Murray's Journey: Finders Keepers

[Laraqua]

"No, but I don't think ready means anything here," said Craig, groaning as he clutched at his wound.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray nods and listens carefully at the door.

[Laraqua]

Everything sounds so quiet and still.

[Mr. Handy]

"All right, here goes," says Murray. With his revolver in one hand, he tries the door with the other.

[Laraqua]

The door opens to reveal an empty, dusty hospital corridor with doors along one side. The linoleum is cracked and peeling and in some places has come loose a little, adding a dry crunch to any steps taken inside on the odd spot. The walls are flybitten and sometimes covered with faded health-related posters.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray looks to see which doors lead off of this hallway, hoping to find one that leads to a storage room. He also recalls that there are storage rooms in the basement, so finding his way to the stairs leading down would be good too.

[Laraqua]

Murray came from the basement last time so it's easy to find the stairwell, particularly as it's on this side of the U-shaped corridor. Craig doesn't do so well on the stairs, struggling with each belabored step to keep from sliding all the way down to the bottom. The difficulty is that there's no lights on down there. There's nothing but shadows.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray takes out his flashlight with his free hand and turns it on, shining it around and looking for the storage room doors he had noticed the last time he had been here.

[Laraqua]

The basement is still in its peeling, battered condition, and the store room doesn't seem to contain medicinal supplies. Rather, it is filled with spare gurneys, stacks of blankets, boxes of medical equipment, and other assorted goods. There are a lot of gauze bandages in rolls but nothing else. They must keep their medicinal supplies upstairs in another, likely smaller, room. There is, however, a Health Drink perched on the edge of one of the shelves.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray offers the Health Drink to Craig. "You thirsty?" he asks. He stuffs a decent amount of the bandages in his pockets. "Looks like the first aid kits aren't down here, so I'm afraid we'll have to check back upstairs."

[Laraqua]

The bandages don't appear to have been fully cleaned. Most of them are a little aged and yellow, all of them are dusty, and some of them have suspicious looking brown stains on them that could be rust or old blood.

"Yeah," says Craig, uncapping it and gulping it down. "Oh, that feels better. Whereabouts should we check?"

[Mr. Handy]

"I'm not entirely sure," says Murray, putting the bandages back where he found them. "I've only been here once before. My guess is the ground floor. We can try each door systematically."

[Laraqua]

Craig nods and follows Murray and his wavering flashlight back into the basement corridor but the stairwell has been locked with some sort of security gate, pulled shut and padlocked with a rusty lock. The elevator pings and the doors smoothly open.

"Well, that ain't natural," mutters Craig.

The probing light of the flashlight finds the elevator empty, its peeling greenish paint revealing the steel casing underneath. The lights on the buttons are all on and there's a choice of 4 buttons. B. 1. 2. 3.

[Mr. Handy]

"Yeah, none of this makes any sense," says Murray. "Nobody was down here to block that stairwell off, and now the elevator suddenly works. I don't trust this thing, but I guess we don't have any choice. Shall we try 1?"

[Laraqua]

"You go in first," mutters Craig, nodding toward the elevator.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray steps into the elevator, waits for Craig to join him, and then pushes the button marked 1.

[Laraqua]

The elevator doors open with a ping to the ground floor. The corridor is dark but for a single set of light coming from one of the rooms at the far end of the corridor. The ground is dusty, dirty. A lone wheelchair stands abandoned by one wall. Somewhere inside the Director's Office, a telephone rings. All around him is a miasma of hospital smells, bleach and cleaning agents, mixed in with the stink of abandoned houses, lost to time and decay. Somehow, in the space of a single trip down into the basement, the hospital seems to have aged a decade, and the years haven't been kind.

[Mr. Handy]

"I think we'd better answer that," Murray says, leading the way to Director's Office and trying the door.

[Laraqua]

The Director's Office is a mess of padded walls and open books. The telephone is a black telephone straight out of the 1950s with a winding dial and it sits on a stack of phone books in the corner behind the chair. Murray's shoes crunch shattered glass from a few dropped vials as he comes closer to it. The telephone keeps ringing. There's certainly no voicemail here.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray picks up the receiver, which feels comfortable in his hand. I've always liked these kinds of phones, he thinks. He holds the earpiece to his hear and speaks into the mouthpiece: "Hello?"