Chapter 41: Angry Hamster
When Derek had first flown out of the city. He had been faced with a great possibility that his plan to end the strike would fail. And had it failed, he would have been looking at a huge problem, the whole thing growing so fast that he was glad that he only had to imagine it and not deal with the actual thing.
But other than that huge thing that he was extremely grateful for. Derek could not shake the feeling that the entire town was playing a messed up joke on him. First there had been the striking workers blocking them before they could check into their hotel and rest. From there it was all of the planes suddenly needing to be checked for glitches when this entire time there had been none. And then, just when he had thought things could not get any worse, he’d had to deal with the very real possibility of not being able to find a place to sleep that night.
He had even been considering paying the driver to let them sleep in his living room for the night. But then Emily had come through, her determination managing to get them to a place that might still have room.
While that was great, what was not so great, was arriving at the location and finding what looked to be a serial killer’s playground. There was absolutely no way that people had not met horrible painful ends in the place. A theory not helped when they walked into the reception area and found an old man that looked like he had been dead for years and his body had just never gotten the memo. Simply continuing to carry on without a heartbeat. If there had been two rooms available for the two of them, Derek would have been willing to overlook all that was wrong with the place.
But there was just one room for them, one room. And they’d had to fight for it like it was some sort of rare prize. Emily barely ripping it from the hands of a lovesick couple who clearly did not have any taste.
Now, the icing on the cake, it was not just one room, it was one room with one bed.
One bed, a tiny little thing that barely counted as a king. It still took up most of the room though, with just enough room for there to be two bedside tables on either side of it.
The sheets from where Derek was standing, looked clean enough. And Derek would think of them as just that and not inspect the blue fabric too much, some things a person was better off not knowing, especially in their situation since they were forced to use the room. So long as he did not smell anything untoward on the sheets, Derek would ignore everything else. He would simply get into bed, stare at the water stains on the ceiling, stare at the ugly walls and be grateful that he at least had a place to lay down for a bit, even if he would not be sleeping.
Stepping further into the room, Derek stepped around Emily, who was also still taking in the small space. He headed to the bathroom, and opened the door. There was a plastic curtain around the shower. Derek took a moment to stare at the floral print, he’d had no idea that those still existed.
Looking at the yellow flowers and the yellow walls was giving him a head ache, so Derek, glad that the bathroom was as passably clean as the front end, stepped outside and Emily stepped in.
When she came back, he was going through his bags, looking for his toiletry bag. He searched around until he finally found it, then he looked in his other bags for his towel and pyjamas.