CHAPTER 42
Alice dodged behind one of the rotten fish containers just before the masked man walked through there.
He walked into the storage room. His heavy boots pulverized the ground as he walked. He walked like someone who had had military experience. His shoulders were back, chest puffed out. He marched, though not intentionally, and with a slight limp. Alice felt a smug smirk cross her face when she noticed the bleeding, barely bandaged wound is his leg.
Serves the bastard right.
He wore shredded jeans and a weathered army jacket. It was too blurry to see, but Alice could make out that there were golden letters written on the sleeves. Didn't help that it looked like it was in a foreign language, either. The man's pale hands peaked out from his long sleeves. They were knarled and deadly pale. It was so bad you could see the veins if it weren't for the…For the blood.
Dried blood stained his hands and covered the little crevices in his fingernails.
The sick bastard didn't even bother to clean himself up. Alice couldn't see his face; it was still shielded by an eagle mask. Strange. Why an eagle? What did an eagle stand for?
Freedom, victory, earthly peace or whatever…Nope, she couldn't remember anything about eagles being the spirit animal of a serial killer.
A scurrying noise came from behind her. Alice could swear time stopped. The killer stomped forward in his wounded, unconscious march. His feet pounded against the ground until he stopped right in front of her quiet little shelter. Oh, God. Alice felt herself try to make itself look as small as possible, so as not to be seen.
This was it. This was how she was going to die.
She, one of the greatest detectives in all of British history, was going to die because of a fucking rodent. She was a Kirkland! She was going to be the only Kirkland to have not died from a pub fight, drinking all her liver away, getting heart disease, or a mixture of all those things combined.
Fuck. She swore to every god that existed, from every goddamn culture, that if she survived, she would personally make sure that all rodents on the fucking stupid planet named Earth were destroyed. Painfully.
Silence and then…the man walked away.
He stomped his way down another hall and then entered a room that she hadn't noticed earlier. Alice nearly let out a breath of relief. She needed to find a weapon and somehow contact Lovino or Alfred. Exterminating the world's rodent population and officially becoming the most religious person in the galaxy would have to wait.
Alice tiptoed down the hallway from where she came. Maybe the killer had just left the room with her sibling in it. Or maybe she'd find something else. All she knew was that heading in the same direction of a mass killer without a weapon was a stupid waste of her newly regained life.
XXX
She finally came across a new room.
It was a large red room, little bits of rust covering the corners of the room. A corner of the room was brighter and stained yellowish. She wrinkled her nose as she went closer and recognized the smell. She'd smelt it enough when she got hammered at the pubs or sometimes the stench covered one of her siblings when they finally came home from wherever. Piss.
Alice continued on, hesitantly.
A desk in the corner was covered with a bunch of random junk, like old pens, knives, and beer jugs. But that wasn't what had caught her attention. Above the desk, nine pictures were pinned to the dark, red wall. She recognized five of them. Isabelle Blackwater, Olivia Forester, Vanessa Lorelei, Vash Zwingli, and…
Alice Kirkland.
She glared at the picture. It was a photo of her when she'd just discovered her bloody, abandoned home. Her eyes were wide with terror and brimming with tears. Her skin looked paler than it ever had. Alice glared at the picture. It showed her weakness. Showed that he could scare her.
Alice looked at the other pictures. There was an older woman, probably in her mid-fifties; a young college student, and- Her blood went cold for a moment…and then she was in an inferno. A picture that looked like it had been recently taken stared straight up at her.
It was a little girl, only about four years old.
A feral growl burned in the back of her throat as she stomped over to the desk and dug through the mountain of trash. She found a rusty old gun that looked to be ten years old. The Italian word Lupo was inscribed in the side. Wolf.
Alice inspected the gun further. "Fuck." There was only one bullet left. How convenient. She looked further and found an old Morse code machine. A smirk crossed her face. "What have I found here?"
XXX
Thirty minutes later, Alice snuck out of the red room.
She tiptoed down the hallway, old gun in her hand. "She's ruined it." Alice froze. The man's voice sizzled with anger. She peeked through the open doorway. The masked man was speaking, but she couldn't see who. She had some guesses.
"She. Ruined. It." He hissed. "She ruined everything and now…Now, I'm going to make you pay for what she did." Alice kicked the door open.