Out For Blood 41

Gregg pushed his forefinger onto his lips instructing Jill to remain silent. He withdrew his gun and moved towards the door in the opposite corner; Jill followed him also retrieving her gun.

The top half of the door was frosted glass; he could see to the right behind the door light coming through a window. He pushed the door open slightly and looked left through the gap. To the left of the door was a wooden staircase, he opened it further and looked up. At the top of the staircase he could see another door off to the left that lead into a room above the classroom.

Slowly they made their way up, Gregg felt sure whoever was up there must have heard the noise when the bench fell into the tunnel. Gregg was about four steps from the top when the stair creaked.

‘That you Sheldon?’ said a voice coming directly from behind the door.
‘Yep!’ said Gregg hoping a single syllable word would sound generic enough to throw whoever it was.

The single gunshot that burst through the wood panelling just missing Greggs’ head gave him his answer. Mervyn knew it wasn’t Sheldon; he was in the cinema and knew he wouldn’t climb the rotten stairs in the tunnel. Then they heard feet running across the floor, Gregg looked through the bullet hole and saw a tall thin black man open and enter through a doorway and the door close behind him.

Gregg told Jill to stay put as he entered the room, scurrying on all fours he concealed himself behind a wooden crate. Jill then peered through the bullet hole Mervyn had made and watched Gregg, crouching he ran to the other door and knelt beside it.

Gregg heard a quiet scattering sound coming from the middle of the room; he turned towards it and noticed dust falling from the ceiling above. He then pushed open the door which revealed a dark staircase going to the attic; he crept as silently as he could up the stairs where he reached yet another closed door. Lying there he pushed at the bottom of the door opening it. Two more shots pierced the woodwork above his head showering him in splinters.

He lay there thinking about the distance it was to the Town Hall, and hoped they wouldn’t have heard the shots. He was just about to push open the door and empty his gun when he heard three more gunshots, but coming from the room below. Then there was a crashing sound followed by a loud thud. Gregg looked into the attic, it was black as night apart from a shaft of light coming from downstairs.

He quickly returned to find Jill stood over the man from the attic, a thick cloud of dust surrounding them. Jill had shot him under his chin and he had fell crashing through the rafters.

‘Nice shootin’ Tex,’ said Gregg.
‘I just fired where the dust was falling.’ She explained.
Gregg frowned. ‘So you had no idea it wasn’t me?’
Jill shrugged. ‘No, I guess you’re just lucky.’
Gregg sighed and shook his head, then put his gun in the top of his jeans. ‘Now we gotta find Sheldon.’ He said.

They returned to the classroom where Jill opened the desk of David Marsh once more and taking the folded piece of paper she put it into her empty back pocket.
‘Why’d you do that?’ asked Gregg.
‘I don’t know,’ she said shrugging. ‘I just didn’t want to leave it here!’

They climbed down the wooden bench in the storeroom and headed into the tunnel that would take them to the library. After only walking for fifty-feet or so they came upon a wall of earth. The roof of the tunnel had collapsed and their way forward had been blocked, they couldn’t search the library. But this also meant if someone was in the library they were trapped there and couldn’t get out till the rain stopped.

They turned back and headed across the main tunnel into the tunnel that would bring them out under the garage. When they reached the cross over Gregg shone the flashlight left and right just to make sure it was still vacant. It was.

They reached the steps under the garage and to the right was the tunnel that would lead them to the cinema. Gregg put his weight on the first step expecting it to give way but it seemed fine, he climbed the rest until he reached the door and pushed it open slightly. Apart from the howling wind and rain hitting the building it was relatively quiet and the place looked deserted.

They climbed out of the tunnel and began to look around; the garage was a metal structure with defused white plastic sky-lights. It was around sixty-feet long and forty-feet across. On the front wall facing the schoolhouse was a steel door that had been padlocked from the inside, a roller shutter next to the door was the only other way in, other than using the tunnel.

The light in the garage wasn’t great but it was enough to see by, and they didn’t want to advertise where they were by switching on lights that would show through the roof. The floor was concrete and scattered with small puddles of water where the rain had seeped through the above metal sheeting. There was a small room on the left side of the roller shutter with clear glass windows either side of the door, a sign on the door read,

"Office"

Parked inside the garage was a large oil truck with a severely cracked windshield, a mini-bus without wheels that had been propped up on wooden blocks, and had glassless windows. Gregg picked up a rusting spanner from the floor and went over to the oil truck; he tapped the spanner at the bottom of the large tank and raised it a half dozen times before he found the oil level. The truck was over three-quarters full.

Jill was stood at the door marked "Office", she noticed a small bunch of keys hung on a nail beside the door, lifting them off she threw them over to Gregg and said to try them in the oil truck.

Gregg opened the trucks’ door and put one of the keys into the ignition, it would not turn, the other keys were not ignition keys so he just threw them against the cracked windshield and they fell to the back of the dash. He climbed back out leaving the keys where they had landed and walked about the truck.

Jill gingerly wandered into the room marked "Office". She pushed open the door which gave out a loud ear piercing creak, outside the wind and rain raced furiously around the tin walls causing them to bend and moan in submission, lightning accompanied by a double clap of thunder also shook the building.

Jill looked out from the window in the office and could see the schoolhouse and the library across the road, directly in front of her was the garage forecourt, it contained two fuel pumps and… Jill questioned her vision. ‘A short fat man trying to fill a fuel container?’