30: Skull
The death’s head grinned up from its position on the floor where it lay, empty sockets staring accusingly a this latest intruder to its resting place. Jen did not pay it much of any mind, mostly because as a dead thing it was hardly in a position to do anything about her presence. The beam from her flashlight danced across the room, showing off its extremely boring interior: dirty white walls with patches of sickly-looking mold, some fungi making a noble effort at establishing a colony where moisture had seeped down from the ground above, and a scattering of furniture that was too rotted to really tell what purpose it had served.
As far as Jen could tell, the skull on the ground (along with the rest of the skeleton, but it was the skull that held her attention) had belonged to someone roughly six feet tall. The tattered clothing suggested that the person had been a woman, which tracked with her own personal theory as to who, precisely was the bunker’s previous resident and what, precisely, had caused that resident to become a skeleton. Jen crouched next to the skeleton and gave it another look.
“This would go a lot faster if you could just confirm you are who I think you are,” she said to the skeleton. The skeleton did not answer, but Jen would later insist the skull’s empty sockets had indicated its left hand when retelling the story in the bar.
Clutched in the skeleton’s left hand was a simple blade. When Jan saw it, she felt her heart beat faster, and she reached out to gently take the blade for a closer look. The blade had no notable features apart from a small etching of a flower growing out of a skull’s eye socket. Jan laughed delightedly, then looked down at the skull and smiled.
“Hello great auntie Prim,” she said. “Grandmother says hello.”