Page 76 of Such a Feral Little Lamb
“Okay, let’s go.”
It takes too long to navigate the twisting corridors, but just when I’m about to give up, I spot a door I recognise. Blake isn’t bitching behind me, which tells me just how much he believes what he’s told me. He really thinks that the people here have something to do with it all.
What if they do? We’ve still got another full day before the train arrives, which means we’re trapped here until then. Zombies are in the woods, according to Mason, though maybe that’s not true, either.
And we have to meet the train at the station. We can’t exactly flag it down further down the tracks.
“Here,” I say, gesturing at the door. Blake slips past me and crouches, leaving me to watch the narrow corridor. We really will have to be fast. There’s only one way in or out of this room, so even if anyone appears in this hallway, we’re fucked.
It takes a few minutes, but then the lock clicks and the door swings smoothly open. I hold my bat tightly, though I know no one can be inside.
Sure enough, the room is empty. Dark, too, so we use torches to light the room and avoid walking into anything.
“Remember,” I murmur. “Not a thing out of place.”
“Got it,” Blake says and heads directly for the cupboard in the corner.
It seems to be locked, too, so he focuses on that while I round Nia’s desk. I examine the ledger on top carefully—it seems to just be an overall inventory of the town, which makes sense. The first and second drawer on the desk reveal nothing but more papers, all of them mundane, and assortments of odds and ends that I suppose she drops in there from time to time.
When I open the third drawer, my eyes go wide. Blake opens the cupboard finally, then stuffs his lockpicks away, and he’s silent too.
“Blake.”
“Isaac.”
“What do you have?”
He takes a step back from the cupboard and then looks at me. “You?”
“Remember they took our guns?”
“Yes.”
I glance down again. There are a lot more than six guns in this drawer. And I wouldn’t worry about that—or I’d explain it away—except that the ones we’re given, the ones that contain just the single bullet, are also stamped with the symbol of the Citadel, plain to see.
“There must be twenty guns in here,” I whisper.
“Fuck. Come here.”
His eyes are on the cupboard, so I slip one gun from the top of the heap and shove it into my pocket before I close the drawer. It’s more an impulse than anything else.
I round the desk again and come to a sudden stop as I look inside the cupboard. There’s a safe on a shelf at one side and more papers above that.
But on the left… There are photos of all of us. A map of the Citadel, crudely drawn beneath, but then refined with details that no survivors should know.
Belongings, too. Weapons that I’ve never seen the people here use. A bat like mine. A knife that I know came from a hunter, just like us.
And bags. Three or four of them, all empty, piled neatly on another shelf.
“The fuck?” I mutter.
Blake shakes his head. “Other teams have been here,” he says. “They killed them.”
“That’s not the worst part.”
“How is that—”
“We were told before we came here that no other team had been sent this far north,” I say slowly, and Blake snaps his mouth shut. “But look at this. The guns. Must have been at least two or three of them.”
