The Cabin in the Woods

EIGHT

Hadley was standing behind Sitterson, watching the action on the giant screens that rose before them. He’d been pacing nervously for the last couple of minutes, and Sitterson had to resist the urge to swivel in his chair and tell him to sit the hell down. Things were going to be okay. The kids were doing pretty well in comparison to other occasions, true. But they’d gone from outside to inside, and inside to down, just as was intended.

And now that they’d got the better of the huge zombie Matthew, their defenses would be lowered for a while. They’d feel a flush of success, celebrate their resilience, rejoice in their humanity. Who knew, they might even fuck. It had happened before.

“Oh yeah,” Hadley said. “Nothing to worry about. He looks dead… ”

Sitterson smiled, worked at his keyboard, and turned a dial a quarter-clockwise. A graduated display on the small screen beside the dial showed a steady increase in power.

“And what do we do when the dead guy stops moving?” Sitterson asked. He was aware of Truman standing off to their left, more enrapt than terrified now by proceedings.

That’s good, Sitterson thought. He’s learning fast.

He pushed the button beside the dial. The charge peaked, then purged and dropped to zero. And on the screen—

—Dana jerked her hand back from the knife, staring at her fingers and palm. Holden could hardly blame her. The damage she’d done to that thing, that zombie, was sickening. Whatever it was now, it had once been human.

She turned to him with a frown, hand still held out, and she was about to say something when he took her in his arms and held tight. He felt tears burning but swallowed them back. She relaxed into his embrace, her face slick with sweat and a sheen of blood down her left cheek, and he took as much comfort from the contact as she. Even the pain where her hand pressed against his injuries was refreshing, because it made him so alive.

“You smell good,” he said, remembering their tender kisses and tentative caresses.

“I stink of blood and sweat,” she mumbled against his neck. “Yeah. Blood. Sweat. Mmm.”

She felt good, as well, but he didn’t need to tell her that. Her hands pressed against his back, never quite still, and she was feeling the solidity of him just as he was with her.

“Holden…” she said, her voice quivering, and she started to shake.

He should have comforted her. The words came to his lips but when he tried to speak they emerged as a sob, and in this silent pause when violence was no longer upon them, he felt his barriers beginning to tumble.

“Come on,” she said, edging him toward the back of the room. “Come on.”

The hanging shape of the slashed-up zombie was starkly illuminated by the dangling lamp, casting a horrific shadow against the far wall. His big hands almost touched the torture room’s dirt floor. The chain wrapped around his wrist bit in deep, and the half-moon curve of the broken bear trap glistened and glimmered with fresh blood.

Holden frowned, because he wasn’t aware he’d been injured that badly. There was so much blood on there.

“Come on,” Dana said again, “we’ve got to try and—”

A rumble came from the wall, and for a moment Holden through it was another of those troubling earth tremors. But then he felt the vibration through his feet and heard the sound coming from a very definite direction.

Then a section of the wall started to fold away. “Back!” he shouted, hauling Dana behind him in some deep-set belief that he should be protecting her. She’s the one who killed the zombie, he thought, and he barked a brief, mad laugh as Dana dashed to the table and brought up a heavy, curved hatchet.

“You feint left, and I’ll get it when it goes for you,” she whispered. Holden nodded, tensed, and when the wall was fully open and the flashlight blinded him he darted to the left… straight into the thing’s arms.

“Hey!” Curt said, squeezing his shoulders. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Curt,” Dana gasped.

“Let’s move let’s move!” he said without even pausing to check out the room. Behind him, the chaotic mess of the main cellar was lit by two hanging bulbs, both swinging and dancing as Curt ducked beneath the joists for the floor above and brushed the wire with his head.

Dana followed, with Holden bringing up the rear.

Should’ve closed the door, he thought, even though he’d seen Dana doing a blade-job on the bastard thing. If it gets out—

“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Curt said. He moved quickly across the cellar, knocking a bookcase with his thigh and spilling a slew of moldy books across the floor. Dana walked into a chandelier of fine chains hanging from an old wagon wheel, waving her hands around her head as if to shove aside spider webs. Holden went to help but she was through them, one hand fingering through her hair and bringing the dirty, bloody knots to his attention. She’s bleeding more than I thought. He wanted to embrace her again, and he promised himself that he would. Soon. They would hug soon, somewhere safe where terror couldn’t tear them apart again, and where warmth and safety replaced the stink of age and the coldness of death.

Curt stopped below the storm doors that led to the outside, looking around, kicking a heavy shelf from the wall and hefting it as a weapon. A dozen ornaments spilled from the shelf and shattered on the floor, and as he went for the three stairs leading up to the doors he crunched them into the ground.

He turned around and glanced from Dana to Holden, sizing them up.

“Hurt?”

Dana shook her head, denying the blood. Curt pointed at her nose, her scalp. “Not bad,” she said.

“I’m cut,” Holden said. He hadn’t yet explored his wounds from the bear trap, but he could still feel them leaking afresh. Once when he was a kid he’d fallen and scraped his knee, and keeled over in a faint when he looked down to see the slight dribble of blood. Since then he’d been terrified of blood— especially his own— and the last thing he needed now was to pass out.

He turned his left side to Curt, who looked him up and down without his expression giving anything away.

“Think you can you run?” he asked.

Holden nodded.

“Good. I open these doors and we go for the Rambler, okay?” Dana and Holden agreed with a nod, Curt turned to the doors and shoved them open, and darkness flooded in.

No time to talk and plan, Holden thought. This is controlled panic. None of us really knows what’s happening here.

Curt went first, the heavy shelf held across his chest ready to swing. He climbed the stairs, stood in the open beside the cabin, and looked around.

“Okay,” he said, and Dana followed him up. Holden came last, ready to stand and look cautiously into the darkness between trees, but the other two were already sprinting for the Rambler.

And this is when control gets flushed down the toilet, he thought, remembering every horror movie he’d ever seen. The creeping and peering around corners is over. Now we’re just running.

Holden’s side and back hurt more when he ran, and the cool night air was chill across his flowing blood. But he concentrated on Dana, even smiling slightly as he realized that despite all this he was still checking out her butt, and they reached the vehicle without being attacked by any of the walking dead.

“What about Marty?” Dana gasped as they skidded to a stop.

“They got him,” Curt said.

Marty? Holden thought, feeling a deep loss for someone he hardly knew. Marty’s—?

Curt pointed at the door handle and touched his finger to his lips. Holden looked and saw what had made him so cautious. Dirt on the handle, a wet slick with half a dead leaf trapped in it like a fly in amber.

Marty, Holden mouthed, but Curt shook his head. Whatever he had seen, it must have been enough to mean Marty couldn’t possibly have recovered.

Curt hefted the plank over his shoulder and stepped back, looking from Holden to the door and back again, and Holden nodded in acknowledgment. After three, he thought, crouching beside the door and reaching for the handle. He mouthed one… two… three… then flipped the catch and moved aside.

The door swung open. Curt tensed, shuffling a half step forward. Shook his head.

“Okay,” Dana said. “Okay. Now can we please get the fuck out of here?”

“Seconded,” Holden said.

“Yeah,” Curt nodded.

They climbed inside, slammed the door behind them, and Curt took the driver’s seat. He whispered a prayer and the Rambler started first time. Its headlamps pushed darkness back between the trees. As he steered them out of the clearing, the lights splashed across the front of the cabin. The door was cracked and broken, but still solid in its frame. A lamp still burned in the large main room. There was little to show what had happened there.

Good fucking riddance, Holden thought as Curt swung the vehicle around and headed back along the road they had traveled so recently, and a lifetime ago.

Oh fuck, Sitterson thought, they’ve gone and screwed it up. And much as he always enjoyed the tense competition between themselves and the Japanese, and the friendly rivalry to see who could produce the most perfect, most imaginative, most effective scenarios, he also liked to win. And what he saw on the screen meant that they weren’t out of the woods yet.

And that brought immense pressure to bear.

Hadley had wheeled his chair over to sit beside his friend, an unconscious desire for closeness as they watched the Japanese effort fall apart on their central big screen.

The hideously screaming face of the drowned Japanese girl filled the screen, long black hair floating and waving about her head like a million individual snakes ready to inject their own unique venoms. Yet horrible and terrifying though the floating drowned girl was, both Sitterson and Hadley knew what was about to happen.

To this story, there would be no shock ending.

The screaming face started to relax. She looked bewildered, as if remembering that she had once been a little girl, not this screeching banshee-thing with hair that cast lethal shadows. A warm glow grew around her, driving away the monochrome of dark tendrils and white pasty skin, and imbuing her visage with a semblance of life.

Sitterson sighed as the view pulled back to take in the entirety of the Japanese classroom. Several children knelt at its centre, carefully placing lotus flowers into a large bowl of water above which the floating drowned girl hovered. She seemed smaller now, her hair more lank than wild, her eyes sad instead of filled with vengeful rage.

The kids sang a song whose lyrics Sitterson did not understand, but his skin prickled with the happiness of the tune, the love it conveyed, and any other time he might even had felt a lump at his throat.

But not now.

“This is just too fucking fucked up,” he said.

The floating drowned girl began to glow. For a moment her face dropped in fear, but then she smiled brightly as light enveloped her, spewing from her eyes and mouth where previously there had been only darkness. She waved her hands in the air as if swimming, and her hair drew back and hung across her shoulders, no longer obscuring her eyes.

The light grew brighter still, and then it faded away to a background glow that seemed to fill the whole classroom with sunlight. The girl faded away, as well.

A frog leapt from the bowl of water and flowers, sitting amongst the other girls and looking around.

They chanted something, and at the bottom of the screen a line of subtitles appeared. Sitterson wondered who in control was translating. He didn’t really care. He knew the gist of what it would say.

“Now Kiko’s spirit will live in the happy frog!”

The girls laughed and hugged. The picture flickered, went to static and then cut to black. Sitterson hoped that somewhere in Japan, heads would roll.

“Fuuhhhcck yooouuu!” Sitterson shouted.

“Not good,” Hadley said, shaking his head. “Not good.” Sitterson turned to his friend and colleague, a useless anger brewing, and then something buzzed and something else flashed and he had an incoming communication.

“That’ll be Lin,” Hadley said, wheeling himself back to his control panel as Sitterson composed himself a little. He flicked a switch and a monitor on his desk lit up. Lin stared from it. It looked to Sitterson as if she’d had her hair pulled back even tighter since he’d seen her last. Maybe she had a machine that did it.

“You seeing this?” he asked.

“Perfect record, huh?” Lin said without expression.

“Naruto-watching, geisha-fucking, weird gameshow-having dicks! They fucked us!”

“Few injuries, but zero fatality,” Lin said. “Total wash. Any word from downstairs?”

“Downstairs doesn’t care about Japan,” Sitterson said, sighing. Move on, he thought. Accept it, stop stewing, stop blaming everyone else when everything is down to you and everyone else here and… Move on!

“The Director trusts us,” he said softly

“You guys better be on your game,” Lin said, voice even more impersonal than ever over the electronic link.

Before Sitterson could spit out something offensive Hadley cut in. He knows me so well, Sitterson thought as his friend spoke. “You just sweat the chem, Lin,” he said. “While these morons are singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Shinto’, we’re bringing the pain.”

“Fuck was up with that fool’s pot, anyway?” Sitterson asked. “He shoulda been drooling, and instead he nearly made us.”

“We treated the shit out of it!” Lin said, and her defensiveness was the first real expression he’d seen on her face. He shouldn’t have enjoyed that—they all worked together, after all—but he did.

“Got ’em in the Rambler, headed for the tunnel,” he said to Hadley, spotting the vehicle’s movement on a big screen. He turned the central monitor back to focus on their own concerns, now that the Japanese were out of the picture. They never messed up, and deep inside he found that cause for concern.

But it also presented a challenge.

And what a challenge, he thought. But he couldn’t go that way, couldn’t let the implications get on top of him. Right now he needed to focus like he never had before.

“The Fool is toast anyway,” Lin said from the monitor, as if that could excuse the mistake. “You better not fuck us on the report.”

“Shit!” Hadley said.

“What?” Lin asked. “Shit why?”

Yeah, shit why? Sitterson thought, looking across at his colleague. Hadley glanced up and flicked his fingers across his throat.

“Work to do,” Hadley said, and Sitterson could hear the urgency there. “Gotta go.”

“You guys are humanity’s last hope, don’t tell me—” Sitterson cut her off.

Don’t tell us what we are, bitch, we already fucking know.

“So?” he asked.

“There’s no cave-in,” Hadley said.

“What!?” We can’t fail we can’t fuck up we can’t let anything go wrong—

Hadley worked his keyboard and pointed at the main screen. It was a view through the tunnel, a staggering transfer through the fifteen cameras along its length. It went from moonlight at one end, to moonlight at the other, with no obvious blockage in between.

“The fucking tunnel is open!”

Sitterson breathed deeply for a second, composing himself. Then he hit a switch and spoke into his microphone.

“This is Control to Demolition.” He waited for a response but heard only static. “Shit, they’re not even picking up!”

“What?” Hadley asked. The panic was brewing in him, the constant nervousness expanding. He looked gray.

“Don’t worry,” Sitterson said, though he was more than worried. He hit another button and spoke again. “Broadcast, can you patch me in to Demolition?” “We’re dark on their whole sector,” an anonymous voice replied. “Might have been a surge in the—” Sitterson cut them off. Sat there breathing for a while. Looked up at the screen, tracking the progress of the Rambler as it careened around the forest track too quickly, wheels spitting grit and mud and the Jock driving it expertly.

He stood quickly, sending his wheeled chair rolling across the floor to strike the wall below the mahogany panels. Two open, three still closed. He blinked at them, then turned to Hadley, who was busy tapping away on his keyboard.

“See if you can bypass—”

“Fuck you think I’m doing?” Hadley snapped. Sitterson started to reply but decided better of it. Instead he turned and walked toward Truman.

“Get the door.”

The soldier shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“Mister Sitterson, you’re not supposed to leave the—”

“Open the goddamn door!” Sitterson snapped. He was standing in front of Truman now, the soldier’s uncertainly evident, but his professionalism was also clear. He glanced down at the boy’s pistol, then snorted. What the fuck are you thinking?

“You got family, Truman?” Hadley asked without looking up from his screen. He was sweating, leaning closer to the computer than ever, eyes alight with text and numbers and whatever else he was absorbing.

“Yeah… ” the soldier said.

“Kids get through that tunnel alive, you won’t anymore.” Hadley didn’t even glance up. Sitterson nodded at the screen—the Rambler sliding around a curve, headlamps lighting the trees, wheels spinning—and decided to give Truman three seconds.

At the count of one he’d stepped aside and hit the panel to open the door.

“Good choice,” Sitterson said, and he started to run.

Demolition was one level down, and the staircase was at the end of this corridor, past the dog-leg and past Chem. He reckoned thirty seconds. He wasn’t as young or as fit as he used to be, but he ran faster than he had in years, ignoring the pains in his toes and shins, the burning of his lungs, the thumping of his heart.

Maybe three minutes ’til they reach the tunnel, he thought, running through their route in his mind. That’s if they don’t blow a tire or hit a tree or skid into a ditch. And with what was at stake, there was no way he could rely on anything so remote as luck.

“Make a hole!” he shouted at a couple of guards milling outside Chem. “Fucking move!” They pressed back against the wall and he ran by, wondering whether at that moment Lin might have glanced up at the door and seen his panicked shape rush by. Maybe she had. And if he didn’t run faster, maybe she’d never have the chance to ask him what it had all been about.

In his earpiece Hadley’s voice was shrill.

“I can’t override! It’s asking me to run a systems diagnostic!”

“By the time that’s finished, we’ll be finished!” Sitterson panted.

“Good luck, Buddy.” Sitterson smiled and ran faster, skidding around the dog-leg, pushing between two strolling workers and barreling through the swing-doors leading into the stairwell. He slid down the handrails, quick but cautious—a broken ankle now would mean the end of everything—and then back out into the corridor below. First door to the right was Sustenance, and when he drew level with the door to Demolition he kicked it open and ran inside.

There was a guard standing to the left, hand on the butt of his gun. Sitterson glared at him and rushed by. Just you fucking dare, he thought.

A second to scan the Demolition control room and he knew where the problem was. One large control panel was dark—power off—and from beneath came sparks and flashes. A man and a woman were working the panel, the man flicking a switch back and forth as if persistence could lure electricity back to him, the woman running diagnostic on a wired-up laptop.

Jesus Christ, where do we find these people?

“It’s not the breakers!” the man said, glancing up as he saw Sitterson approach.

“Fuck is going on in here?”

“We don’t know!” the guy whined. “Electrical said there was a glitch up top, one of the creatures?”

“The tunnel should have been blown hours ago!” Sitterson said.

The woman glanced up at him—pretty, terrified— and said, “We never got the order!”

“You need me to tell you to wipe your ass?” He shoved the man aside, glanced down at the laptop screen. She was stuck on the fucking password. “How do we get past this?”

“We’re fried inside,” she said, a quaver to her voice. “We need a clean connection to the detonator—” Sitterson snorted, dropped to the floor and crawled beneath the unit. If they needed a clean connection then why were they fucking around with switches and trying to run a fucking diagnostic! She was stuck on the password, for fuck’s sake! He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to chill, shedding the fearful anger and shifting focus to what needed doing and what had to be done.

After two seconds he opened his eyes again and pulled half a dozen quick-release bolts. Plastic covering fell away and a mass of wires and circuits was revealed.

“Okay, I need you to tell me exactly what went down first and how long after the other systems followed. And hand me a voltmeter.”

“Systems Tech is trying a reboot on the—” the guy started, but Sitterson cut in.

“We don’t have time. Talk me through.”

As the guy talked, Sitterson started checking boards until he found the one that had fried. He noted the number and shouted up for a replacement. It took thirty seconds for the woman to drop one in his hand, and another thirty before he’d replaced it with wire clips. Should be soldered, he thought, closing his eyes as he connected the last wire.

Something hummed, and he saw some of the surface indicators lighting up through the guts of the panel above him.

“We good?” he asked.

“No, that’s just local,” the woman said. “It’s not linked.

“Shit!”

“Lin’s here,” Hadley said through his earpiece.

“Oh, great, she’s just who we need right now. Tell her to go poison someone.”

“The Rambler’s a mile away from the tunnel,” his friend said softly.

“Okay. Okay.” Sitterson scanned the mass of boards and chips, wires and fuses, circuit connectors and relays. A flush of utter hopelessness hit him, but he shoved it aside with an angry growl. He applied the voltmeter here and there, noting where power had failed but also knowing that in each of these places, it shouldn’t really matter. It was the relay to the detonator that mattered, and he’d just replaced…

“Is the detonator button still lit?”

“Yes,” the woman said, “but I told you, it’s just—”

“Local,” Sitterson said. He shuffled further beneath the unit and probed with his penlight, sniffing, smelling burnt plastic.

There!

He held the penlight in his teeth.

“Gary, we don’t have long,” Hadley said in his ear.

“Uh-huh.” He pulled the melted mass of wires apart.

“I mean it.”

“Uh-huh.” In the artificial light, orange and red were too close, indistinguishable, so he stripped all four wires with his thumbnail.

“They’re approaching the last bend. Damn, that kid can drive.”

“Shud the huck up!” Sitterson growled, and he touched wires. Sparks flew, he flinched, and then from above he heard a brief, victorious yelp.

“We’re up!” the man said.

Sitterson spat the torch aside and held the wires together.

“Blow it!” he shouted.

The woman smacked the big demolition button and Sitterson winced as he was shocked. Been sweating, wet, this might kill me. But the pain was brief, and when it passed he called out.

“So?”

“We’re good,” the man said.

“We’re good,” the woman echoed.

Sitterson twisted the wires and snaked his way out from beneath the unit. The guy and woman were staring at him, faces slack with almost unbearable relief. The man actually held out his hand to help him up. Sitterson stood on his own, wiping imaginary dust from his sweat-soaked shirt. He examined the burns on his thumb and forefinger, pus-blisters already forming there. That was going to hurt, but all was still.

Downstairs, all was still.

“Wipe your ass,” he said and, leaving them to their shame, he smiled and left the room.