Entry Fourteen
Back in the harbour, we headed right; our only lead, a bloody smear on a café
window. We turned into Marine Parade, a row of tall nineteenth century terraces, mostly converted into flats, lining the right hand side of the road and the beach to the left. At the beginning of the terrace row stood the Gran Canaria Hotel. I stopped. ‘Kay, this was where that Marco bloke said him and his people were staying. Do you think we should check it out? They might have seen or heard something, something to help us find Sean and Anna.’ Kay nodded her agreement and we shot across the road towards the hotel.
‘Do you see that?’ said Kay as we drew closer to the hotel. I followed the line from her raised finger to the hotel and saw a faint blood smear on the white paint around the door frame.
We trotted up the front steps and across the terrace with the four story white painted façade looming over us and paused at the door. It stood ajar. I nudged it open and stepped over the threshold. Straight ahead, I saw a lift, next to that a white door with a sign saying ‘PRIVATE’ in silver letters. To my left a large L-shaped faded red velvet sofa lined two walls of the reception area, with the dark oak reception desk at the rear. A row of tall padded stools sat in front of the reception desk making it look more like a bar in a cosy old pub than a check in desk.
To the right, a big red velvet U-shaped sofa, even more faded than the one in reception, sat in front of the tall arched windows. All these details registered in the back of my brain, but what pushed itself to the forefront was the blood. The cream walls were covered in bloody hand prints, I even noticed a big red smiley face smeared on the mirror in the reception area.
More blood stained the patterned carpet, sticky under my feet. ‘Jesus,’ said Kay. ‘Who decorated this place – Sweeney Todd? It stinks of dead things in here.’ I sniffed, Kay was right, the air wasn’t just old abandoned building style stale and dank, there was something else … sweet and musty – the smell of dead things. Something told me the blood on the walls was just the introduction to something a whole lot worse.
‘What the hell happened here?’ I said as I edged further inside the
foyer. With my stomach tightening and my palms beginning to sweat, I headed for a door to the right of the one marked ‘PRIVATE’. When I pulled it open, the smell of death wafted towards us. Kay gagged and covered her mouth with her left forearm. I coughed and put a hand to my mouth and nose, holding the door open with my right shoulder. We slipped through the door and stood in a stairwell. Stairs led up to the left, I guessed to the hotel rooms, and to the right, they led down.
We paused for a moment, wondering which way to go. I sniffed. The acrid smell of death filled my nostrils, leading me downwards. Following the stench we crept down the stairs, turning left as they bent round until we arrived at an open door. The room beyond was pitch black inside but the strength of the stench told me we had reached our destination. I strained my ears for any sounds to indicate we weren’t alone, but I heard nothing.
We crept inside the room. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, hoping to be able to see something other than blackness, to no avail. My foot hit something hard on the ground and I stumbled a little. I managed to get my balance and I kicked out at the thing before me, running my foot to the left and to the right, testing its length. Something solid and long lay before me.
Remembering my lighter, I pulled it out of my pocket and pressed the button. The small flame highlighted the top of a table to my right. It had a red and white checked plastic tablecloth over it and in the centre stood five candles, all burned down to varying heights. I lowered the flame towards my feet and recoiled when I saw the body of a man. I ran my flame along the line of the body and noticed its stomach had been ripped open, what was left of its insides spilled slimily onto the floor. The flesh on the man’s left arm had been stripped down to the bone. I moved the flame to its head, bending down so I could get a good look. The body was human with no head wound. It had been murdered, not attacked by a zombie.
I stood up and edged my way across to the table. I held my lighter to the wick of one of the candles, moving the flame on to the next until all five had been lit. ‘Fuck me!’ I said as the resulting glow revealed piles of dead and mutilated bodies stretching back into the room. The bodies littered the floor of what I could now see was a small windowless subterranean restaurant. Columns formed archways, through which I spotted more red and white topped tables nestled in what would once have been cosy nooks and crannies to enjoy a meal with a loved one. But now, with the low ceiling, blood splattered white walls and butchered bodies, looked more like a serial killer’s basement.
I stepped over the dead man in front of me and walked around to the left, stepping over and around bodies as I went. My head snapped in every direction – more bodies, more bloody hand prints on the wall. ‘Shit. This has to be Marco and his group … or what’s left of them.’
‘Anna’s been a busy girl,’ said Kay.
I studied the decomposing body of a young man. He had been stripped naked and his chest cavity was empty. He had bite marks on his arms and over his ribcage, chunks of flesh missing but, again, no head injury. Beneath him lay a plump middle aged woman with long cuts from her shoulder to her wrists on her right arm, and her throat had been cut. Her clothing below the waist had been removed and I could see parts of her leg bones where her flesh had been eaten away. ‘And obviously hungry too,’ I said. ‘Kay, I don’t believe Anna did this all on her own.’
‘Shit. We’re a couple of mugs.’
‘What?’
‘Sean. Him and Anna. It has to have been the pair of them.’
‘No. I don’t –’
‘I don’t want to believe it either but like you said, Sophie, one girl can’t have done all this. Maybe Sean and Anna have a Firefly family thing going on …’ said Kay.
‘I can’t believe that.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’
I let out a long sigh.‘Shit … and we’ve just stumbled upon the sadistic serial killer family’s latest kill.’ Horrified, I stumbled back and hit something hard behind me with my foot. I looked around to see a pile of bodies in front of the bar. As my foot made contact with them, the head of one rolled across the floor. Kay jumped at the sight, staggered back and hit the raised bar hatch with her elbow. The wooden hatch fell down with a slam.
‘Shit!’ she yelled.
‘We should get out of here,’ I said, backing out of the room. ‘We’ve no idea –’ The sound of feet tearing down the stairwell outside the restaurant cut me off. ‘Fuck, someone’s coming!’ I leapt over the bodies and around to the table with the candles and blew them out. With the frantic footsteps getting louder, I darted back around to the bar, tripping over bodies in the dark. I struck my lighter and saw the gap under the bar’s hatch. ‘Through here,’ I whispered to Kay and the pair of us crawled underneath and hid behind the bar. I switched off my lighter, shoved it in my pocket and sat with my back against the wood, my knees drawn to my chest.
I heard the feet stop outside the restaurant door. I prayed whoever it was, they wouldn’t come in. But the sound of a sudden squeak of chair legs scraping the wooden floor told me someone was in the room with us. I held my breath as I heard footsteps skulk past the bar. I considered grabbing Kay and running out the door, but in the dark room with the floor littered with bodies, I didn’t really fancy it. And I had no idea if there would be anyone waiting for us at the top of the stairs. So I sat tight.
The footsteps scurried back past the bar and towards the door. I allowed myself to breath again as I heard the door shutting, hopefully indicating whoever it was had left. The faint sound of footsteps heading up the stairs confirmed me and Kay were now alone in the restaurant. ‘They’re sick, Kay,’ I said, switching my lighter on so I could see her. ‘What have we set loose?’
‘All fucking hell, by the looks of it.’
‘Come on,’ I said, crawling out from behind the bar on my knees and one hand, the other hand holding the lighter out in front of me.
We crept over to the door. I switched my lighter off, cupped my hands over my face and peered through its narrow glass panel. I saw nothing but an empty stairwell. I slid my knife from my belt and placed my free hand on the door handle, but when I tried to open it, I discovered it wouldn’t budge. ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘We’re locked in.’
‘Well I’m not sitting around in here waiting to be the next notch on a serial killer’s torture room bedpost,’ said Kay. I struck my lighter and illuminated Kay who stood before me, axe in hand. ‘We’re getting the fuck out of here,’ she said.
Aside from attracting whoever locked us in, the glass panel in the door was too narrow to climb through, so smashing it would be pointless. We decided to look for another way out.
I headed back to the table and lit one of the candles, a short fat one, and I picked it up. It gave off more light than my lighter and didn’t hurt my thumb from having to keep a button depressed. I held the candle out in front of my body as I edged around the room – no windows. Not off to a good start. We crept back to the bar and followed it to the left where we found a set of double doors. I pushed one side open to see a large kitchen, long stainless steel work surfaces straight ahead, but I noticed a faint glow of daylight to the left.
The rubber soles of my baseball boots squeaked on the tiled floor as me and Kay inched our way to the left of the kitchen, past shelves of gleaming pots and pans. Around a corner, I saw a small window above a big stainless steal sink. ‘Hell yeah,’ I said as I placed the candle down on the draining board, no longer needing it with the natural light, and I climbed up so I stood in the sink. The window was about three foot wide and no more than a foot high; a tight squeeze, but it was a way out and that was all I cared about.
I opened the window and pushed it out and up as far as possible. I could see the pavement was only a few inches below, and it came out into the street that led off Marine Parade and up to Remembrance Hill, up to town. But I could also see the slow, shambling, rotting feet of some zombies just a few metres up the road.
I ducked back inside and turned to Kay. ‘We’re going to have to be quick,’ I said. ‘There’re some zombies out there.’
‘Well, there are serial killers in here, so, yeah, time is of the essence,’ said Kay.
I turned back to the window, amazed at how less frightening zombies were when compared with serial killers, and, with my knife through my belt, I grabbed hold of the window frame with both hands and hauled myself up and through. I’m fairly skinny, but squeezing between the base of the window frame and the window pane above wasn’t easy. I dug my nails into the pitted surface of the pavement outside and heaved my upper body outside, keeping my eye on the nearby zombies who now staggered towards where I shimmied on the ground. ‘Come on, come on,’ I muttered to myself. With my arms hugging the pavement and my legs kicking out into the kitchen below me, the first zombie reached its ravaged hand down to me. ‘Fuck shit,’ I said, stopping to manoeuvre my knife from my belt.
No chance for a head shot from my current stomach on the ground position, so I
stabbed repeatedly at the outstretched hand of the zombie until I had torn it to useless dangly shreds. The zombie didn’t seem that bothered about its obliterated hand and, instead, reached its other hand down towards my head. ‘Yeah, come on,’ I said to it, tilting my head sideways to expose my neck, all the time keeping my eyes on the other four zombies lumbering towards me. ‘Get a piece of this, why don’t you?’ The zombie lowered its jaws towards me, more than happy to take up my offer of a nice piece of juicy neck flesh. Once it had stooped low enough, I slid my knife into its ear and it slumped down to the ground in front of my face. ‘Sorry, I’m just a tease,’ I said to its dead, rotten body.
‘Get a move on, for fuck’s sake,’ said Kay from inside the kitchen. ‘We haven’t got all day.’
‘I’m trying,’ I said as I shoved the zombie’s body aside and dug my fingers into a hole in the pavement so I could drag my way free from the window. ‘You’re welcome to give me a push.’ I felt hands on my arse as Kay shoved me from behind.
Another zombie had reached me and this one, I swear, had a glimmer of intelligence because instead of going for me at my head end – where I could reach it with my knife as it bent down to bite – it staggered past my head and went for my bum, that I had just squeezed outside. As it bent down to bite me, I shimmied forwards on my stomach, pulled my legs through the window, rolled over onto my back and threw my body forwards, plunging the knife into the zombie’s head.
I scrambled to my feet and kicked the zombie’s body clear of the window. ‘Come on,’ I called down to Kay. ‘I’ll keep the zombies back while you crawl through.’ I turned, surged forwards and drove my knife through the ear of the closest zombie, pulled it out and plunged it straight into the head of the next. As the last zombie lunged for me, I kicked it back, pulled my blade from the one I’d just killed and slammed it between the eyes of the zombie as it came at me again. I looked up to see more zombies, a sizeable crowd, staggering towards me from Remembrance Hill.
I darted back to the window and grasped Kay’s hands as she wiggled her way through the window. I pulled until I’d dragged her free. She sprang to her feet, and with zombies to the right of us and psychos to our left, we sprinted down a narrow road behind the hotel that led to a car park and back out onto Marine Parade. We didn’t stop until we had reached the cover of the Lower Leas coastal park. We slowed to a jog until, exhausted as the adrenaline left our bodies, we stopped to rest on a bench.