[Silent Hill] Seven of Wands
Café Texan: locked and abandoned. Café Mist: locked and abandoned. Zuzu's Petals: locked and abandoned. Store 24: locked and abandoned. All north along Lindsey Street, seems like there's not a damn thing here that isn't. She knows it's not true, but judging by what she can see of the interiors through the windows, nobody's set foot in any of these places for quite a while. A faint layer of dust coats tables and counters, plates decorated with painted cow longhorns and dry yellowed leaves.
Katz, on the other hand, that looks more promising. She thinks she can spy a door down there that isn't laying flat with the wall. And she'll take any refuge, at this point. Especially after noticing that, for some reason, all the cars parallel parked along these sleepy streets and all the vehicles left in driveways and tiny parking lots, they're all damaged. Cracked windows, bend metal, scrapes of the wrong color of paint, full-on crumpled from some collision. And especially after something taps faintly against pavement from beneath one of the wrecks as she walks by. Maybe an unlucky squirrel.
She hobbles to the other side of the street anyways.
Exactly which building it is with a door ajar gives her a moment's pause. A butcher shop isn't likely to have much in the way of a bandage, and just the word makes her nervous. But she bucks up her courage and steps inside; if this place doesn't have a decent blade she can cling to for self-defense, nobody will.
And she's rewarded for it. With the unpleasant smell of old meat, unfortunately, and the lonely buzzing of a fly delighting in a wad of hamburger that's gone soggy and begun to run, but also with her choice of meat cleaver. Good enough, and she knows exactly what to use it on.
Some bred-in sense of cleanliness compels her to actually pick up the three-and-a-half inch disembodied heels from where they rolled to a stop on the counter and drop them in the trash bin.
Her calf thanks her for having a pretty flat sole to stand on, but it's still outroared by the burning. She leans back against the wall for a moment, eyes fluttering closed as she takes three deep breaths and tries to get a handle on the pain. But when she opens them again, she catches sight of a scene that had escaped her notice before. Over there, in the corner by the freezer, the tile floor and plaster wall have been scoured by something, as though somebody had taken a hell of a cat-o-nine-tails to the place. The huge slabs of meat that dangle from hooks in the ceiling have gashes drawn along their ribs, and a chair has buckled where something collided with it. Signs of an old struggle if she'd ever seen one, and an awfully destructive event it was. Her breathing slows as her heart starts speeding up again. The deal is sealed when she hears a noise coming from the direction of the business office down back. The rasp of something soft being dragged along the floor.
---
She is sure to close the door firmly behind her, and hurries north as quickly as her wound permits.
Anxious glances back over her shoulder reveal the road to be as empty as it was when she found it. Though telephone lines are draped up and down along Neely Street, there's nobody home here either who could make a call. All the lights are off, all the doors closed, and the lack of sound is really starting to press in on her.
She almost goes right by her potential salvation, her ears starting to ring dimly and her mind buzzing with questions. But she catches on before she can round the corner; kibble she can do without, but a veterinary office might really do the trick. The gauze used on cats and dogs can't be all that different from what's applied to human injuries. The door's locked, but visions of buffered aspirin dancing in her head, she's not about to take no for an answer. She slams the blunt leading edge of the cleaver sharply against the window until it spiders, cracks, and shatters. Knocking lingering shards away with the unfeeling blade, she's able to reach her arm through and turn the lock.
As glass crunches under her shoes, she spies movement out of the corner of her eye and freezes. Yes, there to the north, a point of fog is darker than the rest and growing larger, now accompanied by the sound of footsteps, until it resolves itself into an outline. A person, drawing nearer.
Her calf burning, Eileen is not about to make that mistake again. She holds her breath and quickly ducks into the clinic, shutting the door behind her as quietly as she can. Outside, she does not see the figure halt when she moves, then hurry away.
---
It smells musty and stale and, well, like wet dog, actually, and though everything seems so still and long undisturbed, she's careful where she puts her hands as she uses counters and tables to help her leg along. The last thing she needs is to palm a scalpel. Once out of the lobby and its high-set windows, navigating becomes a little more difficult. The lights don't turn on, of course, though she gives it a fair shot, leaving her to squint and stick her nose right up close to the labels on the cabinets to find what she wants.
Gauze, cloth, and wrappings, bingo. Opening the cabinet doors releases a flutter of dusty gray-winged moths into her face, and after her heart calms back down and she's held back a sneeze, she's dismayed to find that they'd made pretty good work of much of the supplies. Jerks. One roll seems mostly intact, though, and she claims it.
The search for some scissors with which to cut yields even greater fruits. A drawer opens with a clink and a roll; tiny vials, only a couple where once they would've been packed in like sardines. Nonsense to her, mostly, blah blah somnopentyl, cinchocaine, phenylbutazone, but the label on one of them makes her eyes open wide. Morphine sulfate. "....No way."
It's not been so long that she's entirely forgotten how things work around here. The mechanism doesn't really come to mind, but she certainly remembers that painkillers = good. She'd witnessed bruises disappear from Henry's skin after just a caffeinated drink, saw how cuts could be eliminated with mild topic anesthetics from a subway first aid kit. Eileen has no medical training to her name and the only syringe she's able to come up with bears a little rust on the needle, which under any circumstances would give her serious pause about plunging it into herself, but this definitely qualifies as "desperate times."
One hurdle in addition to her inexperience with sticking needles into anything. She's drawn out a full syringe's worth before it occurs to her. "Damn, how much..." Euthanasia is not what she's going for here, it just might not be so wise to fill her veins up with the whole thing. The writing on the bottle is eye-wateringly tiny, and the terribly low light isn't helping much. There, 0.05-0.12 mg/lb. ....Great, how's she supposed to measure that out. Squinting at the syringe, she finds it marked "mL" but no indication of how to convert between the two, and her increasingly blood-deprived brain rails indignantly at being asked to do math. Sighing, she closes her eyes and starts counting out on her fingers. If I'm one pound then I'd use 0.05, so if I'm two pounds I'd use twice that, which is 0.10, and if I'm ten pounds, uh... 0.5, so what's 0.5 times... uh, .5 + .5 + .5 and on and on, so 6. Okay, so, I can round, hopefully the mgs are one-to-one with the little mL dash marks, then...
A growl of frustration is matched by a growl to her left. Her eyes snap back open and the syringe falls to the floor with a 'ping.'