Many of the walls were cracked, or crumbling altogether. As he stalked along, Arthur noticed that despite the many voices he’d heard after the rumble, he heard nothing now. He tried to put it out of his mind as he made his tentative way towards where the exit should be. Before long, he encountered the gift shop that was near the employee break room. He’d never been inside either, but passed by both frequently, and knew the seller from the gift shop well. If he was better off financially, he may have been inside the gift shop as much as he passed it by. The gift shop walls used to be made of glass to entice passerby, but just like all the rest of the glass in the building, it was shattered or severely cracked. The items in the shop were strewn across the floor, with some even reaching the other side of the room.
Arthur sifted through the fallen items, looking for something that he might be able to use as a weapon. He didn’t relish the idea of killing anything, but he wasn’t na?ve enough to think that he could talk those abominations down. It seemed that would be exactly what he’d have to do, however, as he couldn’t find anything passable as a weapon. Everything the place had was either snacks, fast food or soft plushes of sharks and manatees. He reached for the snacks, wondering if it had a high enough sugar content to give the monsters a heart attack in place of a weapon. Without warning, another blue screen flashed in front of Arthur, almost shocking him off of his feet. It had white square boxes that didn’t fill out the rest of the screen, stopping less than halfway. There was a single word on the top of the screen.
Vault
He let out a breath as he silently rejoiced. He’d wondered if there would be something like this, and he was happy that there was. This would mean that he could take a certain amount of things with him, regardless of his meagre physique. He wasted no time in testing it out, attempting to shovel things into his vault. He noted that things of the same nature were all counted in one square, like multiple of the same bag of chips. However, if it even had a different brand, they will be separated. He saw the maximum weight of things he could have in his vault scaled off of his weight tolerance, which would mean if he did the build he thought of earlier, that would be good for him.
He also found out that he couldn’t take things out of his vault in quick succession. Arthur assumed it was for balancing reasons, to stop people from being able to rapidly pull things out to throw at monsters with no repercussions. With it being this way, whatever weapons people were mainly using, they would have to keep out and on their person. Arthur assumed it was also that way with other items people would want to keep out just in case, like grenades or potions. If those things existed in this new world.
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Finally deciding to move on, Arthur stopped going through the trash left by the destruction of the gift shop. He’d stored a bunch of food, just in case it would come in handy, but he found no weapons. Everything in the store had been mostly child friendly, so there wasn’t anything to really hurt someone with. As he prepared to leave, he noticed the knocked over trash can that had always been outside of the gift shop. It was an old-fashioned one, made of metal with a metal lid that you’d lift with your hands, rather than being automatic. There was a handle in the middle, with a rubber grip that’d always felt comfortable in his hand when he needed to throw something away. He remembered old Jericho’s reluctance to replace it, despite the rest of the staff’s insistence that it was an artifact older than most of them.
Arthur reached down tentatively, unsure if he should do what he was planning to. He didn’t even know if Jericho survived the tremors, let alone the rest of the staff. Arthur was also terrified that the monsters in the hallways might’ve gotten to them.
He knew he needed to leave.
He understood that logically, the building should collapse fully any second, especially with the monsters now stalking the halls. And he knew that the most likely outcome for him, if he came across them again, would be death. As Arthur lifted his new makeshift shield, however, he made the admission to himself that he was incapable of leaving them behind without at least trying to find them. If someone had died when he could’ve helped them, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to sleep peacefully ever again.
Thirty minutes. He allowed himself to search for them for thirty minutes, and whether or not he found them, he would then leave afterward and look for his family. If what was happening in here was the same as what was happening outside, he shuddered to think about how his parents would be faring. Arthur gripped the trash-can lid and headed for the employee only room, his steps trailing an aura of determination once again.
As he opened the door to the employee only break room, Arthur lifted his “shield” to cover him. He surveyed the area, looking for any signs of other people having been there. Arthur noticed that there were many signs that people had been there at one point, but he wasn’t sure if those were signs from before or after the quakes. There were items strewn everywhere, but Arthur couldn’t tell if that was because of those quakes. He wasn’t a super investigator that could tell the difference between a plain mess and signs of someone tearing through a room looking for something.
It was dark, and the room was partly collapsed in the far right corner. It left a thick pile of rubble that marred the otherwise normal, if not creepy, room. There were wrappers for various snacks and sandwiches strewn about, along with more cleaning items, like from the janitor’s closet. There was a large table in the middle of the room, with some scuffs on the floor, as if someone had moved it recently. The scuffs were hardly visible in the dark room, with only the light coming from the door he opened. He couldn’t tell if they were recent or not, but neither helped him in his current situation. Arthur considered going in or saying something in case someone was hiding out somewhere in the room, but eventually decided to simply move on. There wasn’t any evidence he could tell that there were people still inside, and he was hesitant to deliberately make more noise than he already was. He’d felt that was a mistake that the first person to die in a horror film would make.
As he gingerly closed the door, he looked about behind him again. The surrounding area still held no sign of the nightmares he’d escaped. Arthur hadn’t seen them since he escaped them the first time, and he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or worried. After closing the door with as little sound as possible, Arther tilted his head to the side. He’d thought he heard something, and strained to listen closer. It wasn’t long before he recognized the sound of a crying baby. The noises were muffled, as though behind a wall, but the crying screams were unmistakable. Arthur looked around in a panic, unsure which hallway the cries were coming from. He just picked one and started running down it, however, as the sound of a crying baby was followed-up by a shout for help.