Got it.” Deke
began an immediate scan of the area for something to stand on so he could reach
the ceiling and do as instructed. He spied some plastic crates for carrying
large jugs of salad dressing and started for them.

“No, Deke.”
Marisa tightened her grip on his arm, and he turned to look at her in
confusion.

Her face was
tight, and he suddenly got the feeling she was about to tell him something he
really didn’t want to hear.

“What?”

“Now for the bad
news,” the waitress continued. “You can’t get there from here. The wall all
these doors are set in is a firewall. If you go up into the ceiling here in the
hallway, you can only get to places inside the restaurant. The office is on the
store side of the wall, so to get in there you’re going to have to go up into
the ceiling from the store side.”

His urge for
decisive action faded as he considered the ramifications of that.

“Wait,” he
swallowed, “You mean where those…”

“Yeah.”

“But how? If
those things are in there, how am I supposed to do this? It would be suicide!”

This changed
everything. Deke didn’t want to let everybody down, but getting ripped to
pieces didn’t appeal to him either. He had seen the damage these monsters could
do to a man in a very short time while fighting at the door.

“By sneaking
past them.” Marisa’s grip tightened on his arm. “You can do this.”

“Are you
serious?” He eyed the girl warily. “How?”

 “I saw
seven of them in there. Four were eating Gladys and some other guy at the
counter, and two were at the door trying to push their way in. I think a couple
of them moved to join the ones at the door while Harley and I were trying to
hold it closed. But that still means they’re all up front of the store. If you
go through this door, you should be able to duck right into the men’s room on
the other side without being seen.

“That makes
six.” Deke really didn’t like this. “You said there were seven.”

“Harley killed
the other one. By the way, what is he…some kind of redneck ninja or something?”

“Huh?”

 “No, nevermind
that,” she shook her head as if irritated with herself. “The point is it’s
down, and you should be able to do this without getting caught. Just duck into
the men’s room and go to the last stall. Climb up through the ceiling there and
you should be able to go right over the wall into Big Earl’s office. Got it?”

“Yeah,” he
shrugged without enthusiasm. “Okay.”

“Deke, you have
to do this. If you don’t…we’re all dead. Stacey, too.”

“I know,” he set
his jaw. “I know. I’ll do it. I’m just trying to figure out how this could suck
any worse than it does.”

“You could be on
fire,” she suggested as she gripped the doorknob to the employee’s entrance to
the store.

“Oh ha-ha, and
here I thought Stacey was the comedian of you two.”

“Oh, trust me,”
Marisa rolled her eyes and glanced back up the hallway. “She has her moments.
Now, I’m going to open the door on three. Are you ready? On three…One…”

“Wait a minute.
Do you mean…”

“Oh, nevermind!”
she hissed and pulled the door open a bit to take a peek out. “You’re clear.
Just go! And stay low until you’re in the bathroom.”

“Right.”

“And hurry!”

“Right!”

Deke took a deep
breath and slid around the door into the short rear hallway of the store. He
crouched low, one hand on the floor and located the bathroom door only six feet
away. Behind him, the door to the back hallway closed with a soft click.

He was now in
enemy territory…and scared half out of his mind.

But so far,
still alive.

The killers must
have been at the front of the store like Marisa had predicted. Deke had an
unobstructed view down one aisle and to his relief it stood completely empty.
But something had definitely happened there. The floor was littered with broken
glass and cans, and the steel shelf on the end was bent down into a shallow “U”
from some kind of impact.

He could also
hear things.

From somewhere
in the front corner of the store, where the cash register ought to be, he could
hear a strange, soft whimpering punctuated by the tear of cloth and rustle of
movement. His mind rebelled at the image the sound conjured and focused more on
the scrabbling noise emanating from the direction of the door to the
restaurant. There was an occasional squeak, like the sound of a hand sliding on
glass, consistent with Marisa’s tale of the things trying to push their way in
to get to the rest of them…

…a reminder that
time was of the essence here.

Deke ghosted
over to the entrance to the men’s restroom. He pushed the door open with slow
care, trying not to make either noise or a sudden motion that might catch the attention
of the monsters, and slipped inside. Once in, he eased the door closed while
holding his breath…expecting it to be slammed open again by some skull-faced
horror any second. When that didn’t happen, he wasted no time in hurrying over
to the far toilet stall.

Step one had
been accomplished.

This was an
industrial style toilet, without a tank on back. It only had a pipe leading up
from the toilet itself featuring a valve handle on it’s side. Deke stepped up
onto the bowl and then the top of the pipe in two quick strides and examined
the ceiling. A rectangular fluorescent fixture hung over the center of the
stall, but in the back corner a large ceiling tile provided exactly the exit he
was searching for.

He pushed up the
tile with alacrity, did a quick check of the top of the wall for spiders or
other vermin he had no wish to put his hands on, then grabbed the wall top. The
young man pulled himself up into the ceiling with limber ease and found himself
crouching in the dark recesses of the ceiling, on top of an eight inch wide
strip of concrete wall. A stray part of his mind noted he was getting filthy,
but it barely pinged on his consciousness at the moment.

“Okay,” he
muttered while reaching for a tile on the opposite side of the wall from the
bathroom. “If Marisa is right, then this should be the ceiling to the office.”

He pulled up the
tile to reveal a square of blackness below.

“Naturally, the
lights are out,” he grumped. “Oh well, here goes the dashing Deke leaping blind
into the jaws of…uh…whatever.”

The boy grabbed
the top of the wall, and slid his lower body down through the hole as fast as
he could and still maintain control. He worried he might end up hanging down
the side of the wall, and have to let go and drop in the darkness without being
able to gauge where the floor was beneath him. As it turned out, the exact
opposite became the problem.

His feet hit an
obstruction just as he had the top of the wall at chest level.

The fact he was
allowing himself to descend rapidly meant he essentially landed on whatever it
was, with his legs now absorbing the brunt of his weight as opposed to arms.
The result of this was his arms suddenly ceased to support him and he
reflexively relaxed them, and then a second later he flailed in the darkness as
the surface starting slipping out from under his feet. Instinct told him he
must have landed on the desk, and on a large stack of papers, because now he
was slipping and kicking them all over the darkness in a desperate dance to
keep his balance.

“Aw shit!” he
yelled as one leg kicked a tad too far and he went down in a crash of plastic,
glass, and papers.

“Deke?” A
worried voice came through what had to be the door to his right. “Are you okay?
What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” he
retorted while flailing on the floor to get his feet under him. “Where are the
lights in here?”

“On the wall,
near the door.”

Her tone left
“where they always are” unspoken but not unsaid.

“Right.”

Fumbling his way
up the wall, he found the switch and turned it on. As he expected, the office
now qualified as a wreck. Papers, pens, and plastic desk trays covered the
floor. And the desk… he hoped Big Earl was in a forgiving mood when he saw
this, because the desk was going to have to be replaced. It had broken in the
middle when he had fallen and landed on it.

“I did that?” he
muttered, astonished at the destruction.

On the bright
side, the lap drawer had been forced open, and now revealed the object of his
quest.

“I got it!”

Deke snatched
the large key ring from the broken drawer and held it aloft like a prize.

“Well,” the girl
retorted from the other side of the door, “then hurry up and get out here with
it!”

“Right,” the
youngster sighed and turned towards the door. He twisted the little knob in the
handle to unlock the door, then turned his attention to the dead bolt above.

“Aw crap!”

“What now?”

“The dead bolt
takes a key on this side too! There has to be forty keys on this thing!”

Marisa said
something in Spanish that Deke suspected wasn’t very nice…and probably had
something to do with him. He was beginning to get irritated with her attitude,
but understood it probably had a lot to do with the fact their time was running
out. Besides, she was Stacey’s best friend so he figured it wise to stay on her
good side.