✔ᵉⁿᵍˡⁱˢʰ War Dogs [The Punisher | Frank Castle]✔

─⌖❖ 00

Grumbling, Page rolled onto her side, fumbled half-asleep for her phone, and looked with narrowed eyes at the too-bright display. It was just a little before four. Can't people just get themselves killed, or even found, at a normal hour, and not in the middle of the night when every normal person was still asleep?

─⌖❖⌖─

Something was not right here. Not at all. Right when they arrived, at the old apartment complex, things seemed quite strange to Page. No police, ambulance, fire department or FBI were on the scene. The situation, after entering the house, didn't really get any better. It was dark. It wasn't that kind of darkness where you could still see your own hand in front of your eyes or if something was on the floor so you didn't fall, but it was pitch black. Everywhere there was something in the way that you would fly over with every step if you weren't careful where you stepped.

A clang made Page cringe. Rats. Surely those were just rats. They could only have been rats, anything else was impossible -inconceivable. It was the best hiding place or even nest for these animals. An old, abandoned and rather run-down building that had not been used for years and was simply empty. Still, she pulled her knife out of her pocket, let it snap open, and shone the flashlight slowly across the floor and along the walls.

A horror movie. And then, it was a damn bad one. The kind of horror movie where you knew something was about to happen, you knew you were about to die, or you just thought, how stupid are you and you're going in there alone, it's obvious something's about to happen to you. Page found herself in one of those situations. At least that's how it seemed to her. It wasn't fear, just paranoia that something bad was about to happen.

And as if Page hadn't suspected it long ago, she had no reception in here, of course. So she could write off one thing. To call for help. If anything happened, she was screwed, and surely, with her kind of luck, some murderer would be just around the next corner, waiting for her, and then cut off her head as soon as she passed him.

Cautiously, Page shined her light around the corner, but there was no one there. Shaking her head, she climbed over a fallen ceiling beam on the floor and turned around the main hall. Nothing? There was nothing here. Fallen plaster and that was it. Nothing more. Then why, in the middle of the night, would she come here? A bad joke. A very bad joke, and the person would have nothing to laugh about if she found out who had called her here.

Step by step Page climbed the rotting steps of the wooden staircase up to the second floor and stood rooted to the spot.