Chapter 5: Empty

Adrian looked around as he felt a sharp jolt of pain in his stomach. His head leaned down to look at the table he had been sleeping on, and to see an food plate next to his arms. Completely clean, save for the few crumbs that had been left there. He had brought a hand over his ribs and winced.

The feeling of sickness was coming back, a feeling he knew all too well those past couple weeks. He just couldn't stomach eating anything for some reason. It made him go into a frenzy sometimes and have him on the ground in seconds, which was almost about to be repeated then and there in that restaurant as he stood up and flung away the chair he was sitting on and quickly dropped to his knees. He was ready to puke at any moment, and the thought that he had nearly been killed on two occasions did not comfort it in the least.

He kneeled there, coughing, tears involuntary moving down his cheeks as he fought the surges of pain. The surges of pain that felt like being hit by an oncoming car.

'Good God....'

And then it was over. The pain abruptly stopped, just like that. He inhaled deeply and brought his hands from his stomach to the floor so he could push himself back onto his feet, which he did. He then sat up on the table behind him and looked around, just realizing that the entire place was eerily empty. "...Hello?"

He looked around, and saw no signs of anyone. Not a single, solitary person. Everything about the restaurant was neatly kept; the tables were cleaned to perfection, the chairs, all but the one Adrian was sitting in were all turned over on top of their tables. More than enough to give Adrian the sense of feeling that he shouldn't have belonged there at all.

"Hello?" His voice came off like an echo through the soundless restaurant, distant and spine tingling. It was almost unreal.

He hopped off the table he was sitting on and took a couple steps over to the counter which was also clean and had nothing on it more than the cash register. He leaned forward and peered into an open doorway that led into the kitchen. "HELLO?"

He climbed over the counter and stepped in the kitchen doorway for a closer look, but still couldn't see anything moving. He stepped inside and walked through the narrow path in front of him which was surrounded by metal shelves for holding food. However at this moment, they weren't holding much of anything except for maybe dust. And with how tidy the place looked, dust on those shelves wouldn't have been very likely.

Adrian continued none the less as he limped down the hall. His left leg was beginning to hurt badly, but he pressed on; it wasn't like there was much to do if he stuck around anyway. However, he found himself rewarded for his persistence still when he found what appeared to be a first aid kit.

Immediately drawn towards it by the red cross it carried on it's white plastic case, he threw off the top and found a bunch of bandages and a needle full of adrenaline inside. He wasn't about to play with the needle however, and instead simply opted to wrap his wounded leg with the bandages. Once he wrapped them tight enough he rolled his pant leg back down and turned to continue walking when something alerted him.

He turned around and noticed the fry cooker nearby was still running, and was still spouting steam. He cocked an eyebrow as he made his way over to it, and had noticed that the filter was still the container of boiling liquid. He grabbed the handle to it and lifted it up, but it didn't reveal a few dozen fries; instead a sole silver key emerged, and it gleamed from the oil that it had been left in.

"Very odd place to leave a key..." Adrian mumbled to himself. And taking a glove from the counter next to him, he grabbed the key and quickly put it in his pants pocket.

'Someone sure as hell didn't just go and make keys a part of the menu here.'

The key to Adrian was more important than it may have seemed to someone else. Who would leave a key in a fry cooker if they weren't trying to hide it? Adrian had those kinds of hunches every once in awhile. And usually his hunches, the few that he ever had, were dead on.

Sighing, Adrian looked to his left and saw a door at the end of the hall. He made his way over to it and threw it open, only to find himself in a narrow, fogged up alley. The fog was as intense as it was on the road Adrian was driving on, as intense as it was on the dirt path Adrian had been chasing someone on. And with how much fog had been there, it was to the point that Adrian could even argue that there was anyone at all.

He took a couple steps down to his left and squinted his eyes. Nothing but a brick wall in his way. "What the hell is that doing there?"

'Heh, smart question to ask in a town with the fog from Antonio's Bay in it.'

He laughed at the thought in his head, even though the overall situation made it tough to do such a thing. He shrugged it off however and turned to head back in the other direction. However, what he found was not a way out of the alley that he would have expected. Instead, he found yet another brick wall blocking his path, not being able to see it until he was practically on top of it.

"Oh what the fuck is this?" He slowly stepped back from the wall. "How could an alley be blocked off like this?"

He moved towards it and jumped to try and grab the top of the wall, but it was no use, it was simply too tall. "Does this place have criminals that have an easy time hopping fences or something? Goddamn..."

Sighing, he turned and made his way back inside the restaurant, not given much of a choice in the issue. He hopped back over the counter and walked around in the middle of the main part of the restaurant before he rubbed his stomach with one hand. He was getting that pain again.

Looking around, he found a door that had 'Restroom' labeled on it in faint letters that would have been easily overlooked if the place had not been so empty. He ran with a limp over to it and threw the door open and immediately went to the first stall, throwing up in the toilet in front of him. When he finished he stumbled back, the tile wall behind him being the only thing that kept him standing.

He audibly exhaled in relief and reached into his pocket to pull out a pack of Orbit gum. He put the gum in his mouth and looked around further as he began to chew, noticing a gust of wind that chilled him to the bone. It came from a wide open window at the opposite side of the restroom. He approached it and stuck his head outside. And as fast he put the gum in his mouth, it fell right out as his jaw dropped in awe. What was once a foggy day had become a dark, very dark night.

"It's a little past noon," Adrian whispered to himself, "how in the fuck could it possibly be night time?" He looked to one side of the alley outside, but could see nothing.

"What the hell is going on here?"

The darkness was even worse than the fog was, and that wasn't much of a small feat to accomplish, either. He turned his head to the other side and looked real hard, and there it was. The same figure that he saw earlier, or at least it could have been. Either way, it was a silhouette and Adrian needed to see who it was.

"HEY!" Adrian bellowed before climbing out of the window. He dropped down and scowled as he lifted one of his feet to reveal that he stepped on the gum that fell out of his mouth a moment ago. "Dammit!"

He lifted his right foot and successfully scraped the gum off on the side of the restaurant. When he turned to look at the silhouette, it was gone.

"You stupid bitch," he growled in frustration as he dug into his pocket once more, this time pulling out a laser pointer. He held a button on the end of it and the small red light beamed out.

"Meh, better than nothin' I s'pose," he said meekly before pointing it down at the ground and creating a faint red light around his feet, "wow this sucks."

He then headed over in the direction where the shadow had been standing, hoping he would catch up to it, but to no avail. When he stopped he was out in the sidewalk, and nothing but the empty street in front of him. His laser pointer wasn't showing well, thanks to the inability of it to shine on anything from long range. So instead of pointing it in front of him, Adrian pointed it back to the ground to see where the street began, but had caught a glimpse of more than he had expected.

Something on the ground reacted violently to the red light being shined on it and as a result it scampered across the street, crawling along quickly and scaring Adrian enough to make him jump back and put all his weight on his left leg, therefore causing him to yell in pain and fall back to the ground, laser pointer skittering across the sidewalk.

The thing, only a matter of feet away from Adrian, had stopped at the sound of the human body crashing to the pavement. It remained impossibly still, as Adrian slowly pushed himself along the sidewalk and away from the thing on the ground. He couldn't get a good look at what it exactly was, but something told him he didn't want to know; it surely wasn't a person and he was positive it wasn't the figure he had seen right before then. And he had a scary feeling it wasn't going to be anything he had ever seen before.

He dared not take an eye off the thing that remained unbearably unmoving, although he was trying to spot where his laser pointer had rolled off to without making the slightest movement that would further piss the thing off. He looked to turn around, he wanted to, but before he did the thing began to move again. It mimicked Adrian's slow gestures as it moved one of it's limbs towards him, and then the other. They both began to move rythmically, Adrian moving a foot and arm back, and the thing in front of him moving what would appear to be a foot and arm forward.

That continued for a few moments, before Adrian crashed into something behind him which created a load of noise and caused the thing to scurry backwards alarmingly quick. Adrian yelped and turned his head to see that it was nothing more than a pile of garbage bags that he had just caused to spill its contents onto the sidewalk. Among those contents was a rather noisy item, square and compact and in Adrian's reach. He grabbed it and put it to his ear to listen.

"Broken radio..." he said grimly. He could've sworn that he heard one of his band's songs playing faintly in the background, but he couldn't be sure. That didn't really matter anyway. Ade looked back at the thing nearby to see where it was, surprised that it had moved back rather than forward to attack him. It then slowly retreated further backwards, only a couple steps. However, when the figure did that, the radio's crackling of white noise began to dim just a bit, but enough to be noticed. Adrian glanced back at the radio and shook his head quickly before turning back around and seeing his laser pointer shined on the wall of the restaurant, and only a few feet away.

He crawled on over to it and picked it up, now having that in his left hand and the radio in his right. And as he slowly stood himself up, the radio began to blare the static at an increasingly high volume.

"Agh.." Adrian winced and turned around only to realize that the figure was crawling back towards him, making definitive threatening movements in his direction. Adrian froze still and slowly brought the laser pointer to shine on the thing a few feet in front of him, and this only seemed to make the figure even more incensed.

The faint red on the shadow had caused it to shriek in an ear splitting manner before in one swift and shocking movement, two wings sprouted from its back and it shot up nearly six feet into the air, level with Adrian's face. It began to hover there idly, its wings beginning to flap in a slow and steady motion. And then, in another quick movement, it shot forward and for the first time its features had become disturbingly clear to Adrian's eyes. And Adrian had immediately wished that the monster had stayed in the shadows.

Long serrated teeth grinned a demonic grin as its mouth hung open as if it were ready to scream. Its skin was pink and almost elastic like, in a sense that it seemed to be stretched and barely able to cover the indescribable monster's body. The wings were large but thin looking, the whoosh they made when they flapped added with the crimson liquid that dripped from the pierced skin where the wings had shot out from however made them dreadfully menacing. Its thin legs dangled underneath its giant upper body, long clawed feet curled as if the monster were perched on something. Its terribly white eyes stared into Adrian's contrasting dark brown ones, although it seemed to be fixated on something more than anything tangible. Rather, it seemed to be staring to the pit of Adrian's very soul.

It made another swoop forward at Adrian, but Adrian dropped out of the way and it shot past him and swirled by before disappearing into the alley Adrian had come from. This was Adrian's chance. He ran towards the front doors to the restaurant he had left and tugged on them. However, they didn't budge.

"Fuck..." he mumbled quietly, hoping to refrain from raising the bird-like monster's annoyance level further than it already looked to be. He gazed around at the empty block around him. Nothing but foreboding buildings and intimidating shadows they gave off. The streetlights refused to work which forced Adrian to stay where he was rather than go blindly running in any direction where he could be led to another one of those things.

Frantic thoughts raced through his mind. Would he take his chances in the darkness? Would he check to see if the monster was gone so he could climb back into the restaurant window? Or would he flat out attempt to kill it? So many possibilities, although none added up to results Adrian particularly enjoyed.

He placed the radio in one of his pants pockets, its static dying down for the time being which seemed to signify that the monster wasn't near. He then decided to take his laser pointer and put that away in his pants pocket. It didn't seem to help much anyway other than egg the thing on. He then walked over to the pile of garbage he had knocked over and looked down to see what he could find, hoping he would hit-

'Paydirt...'

Adrian eyed the steel pipe that leaned against the restaurant's brick wall. He picked it up and looked it over with a smirk. "Here, birdy birdy..." he cautiously stepped into the alley and looked into the darkness, where his voice became an echo. "If there's a God out there, God.. you better not make me use this."

He continued to move forward, raising the pipe as if it were a baseball bat. And then, against Adrian's silent wishes, the radio began to crackle. He took another step forward, praying it was only his cruel imagination tricking him into running like a scared little girl. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't.

Over the radio's cries, a faint flapping noise could be heard down the alley. And it began to get louder and closer... closer and louder... and finally the thing shot out from the darkness and right at Adrian as if it could see him perfectly in the dark. Adrian wound up and swung away...

...and completely missed.

The bird had flown right by him, but lucky for him his rabid swinging had kept it from getting to swipe back at him. He turned and waited for it to come back, which it did after it circled around. It zeroed in on Adrian, just as he swung again, this time successfully connecting with the monster's side. Adrian winced and almost instinctively pulled the pipe back at the sound of the bones cracking against the thud of the rusted steel, but knew he would be in for a hell of a painful death if he did, which gave him no other alternative than to put all his force into his swing, and that sent the bird crumbling to the ground in a heap.

Its wings flailed meekly in an attempt to right itself, but it was no use. Adrian put one foot on each wing which pinned it to the ground as he continued to wail away. The combination of the bird's insanely loud screams and the radio seethingly annoying spurts of static only fueled Adrian more as he slammed the pipe repeatedly into the thing's face, over and over again. However, he could surprisingly feel the wings buck underneath his feet in a last ditch effort to get free rather than quickly going limp. Adrian continued pounding away, emitting a grunt with each swinging motion he had made. And finally, after about a dozen smashes to the sides of the bird's frail head, he slammed the pipe down through the monster's wide open mouth where it left the back of its head and shuddered against the concrete ground, which ceased its inhuman shrieks for good.

The radio quieted down as well as Adrian pulled the pipe out of the monster's bloody head. He stepped off its wings, but only to give it a couple of swift stomps to its body for good measure. He then slowly backed away as a pool of blood began to form around the dead body, and Adrian refused to get any blood on his pants that wasn't his. His breathing was heavy and ragged as he stared at the unmoving figure at his feet before he finally spoke in a voice that cracked from fear.

"What the FUCK is that thing?"

He hoped to think about it more once he got back inside so he chose to do just that. He put the pipe in through the window before he climbed in after. And then he realized, things were very different.

The tiled walls were now caked with something that looked like a mix of blood and dirt. The floor crackled underneath Adrian's feet due to the chips of tile that crumbled under Adrian's weight. The stalls were now washed over with blood and strips of decayed flesh and the toilets were full of the same slushes of red. Adrian looked at the restroom for a long minute before he turned to look at his reflection in a now broken mirror as he tried his hardest not to cry. "I wanna go home..."