That morning, after Heather made Douglas put the garbage out, the pair made their way to work, quietly entering Cybil's office to wait for the S.T.A.R.S members.
"Are you two ready? " Cybil gave them a once over, unable to contain her worry . "Cheryl, why aren't you wearing the police issue Kevlar vest? And Douglas, what's with the coat and hat? They look like they've seen better days."
"Well," they both started.
"This vest got me through Silent Hill the first time, so I'm using it for good luck. I have the other one with me, if you're that worried."
"I wore this ensemble the last two times I was there, so I feel that it's fitting that I wear it this time as well."
Cybil sighed. "Ok. Well, we're just waiting on the others."
Just as Cybil finished her statement, Rebecca poked her head through the door.
"Sorry. Chris and Barry just wanted to check the SUV again. Are you two ready to go?"
"Yep." Heather and Douglas followed Rebecca out to the parking lot, where the others were waiting around a black military issue SUV.
"So, are you two really ready for this? You said you've both been there before, and it didn't end well..." Barry asked as they loaded themselves into the vehicle.
"I think we're both as ready as we could be for another trip to that town. So, who's driving?" Heather asked.
"I'll drive," said Douglas, heading off any arguments. "I know the best ways there, and I've been there more times than any of you."
"Fine." Chris gave Douglas a scrutinizing look before handing over the keys. "This is a rental. Don't make us lose our deposit."
They all chuckled, and Heather smiled as she slid into the back seat, against the window.
They drove for 2 hours, before stopping at the last road-side gas station and convenience store outside Silent Hill. As Douglas filled up the SUV, everyone else went inside, to stock up on sugary goods and to use the facilities.
"Good afternoon! Where are you folks headed?" The attendant asked.
"Silent Hill." Barry, Rebecca, and Heather all replied quietly.
The attendant paled. "S-silent Hill? Whatever for? Surely not for a vacation..."
Heather turned to him. "Police business. Now, where do you keep the energy drinks and first-aid kits?"
After leaving the gas station and it's freaked out attendant behind, they relaxed for the remainder of the drive. Heather, Rebecca, and Claire made idle chit-chat, while Chris and Jill spoke quietly as Douglas drove while keeping up a lively conversation with Barry.
It was about an hour later when they started seeing signs for Silent Hill.
"'Silent HEll'. How imaginative. I assume we're almost there, then?" Jill asked.
"Yeah. We have about 20-30 more minutes before we get there."
Everyone was quiet for a while, until Rebecca heard something coming down the highway behind them.
"Is that a motorcycle?"
"Yeah, it is. What's a motorcycle doing on this road? It leads exclusively to Silent hill, so..."
"So, who's driving it?"
Almost everyone turned, and craned their necks, trying to get a good look at the person.
"Come on, let's just let them pass us so we can get a better look at them and then we can decide if they'll be a threat to our mission." Chris settled back into his seat.
Everyone else took a deep breath and settled back into their seats, and chatter resumed. Douglas slowed down subtly, hoping to make the motorcyclist pass them. Finally, 20 minutes later, the rider began to speed up, and everyone quieted down, and started straining their necks, again trying to see who was going to Silent Hill, besides them.
The rider sped past the SUV, but slowed enough to wave at Douglas, before taking off again.
Douglas swore. Loudly. "God damn it Cybil! I thought you said you were staying back at the detachment because of your duties!"
"Cybil...The chief? Why would she be coming out here?" Jill asked.
"She's...been to Silent Hill before...Maybe she wanted to make sure nothing happened?" Heather knew her idea sounded weak. "I really have no idea..."
As they rounded the next corner, Claire called out for Douglas to stop.
"Guys! Look...Isn't that..." She pointed out the window at a motorcycle crashed on the side of the road. "It looks like the one we saw in the stations parking lot...Do you think maybe she...crashed?"
Heather and Douglas tried to ignore that comment, as everyone piled out of the vehicle to look at the bike.
"It doesn't look like she ran into anything...There don't seem to be any dents caused by a collision, just scraping from hitting the ground and sliding." Chris and Barry flipped the bike upright.
"It looks like she lost control not long after she pulled past us...So why didn't we hear her bike crashing?" Rebecca looked worried. "And what if she's injured? Where did she go?"
"...This...This seems very familiar..." Heather looked down at the tire tracks. "I think...We'll find her in Silent Hill..."
Everyone else turned to her. "Why do you say that?" Jill asked.
"Because we are almost in Silent Hill, and where else could she be...Besides...I guess the best way to say this is that that town...It steals people, I guess..." Heather looked uncomfortably at the bike.
"Hmm...Well, she obviously isn't here, so what should we do? Leave this here and keep going?" Chris asked.
"We should take it with us, but I'm sure it won't fit." Douglas asked, "It'd be a shame to leave this here though. She loves this bike."
"Anything else we need to do while we're stopped? Bathroom breaks? Anything?" Everyone replied negitory, and returned to the SUV.
For the rest of the ride into town the talk was about Cybil's crash and disappearance.
"Why do you think she crashed? I don't think it was speed, and there aren't any weather conditions that could cause problems. And I doubt she was drinking or consuming any drugs...So what could have caused her to crash?" Chris was still trying to untangle what had happened, unwilling to just believe that the town had just "taken" the Brahms police chief.
"Maybe distraction? Or wild animals? Those could be factors as well. Or possibly she was distracted by the thought of returning to Silent Hill?" Jill also didn't accept Heather's theory.
"That's a possibility. She wasn't even supposed to be coming, so maybe she was feeling conflicted? Well, why she crashed doesn't change the fact that she's missing. Can you guys see anything out your windows that'd suggest she was on this road?" The others shook their heads, and Chris frowned. "I just hope it wasn't something to do with Umbrella...That wouldn't be pleasant."
Heather stayed silent, knowing in the back of her head that Cybil was in Silent Hill, and that she was safe. Plus she had the knowledge of reading her father's first book, which was based on of his experience in Silent Hill. Cybil had crashed then too, and shown up perfectly fine in town later on.
She shifted, and pulled said book out of her backpack. She'd read it a couple times, but only before her time in Silent Hill. Figuring that they still had a few minutes in the car before entering Silent Hill proper, providing that Douglas didn't crash like Harry had, she opened the book and started reading. It'd be nice to comprehend what Dad had gone through, now that she knew what he was talking about in his book.
"Wow. I've never seen that copy of that book. Where did you get it?" Twenty pages into the story, Claire looked over and recognized Heather's reading material. "I wish he'd come out with another book, a sequel or something. Wouldn't that be great?"
"...Yeah, that would...But, didn't you hear?" Heather tried to disguise her exasperation. She was getting to the part where "Henry" crashed his car, and she wanted to get to the page where it described "Sybil" showing up.
"Hear what? Did something happen to him?" She looked disappointed with Heather's nod. "Ok, that really bites! That book is one of my favourites...What happened?"
"I saw on the news a while back that he was shot and killed in a home invasion. I don't know if they caught the creeps who did it though. It'd be nice to have closure though. Harry Morris was a great author."
"That he was...Hey, Becca! Did you hear that? Apparently Harry Morris was killed..." Heather tuned out their voices as she continued reading, feeling slightly down at the memory of her father's death.
"Well, here we are. The lovely tourist town of Silent Hill. To your right you'll see Toluca Lake, and to your left you'll see a bunch of trees." Douglas seemed to be in a better mood, and even Chris cracked a smile.
"Great. I can't wait to stretch my legs and question some locals." Barry chuckled.
"Yeah, I can't wait to get out of this car. My legs are killing me, and no offence, but being squished in the back here with you guys isn't that fun." Jill flashed a grin at Heather, Claire, and Rebecca.
"Well, it looks like you get your chance. The road is blocked off ahead. We're going to have to walk the rest of the way." Everyone sobered up at Chris's declaration.
"Blocked off? Can we move the blockage?" Claire unbuckled her seat belt and leaned onto Barry's head rest. "...Never mind. That's pretty big. There's no way to get around it?"
"Nope. We'll just have to see if we can find a way in on foot. It is big though...I wonder what sort of construction they're doing here that would have them blocking off the entire road...It'd have to be major..." Their good moods disappeared as Douglas pulled into a rest stop's parking lot. He stopped in between a white van and a white car with its door open.
"Well, that's one car battery drained and one car pillaged. Who'd be stupid enough to leave their car here like this?" Claire shook her head and slammed the door of the offending car.
"'And then the owner of the car jumped out at Claire and was angry and all zombie or axe-murder.'" Rebecca joked as she stretched.
"Becca! That's not funny! Now I'm going to be thinking of zombie axe-murderers coming to get me for slamming doors shut!" Turning away from where Claire and Rebecca were fooling around, Heather pulled her pack and other items out of the car and sat on the concrete barrier. She strapped her sword on again, and checked to make sure all of her weapons were loaded. Then she pulled out her book and started reading again.
After everyone had used the facilities, which were hellish in their own right, they started looking for an alternate path into town.
"This blockade has a door for some reason...and it's locked." Barry pulled half heartedly at the handle. "Want me to try and bust it open?"
They looked at the wall blocking their path. "I don't know...I don't really feel like going for a romp around in a blocked off tunnel around here. It's probably locked for a reason, maybe part of it collapsed? Why don't we keep looking?" Surprisingly, it was Jill that spoke up. Heather had thought that the woman wasn't the type to get nervous, but it appeared that she wasn't all that keen on entering a possible death trap.
"Ok then, we'll keep looking..." Chris started to say something else, when Claire called out.
"There's a path over here! It looks like it goes towards the lake...Should we give it a try?"
"Is that our only option?" Douglas walked over and peered down the path.
"It looks like it. Unless you want to go through the tunnel. So, are we going this way?" Heather adjusted her backpacks straps, and at Chris's nod, began walking down the path.
"So...where do you think this leads to?"
"Probably the lake. That would explain the fog, plus you can see it's just over there, and we're heading that direction. "
"...Ok..."
They continued walking on the path, briefly stopping to look into an seemingly abandoned well that Claire and Rebecca jokingly tossed several coins into for "good luck", before they came upon a gate.
"Oh, great. It goes not to the lake, but to the graveyard," Jill looked disgusted. "Here's hoping there aren't any open graves in this one..."
"...You go into a lot of graveyards with open graves? Fall in any yet?" Douglas joked.
"Yes, actually. Zombies don't tend to fill in their graves after leaving them."
"Oh...Well, let's try and stay away from any holes then."
They continued on in silence again, only stopping to open the gate on the other side of the cemetery.
"Ugh. I'm glad to get out of there. There's just something about places like that that just give me the creeps. Like the people are still there watching us..." Claire shivered.
"They could be. Silent Hill was said to be built on a...well, I guess the best way to put it is that it was built on a "sacred place" according to what was once the local tribes." Heather said as they continued down the road.
"What's that supposed to mean? "Sacred Place"? Are you implying that Silent Hill is haunted as well? And what do you mean by "what was once the local tribes"?" Claire looked even more freaked out, but the rest of the group appeared to be more amused by her discomfort and Heather's explanation.
"It probably means that this place was revered...or that it was avoided like the plague. And the local tribe thing? There used to be two big tribes in the area, but the members either died or left the area. They have some books on the tribes and their legends in the library back at home. I read them a while back, so that's why I know this stuff.
What's that noise? Is that a...chainsaw?" Everyone turned towards the source of the noise, and Barry rushed over to the chainsaw that was steadily running out of log to saw through.
"Jesus! Don't people know how big a hazard this is, just leaving this here to run. It could have exploded or something! Especially since they had to jerry-rig the shut off switch."
"I don't know...But that means there's probably someone around here then, right? We could try and ask about what's been going on; whether or not they know about Umbrella Corps." Heather asked as she took the chainsaw from Barry and dropped it onto the stump it was sawing through. She'd love to take it with her, but it was almost out of gas and she wasn't sure if she'd be able to find more in town, or if she'd even get a chance to look.
"We could...let's see if anyones around." Chris and Jill looked over the van that was parked on the side of the path, as Douglas and Barry poked around in the underbrush and around the fence. Rebecca and Heather looked on the other side of the path, but they were all unable to find anything, other than the van and chainsaw, that suggested that there was an unknown in the vicinity.
"Well, that was...umm...not very useful. Oh well, shall we?" They continued up the path, walking at a steady pace (excluding the interval when Claire heard a strange noise, and they broke into a swift jog) until they reached the street.
"So, which one of you guys has the map?"
:) What do you guys think?