Both of them continue walking, watching for anything out of the ordinary, but they find nothing other than the weird emptiness. Kyle decides to strike up another conversation, still feeling uneasy.
“Why did you join this, uhm, paranormal investigation club?” He asks, repeating the question they asked him.
“Well,” she hesitates, “you could say it’s some sort of coping method for childhood trauma.” she jokes, laughing but then faltering once Kyle’s face shows concern. “Ah, sorry, it’s this whole thing-”
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s perfectly fine,” Kyle backs off.
“Oh no, I’m fine!” April consoles, “It’s just a little hard to explain,” she takes a breath in, “So basically, I was raised in this doomsday cult, but thankfully I escaped with all- er- most of my siblings. Being a paranormal investigator kinda helped me come to terms with all the things that happened I guess. It helps to know about all these spooky things, rather than just be scared and stuff.”
“... damn. If it doesn’t bother you, can I ask what this doomsday cult was about?” Kyle silently cringes at himself for being so pushy.
“Honestly, I can’t remember too much, but it had something to do with ‘the rapture’ and angels coming to take us all to salvation from demons or something,” she scoffs at the ground, “It was a whole load of bullshit, and… just bullshit.” April says, bitterly.
“I'm- uh- sorry.” Kyle says.
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April snaps out of it and looks back up, “It’s fine, the past is past and all that. I should be sorry, really, just dumping all that baggage onto you,” she lightly chuckles.
“No, it’s alright,” They both stop speaking for a moment. Farther down the road, Kyle can see the tops of the trees over the buildings, and a split in the road. “There’s two ways to go from there,” He says, diverting the conversation.
“Hmm, how about you go left and I go right? I think you can handle yourself for a bit and after that, we can just meet back up at the cafe!”
“I don’t know…” he holds the back of his neck with one hand.
“If you want, you can have a walkie talkie!” She pulls out two from her backpack and hands one over to Kyle. “If you need help, just press this button and talk into it.”
“Oh! Thanks,” he takes the device.
“I’ll be seeing you! Don’t get lost and try to get back in time!” With that, April walks away, leaving Kyle alone. He looks at the walkie talkie and holds it tightly as he goes on his own.
Wandering through on his own, the uneasy feeling grows tenfold. Kyle looks behind his back, trying to catch whatever might be following him, but finds only the pavement and litter. He feels a shiver down his spine as if the air got colder. But that can’t be, nothing has changed, everything is still empty.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something move in between the buildings. Was that a person? Even if it wasn’t, it would still be worth going after whatever it was to get some more pictures. He quietly sneaks over to the gap in the buildings and takes a peek inside. Despite the lack of light, he could see pretty clearly within the alley. Concrete floor, metal ladder, strewn about garbage. But drawn on the wall in black marker, a strange symbol. He is clueless, his best guess is some sort of angry Cyclops drawn in a stick figure style doing a sumo wrestling stance. After snapping a picture and taking the film out, he finds another drawing on the wall. An arrow, pointing away from the street and further down the gap. He hesitates, is he really going to go down the spooky alley with cryptic symbols?