It’s a strange thing to go back to your old school, Amber thought. Most people only do it at re-unions, dressed up and out to impress. Not too many turn up in the dead of night armed with a shotgun.
Ghost walked up to the steel gates. It seemed to Amber that the area around him became slightly out of focus for a moment before snapping back to normal. The padlock fell open easily in his hand, even though a moment before it had been securely locked. No matter how often Amber saw him do it, it still seemed eerie, hence her nickname for him, “Ghost”. She’d done it so long now, she never called him anything else.
He pushed the gates open and thankfully they didn’t creak; who knew what attention that would attract?
Amber looked at the barbed wire and spikes around the top of the gate and the surrounding fences. They had been put there, she had been told, to “protect the children”. Hah! At school the things you needed protection from lay inside the gates. Those gates had been fortified to make sure you couldn’t get out!
Just ahead lay the first security cameras. Again the area blurred for a moment. When Amber looked again the cameras were covered in cobwebs; apparently someone had decided it wasn’t worth maintaining them. She carefully swept the courtyard with her shotgun. It was quiet, too quiet. Amber brushed her hair back over the tip of one delicate ear, listening to the night. There were different kinds of silence, but even at night there were often sounds that were supposed to be there. She listened more carefully. In the background there was something, but it didn't make sense. Just discordant noise. Even so, everything seemed to be alright. She doubted it would last.
As they crept through the gates Amber looked more closely at the windows of the decaying school buildings. They had all been smashed; although strangely it looked like they had been broken from both inside and out. That was not a good sign. The gloom inside the rooms could too easily conceal things she really didn't want to meet tonight. They wanted to be in and out, smooth as silk, that would be good. She smiled bitterly to herself; somehow she didn't think they'd be that lucky. But then she had the shotgun for a reason. And of course there was Ghost.
The school had started off much smaller than it was now. Over time more buildings had been built until gradually it felt more and more claustrophobic. Shadows engulfed large concrete walls and obscured the small pathways that ran between them. Ghost stood silently in the courtyard. They’d spent several weeks studying this place from a distance. It seemed that no-one was interested in it at the moment and that suited him fine. He still wasn't entirely sure what he was doing here. Gideon gave new depths of the word “enigmatic” but so far his advice seemed to have been productive, if you looked at it sideways with hindsight and one eye closed whilst hanging upside-down, preferably drunk.
There were a lot of ways this could go wrong, too many unknowns, too many possibilities. Everyone had their own way of dealing with life. Ghost was patient. Some people would have rushed in guns blazing, and he accepted there were times when that was the best way forward. But given the choice, he preferred to think through what could happen and then adapt to what did happen as calmly as possible. Of course it helped that he could shift the odds in his favour. But to do that he needed to consider how the smallest change could cause the greatest benefit; unfortunately, these days, he often needed to do that whilst somebody was trying very hard to kill him.
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