Well, I think that chapter's will be a couple parts shorter from now on, 'cause that's a little easier for me to finish on a more regular basis.
This chapter in itself is really weird… Probably because I keep having weird dreams where I live in an Umbrella office building lately… Last night the whole dream focused on pizza… in an office building.
Yeah, I have weird dreams… Maybe I'll turn them into a story someday. In the meantime, onto the newest chapter!
-------------
Chapter Seven
In the Home Depot Near the School
Salazar was seriously rich, but that was beyond the point. Looking around a Home Depot, you quickly find yourself remembering just how expensive building projects can be… And time consuming, too. Our vertically challenged castellan friend wasn't about to give up on his Hotel-Rwanda-rip-off idea, though.
There weren't a lot of people in the lumber section, so he set off to look around for someone until he noticed a man standing by the rolls of chain, observing each of them carefully, while impatiently swinging the paint can in his hand.
"Pardon, but where's the nearest hotel, friend?" Salazar asked, walking up to the man who promptly dropped the paint can on his own foot at the sight of him.
"Oww," the guy said irritably, hopping up and down on his good foot and failing to notice that the lavender paint in the can was leaking out all over the floor next to him. "You mean the Best Western?"
"Sure, if that's the closest one," Salazar replied good-naturedly, and the man removed one hand from his foot to point towards the shelf on the right.
"It's that way," he muttered, and the castellan decided it was time to get this project going and set off, just as the annoyed man slipped in the paint and went right into the shelf he'd pointed at seconds earlier.
"I hate this place!" the guy screamed, and a kitchen sink fell on him.
In the Cafeteria, Back at the Middle School
Annette, for reasons she didn't quite understand herself, had come to substitute in this seriously strange school, and since the lunch lady had come down with the flu, she got stuck in here… in this filthy room where she had to cook and watch people eat…
The thought of that made her shudder, but since she was here, she might as well do something in the way of work to keep her mind occupied. After all, virtually all she ever did before this was work constantly.
There was about ten minutes until the first lunch period, and she was staring at what was supposed to be ravioli… but for some weird reason it sounded like it was growling at her.
"Hmm…" she said, backing away from it. "Maybe if I just turn the heat up…"
The pasta grumbled loudly, and she immediately decided that wasn't a great idea.
"Okay, then I'll just come over here and toss the salad…"
She raised the salad fork, and poked at the mixture of lettuce, julienned carrots, and something that remotely smelled like watered-down Italian dressing. She jumped back in shock when it appeared to blink, and rustled around slightly as though it was repositioning itself.
"Who makes this stuff?" she asked, taking a closer look at the box the food had been delivered frozen in. "Let's see… Food prepared by Awesomely Cultivated – 'We treat our foods with less antibiotics, so it grows bigger, but you don't become immune!'… A division of Umbrella."
Nothing even needed to be said about that.
Tossing the box aside again, she took a brief look around the cafeteria, which in a few minutes would be like… Well, it wouldn't be pretty.
She was contemplating how to go about doing this, since there was no way she was touching that food now that she knew how disturbingly fresh it was (even if she did work for Umbrella) when she heard the door open, followed by a very ominous wheezing sound like someone breathing through a shredded straw. She peered around the corner, spotting something she wasn't sure she wanted to see anywhere, let alone in an empty cafeteria… An Iron Maiden.
It inched towards her, twitching and wheezing. She had no idea what to do, since the kitchen didn't have any back exits and it was getting close now. Without warning, it stopped. The Iron Maiden pointed an abnormally long, and gnarled finger towards the food.
"… You want food?" Annette asked, having no clue whatsoever how it even got there.
It shook its head and wheezed louder, continuing to point. When she didn't venture to ask any more questions, it went over to the food, and started dishing it out, completely ignoring the weird sounds it made.
"I'll take the money then…" she said manning the part of the counter as far away from the monster as she could, and the Iron Maiden just looked at her and wheezed.
Within minutes, students began to pile into the cafeteria, and Annette barely paid any attention to them, her mind being more on the beast a few yards away, handing out trays. Most of the students were rather uneasy observing the creepy spiked creature. Some of them, on the other hand, were barely aware of the fact it was there.
Annette was virtually off in La La Land, when a student stopped, and said to her matter-of-factly, "I had a dream in math class today that the lunch lady was smothering me with a chicken patty."
"Congratulations," she muttered unenthusiastically.
As the line began to deteriorate, she was surprised to see her husband William walking up to her.
"Good Afternoon, Annette," he said on a cheerful note, happy to be away from his students for a little while longer.
"William, what are you doing here?"
"'Lunch Duty'," he replied meditatively. "What is the purpose of the Iron Maiden?"
"I don't have the slightest."
They both looked down towards the monster just in time to see it rip a poster of Cookie Monster that said 'Got Milk?' off the wall and tear it to shreds with its teeth for no apparent reason. They were about to exchange confused comments when a student came through, dancing around in a circle and singing loudly to himself.
"… I wrote to explain I'm your biggest fan. I just wanted to ask could I eat your - "
"Okay, I think that's quite enough," Claire said, covering the kids mouth before he could say the next bit. The Birkins had been so involved in watching the poster get eaten and a kid singing a dirty song that they hadn't even noticed her come in.
When the kid had left, Claire decided to try striking up a friendly conversation. "How do you like the school so far?"
They exchanged looks and replied, "Dreadful."
"I don't think it's that bad… Although I did get chased around by a guy with a chainsaw…" She looked down to where the Iron Maiden was now playing tug of war with the green Jell-O over a piece of poster. "Um… What's up with that?"
Before either of them could answer, the cafeteria became completely filled with the sound of every single student clapping the rhythm of "we will, we will rock you".
"What is that?" William asked, not expecting an answer.
"That's Queen," Claire said, and then after a moment added, "Why don't they ever get to 'we are the champions'?"
The three of them stared at each other in complete silence for a while, listening to the hypnotic clapping until they were joined by an annoyed Alfred.
"Does anyone plan on stopping them?" he said unpleasantly, and they all just stared at him. "Alexia would never let something like this go on."
"No offense," Claire said, "But your sister is a completely homicidal psycho."
"Don't speak of my dear sister like that, or I'll throw you in the Iron Maiden!" he shouted, receiving three odd looks.
"That thing down there?" Annette asked, pointing to the creature, which had somehow managed to make the green Jell-O bleed like a wounded animal.
"No, the torture device… What is that?" Alfred asked, somewhat revolted at the sight of it.
"It's Iron Maiden," Claire answered, and the student from before (who happened to be passing by on the way to the garbage can) piped in.
"Like the band?"
"No. The beast," William replied.
The student brought the tray back up to the Iron Maiden, and looked at it intently for a moment before starting to sing 'Number of the Beast'. "Just what I saw in my old dreams, were they reflections of my warped mind staring back at me?"
The four of them traded funny looks, while the kid continued.
"Night was black, was no use holding back! 'Cause I just had to see was someone watching me? In the mist dark figures move and twist! Was all this for real, or just some kind of hell?"
The Iron Maiden seemed to like the tune, since it stopped tormenting the Jell-O and started to do something slightly like a dance.
" … That… is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen…" Alfred said, watching the scene.
"You would see much worse in a vivisection lab, A-Money," William stated, not noticing what he'd just said.
"Are you feeling all right, William? You just called Alfred 'A-Money', whatever that means…" Annette explained, starting to feel concerned about her normally erudite husband.
He scratched his head. "I must have picked it up from my students…"
She rolled her eyes. They'd only been here for a little while and already William was starting to act batty.
By the Janitor's Quarter's
Steve was substituting for a janitor that had recently gotten fired for… somewhat disturbing reasons.
He had been informed by the school administration that there had been funny sounds coming from the ceiling crawl space, and they wanted him to go up and take a look around. He didn't want to pull himself away from picking through the "interesting things" that were scattered around the room, but there was a job to be done… And money to be made.
He grabbed a ladder and started to wander the hall looking for a loose ceiling tile. About an hour later, when he was starting to get tired and could just barely even drag the ladder along the floor, he stopped.
"Why can't I find a loose tile?!"
"You're right under one," a passing student muttered, and Steve looked up.
"Damn."
The ceiling crawl space was mostly for the purpose of storing the miles of electrical wiring, heat and water pipes that the school didn't have any other room for. As Steve looked around, he didn't notice anything all that out of the ordinary. It was almost pitch black so he could barely notice anything anyway, since he forgot the other batteries for the malfunctioning flashlight on a pile of health magazines the students had defaced back in the room.
When he was about to turn around, he heard a snarl up ahead, but thinking it was probably just a heating vent, he put out a hand to see if there were any nearby surfaces. To his dismay, his hand met with something right in front of him that felt coarse.
"Is that insulation?"
But there was something different about its consistency. It didn't feel like fiberglass, it felt almost like fur… And as he kept poking at it, something wet dripped onto his wrist.
"Eww. It feels like… drool?"
Something barked, and began to growl loudly. He took the virtually dead flashlight out of his pocket, and banged it on the tile a few times until it came back on.
"Uh oh."
A seemingly perturbed colmillo stared him in the face, drooling everywhere. What Steve didn't know, was that all the drool was soaking into the already fragile tiles around them.
"I'm leaving now," he said, inching away from the monster, just for the tile below him to give out. He hit the floor hard, laying there for a moment before opening his eyes to see three girls staring at him with their arms crossed. He'd fallen right into the Girls Bathroom.
"You better get out of here right now," Girl Number One said.
"Uh…" replied Steve, still a little dazed.
"If you don't get out, we'll report you," informed Girl Number Two.
When Steve just continued to stare at them, Girls Number One and Two looked over at Three, whom nodded.
"If you don't get out," she said, cracking her knuckles, "Ima bust a cap - "
"Okay, okay. I know when I'm not wanted," Steve cut Three off, leaving the bathroom in a hurry.
He started back towards the janitor's quarters to give the administrators a call and tell them what he found, when he came to a dead halt next to a window. Out on the field, there was a whole pack of colmillos… playing soccer.
"I'll pretend I didn't just see that."
Back in the room, he got on the phone with his findings.
"Well, when I was looking around in the ceiling, I ran into a colmillo, and - "
"I knew it!" the man on the other end said, "Every year, those colmillos flock here in the masses to play soccer and listen to Snoop Dogg!"
"What??" Steve said, not totally sure he heard him correctly.
"Keep an eye out for the Hunters. They have some weird obsession with eating textbooks…"
-------------
Well, I finally worked Annette and Steve in there… Now I've only got a few more people to add before I can really do something here… But what, even I'm not sure.
The Home Depot is actually one of my favorite places to just wander around and look at stuff. My mom and I like interior design, so it makes sense.
Ahh, how I fondly remember avoiding the school's food! Although I did always like the salad… We used to do that "We are the Champions" clapping thing in my middle school whenever the principal wanted to make an announcement. That's one of my favorite memories, actually. And I do know a guy who dreamed about the lunch lady smothering him.
Now try to picture that – Colmillos and Hunters being common pests. I wonder if they would make repellant for that…
Anyway, leave me a review and let me know how it was! Your reviews make my day… or night. Whenever I check my stats.
