by Adan Ramie
Sara smiled, and the feeling was gone. Riley blamed it on nerves and fear at the terrible situation.
“You’re welcome. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Then she was gone. Riley settled down on the floor of the elevator to wait until someone came back to help her.
CHAPTER
13
Riley checked her phone after what seemed like hours and found it had only been half an hour since Sara left. She hadn’t heard anything, not the sound of a foot on the floor or even the wind outside since Sara had wandered down the dark hallway.
She wished she had thought to give Sara her phone to use as a flashlight but knew berating herself wasn’t going to get her out of the elevator any faster. She tucked her phone away.
Eyes on the prize, she told herself, then put all her attention back on the tiny space Sara had crawled through only a short time before. If anything, it looked darker and more eerie.
There’s no danger here, she repeated in her head. No danger. I’m safe. The power is out, but I’m not hurt, and I won’t get hurt. Everything is okay. This is now. The danger is in the past. It’s over.
She closed her eyes and focused on her heartbeat and bringing it back down to a normal level. She breathed slowly in through her nose, filling her lungs from the bottom up, then held it for a count of three.
She breathed out through barely parted lips almost double the count. Then she did it again. She imagined a white light glowing in her chest around her heart, then expanding to her limbs, filling the elevator, and shining out the shaft through the small open space and into the hallway. Then she opened her eyes.
She was still alone, but she was calm. She listened. It almost sounded like footsteps outside. She stood up, willing herself to remain calm, and cleared her dry throat.
“Hello?”
She closed her mouth and strained her ears. No response.
“Sara, if that’s you, say something.”
No one answered, but she would swear she heard something in the hallway on the sixth floor above her. She strained on her tip toes at the back of the elevator, but she couldn’t see more than a few inches past the opening. She settled on flat feet. And she listened.
“Hello?” she called again.
A head popped through the hall and Riley jumped back. When she realized who it was, she laughed and stepped forward.
“Jolie! Thank God you’re here.”
“What are you doing in here alone? Where did Sara go?” Jolie asked.
Riley shook her head. “We got stuck when the generator died. Sara got out and she went to look for you guys, so maybe someone can help me get out of here. I won’t fit through that hole, I don’t think, but even if I could, I can’t get up far enough on my own.”
Jolie checked out the elevator, then the hole. “You’re right about the second part, but maybe not the first. What do you need? Fast, before Sara gets back.”
“Well, if I would fit, a rope or something.” She laughed, feeling lightheaded and unbalanced. “You probably won’t find a rope. That’s silly. A ladder or something like that? I could probably climb up even if I had something strong enough to hold my weight that I could climb on.”
“I’ll look for something,” Jolie said. She pulled back, then leaned back down to look Riley in the eyes. “I’m trusting you. This had better not be a trap.”
“What?” Riley asked.
“It had better not be a trap. Your girl Sara is a psychopath and I’m hoping she didn’t get you to go along with her. Don’t make me regret helping you.”
Riley’s shoulders slumped and her smile fell away. “Jolie, this isn’t a trap. I’m stuck here. Sara went to find you all, but I guess she couldn’t because you hid so well.”
“Damn right we did,” Jolie said. She looked around, then leaned a little closer. She whispered. “Everyone is hiding in one of the wings they closed down for remodeling. The place is so stuffed, it blots out any light coming from outside, and you can barely see each other when you’re standing right next to each other.”
She grinned. “Let me find something to get you out before Sara gets back and takes me out from behind.”
She huffed to her feet and Riley heard her footsteps as they went down the hall.
“Please hurry,” she said behind her. “Please.”
Long minutes passed and her heartbeat picked up speed again. She didn’t hear anything. She couldn’t see anything. Her skin crawled with prickly cold and she wrapped her arms across her chest and tucked her hands in on her sides.
“Please, Jolie, come back,” she said over and over so that it sounded like a chant. “Please, Jolie, come back.”
Then Jolie’s head was back in the opening, and Riley felt like crying with relief.
“What happened? Did you find something?”
“Of course, I did,” Jolie said, and slid something small and metal into the hole. Riley grabbed it and lowered it to the floor. “Pop it open. It’s one of those step stools short people use in their kitchens. I’m sure you have one, right? I know I do.”
Riley fiddled with the shiny metal poles until she had the little step stool popped open as far as it would go. It didn’t stand more than a foot high. She pushed it up against the concrete wall and stepped on it.
She reached as far as she could on the tips of her toes, and Jolie reached out for her, but their fingertips slipped over each other.
Riley felt her heart plummet into her stomach as she stretched and couldn’t make her fingers hook onto Jolie’s.
Jolie sighed and pushed herself up off the carpeted floor. “Okay, you really are short. We need something else.” She got onto her feet. “I’ll be back. Stay down so you don’t get yourself killed.”
“Wait!” Riley cried out, but Jolie didn’t hear her or didn’t respond. In moments, she was gone, and Riley was alone in the dark hole again. “Please hurry.”
Jolie was only gone another couple of minutes. Riley didn’t have a chance to go into full-blown panic mode, so when she saw Jolie’s face, she managed a smile instead of a grimace.
“Try this,” Jolie said, and handed down a folding chair. “I must have been blind as hell to not see it before. If it’s not tall enough, you can probably put the stool on the chair and make it that way. Be careful. If you fall and hurt yourself, I won’t be able or willing to go down in that hole and get you. You’re on your own.”
Riley opened the folding chair and made sure it was sturdy on the floor before she settled the folding step stool on top of it. The structure was wobbly and insecure, and in any other situation, Riley would have waited it out instead of trying her luck.
But this wasn’t an ordinary situation, and she could easily imagine herself losing her mind in the hours or days it would take for someone else to get her out, so she took a breath and started to climb slowly up the metal monstrosity.
“I told you to be careful,” Jolie warned.
“I’m trying. Stop harping on me.”
Jolie watched from above as Riley climbed. A thump sounded from behind Jolie. She scrambled to her feet and faced away from Riley.
“Who is that? I know you’re out there, so you can show yourself now before I go off on you.”
“What did you hear?” Riley asked. She stopped in the middle of her climb to listen. “Tell me what’s going on. What do you see?”
“Someone’s in here with us,” Jolie whispered. “What gives, Riley? You told me this wasn’t a trap. I tried to help you.”
“It isn’t a trap, I swear!” Riley cried.
She could hear the desperation in her voice, and she hoped it came through as genuine to Jolie. She doubted Sara meant anyone harm, but if the girl wasn’t being honest with her, Riley didn’t have any idea of it. She waited a beat.
“What’s going on out there?”
“I can’t see anything,” Jolie whispered. She dropped down to a crouch but kept facing away from Riley. “I’m going to go see what’s going on. Stay where you ar
e and be quiet if you don’t want to end up like Cindy. No one can get you down there.”
“Wait – Jolie!”
But she didn’t wait. Jolie got to her feet and started slowly down the hallway. In seconds, she was out of Riley’s field of vision.
Riley waited a beat, then called out again. “Jolie, come back!” She listened. Nothing. “Damnit, Jolie, don’t leave!” she called out louder.
This time, she heard a strangled cry and the sounds of bodies struggling on the soft carpeting. Riley looked down, found her footing, and started climbing again. A body thumped against a wall or a door, and Jolie let out a strangled growl as though she were being choked.
The structure on which Riley stood started to wobble, so she steadied herself, knowing she couldn’t help if she was stranded in the elevator with a broken leg from a fall. When it stopped moving, she started climbing again.
She reached the top of the shaft and the opening in time to see Jolie’s dim shape hit the ground.
“Jolie – no!”
A figure crouched over her. Riley could tell the person was light-skinned, bright against the darkness, and wearing something that blended in with the dimly lit hallway, but that was all she could make out.
She glanced down again to make sure her footing was sure, then pushed herself over the lip of the floor and onto the carpet. She scrabbled up onto her feet, but she was too late. Jolie’s attacker was gone.
Riley ran down the hall and fell onto her knees beside Jolie’s prone body. Her throat was cut in a jagged line and blood pooled all around her. Riley put a hand to her throat to feel her pulse, but as she did, she felt the blood cover her fingers too fast and too thick for Jolie to be okay.
“Jolie,” she whispered against all her instincts.
Jolie didn’t answer. She was dead – and what she said had come to pass. Someone had deliberately come after her with the intent of grievous bodily injury. The killer was locked in with them, and it could be any one of them.
She did the only thing she knew to do in the situation: she screamed at the top of her lungs.
CHAPTER
14
Riley didn’t stop screaming until she heard a group of pounding footsteps coming toward her. Around the corner at the end of the hall into which the killer disappeared, Nick was the first one to pop out his head. He ran to Riley without stopping or looking around him, and when he got to her, he grabbed her shoulders and looked her up and down.
“What is it? Are you injured?”
Riley shook her head and looked down at Jolie’s prone body. She wished she had been the one hurt. “Jolie” was the only word she could push up her throat and out of her mouth.
Nick looked down at their feet and recoiled. As he did, he pulled Riley with him, and she stumbled into him, smearing Jolie’s blood from her shirt onto his clothes. Both their shirts were smudged with red and brown.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I was stuck in the elevator,” she said, and pointed with one bloody hand toward the open shaft. “I helped Sara out, and she went to look for someone to help me out.”
“She told us,” he said, and at that moment, Sara, Veronica, and Bethany rounded the corner in a huddled group. “We were trying to figure out which floor you were on when we heard you scream. What happened?”
“Someone...” She stopped and stared at his face, then looked down at his bloody shirt. She pulled away from him and put Jolie’s prone body between them. “Someone killed her.”
“What?” he asked. He stepped toward her, but she took two steps in the opposite direction. “What do you mean, ‘someone killed her’?”
Riley looked from Nick to the group of women around him. Sara broke away from the pack and raced toward her. She wrapped Riley in a hug that transferred more of Jolie’s blood onto Sara’s shirt.
“I am so sorry I ever left you. I got turned around and confused, and when I finally found them, I didn’t know where I was going.”
Riley looked down at Sara’s trusting face and wrapped an arm around her shoulders protectively. “Someone killed Jolie… Maybe she was right. Maybe someone killed Cindy, too.”
“This must have been an accident,” Nick said, and stepped toward Riley. “No one among us would have done such a thing. It’s unthinkable.”
Sara stepped in front of Riley. She bared her teeth at him. “Stay back.”
“Sara, you were with me!”
“You broke away,” Sara said. “We all split up. When I heard Riley scream, I didn’t know where any of you were.”
“We didn’t see you, either,” Bethany whispered. “Maybe you killed her.”
Sara crossed her arms over her chest. “I wouldn’t have killed her. I already told you I am not a killer.”
“Jolie thought you were,” Veronica said. Her voice was dull and lifeless, as always, and Riley turned toward the sound of it. “Jolie knew from the beginning that there was something off about your story.”
“Stop saying that!” Riley said, and pulled Sara closer into a side-armed embrace. “Sara was with me. She had me at a disadvantage, and she could have hurt me, but she didn’t. She went for help. If you people had trusted her in the first place, we never would have split up, and maybe Jolie would be alive.”
Nick stepped between the two groups of women and held out an arm at each. “Listen, no one here is thinking straight. We’re in a tense situation. Maybe we should keep the accusations to ourselves, stick together, and keep our eyes on each other.”
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Sara said. Riley’s eyes went to her, then back to Nick as Sara spoke. “You’re the reason we are all here on this terrible day in this terrible place. You’re the reason we didn’t get out in time to evacuate with everyone else. Why did you bring us all here?”
Nick opened his mouth and stared at Sara. “I wanted you all to be able to tell your stories. When I planned this, the hotel was going to be unable to accommodate many people, and I thought it would be safer. I had no idea there would be a storm or an evacuation.”
“But what do you get out of it?” Sara asked.
He closed his mouth and the muscles of his jaw bunched and released over and over as he clenched and released the muscles there. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. “Maybe I get a book deal. Is that so bad – to want to get paid for what I do?”
“Is this a setup so that you can write a book about a bunch of so-called Final Girls dying in an abandoned hotel by the hand of a faceless killer?” Sara asked. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Riley watched him. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared. His posture straightened, his arms pulled away from his body, and his hands were two hard fists.
“Is that what you wanted?” Sara asked, and gestured to Jolie’s body between them. “To see us all die?”
“Stop it!” Bethany said. She ran over and clung to Nick’s arm. “Please, please, we need to stop fighting.”
Nick relaxed a fraction with Bethany so close to him. His face softened when he looked at her, then closed off again when he looked at Sara and Riley standing arm in arm across from him.
“She’s right. No matter who is doing this, if that’s really what’s happening, we should stick together. If it’s someone who isn’t here right now, we will all be safer in closer proximity. If it’s someone here with us in this room, we can use strength in numbers to disable them and take away their power.”
Veronica stepped forward. “What are we going to do with her?” she asked. She gestured at Jolie’s body and they all looked down at her.
“The same thing we did with Cindy,” Nick said. His jaw clenched again.
Riley didn’t like his tone. It was too icy calm.
CHAPTER
15
They brought Jolie down the hall and into one of the closed off rooms. Veronica and Bethany held doors, directed, and dressed down the bed, while Nick, Sara, and Riley carried Jolie’s body and laid her to rest in the bed. Veroni
ca pulled the blanket up and tucked Jolie in.
“She almost died in her bed at school,” she said. “Maybe she can finally rest now without the shadow of death following her.”
Riley watched as Veronica used the pads of two fingers to close Jolie’s eyes for good, then let Sara lead her by the arm into the bathroom. Sara turned on the tap and let the water run over her fingers.
“It probably won’t be warm, but it will get the blood off,” she said. “Hand me your shirt.”
Without a thought, Riley pulled off her bloody shirt and handed it over to Sara. She caught Sara’s appraising glance, but she was used to it. In the dressing room in her high school after the thing that happened with her boyfriend, she had gotten a lot of looks.
Mainly, the girls she went to school with for the two years after it happened wanted to see what it looked like when you lived after being stabbed over twenty times.
Then Sara pointed at the bathtub.
“You might want to wash off the rest of you while I handle your shirt.”
Riley did as she was told. When she had finished rubbing the cold, wet cloth over her body and the water had started to run clear, she turned the tap off and stood back up. Sara draped her shirt over the shower curtain rod.
“I would say you could wear mine,” Sara said, and indicated her own bloody t-shirt. “But I need to clean up, too.”
“Let me help you,” Riley whispered. “I can help.”
Sara shook her head, plucked a robe from in the little closet, and wrapped it around Riley’s shoulders. When Riley didn’t respond, Sara wrapped it tighter around her and tied the belt at her waist.
Riley felt like a ghost. Part of her felt like she was in the bed with Jolie, lifeless and no longer a part of the action. The rest was numb. She let Sara lead her out of the bathroom and into a stiffly upholstered chair.
“I’ll be right back.” She gave the others in the room a look that dared them to even move, then went back into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
Nick shed his sport coat and draped it over the flat screen television. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, starting at the sleeves, and pulled it off. He wasn’t as covered as Sara or Riley, but the blood from Jolie’s extensive wound still managed to dot the shirt in such a way that all it brought to mind was the woman’s death. He stood in his undershirt silently a few steps away from the closed bathroom door.