Hoping that the intruder, possibly plural Kre suddenly realized, was still on the other side of the house, Kre decided to make a dash for the bedroom. It was just the next door down from the den he was currently in.
Though he hadn’t been invited to explore much of this specific house, Cooter’s home was similar to most of the others in the community. The front door led to a large sitting room which had a door leading to the kitchen on the opposite wall. The kitchen usually had a door leading to the back yard, which made it easy to bring in recently slaughtered livestock or garden products without making a mess in the rest of the house. On one side of the sitting room were the doors to the study and the master bedroom. Opposite those doors was a hallway that typically led to two other rooms, sometimes four, depending on the size of the home and the family. In some homes these extra rooms would be anything from a formal dining room to a children’s room to a guest bedroom. Down Cooter’s hallway were two rooms, a barely used but full pantry and an empty room that held random pieces of furniture Cooter would make then keep, much to Kre’s curiosity and amusement.
Kre had asked Cooter once why he didn’t sell any of the furniture at the market. Cooter responded with a simple, “Don’t need the money.”
For now, Kre could hear some of the crockery from the pantry being shifted about and picked through. ‘Good,’ Kre thought, ‘the intruder is busy with something else.’
Kre stepped out of the doorway and tried to keep his steps light as he softly padded towards the nearby door. Thankfully it was slightly ajar and Kre gave another silent thanks to Cooter’s obsessive rigor for carefully maintaining his home as the door opened without even a squeak of the hinges.
The bedroom had been tossed as much as the study had been, with clothes strewn about and the mattress cut open. It was such a mess that he didn’t notice the body of Cooter propped up against the wall behind the door.
“Cooter!” Kre whispered softly. “What…”
The old man’s head shook just a bit and his eyes blinked once.
Kre knelt down and placed his hand against Cooter’s cheek. There was a line of foamy spittle trailing from the corner of his mouth and Kre wiped it away without thinking about it. Cooter’s hand was tightly wrapped around a small hand-sized crossbow, loaded with a bolt. Kre figured that whoever broke into Cooter’s home must have been very fast or very good to have incapacitated the old man before he even had a chance to fire. ‘Or,’ thought Kre, ‘maybe he did fire once, missed, and was attacked just as he reloaded.’
Cooter’s eyes were a mixture of sadness and pain and they darted between Kre and the nearby window. Even without words, Kre could tell that the old man was trying to tell him to get away from here as fast as he could.
“What happened here?” Kre asked in a hoarse whisper. His voice was on the verge of breaking from the sheer amount of emotions he had welling up inside of him.
Cootsman’s eyes closed tightly for a few seconds and with what had to be a large amount of effort and pain, gasped out a barely audible hiss of a sound, “…sssassnnn…”