: Prompting Needed_

Mr. Nix

"That chair's gonna break, Sam."

Sam heard the warning. But seeing as his partner had been talking all day about things that weren't entirely important, he chose to ignore him. He shifted his seat again, drawing out more sharp creaks of protest from the stressed coils below. He heard those things, too. He knew what those little metallic cries meant. But his chair had been making those sounds for nearly four years now, and they would hold. They had to hold. Because – and he didn't admit this to anyone – the amount of weight he had been packing on for the last year or so got to him more than he was willing to admit. But if he just kept moving forward, got a new belt occasionally, and didn't break any chairs... he was fine.

"Watch yer screens," he replied gruffly. Probably a bit too gruff, he reckoned. He lightened his tone and changed the subject. "S'big parade outside tonigh'. There's gonna be a good bit'uh foot traffic." He leaned forward and ignored the agonized cries of springs protesting beneath him. The line of black and white video monitors in front of him flickered as they cycled through three separate camera feeds per screen at a rate of... what had it been? Four times a minute? It was easy to miss something if they weren't staring at them constantly. Sam's four screens monitored all the activity on the north side of the storage building complex while Heddy's showed the south side. Heddy, however, had one extra screen. That one never changed from a colored, wide-angled shot of the main inner corridor that served as the customer's access to their storage areas. It was shot from a high enough vantage point that Heddy – and Sam too if he glanced over – could see all the sliding doors and all their different padlocks. The only entrance to the corridor – a set of double doors that were reinforced with bullet-proof glass – centered the shot. To get to that door, someone would have to walk past Sam and Heddy. It was a good, tight system, meant to deter folks from wandering in.

Of course, for any deterring to happen, someone would have had to come in. As far as Sam knew, no one had stepped foot into the complex in the last four years.

Heddy muttered, "Not like they're gonna come in here." Sam looked over to the skinny, mop-haired kid. Heddy's chair sighed as he leaned back to look at Sam through upside down eyes. Damn, but that boy was agile. "No one ever comes in here." Sam grunted an agreement then faced his row of screens again. "Why you suppose that is?" Heddy wondered in a soft voice. Sam could feel the kid's eyes digging into the side of his head.

"I don' ask questions, kid. Watch yer screens." He leaned on the pressed wood counter and idly flipped the channel switches below the third screen. Outside of the building, the three-camera set caught various parents and small kids placing their folding chairs and blankets on the sidewalk facing Main Street. Already cops were driving slowly by to keep the street clear for the floats that would be crawling by soon. The bars of light on top of the cops' cars splashed varying degrees of white and grey across the monitors.

Everything was as it was.

All four of his monitors, starting with the second then ending with the first, turned off with a small electronic droning beep, leaving their screens black as the night outside. He sat up, anxiety making his neck hair stand on end. Behind him he heard Heddy curse softly. Then more loudly, the boy yelled, "Jesus Christ, Sam. The hell? The hell?" Sam swiveled and tilted as his chair gave into Heddy's prophecy. The springs screamed one more time before obliterating the wood and plastic around them. Sam fell back, thudded to the concrete floor, and bounced. His brain rang like a bell as his skull slapped the smooth cement. At the same time, the lights in the office cut out with the sound of a large breaker being thrown. "I'm blind," he cried. Seconds later, the air – a steady, thin whoosh of wind that kept the facility at a comfortable seventy-one degrees – cut out. Sam's ears rang in the thick silence. The only other thing he could hear was Heddy's shallow breaths and shuffling as the boy crawled towards Sam. "Ah, hell, Sam. You good? Shit, Sam, is that blood?" The kid's fingers came away from the back of Sam's head with a sticky sound. Sam tried to sit up but the lack of details to latch onto in the dark made him feel sick. He pressed a hand to the side of his head that had smacked into the floor. It came back wet and smelling like pennies.