This had to be the best idea he had ever cooked up.
This had to be the worst idea ever…
Milo stepped cautiously down the empty street. He could barely see a few feet in front of him thanks to the fog that had rolled in while they were talking inside. A few more minutes and the sun would fully set, and it would become even harder to see than it was at the moment. As it was, Milo couldn’t even see the sidewalks that lined the street he was wandering down. If he was going to find anything at all, it would have to be right in front of his face before he even realized what it was.
Well, so far, he had been out wandering for what seemed like an eternity, but a quick look at his watch told him it had only been a half hour. Since he ran out the door into the thickening clouds, he hadn’t seen another living soul around. After a minute or so of running around giddily through the fog like a little adventurer, he had gotten a bit frightened. He called out to see if anybody was around, and there had been no answer. He was truly alone in a deserted city where he could barely see the road ahead of him.
Every store he had tried to go into was locked tight, strange enough, even though it was only around seven twenty when he had tried most of them. The first ten minutes he had spent trying to get into any of the stores without breaking a window, and the last twenty had been spent trying to find his way back to the hotel. From the road, this place had seemed rather small and homely, but when there was no end to the road in front of him, things had a way of seeming a bit larger than life.
Maybe… Maybe there was somebody around him now, or he was near the hotel. He could call out again and hope somebody heard him, but his hopes were dismal.
“HEY!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, which, unfortunately, only sounded like a frustrated little kid.
He hated being so small, he hated being so cute and cuddly. He wished somebody would take him seriously for once, and-
His train of thought not only derailed, but crashed and burned as his eyes turned towards the left end of the street. He could have sworn he just saw some movement over there, most likely one of his friends hoping to scare the flaming bag of dog doo out of him. They had always done pranks like that on him, like hiding in his house and waiting for him to get home from school… They still hadn’t changed, had they?
Stifling a chuckle, he turned and silently made his way out of the street, only seeing the curb a second before he tripped right over it. d**n this fog… But then again, if he was having trouble seeing, that meant that his friends were having the same problems as he was. This was turning out to be fun after all…
His eyes lifted up, and right in front of him was a pharmacy. He couldn’t make out the name on the cracked wooden sign that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades, but he could make out the shape of a pill at the bottom. His eyes made their way towards the door, and much to his surprise, it was closed.
Well, might as well check to see if it’s locked, maybe he could bring back some drugs and get a good laugh from everybody. That’s something interesting right there… Better than nothing. So much for his hopes of finding some kind of historic treasure… That would have been the ultimate find.
His paw found the surprisingly polished handle on the glass door and he pulled it gently, hoping not to set off any alarms. Much to his surprise, it came open without even the telltale creak of an unused door. Flattening his large ears the best he could, Milo ducked inside, pulling the door silently shut behind him. Best not to let the prankster out there know he was inside.
After taking a deep breath, he turned to see if anybody was at the counter. As he suspected, the place looked like it had been abandoned for a good century or so. A thin layer of dust coated the ground, and the wooden counter was cracked in several places. In Milo’s mind, this pharmacy was ancient, and that front desk proved it. It was unpainted wood that looked like it had come directly out of an unused tool shed, sawdust and all.
The layout of the small pharmacy was rather basic. There was a desk in the front with an old “Welcome” sign imprinted into the front of the wood. Behind that four-sided desk were aisles of assorted things hanging from the two shelves that split the back of the store into three aisles. The shelves were made of the same kind of backyard wood that the desk was comprised of.
Milo cringed slightly at the unwelcome feeling that the store presented. If was almost as if the place was telling him to get out of there, like there was some apparition hunting the pharmacy. A shiver shot down his spine at an alarming rate.
He felt like he was on some kind of childish dare, like spending the night at the old haunted mansion just to prove he was a man. But this was just for fun, right? Nobody would blame him if he came back with nothing, right? So he would just turn around, walk back out into the lonely fog, and… Okay, maybe it was better in here.
Okay Milo… This isn’t so bad, as long as you don’t get a claustrophobia attack while you’re here… His parents had always warned him that enclosed spaces would make him lose his cool, but he was mostly positive he could handle anything that came his way. Hell, if that dense fog didn’t make him freak out, there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish.
And now to get those pills, the ones that would probably get his parents mad-
Wait a second. His parents. Everybody but Nile had gotten here about an hour before, with their parents. Milo’s had told him they were going out to go shopping in the antique shops here, but they still weren’t back. Maybe they were lost in the fog as well. Maybe they were just pulled off on the side of the road, waiting for the conditions to clear. Everybody else’s parents but Nile’s had gone with them, and by now, they were probably more than lost in the few roads this town had.
Well, they could worry about themselves, it was time to get the good stuff. He sure as hell wasn’t going to try any of it, he had learned that much from some of the screwed up druggies at school, but he wasn’t so sure about some of the others if they were left alone with the pills. Ah well, it was their fault if they wanted to screw up their minds. He was going to stay sane. Perfectly sane.
With a resigned sigh, Milo began to plod forward, his tail flicking nervously about behind him with a mind of its own. Around the desk, down the middle aisle… On the shelves, there were plenty of boxes for assorted drugs, but Milo didn’t recognize a single one. Almost every single box had the same exact number of specks on it, and some in the same places. Milo, being as curious as he was, crouched to get a closer look at one of the boxes. He didn’t recognize the name, but it said ti was some kind of birth control. Milo grinned. This would be perfect for Ren and Yani… Everybody would get a crack out of this one. So he leaned over and picked one up in a shaking, but eager, paw. Instead of the finely coarse texture he expected, it was as smooth as wax, and none of the dust specks loosed or even fell on the box. In fact, they were printed onto the box itself, which felt like it had just been manufactured yesterday.
If the dust on these boxes was fake, then… He slowly turned around, wide eyes barely believing what he saw. The dust on the floor was fake also, printed into the tiles he had slowly walked across. There were no footprints from his sneakers, and no dust in the air. What kind of a place was this…
In his confusion, he dropped the box to the floor with a clatter, staring straight ahead at the door. Maybe he was just getting paranoid, but he wasn’t believing that the figure outside in the fog was one of his friends. If that was the case, he needed to get out of there, and quick. But if the movement he had seen came from the direction of this pharmacy, and there was nobody in here, that meant he was still out there. Oh… This was not good at all.
Something broke the silence though, a slight groaning sound from behind him. The first thing that popped into his head, besides panic, was that this was some kind of zombie infested town that was about to reach out and take over the world. Call him paranoid, but when faced with the situation he was in, he wasn’t quite thinking completely straight.
Slowly, he turned around, facing the back wall now, covered in that misleading speck pattern on it. Now that he knew it wasn’t real, it was painfully obvious. But he saw nobody behind him. Not exactly what he was expecting, but still unnerving. Hearing sounds and seeing nothing was much worse than hearing sounds and then seeing something there. This just left his imagination to run wild on its own, and Milo’s mind ran wilder than an out of control train. What if it was some kind of invisible zombie that people couldn’t see until it was too late? What if it was some kind of-
There it was again, not exactly a throaty groan, but more like somebody who was just shifting around in their sleep. And then a slight rattling sound, like metal hitting a wall over and over.
Milo just stood there frozen. He could tell where it came from, and it sounded like it came from behind the back wall. But there was no door back there, was there? Granted, he was still about twenty feet or so from the back wall and his vision wasn’t the best, but… Well, he might as well check it out. He wasn’t about to go back outside into the stifling fog.
The sounds continued, and they drove his feet slowly towards the back wall, making sure he was as quiet as possible. Every step he took could be his last… No, why the hell was he thinking like that? He truly was getting paranoid. This place probably wasn’t a ghost town, their parents probably went out together and had all of the shopkeepers make everything look old fashioned. This was all for the party, and Milo had fallen for it. Everybody had fallen for it. That figure outside was probably one of their parents making some last minute preparations with the sound device hidden in this back wall… Ha, this was perfect. They truly did an amazing job… They went to such lengths to do this, and the fog was probably in the weather forecast for the area. Wow… Milo wished he had the kind of creativity his parents did.
Mentally saluting whoever put all of this together, he walked casually back towards the wall, trying to find the tape recorder hidden in there. He put one of his large ears against the wall, hoping to get a better idea.
Genius, this was pure genius.
He slowly made his way over to the right side of wall, hearing it strongest over there. Sure enough, there was a little break in the marvelously dusty paint job, just like a door. Milo smirked and slipped his tiny fingers into the crack, slowly pulling it open.
Their parents were great.
Light slowly began to show the hidden room as it spilled into the darkness that had apparently been camping in the room for a long time now. Slowly, the darkness receded to the foreign light, and the door opened further, showing the contents of the room. Actual flecks of dust danced about in the invading light, sparkling and doing a dance that Milo didn’t understand.
The room was bare, the walls were a blandly gray cement that looked unevenly poured, and the ceiling and ground were exactly the same. There were a few glass cylinders on the ground that Milo could see, scattered about in a brainless fashion. Milo only then recognized what those were on the floor.
Syringes.
His eyes went wide and his pupils dilated so far that his eyes almost seemed like little black dots with a gradient of hazy color around them. What the hell… What the hell were syringes, shattered and whole, doing in a back room of a pharmacy… But then again, since what’d he’d seen in this shop so far, he wouldn’t be surprised at anything anymore. Nothing at all would scare him now. This was the final straw.
Sighing a bit, he began to turn around.
Clank.
Milo froze. His back was to the darkness that was slowly becoming light.
Mmmmmmpppph…
He needed to turn around. He needed to.
Clatter. Clank.
God, do something. Run. Legs, dammit, do something!
Nnnn… Mph.Clank. Clatter.
Run Hide. Something. Don’t just stand there.
The sounds continued. He didn’t want to turn around. He just couldn’t move.
“Okay…” he whispered to himself, closing his eyes and turning around. He had to face this. This whatever it was. Zombie or something.
But when he opened his eyes, all of his expectations were shattered by something far more than he had anticipated.
Chained. Chained to the wall like that… How could they?