Amber paused. They could investigate it now or they could see what the rest of the place looked like first.
At first she’d liked the idea of being outside, but now the cold was getting to her ears. She nodded towards the open shutters and unslung her shotgun. Ghost did the same and looked up at the windows. Nothing. Someone had bricked them up a long time ago. Ghost thought back and remembered what this place had been. It had been the victim of cutbacks. Local post offices had closed because they didn’t make enough profit. Nevermind they were important to the locals. And somehow some genius in the local government had come up with the idea of shutting down the actual Post Office and moving it to the upstairs of a department store.
They carefully moved over to the doors. They were mainly glass, designed to let shoppers see the books and chocolates in the front of the store. Looking through the doors he could see the shelves still had leftover magazines stacked on them. On the carpet, he could see a set of wet footprints leading inside. He examined the doors carefully looking for traps or alarms but after several minutes couldn’t find anything. He gently pushed against the door and it swung open easily. Too easily, someone was maintaining them. He waited a moment and then stepped in. Amber checked around behind them and then stepped in behind him. The daylight lit up quite a bit of the store. They could see the shelving going back and the now still escalator on the right leading up to the next floor and the Post Office.
Unlike the music shop, the shelves at the back of the store went all the way up to the ceiling, though they were empty.
“That’d make good cover,” Amber whispered.
Ghost nodded. The footprints lead past the escalator and to the stairs. He remembered this bureaucratic idea too. Someone had decided to remove down escalator entirely and add in a flight of stairs. They then tried to enforce that the stairs should only be used for going down. It hadn’t worked terribly well then and apparently still wasn’t working now.
“I can hear someone upstairs,” she kept her voice low “strange sounds too, metal, paper, not quite sure what it means.”
Ghost gestured at the empty shelves and together they moved through them, checking there was no-one hiding back there. Once they were satisfied they moved to the stairs. There was light up there, but it wasn’t the steady glow of electric lighting. It was flickering almost like
“Candles?” Amber looked at him questioningly.
He nodded. Stranger and stranger.
Next
