"Sever" artcl:3

Several nights later we decided to go back to the warehouse. Now on this night unlike any other we started off by sitting in a pub call the “O.” No it doesn’t stand for what you think it means. It was a place in Oakland, Pittsburgh between downtown and Carnegie where you could get a pitcher of beer and a pizza pie for $10. They also had they’re “O” fries which were killer.

Steve, Jen and myself were sitting there from what my memory serves and the conversation came up on what to do that night. Movie? Hang out? Or hedge? Steve and I had recently climbed a bridge at night which I think I already mentioned that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone unless you have a death wish.

This time we had Jen and she had seen us climb a trestle once before during the day and that was hairy in itself because she kept yelling up at us that we were going to die. Not really the thing you want to hear while 100’+ up in the air. So doing that again with here in the same zip code is not really on the table for discussion.

Steve suggested we go back to the warehouse and climb around there at night. Jen wasn’t a big fan to say the least and I was impartial, basically the why not? Attitude.

We devoured our grease and beer and Steve drove us there in his rust colored 1980’s something Cadillac. We get down to the Strip District which is a ghost town this time of night around 9pm if I had to guess. We parked a block or two away so not to have the cops discover us. Between the wind howling through the streets, empty buildings and the random echo of a squeaky grocery cart being pushed. We ran to the blind side of the building and around back.

Now we had been there before at night and it was the scariest place during the day, but at night it had a sinister feeling about it as if someone had walked across your grave.

All we had is our usual: Two not three, but two small Mag Lights.

We stand at the back of the building and stare up at the entrance on where we go in. Now my heart was racing faster than it did in the building a few days earlier. The place was eerily silent. Steve was ready to go in, but something came over me, I don’t know what it was, gut feeling, seeing the future, who the hell knows. But I stood up and said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go in tonight.” Jen before this was not having it anyway so to convince her was not an issue. She was scared and totally freaked out. I don’t think she had traveled with us inside at all during the night. Perhaps once, fuzzy on that fact.

Steve called me a “pussy” and was going to go anyway. I told him it wasn’t a good idea yet again and he insisted. Finally after Jen begging and pleading with him we didn’t go.
Steve of course was pissed, but what are you going to do? We left and I cannot remember what happened the rest of that night. I could make something up, but it could have been a various number of things.

The next morning I awake, turn on the tele and make a cup of coffee. As I’m taking a sip in my kitchen I see a familiar site on the morning news. I run over to turn up the volume to discover “our” warehouse on the news. The cops were standing right where we had come out just a few days earlier and had scared those taggers.

As I sit on my yellow paisley couch and dug my toes into my multi brown shag carpet. The news reporter revealed that a body had been found in the first floor of that building. It was of a suspect they called the “Nazi Vampire Killer” I kid you not. I don’t know why they called him this, I don’t remember them exactly saying if he left a note but I feel he did. They discovered his body among a ring of candles. He had killed himself.

Come to find out, we had several killings in the area over the last several months in and around my neighborhood of Bloomfield where they were finding decapitated heads in dumpsters. One in fact had been discovered near my ex-girlfriends place.

They basically put this guy at the scene of the crime from what little I remember about the details. I called Steve up and told him to turn on the television. “I told you so,” I said. It was one of the few times in my life I listened to my gut and we were right to stay out of there.

We never saw anything prior and I don’t know if this was the guy with the hatchet. But Steve and I didn’t visit for exactly one year. And even after that we only went there one more to check out where he died. The place had at this point been fenced off.

…next artcle. Another life experience that forged the script of “Sever.”