Head Full of Ghosts

Chapter 29 - Call Me the Hunter

Eli took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

He had followed Amber through the woods for the last few hours of night that had remained. Her trail had proven almost invisible, and he was mostly spurred on by the couple of flashes of movement he was pretty sure he had caught that he was further convinced had to be her. It wasn't much to go on, but it was all he had to go on.

As dawn began to light up the horizon he knew she would need to seek shelter, and that was his one chance to truly catch up with her.

And just as the sun actually crested the horizon, he found himself stepping out of the woods and into a small town.

The town had probably been mostly a ghost town even before the world had ended. The various brick and cement buildings were crumbling and in bad need of repair. Many buildings had boarded up windows, grass was horribly overgrown, and many of the street corners had signs that had fallen over or were missing entirely. Chain-linked fences stood around most of the buildings, though these fences were frequently incomplete or had big sections that had fallen into the dirt.

Eli almost just turned around and left immediately, not wanting to bother, but there was a nagging insistence in his brain that this would be the best location for miles around for someone to hide out from the sun. So he relented and started to search.

He started with the crumbling buildings. Anything that had large sections cleared of exterior walls, which meant that the building would have few, if any, places to hide from the sun all day. That way he could worry first about gathering supplies, and worry later about finding his target.

There wasn't much around. As he had assumed, many of the buildings had probably been empty for some time. Others appeared to have already been looted, by both humans and animals alike, as far as he could tell. He made do with what little he could find and quickly moved along. Daylight was burning and he knew he had little time to prepare what he needed before it would become dangerously late to deal with Amber.

One by one he searched through buildings, until eventually he narrowed her hiding spot down to three possible contenders. They were all the largest buildings in town that were also still mostly or completely intact, giving her plenty of space to hide and maneuver. One building in particular stood out to him for whatever reason as the most likely, so he had left it for last. The other two had both proven empty, leaving just this one last building, a big warehouse. Amber was either here or she had never stopped in this town and he had been completely wrong from the beginning.

So he stood there now, in front of the open door, staring into the darkness beyond. His breath was coming in heaves, his palms and forehead were sweating. He wasn't sure, but he also might have been shaking a little bit.

He wanted to leave. He wanted to forget this. He wanted to turn around and run away and run and run and not stop running until he got home where he could curl up into a ball in his own bed and try to forget any of this ever happened.

He stepped forward into the shadows.

For a long moment he didn't move, but simply stood there, more listening than looking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Nothing seemed to be stirring in the shadows, so he brought the rest of his supplies inside and closed the door. He planned for there to be no backing out of this confrontation. For either of them.

The windows, which were mostly high up on the walls that towered above him, were all boarded up, but slim cracks of light slipped through the spaces and illuminated enough of the big abandoned warehouse for him to make his way around. It was almost entirely just one room, and Eli almost lost hope when there was clearly no figure hiding in the room, but then he noticed a set of four doors set into the far wall. Little offices.