Winnebago

Bloodstains

In

The Breezeway

Chapter Three

Five hundred watts was enough power to successfully pop 85 percent of the microwaveable bag of popcorn Angela had brought for a snack.  You could run it for longer, but then all you'd end up with was a bag of bitter charcoal.  She went back and forth in her thoughts.  If she didn't snack during her shift, it was always easier to stay awake.  But if she didn't bring a snack, she also felt a smidgeon of depression kick in about hour number three of her six-hour shifts.  What she didn't know was that the scientific reason for her tiredness wasn't the food.  It was the boredom.  The human brain is a very powerful tool.  When you give it nothing to do, it tends to want to shut down.  Once the kids were in their dorm rooms, her job generally became very boring.  The ding from the microwave in the faculty lounge snapped her out of her thoughts.

Her Dr. had been telling her to cut out many things from her diet.  At the age of 48, like millions of other humans on the planet, her body was in the early stages of breaking down.  Try to limit yourself to one alcoholic drink per day her Dr. would say.  Also, completely stop any use of caffeine.  The one good thing about her job at the private school was that it got her out and about walking.  She usually treated herself with a 16oz can of Cherry Coke for each shift she worked.  She would also snack on either some form of protein, like jerky, or a small bag of chips. Tonight's bag of popcorn was a different approach to her choice of snacks.  Jerky, like everything else in this post Covid world, was getting too expensive to buy twice a week.  Steam lifted out from the bag as she locked the main office door and descended the steps to her car.  The night air was dry at the moment, but the haze peaking over the ridgeline to the east, in the light of the half-moon rising, told her that tonight would once again end up cold and drizzly.  With a current temp of 56 degrees, having the driver's side window down all the way was quite refreshing.  As the office door was swinging to a close, she'd feel her left pocket, just to make sure she hadn't left the keys inside.  As she pushed the button on her door handle to unlock the driver's side door of her 2016 Chevy Tahoe, she heard a rustle in the bushes to her immediate left. A quick glance and a sweep with her eyes showed her it was just a leaf falling from one of the many oak trees surrounding campus.  Years of squinting in the full summer sun without sunglasses and staring into the bright screen of her cell phone for hours on end, had damaged her vision.  She had trouble seeing things when her eyes went from looking at something bright, to something dark.  Overall, her vision was somewhere between 20/30 and 20/45.  The Samsung Droid cell phone she carried every shift, vibrated.  Jeri had responded as the adult on duty that night.  Angela would acknowledge the text and make sure to document this info into her nightly report.    She didn't mind her job at the school.  It paid good money.  You just had to be positive minded to accommodate for being alone, looking at virtually nothing all night long.  Easing her Tahoe into drive, she was off to complete a perimeter check of campus.  As she drove on the darkened roads, random music came out of the car speakers.  She'd had satellite radio for years now and the nineties channel was her favorite.  INXS provided food for her brain as she drove around campus.  An owl way up high on a telephone wire screeched at her presence. Flying off just as the Tahoe began to bathe it in light from the HID headlights.  Angela was used to seeing many night creatures to include racoons, snakes, skunks, rabbits, toads, and even deer.  Although she had never spotted them with her 20/45 vision, she more often than not heard the coyotes yipping and cackling in the night air.  Some nights they seemed to be way off in the distance, others they sounded as if they were no more than 50 yards away.  Just as she rounded a turn, a catlike figure skirted alongside the dirt road, quickly diving off into the bushes towards the main hwy that bordered campus.  It was only a blur that she saw, and she was fairly sure it was a simple domesticated cat.  There were maybe a million mice in the surrounding fields so the thought of a cat being out at night was not out of the ordinary.  All the outlying buildings were locked up tight, her perimeter check was complete.  She'd slowly drive to just south of the boy's dorm to observe room checks. 

There was no manual for the work at hand.  Campus Watch was simply that.  She worked graveyard shifts much to her chagrin.  They weren't terrible, and it was only four shifts per week, so even though the hours went late in to the night and early morning, she could still live somewhat of a regular lifestyle.  Room checks were the school's way of making sure the kids were in their rooms, even if only momentarily.  Angela would watch for these checks to be completed.  What the teachers presumably didn't know was, that five minutes after these checks, the kids were out and about.  Visiting one another's rooms, taking showers in the bathrooms down the hall, some, even venturing off up the hill to the opposite sex's dorms.  If and when this occurred, her job became most exciting.  Over the years she had learned ways to catch these kids in their illegal migrations.  These kids were savvy.  Plus, they all had cell phones.  It wouldn't take the devious ones very long to memorize which cars belonged to Campus Watch.  They would peek out of their dorm windows searching for the slate grey Tahoe.  Once they located it, texts were made, and routes were drawn into the battle maps.  If the Tahoe was south of the boy's dorm, the rear breezeway would be the escape route.  From there, a short jaunt up a paved roadway of no more than 200 yards would bring them to the forbidden castle of the girl's dorms.  The only obstacle left once making it to this spot, were the locked doors.  This is where cell phones were crucial.  One quick text and a window would slide open to one of the girl's rooms.  If Angela hadn't spotted them by the time they made it up the hill, they were golden!  Or so they thought. Angela had been at this for her sixth year now, and she knew most of the tricks.  She knew that the car was a marker.  So, she would park it where she wanted the kids to believe she would be, sitting inside.  Then she'd get out on foot, make sure to unlock her car door so that the little red dot wouldn't appear when her alarm was on, and slip off into the darkness.  The hard part was guessing which path the rule breakers would take.  There were a few.  There were also many factors that could change the minutia of the plan.  Had the kids set out a spotter that saw her exit her car and go off on foot?  Had they heard the car door shut?  Or maybe on a well moonlit night, they could see her silhouette sitting inside the car.  With no partner to help close off some of these gaps, her job was actually quite hard to be successful at.  But success had come over the past four years.   In fact, she was confident that the successes of catching these kids out and about, outnumbered the defeats by three to one.  This particular night, while crunching on popcorn and sipping her delicious cherry coke, she would plan on making her way up to the girl's dorms via the dining hall path.  Once she got behind the dining hall, a path led the way up a hill to the south side of the dorms.  Hedges lined the ridgeline no more than twenty feet away from the dorm room windows.  She could stand here in the total darkness and see both the windows, and the paved roadway.  It was a good spot.  A bit creepy as well because you could not see the ground on dark nights and there were an abundant number of rattlesnakes around campus.  She had seen them personally while doing her walk throughs.  As she watched in the solitude and darkness, she almost thought she could hear a cell phone chirping as if one of the girls had left their phone off of vibrate.  The trees and hedges began to drip all around her.  The fog had moved in, and it was extra soupy tonight.  This added to the creepiness.  It also made it more difficult to hear anything.  Sure enough, not three minutes after what she thought was a text being received, a shadowy figure approached up the paved hill.  The kids knew to wear hoodies over their heads to conceal their identity as much as possible.  As the hoodie came closer and closer, Angela waited.  She heard a voice faintly ring out, and soon discovered that this hooded person was in fact a staff member out looking for her cat.  The false alarm didn't bother her.  The more time that went by, the sooner she could get back to her cherry drink and salty buttery popcorn.  Kids made their attempts between certain hours.  She'd never seen them out really late.  One thirty in the morning seemed to be the cutoff.  Not wanting to scare the crap out of the teacher, Angela shined her flashlight as if she was looking for something on the ground and then quietly introduced herself to the cat seeker.  Angela did not know the name of this teacher, she'd probably seen her in the roster, but she hadn't memorized them all.  Teachers came and went rather frequently, so trying to memorize all of them was a lost cause.  This one's name was Nancy.  Her cats' name was Farmer.  Nancy was still a bit startled when the flashlight appeared up by the hedges, but she quickly calmed down when she discovered it was just campus watch out doing their thing.  After introductions, Nancy mentioned she had not seen her cat since sundown.  Angela told her about the cat she thought she had seen on her perimeter check, and that it could have been Farmer.  This made Nancy feel a little better.  Although, Farmer would not usually venture out quite so far as the perimeter road.  The two said their goodnights.  Angela promised if she did in fact see Farmer again, she'd bring him up and put him inside the dorm for Nancy.  

The bright glow blinded her eyes momentarily.  She clicked her side button three times, and the screen went from bright white to a glowing red.  This red color was much easier on her eyes transitioning in the darkness of the night.  Her cellphone told her it was 1320.  She'd used military time since being hired.  It was written in all her reports, and it was just easier to use then regular time.  She was never in the military but had learned how to figure out the twenty-four-hour clock with the help of her father who had served in Vietnam with the Army.   Ten more minutes she thought to herself.  Looked like there would be no migration tonight.  The half-moon was gone, completely blocked out by dense fog.  The dark shades under neath every tree meant that they had consumed enough moisture to begin dripping down onto the pavement and dirt. Toads still sang their nightly tune of ribbit.  There must have been thousands of them on campus and the moisture from the fog meant it was party time.  Angela couldn't believe these toads could sit in the water and out in the cold night air without freezing to death.  She hated the cold.  Even the mid forty temps that were now present in the foggy drizzle seemed extra cold.  The toads could not care less.  Now the phone read 1330 and Angela made her way off of the hedge lined ridge near the girl's dorm.  She slowly strutted down the paved roadway keeping an ear out for Farmer.  As she approached the parking lot adjacent to the Breezeway of the second floor of the boy's dorm, she heard an animal cry out.  It was the unmistakable sound of a cat fight.  Oh boy she thought, Farmer is being a bad kitty.  Maybe he had found a raccoon.  Raccoons were mean creatures and very intelligent.  Their five digits allowed them to do things most other animals couldn't.  Like hold an egg and crack it.  Sucking out the goodness from within.  They also were equipped with very sharp, large, teeth.  Raccoons were also susceptible to getting rabies.  A raccoon with rabies was a dangerous animal.  The fight cooled off for the time being.  Angela moved even closer to the breezeway.  Her flashlight picked up an object dead center in the parking lot.  It was her bag of popcorn.  She scolded herself for not rolling up the window of her car before heading off on foot.  Those stinking raccoons had gotten into her car and stolen her popcorn.  The bag was ripped right down the middle, yet half of the puffy, buttery white goodness remained in the bag. " Can I still eat the bottom half " she softly whispered out loud.  As she thought about this her eyes raised up and picked up a dark figure, about the size of a large purse.  There in the middle of the breezeway, was what had to be Farmer.  His entrails were strung out about seven inches from the main carcass.  His head, completely gone!  Oh my she thought.  If this is Farmer, what would she tell Nancy?  Angela was uncertain what the hell could have torn the head off of this poor cat.  Was it a raccoon!  Surely no, it couldn't have been.  Maybe a raccoon that had several hours to pick at the body could be responsible.  But she had just heard the cat fight minutes ago.  She walked up to the cat body.  A pool of blood had formed on the concrete.  There were smudges of blood leading away and down the hall to the north.  Angela could not tell what they were, but they were big.  Not a raccoon that's for sure, she thought.  Then, she saw a collar, strung in a low hanging tree branch.  Upon inspection, sure enough, it was Farmer.  Her stomach sank.  She felt bad for Nancy.  She would have to break the bad news to her.  Angela loved animals herself and owned a dog of her own back at home.  This would be difficult.  As she turned back to exit out of the breezeway, a warm current wafted past her body.  Odd, she thought.  Where did that come from?  She walked back into the dark parking lot, pausing just beyond the roof line to let her eyes adjust.  The popcorn bag was no longer on the ground.  She didn't see it anywhere.  How could this be?  Had the warm breeze blown it away?  No.  She would have heard that.  She also figured she would have heard an animal carrying it away.  As she stood there thinking, she suddenly got a warm feeling and a memory of her sister that had been locked up in Juvenile Hall ten years earlier.  Her sister had since been transferred to a womans maximum security prison in Vacaville.  Aside from a couple of parole hearings, Angela had not seen Vicki very often.  The memory of her sisters' face was the last task her brain would perform.  From atop the roof, with virtually no sound at all, a massive one-hundred-and-eighty-pound mountain lion leaped from above.  It clamped on to Angelas neck with its massive teeth.  The loss of blood that followed was not what killed Angela.  The force of the attack, with all that weight hitting her at neck level had snapped her spine in half.  She never knew what hit her.  The big cat dragged Angela's one-hundred-and-forty-pound body through the breezeway as if it were a pillow filled with down.  The animal had amazing strength.  Up over the handrail it climbed into a low hanging tree.  The bloodstains in the breezeway were wide and thick.  The handrail dripped with blood, slowly matching the drip produced by the fog layer.  Angela would be half eaten up in the tree.  When the cat was full, it climbed back on to the roof, and out into the damp night air.  The cat would bring its two cubs back to feed on the carcass in the tree. Whoever was the early riser in the morning was in for a ghoulish scene.  They'd come across the blood first.  Then they'd most certainly follow it up to the tree where they'd find the half-eaten body of campus watch, slung over a branch like a piece of jerky hanging in the oven to dry.   The police would be called.  They'd determine the cause of death and begin looking for the cat.  An autopsy would confirm the suspect two weeks later.  Along with Angelas DNA, they found the remanence of a bag of Orville Redenbacher's movie theater popcorn inside the cats' bowels.   Angela's replacement was a young man named Sean.  Sean would not be told about the fate of the last campus watch employee.  And he too, loved to eat popcorn.