Sun Café (Nightmare World)
It's the charred skeleton of a room- no tables or chairs, nothing on the walls but stains and burns. A few jagged bits of broken booth or counter jut up here and there.
Chains droop from the ceiling, with the black-brown crust of an old, heavily-used grill. Equally horrible gibbets hang from a few; more lie in the corner, carelessly tossed aside.
One is still occupied. Amber tries to look everywhere else.
Charcoal arrows scrawled on the floor and wall point her toward the kitchen door.
She checks every other available exit first. Every single door is jammed.
"Fuck this place. Fuck this place so fucking much." It's a comforting mantra.
The odors of soot and meat and blood drift across her face as she walks in, pipe at the ready. Immediately, her cell phone squawks out with the familiar signal of Things Nearby.
Something new comes into vision then- all needles and bandages and sickening flesh. She backs into the wall, all rational thought overwhelmed by the urge to get away.
It headbutts her, and for a moment she can't move for the pain and breathlessness and terror- long enough for a needle-limb to jab her leg. She kicks it away, and then, limping, brings the pipe around.
She doesn't let up until the static from her phone fades to silence.
The first aid kit in her bag supplies gauze and alcohol. The wound is probably going to need real medical attention later, but that isn't exactly an option for her right now.
Mocking her thoughts, the sink supplies a range of bloody, rusty scalpels, clamps, forceps, and needles. IV bags dangle here and there, full of a dark, cloudy liquid.
There's a wheelchair on the grill, twisted and burnt. A newspaper article lies on the seat. Hand shaking, Amber takes it, holding it in the flashlight's beam.
Maybe I'm not the only one... Like that preacher... The fuck is this place? She tucks it into a pocket, fighting the shuddering feeling in her spine. There's not even the joy of exploration anymore- just the desire to get out.
There's a padlock on the exit.
After a break to go through every single curse she can think of, then another to throw a few pans in rage, she starts a thorough search of the kitchen for anything resembling a key.
The ovens glint under her beam. Most of their doors hang uselessly, or lie on the ground, ripped away. One is intact, though, with a poster stuck to it. Giving it only a brief glance, she rips the door open.
It looks like a large roll at first, until she shines the light on it and it quivers. Red and blue lines squiggle just underneath the taut skin. A completely self-contained lump, just sitting there.
She steps back. After a moment, something in the back of her mind prompts her to check the poster.
"...oh, you have got to be shitting me. Fuck no."
When a thorough search of the rest of the facility yields nothing else helpful, though, she gives in. Holding her mouth and standing as far away as she can, she takes a knife to the flesh-thing.
Red fluid pours out, and the two halves fall away. Inside, a small brass key shines.
She grabs a handful of spare gauze from her kit; no way she's touching any of that with her bare hands.
But the key opens the padlock, and that's all she wants right now. She steps through the exit.