Pacifier

🌿Della🌹

Red's was quiet. Still.

Even from the outside looking in, even in the early morning, 8am, winter sunlight hitting the glass windows and the unmarked door.

It was quiet. Too quiet.
And still.

"Stay in the car?" Sam turned to me with the eyes of a lad who already knew the answer to his question.

With the eyes of a lad who knew the answer was no.

So when I shook my head and reached for the door handle he didn't protest, only reached for my waist, his hand gripping the hem of my tshirt to hold me back.

"If shit turns sour do as a say yeah? Am not letting you get hurt no matter what..."

"Yeah I get it Sam am not daft alreet..." I smirked shaking my head at him, dismissing him as overprotective but he held me back a moment longer, had me turn over my shoulder to look at him, and when I did I understood what he really meant.

"Am not letting you get hurt either you know so..."

"Della..." he cut me off, eyes fill of warning, more serious than I'd ever seen him before. Now it was my turn to be too lighthearted. To push my hair from my eyes and flash him a smile. Tease him until he gave in.

"Cmon Sam," I rolled my eyes at him, stomach a little unsettled knowing that I could tease him, refuse to take him seriously all I liked and it wouldn't make a difference.

If shit turned sour he was going to throw himself into the line of fire for me and there would be nothing I could do about it until it was too late.

All I could do was hope that this strange stoll building was just as still inside as it was out. All I could do was hope we were too late. Hope we had missed the battle.

And we had.

Sam insisted on going first, insisted on checking me over, the little pistol he'd stolen from Conway for me tucked into the back of my bra, the only place the elastic was tight enough to hold it still beneath that baggy tshirt of his which I was borrowing.

Hed given me a pocket knife too, tiny and tucked into my sock. And in my hands I held the gun hed given to me, the one I'd chosen not to kill him with only a few hours before.

Be had the same, two guns and a knife tucked out of sight. Just in case.

But we wouldnt need any of them, because we were too late.

Whatever had happened the night before it had been a massacre.

Whatever had happened nobody had survived.

Bodies strewn everywhere, blood up the walls, staining the furniture. Mostly Reids and Lewis's, the women just Billy's girls who though innocent in their own way, would still have killed me had they been given the chance.

Everywhere my eyes flickered I saw death, blood. Maimed faces, heads blown half off. Skulls shattered from a close impact. Throats had been slit, men had been clawed at.

It was hard to breath for that all too familiar smell. Blood which had been left to dry.

"Stay close," said Sam but I didn't need warnings anymore.

It was strangely dark inside. The windows were mostly boarded up, but in some places shots had fired and missed their targets, shattering the glass of the windows, cutting holes through those boards and now little beams of yellow light shot through and cut through the stale air. I could see the dust floating in them. They lit the dead up in lazer quest eery light.