Fallen Raine {Completed}

Chapter Fifteen - When The Lights Go Down

~Chapter Fifteen - When The Lights Go Down~

“Is it wrong to say I’ve never even been in the library before?” River asked, as we made our way through the automatic doors and into the place that had once been like my second home. On my left was the computer bay where I’d spent many hours studying. There were elegant tapestries, automatic book-checkers and check-in desks, as well as numerous shelves. I knew each shelf alphabetically and chronologically; pretty much as well as I knew myself.

How did I even have friends? I wondered to myself. Sure, it wasn't many, but I still had them! Now I wondered how I'd managed that.

I turned to River with a quirked eyebrow. “Never? Not even to study?”

He gestured to himself, with his leather-clad torso, dark-washed jeans and combat boots. “Tell me, Rai, do I look like someone who studies?”

I shook my head with a rueful smile. “My mistake.”

I led the group into the Non-Fiction section, and then specifically to the History section that was full of books on war and America’s history. I searched each title and decimal code until I found one titled:

Mapleton County, California’s History.

 

I pulled it out of the shelf with a smile, and then turned to the group, waving it in the air proudly. “Found it.”

“I have never seen somebody so happy to find a History book,” River observed, leaning against a white table with an amused smirk, his muscular arms crossed over his broad, expansive chest.

I shrugged. “Are you forgetting who I am?”

River smiled and copied my words. “My mistake.”

“Hey, lovebirds, if you’re done with the touchy-feely crap, can we maybe get back to the matter at hand?” Jason asked peevishly, and I turned to him in surprise.

He didn’t even glanced at me.

I apologized quietly and led everybody to a table, before skimming through the index and finding the page number of the murder in question. I flipped it open and laid it flat on the table, before reading to the group out loud.

“On May 10th, 1998, Mapleton County was devastated by the deaths of ten civilians after ex-physiologist, Malcolm Stark, held them captive in an abandoned shopping center, known popularly now as Mapleton Mall, after he pulled an alarm and evacuated the structure. Ten people were left trapped inside with a killer on a mission.

 

“He was found wearing an oversized camouflage jacket he found in a vintage store, and a hunting knife from a camping store, and killed off each civilian one-by-one in increasingly horrific and gruesome ways, leaving small notes at the sight of each murder for the other trapped inhabitants to find.