Black Iris

His hell.

Iris

Once I got upstairs, I retreated to my room, feeling hollow, a shell of a human. I crawled under the covers and sobbed for a while, wallowing in my helplessness, until I couldn't shed another tear. Then, I just laid there, feeling sorry for myself.

Hours later well into the evening, I heard the elevator open. A part of me hoped that Blake would ignore me entirely. Then I heard my door open, and he wrenched the covers off me, and I knew I had been foolish to hope.

"Get up, we're going," He spat.

When I didn't move straight away, he reached out and grabbed my hair, wrenching me off the bed. When I screamed, he snarled.

"I said, get the fuck up, we need to go. We have places to be."

He pulled me to my feet and moved his grip to my arm, then pulled me out the door.

Before I knew it, he was pushing me into the passenger seat of a beat-up black cruiser before going around to the driver's seat.

"I don't understand, why are you driving?" I asked, my voice hoarse and weak.

"Because, Iris," he said, "not even my most trusted employee is allowed to know where we're going."

My body went cold.

"Where are we going?"

But he just shook his head.

I looked out the window, thoughts racing through my head. Where could we possibly be going that even his driver couldn't know about it? Could this have something to do with Jackson? Or was this some kind of punishment for me?

I didn't know, and thinking about it was freaking me out.

I shut my eyes and leant against the window, taking a deep breath to calm myself. Then, I opened my eyes and focused on paying attention to where we were going. If I had to tell someone about this later, I needed to know what to tell them.

We drove across the city until we reached some kind of run-down manufacturing precinct. The factory buildings around here all looked to be shut down, or close to being shut down, and the buildings were marked with more graffiti than I had seen in my life. I paid attention to the street names, my heart in my throat. I couldn't help but fear whatever was coming next.

Then, Blake pulled in to the driveway of a huge factory, with tall chimneys and a handful of silos sat at the stop. A defunct sign near the entrance marked it as what had once been Sunshine Beer. Now, it definitely did not make beer. A part of me wondered how a place this huge could be written off so easily. But I guess, given the state of the rest of the buildings here, it made some form of sense. The company must have folded or moved their factory somewhere else. Either way, they had left their building abandoned, and judging from the number of cars parked in the car park, it had been taken over by a force that I could only guess was much more sinister.

There was a tall fence surrounding the property, with a keypad-operated gate at the entrance. Blake reached out and thumbed in a code, 34629, and the gate slid open. Once we were through, it rattled shut behind us.

Blake parked the car and climbed out. Reluctantly, I did too. He gestured for me to follow him and started walking towards the factory entrance. Without much of a choice, I obeyed.

"What is this place?" I asked Blake quietly, as he thumbed the same code into a keypad by the main entrance, and pushed inside. The linoleum floors were scuffed and marked with dirt and grime, and the garish overhead lights were flickering ominously.

"This, my Iris," Blake said haughtily, "is hell."

I frowned, but he didn't elaborate, and I didn't know how to ask.