Eric, Brandon, Stu and Christine stood in front of the factory, looking once again at its imposing facade of crumbling concrete and dead vines. It looked, the more Christine stared at it, like a tombstone. She could just picture the engravings of the souls it contained etched into the surface, time-worn but still legible.
Keith.
Jennifer.
And if they weren’t fast enough, Betsy.
“I can’t believe we’re going back in,” Christine said in a distant-sounding voice. It felt like she was trapped in a recurring nightmare, repeating the same horrible choices over and over.
“You can stay here if you want,” Stu offered. “Watch the door, make sure she doesn’t come out. No one would blame you.”
She turned and gave him a look. “By myself? Are you insane?”
He chuckled sadly. “I’m starting to think so, yeah.” He caught Eric staring at them, then quickly looking away when he’d been spotted. He figured they were all a little insane by that point.
“Alright, let’s get in there,” Brandon said, and without another word they all headed in, through the heavy door and back inside the place they’d spent so much time trying to escape.
The stillness of the factory once again swallowed them up, cutting out all that outdoor noise, the insects and the wind and the rustling of leaves. The last time they’d stood in that spot already felt like a lifetime ago. That was back when they believed Jennifer and Keith could still be alive in there somewhere. And also before they learned that, sometimes, campfire stories were real.
Stu turned to Brandon, his face dirty and tired. “Splitting up, right? Make better time?”
Brandon nodded.
“I’ll take the left,” Eric announced, already starting to head off. Brandon’s eyebrows raised up, a slight smile on his lips. He was impressed with how quickly Eric had made his choice, doubly so how quickly he’d acted on it. Brandon himself wasn’t exactly thrilled with being back in the factory, especially after seeing what had become of Keith and Jennifer. He figured if a limp noodle like Eric could find the backbone in the moment, he’d better do the same. The nerd had already disappeared into the shadows, and without a flashlight to go by, seeing as Roxy had taken it from him.
“We’ll go right,” Stu said, pulling Christine along before Brandon could break them up. Break up, he thought to himself. What a sick joke. Only a few hours earlier, his biggest worry was how to tell Christine he was moving to New York. And here they were, fighting for their lives and praying for salvation while half their friends were dead or lost.
Betsy had to warn the others about what she’d found.
With the diary stuffed into her back pocket, Betsy left the hidden room of horrors with more purpose than she’d ever felt. She ran back through the small corridor and climbed the ladder as fast as she could, shoving the floor panel aside and scrambling out of the ground.
Back on the ground level, Betsy wracked her brain for some sense of direction, some clue as to which way they’d entered the factory. It felt like a lifetime ago at this point. As she thought about it, though, she vaguely remembered turning left as they’d entered, and then seeing the moon through an opposite window. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something.
Once she found the moon through a window, high up beyond a catwalk, she kept it to her left and moved away from it until she hit the furthest wall. As long as she kept her hand on the wall, she figured, she had to find an exit eventually. It had worked in the Harvest Fair corn maze, maybe it would work here, too.
As much as she tried to stay focused on her search for the exit, her mind kept returning to the diary in her back pocket. The entire night, she’d been wondering how their innocent night of fun had transformed into a house of horrors, with three of their friends dead and the rest more scared than they’d ever been. It had seemed like a random turn of events, crossing paths with a killer straight out of a scary story. The result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And yet, somehow, the truth was even more disturbing. Because in reality, the events of their nightmarish trip to Lake Conklin weren’t random at all. They had been planned from the start by a sick mind, and worse, a sick mind that belonged to someone they knew and trusted. It was almost too much to bear. Fresh tears began to well up in Betsy’s eyes, tears not just of fear, but of betrayal.
Just then, in the far distance, she heard something she hadn’t been sure she would ever hear again: the voices of her friends.
It sounded like Brandon talking, but she couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered now was to reach them before it was too late, before they were betrayed again and again until nearly all of them were dead.
She wanted to call out to them, to cry out, I’m here! But she didn’t dare. The Bludgeoner was still in the factory somewhere, and all he needed was one slip-up from her to give away her location. No, she would have to wait and be silent. She would have to hurry up and reunite with her friends and expose the truth so they could all survive the night, together.
Betsy went as fast as she could, as quietly as she could, one hand on the wall and the other feeling in front of her for anything in her way. With every step the voices of her friends grew closer. Not only that, but she actually felt lighter, like she was shedding the dark stain of this night. Lighter and lighter she felt as she went, until she was so light she was swept off her feet.
No. Not swept off her feet. Pulled off the ground. Grabbed from behind and wrenched into the shadows by massive, stinking hands.
Betsy tried to shout, to call to her friends for help, but her screams were silenced by those massive hands squeezing in, until all she could hear was a strange crunching and snapping like someone chewing celery. A pain like she’d never experienced before filled her, but still she couldn’t scream, still she couldn’t cry, and then the pain was replaced by nothing at all.
Roxy almost immediately regretted what she’d done. The moment she stepped into the woods, and that damp darkness overtook her, she wished she hadn’t made such a show of going off on her own. It was too late to turn back and ask someone to go with her, not without Brandon rubbing it in her face. If they all lived through the night, she would never live it down.
The only thing she could rely on now was her flashlight. At least she’d had the presence of mind to grab it from Eric before she stormed off in her big, dramatic exit. She’d been surprised to notice Eric gave her a nasty look when she did that, as if she’d really offended him. She’d never thought much of Eric, certainly not that he was capable of giving looks like that. But a night like the one they were having had a way of bringing things out of people. Maybe he’d make it through after all.
Keeping the beam of her flashlight moving back and forth on the trail, checking for unwanted predators—animal or human—she walked in the direction she believed their campsite had been. It was a little out of the way, but it was the only way she could think of finding her way back to town in the dark. The Lake Conklin trail system wasn’t known for its clearly marked trails, and at least this way she could retrace their footsteps home.
As tough as she was, a forest at night had never been her favorite place to hang out. The night had grown even darker than before. The wind passing through the trees had an unsettling musical quality to it, as if a skinless corpse was whistling through what was left of its lips, the rustling of leaves its skeletal feet dragging across the ground.
“It’s gonna be a long walk if you keep thinking like that,” Roxy whispered to herself.
As she rounded a familiar-looking bend, one she remembered being not far from the campsite, she heard something through the trees that stopped her where she stood. Someone was moving toward her, taking strange, hesitant steps. As she strained to listen and not make a sound, they took a few more steps, paused, then began walking toward her again.
She thought it could be one of the others trying to catch up with her, but they would have been coming up from behind her, not through the trees. Besides, they would have called out to her by now, telling her to wait up. That left the possibility that The Bludgeoner had left the factory behind to stalk her on her own. Or, she thought grimly, it could be an entirely different psycho out looking for some fun.
She didn’t like any of the possibilities she came up with, but then another possibly worse option made itself known. As the footsteps drew closer, she realized they weren’t dragging at all, but were actually being made by more than one set of feet. Small, agile feet, like that of a wolf.
“Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit,” Roxy said under her breath. She tensed her body, making it small, and gripped the flashlight tighter. She didn’t want to do it, but she was ready to bash it over a wolf’s skull if it meant fighting for her life. Even as she prepared for the worst, the footsteps sped up, coming at her now so fast she doubted she’d be able to stop the beast if it jumped at her at full speed. Then she saw it, bearing down on her, teeth and tongue out, the eyes wide as her flashlight caught them.
At the last moment, just as she was about to bring the flashlight down in as hard a swing as she could summon, she realized it wasn’t a wolf- it was a dog.
The white and brown animal nearly knocked her over as it jumped up and put its dirty paws on her. The dog was filthy, its fur disheveled, like it had been wandering around in the woods for a long time. It’s tail wagged so violently Roxy was afraid it would hurt itself.
“Where the hell did you come from?” she asked, a slight smile crossing her face for the first time in hours. It was good to see a friendly face, even one that smelled pretty bad. She checked the small tag that hung from its collar. “Buck, huh? Are you freaking out, too, Buck?”
To her surprise, Buck broke away from her and started heading down the trail away from her. She was heartbroken to see him go, until a short distance away he stopped and turned back, clearly waiting for her. With a hesitant shrug she followed, allowing the dog to lead the way- to where, she had no idea.
“Guys!” Eric shouted, and Brandon jumped. Before he could move, Stu and Christine were already rushing past him in the direction Eric had gone. He followed a moment later, coming up behind them as they rounded a corner to an office area.
Eric knelt on the floor in front of what looked like a broken mannequin that had been dragged through wet paint. Christine only had a moment to register what it was before Stu turned her away, shielding her from seeing what was left of Betsy.
Christine cried out, the tears feeling like they were pouring out of her. Stu held her close, so she could scream into his shoulder. Brandon walked past them, giving Eric a hand to stand up before kneeling himself.
Betsy’s head looked like it had been squeezed in a vise until it popped. He could barely make sense of what he was seeing, other than some pieces of skull and what looked like an eyeball. It wasn’t that long ago that Betsy was freaking out about the eyeball they’d found, Brandon thought, and here she was, an even more gruesome sight herself. It horrified him on a level even Keith and Jennifer’s mangled bodies hadn’t. Maybe it was because Betsy had been the most innocent of them all. She’d never even cut class, for Christ’s sake.
When he stood again, Christine was watching him with wet, puffy eyes, her face a mixture of emotions. She was sad for her lost friend, as they all were, but with that she also looked furious in a way Brendan had ever seen her.
“He can’t do this,” Christine said, her voice shaky from crying. “He can’t get away with it.”
Brendan shook his head. “He won’t.”
“So what do we do?” she asked, a look of determination taking over. Brendan looked at Eric, who was waiting for him to tell them what needed to be done. But instead, it was Stu who spoke.
“We find him,” Stu said, looking Brandon in the eye. “We find this bastard. And we fucking kill him.”
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