Halloween Grab Bag
A/N: While ordinarily I'd do a full length Halloween story, this year I couldn't come up with one so decided to do an assortment of Halloween snippets instead. Hope everybody enjoys, please read and review!
Him
It was a dark and stormy afternoon at Firehouse 51. Sylvie Brett had promptly marched to the shower after returning from a call where an OD patient threw up on her, and in lieu of the typical workday of a quick scrub down to be ready for the next call that came in, she'd taken her time to make sure there wasn't so much as a trace of it lingering on her skin. By the time she finally left the locker room, dressed in a new uniform and her hair pulled back in a damp braid, she found herself alone. Outside the rain poured, on occasion thunder rumbled, on a rarer occasion there was a faint flash of lightning coming in the windows, inside the fire house was quiet. Sylvie looked around as she stepped from room to room, occasionally calling out, "Hello?" As she turned a corner she called out again, "Helloooo? Anybody here? Otis? Cruz? Anybody?"
Nothing. No sign of anybody, no sound of anybody, no signs of human life anywhere. As Brett entered the common room she found the TV had been left on and was currently showing "Halloween", in which Jamie Lee Curtis was likewise futilely calling out to her friends, who had a very good reason for not answering, that being that they'd been horribly murdered a few minutes before.
"Okay, very funny, guys," Sylvie called out. "Ha ha, is that the plan? Everybody hide, then jump out and scare me, is that it? This is the kind of stuff you pull on the candidates, come on out!"
No answer. Sylvie tried to convince herself that that's all it was, for some reason everybody decided today they were going to bust her balls, why, she didn't know, then again they were men and there was no figuring them out. She told herself that they were all just waiting around a corner to jump out and try to scare her, even though she had a tiny nagging feeling in the back of her head that was saying otherwise. That maybe, just maybe, something strange actually was going on here and it wasn't just typical firehouse pranks.
"Guys?"
Thunder clapped suddenly and sent a shiver through the paramedic's body. She made her way from room to room, checking again for any signs of anybody, but no matter where she turned, there was nobody there.
"Guys?"
She found herself in the bunk room and looked around and saw all the beds were empty. What was going on?
Then suddenly, she heard it. Sylvie felt her feet glued to the floor as she felt a presence come up behind her, and heard a garbled sound that she knew was the muffled breathing of someone wearing a mask. She couldn't pick up her feet, but she was able to slowly turn her body around to see who was behind her.
It was the middle of October and people were getting ready for Halloween. Earlier that day before the storm hit, Cindy had dropped off some caramel apples she and the kids had made for the guys at 51. Everybody had enjoyed them, up till Boden bit into one and it wound up pulling out part of his bridgework. He'd gotten an emergency appointment at the dentist's and was expected to be gone the rest of the afternoon.
The guys had been out on the apparatus floor and Severide had just happened to witness a kid riding his bike a block from the firehouse wipe out in the rain and fell in the middle of the street between two incoming cars from opposite directions. Thank God, nobody had gotten hurt, and being that close, everybody had just run onto the scene to assess what had happened, and they wound up staying there for close to half an hour while they waited for the police arrive to take everybody's statements. The 12 year old boy who skidded into a puddle of standing water hadn't been hit by either of the cars and his bike hadn't been damaged either, the two cars had smacked into each other's fenders and neither had been too eager to stand around for half an hour giving a statement and showing all their paperwork to the police, especially given how minor the damage was, but all the same that's what they found themselves doing. Half an hour later, the men headed back up to the apparatus floor, all of them soaked clear through and chilled right to the bone. As they reentered the firehouse, they all heard the distinctive sound of Sylvie screaming from somewhere not too far off, and she sounded terrified, definitely like she was in trouble.
"Brett?"
At the sound of her screaming, everybody took off running to see what had happened, and traced the screaming back to the bunk room.
"Brett?" Casey asked as they came up on the blonde woman, who had pushed herself as tight back against the wall as she could and was just pointing helplessly to something in front of her.
Sylvie was halfway between being completely out of breath and still screaming hysterically, she looked at the firemen and merely pointed to something, and as everybody gathered around, they got to see what it was.
A body lay flat on the floor, a tall man, wearing an ugly, demented looking, clown mask with a grayish white face, black and green smeared makeup around the eyes, a big red nose, blood red makeup smeared on and beyond the lips, two rows of ugly sharp teeth, and the cherry on top was the party blowout still lodged in the mask's mouth. The man didn't move, but everybody standing around could hear a slight groan coming from him.
"What happened?" Casey asked.
"He..." Sylvie found her voice again and explained, "He was behind me, and I...I just panicked and I punched him, and he went down."
Kelly pushed his way to the front and stood over the body and stared down at the man.
Very nonchalantly he asked, "You okay, Capp?"
The only response from the man on the floor was to blow air into the party blowout so it unfurled, but it had gotten broken when Sylvie punched him, so although it rolled out to its full shape, the only sound that came out was the very sound of air passing through the paper noisemaker.
"Just checking," Kelly added equally nonchalantly.
Otis and Cruz got on either side of Sylvie and subtly pried her away from the wall.
"What did you do to him?" Otis asked curiously.
"I...I hit him," she answered.
"How many times?" Cruz asked.
Sylvie shrugged, "Just once."
Both men looked at her.
"You only hit him once and he went down?" Cruz asked.
Sylvie nodded.
"Where were you during the last Battle of the Badges?" Otis asked.
Once Capp recovered from Brett decking him, he peeled the latex mask off and was helped to his feet by a couple of the other guys, who in the process took it upon themselves to deliver a couple swift kicks to the ass as well.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Herrmann wanted to know. "It was fine to give Brett hell when we found out she was scared of clowns, but it's inexcusable to pull a stunt like that and scare her half to death."
"I forgot," Capp replied as he pressed the points of two fingers around the big bruise that was quickly developing on his face.
"How the hell do you forget something like that?" Mouch asked.
The bald man shrugged and answered, "I forgot she was here, I figured I'd do it to whoever was the first one back in the firehouse, then I just happened to find her."
That earned a round of groans and jeers and a couple slaps to the back of his head.
Otis and Cruz had moved Brett out of the bunk room and over to the kitchen where she swallowed half a bottle of water in one gulp as she tried to calm down. After she swallowed it she was still wheezing and gasping.
"Feeling any better?" Otis asked.
"My heart won't stop pounding," she said as she pressed a hand to her chest. "I can't believe Capp would do something like that?"
"Let's face it, he's an idiot," Cruz said.
"I thought that went without saying," Otis commented, then added, "Well, fair's fair."
"What do you mean?" Sylvie asked, "we're gonna do the same thing to him?"
"Nah, that'd be too obvious, but tonight," Otis got a mischievous gleam in his eyes as he explained, "We're gonna take the legs off his bunk."
That made Sylvie laugh.
"I like it," she replied.