Travis hardly ever felt envy. He grew up in a nice enough home, with nice enough parents, in a nice enough neighborhood. He received a nice enough education, and had a nice enough job. Still, as he walked into the main lobby of Porter Hall, he couldn’t help but feel a hint of longing. There were several black leather couches that would very much spice up his basement room, so nice that perhaps even Tex would opt to sleep on one instead of on Travis’s legs, for a change. Though the exterior of the building was, of course, little more than red bricks and a white roof, the interior of Porter was absolutely beautiful. The walls looked nice enough, with a blue and white paint pattern. Somehow, the carpenter in charge of the construction had managed to put seagull shaped indentations in the walls, giving the lobby a very “oceany” feel. Travis suspected that on a normal day, the lobby would be packed with freshmen, as they chatted about one subject or another.
Today was not a normal day; he knew that as soon as he saw the tents on the main campus. Now, most people, when they see yellow police lines, they tend to stay a good deal away from the plastic barriers. The strips serve as a warning, as a natural deterrence. But for Travis, the yellow strips were directions to where he had to go. The stairs were blocked by the yellow strips that stated “Police Line – Do not cross”, so naturally he crossed the lines and headed up the stairs.
Oddly enough, there were no Bensen University Police Officers in the building, despite Porter being evacuated the night before. Travis knew that a senior officer requested his aid in Porter, so it was rather odd that such an apparently important location would be so devoid of people. The students, well, the students absence made sense. Whatever had happened(and Travis was becoming increasingly sure that something major had happened)was of a magnitude that the students couldn’t be present. If what happened, whatever that may have been, was critical enough to force the students out, then why were there no police in the building? There were plenty outside and on the freshmen campus’s perimeter, so why there were none inside was remarkably strange to Travis.
Though odd, it didn’t really slow Travis’s progress through the building. He knew he was supposed to meet an officer Garret on the second floor, so the lack of any people whatsoever didn’t really stay on his mind too long. One interesting thing that Travis noticed was that all the doors in the building were open, some crudely held in place by duct tape. In fact, even the door he had come in through was partly open. Small oddities almost always led to larger strangeness, much like a small trickle of moisture from a crack in a wall hints towards an impending flood. Travis shrugged his shoulders, he’d make it a point to ask Officer Garret about the open doors later.
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The lights were on in the staircase, dim but still present. As he headed up the stairs, he couldn’t help but notice the windows on the far side of the stairwell wall. Their shape was fairly ordinary, three semi circles arranged in a horizontal line. Yet, somehow, be it through the composition of the glass or the positioning of the frame, each of the windows managed to cast a shadow, a shadow which gave the marble stairs at Travis’s feet a light and dark checkerboard pattern. Finally, Travis got up to the second floor. There were two semi-open doors in the second floor lobby, but only the left door had a “Do Not Enter” sign in front of it.
Naturally, Travis entered the left door. The left door gave way to a hallway, and from the colorful decorations on the doors in the hallway Travis concluded that he was in the female wing. Of course, there were no students present. The doors here were not opened partway, and Travis’s tugs on every other door’s handle as he progressed down the hallway hinted that all the doors were locked. Finally, about seven or eight doors down the lonely hallway, Travis saw signs of other intelligent life. He came to a wide opening in the hallway, but the floor here was covered with plastic sheets.
The optimist in Travis told him that some freshmen had too much to drink, the realist in him simply made his stomach feel slightly heavy. He had seen similar plastic sheets laid out before, and they always spelled trouble and tragedy. He clenched his fist. What the hell had happened here? And why was he in the dark about it? Was it neglect? Was it incompetence? Just who the hell felt it appropriate to send someone like Travis to somewhere like this without at least informing him first? He understood the Chik Fil A thing, as tedious and asinine as it was. The Chik Fil A thing was low stea-, er, stakes.
No one was harmed, and the most damage inflicted was on Travis’s sanity. He shook his head. Malicious forces cause trouble and damage, but lack of communication and stupidity often exasperate the problems caused by the malevolent aspects of the world. He took a quick glance again at the white plastic covering, and saw that the sheets took a sharp right about two hundred feet from where he was. Travis speed walked down the hall, his blue eyes not even bothering to scan the hall for irrelevant details anymore. The plastic sheets which headed right stopped at a metal door. There was no handle on the door, but it had a vertical metal rectangle located on where a handle would usually be.
Travis swallowed some excess saliva in his mouth and pushed the door open. And then blue met with brown.