The Kill Factor, page 26
She dropped the arrow and pressed a finger and the thumb of her left hand into the wound she had just made. She tried not to think of the pain. She tried not to imagine the game organizers watching her and releasing the poison before she got to the capsule. She tried not to picture herself lying dead in this room that was gray not only in color but in character too.
She gripped the capsule. It was no bigger than a headache pill. She pulled it free, and as she held it up to her eyes, she heard a pop, and the capsule burst open, spilling its poisonous contents.
She dropped the capsule, picked up the crossbow, and stepped into the maze.
It was cold inside the network of white plastic walls that rose up around her, at least forty feet high and perfectly smooth. No way of climbing them.
She had one objective: kill the Producer before he could kill anyone else. After that, all she had was hope; hope that her brother could find her and bring this whole thing down.
The crossbow felt heavy in her hands, and yet it was comforting—she would not be helpless if the Producer was waiting around the next corner. Would she have the mettle to pull the trigger and take a life if that moment of kill or be killed should arrive? She thought she would. She was driven not only by her animalistic instinct to survive but also a snarling hatred of the man who had pulled the strings that made them all dance like marionettes and die like forgotten soldiers. She didn’t care that he too had been forced into his role; she didn’t care that he was just another contestant in the games. He had enjoyed it; she had seen it in his gleeful eyes over and over again.
The white plastic floor beneath her feet sloped down, and she walked through a tunnel that emerged on the other side with three options: left, right, or straight ahead. Emerson turned right, then right again. The ground sloped upward to a bridge over yet another white path below. The entire structure was so plain and repetitive that it was hard to tell where you had been or where you were going. If it hadn’t been for the blood dripping down from Emerson’s wrist, she might have gotten turned around a dozen times.
This new section of the maze sloped down into a covered corridor, and Emerson began to slow as she heard sobbing from somewhere up ahead. Alone in this lifeless place, the sound was eerie, like something out of a horror movie.
Emerson crept forward as quietly as she could. She inched around a long, curving corner, and finally, she was close enough. She saw Andrew Matthews lying on the cobblestones, his head resting awkwardly against the wall. He had lost a lot of weight in the six days he had been in here, and Emerson wondered if he’d been fed anything at all.
“Andrew,” Emerson said, running to him and skidding to a stop beside him. “You have to come with me,” she said, taking Andrew’s hands and trying to pull him to his feet, but he was too weak. “Listen to me, I can get you somewhere safe, we just need to follow the blood back to the gray room.”
Emerson was aware that she was rambling, but she needed to get Andrew out of the maze and away from the Producer. The emaciated boy looked at her with a dazed kind of understanding. He forced himself to stand, and as he did, a loud clicking sound echoed around the white walls, and a crossbow bolt entered through one side of Andrew’s neck, exited out the other side, and stuck in the plastic wall behind him.
“No!” Emerson screamed, and turned to see the Producer reaching for a second arrow.
Andrew looked around as though he were seeing the world for the first time. He coughed violently, blood spraying out onto the floor below. He swayed on his feet, and then he fell down dead.
The disembodied and distorted voice echoed around the maze: Seven contestants remaining.
Emerson saw that the Producer had reloaded his crossbow.
In a split second she weighed up the distance between them, the time it would take to raise her own weapon and fire back, and the odds that she would fire a terminal shot, and she decided that her best bet was to run.
Emerson sprinted down the corridors and tunnels, along the bridges and walkways.
The Producer’s voice boomed after her. “We should team up, Emerson! The quicker we kill them, the quicker you and I can settle this once and for all.”
She turned left, right, right, left. There was no way of finding her way back now; she had doubled back on herself several times, her shoes smearing blood drops that she had left behind five minutes earlier.
Six contestants remaining, the ethereal voice announced, and Emerson wondered who else the Producer had killed.
She kept running, certain that at any second she would come face-to-face with the Producer. She imagined them pulling their triggers at the same time, two arrows finding their marks, both of them dying, and there being no winner to this terrible competition.
Five contestants remaining, the voice rang out again.
Four contestants remaining.
“No!” Emerson screamed. The Producer had killed two more contestants.
Please not Tiger, please not Tiger, she thought, and then realized that she was indirectly hoping for the death of Alasdair, or Gwen, or Imelda.
As she ran, Emerson heard a shuffling noise to her right. She spun and aimed the crossbow at the sound. She could feel her heart thumping, her wide eyes taking in every part of her surroundings. It was Imelda Fleet. She had tucked herself deep into an indent in one of the plastic walls and was cowering there.
“Imelda,” Emerson said.
“Please,” Imelda begged. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Emerson replied. “I’m going to get you out …”
A bright bolt of pain sprang in her right thigh. Emerson screamed and fell down.
“It’s almost over,” the Producer said as he loaded another arrow into his crossbow.
Emerson looked at the bolt that had gone almost right through her leg, just above the knee. The green dress rippled against the steel of the arrow, and Emerson felt the world swirling away from her. She had dropped the crossbow in her agony, and now she reached for it. The Producer kicked it away, and almost simultaneously fired again. Emerson waited for a fresh burst of pain, but it didn’t come. The Producer had fired at Imelda instead, hitting her just below the left cheek.
“What a game,” the Producer said. “The adrenaline alone almost makes it worth it. You could get hooked on a thing like this.”
As he spoke, he loaded another arrow into the bow.
“Just you, me, and Tiger left,” he said, pulling on the crossbow wire until it clicked into the mechanism. “Once you’re out of the way, the game is as good as over. I might make it last, though. I might savor it.”
Emerson felt a moment of sorrow flow through her. The Producer had killed Gwen and Alasdair. They had been good people, good friends. Now they were gone.
“You said you were like us,” Emerson pleaded, sliding back to lean against the hard plastic wall. “You said that they took you out of prison on the promise that you might get to live. Why do you fight so hard for them?”
The Producer lowered the crossbow and fired. This time the pain exploded in her left shoulder. Emerson screamed so loud and so long that her throat ached. She looked down at her shoulder and saw the bolt there. It had gone right through and stuck into the wall behind her, pinning her there.
The Producer seemed pleased by this outcome. He smiled and then began to speak as he loaded the crossbow one more time. “I’ve always been different, Emerson. Always been a little theatrical, a little heartless, a little bit emotionally distant. By the time the police caught me, I had killed eleven people. They called me prolific. I didn’t see it that way; I was only just getting started. You see, Emerson, I’m what they call a psychopath. A very high-functioning psychopath, but a psychopath nonetheless. When they came to me with their offer, I didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t so much the chance to carry on living that appealed to me, it was the chance to continue my quest. So, in answer to your question, why do I fight so hard for them? Because I enjoy it.”
Emerson felt her heart sink. She wondered just how close she had come to escaping this place. The pain that throbbed all the way through her almost made her wish the end would come quickly.
“This has been fun,” the Producer said, and aimed the crossbow at her head. “Goodbye.”
The nearly instant click of the mechanism and slap of the wire filled the world, and Emerson waited for the end of everything. Instead she heard the Producer choking and growling.
The shot that the Producer had fired was sticking out of the wall a few centimeters from the side of her head. Imelda Fleet—with an arrow sticking out of her head—had grabbed a bolt from the Producer’s belt and shoved it deep into the side of his neck. She was pushing it in as hard as she could as the ageless man tried desperately to thrash her off his back.
Emerson gritted her teeth and began to lean forward. The feeling of the arrow in her shoulder scraping along her clavicle almost made her pass out with the impossible agony of it, but she kept going, feeling the wide end of the arrow, with its plastic flight, enter the hole in the shoulder, widening the wound as she roared through the pain until she was free from the wall.
The Producer was still flailing around, and Imelda was losing her grip on him.
Emerson’s left arm was nearly useless, and she wondered if the arrow that had gone through her shoulder might have severed some tendons, but she managed to hold a bolt in place as she loaded her crossbow.
The Producer threw Imelda to the ground and pulled the arrow from his neck. He screamed in fury as his blood flowed out of him. And then he turned his livid eyes to Emerson.
“You don’t have what it takes to pull that trig—”
But that was all he had time to say. Emerson had fired her shot, and the arrow dug deep into the left side of his chest, piercing his heart.
All the anger seemed to leave him then. He seemed confused for a moment, and then a look of clarity overcame him.
“It’s all going to get so much worse now,” he said, and then dropped to the ground, dead.
Three contestants remaining.
Emerson dropped the crossbow and then fell down, no longer able to hold her own weight. Blood dripped steadily from her wrist, and flowed constantly from the wounds in her thigh and shoulder.
She sat there, in the white maze, and looked at the Producer’s dead eyes, and she was glad that he was gone.
“Emerson?” a voice to her left said. It was Imelda. “Emerson, are you there?”
“Yeah,” Emerson replied, no energy left at all.
“I can’t see,” Imelda said.
“You saved my life.”
“Yeah … I’m sorry I called you a rat.”
“I’m sorry I threw your stuff overboard.”
“It’s just stuff,” Imelda said, and then she died too.
Two contestants remaining.
Emerson watched her own blood pooling around her, and wondered how long it would take to die.
Tiger is going to win, she thought, and smiled, until she remembered what the Producer had told her: There was no freedom; there was no real prize—all the winner got was the opportunity to become the host of the games the following year, and she knew that Tiger would never do that.
She began to feel cold and wondered if this was the first stage of her life slipping away. It would probably take hours to die from the wounds she had, hours and hours.
From here she could see the stars, and wished they were real and not just a projection on a dome, but they were beautiful nonetheless. She looked at the backward Orion’s Belt and laughed. How had she not seen it before?
The center star of Orion’s Belt went out, and Emerson stopped laughing. She stared at the place where the star was supposed to be, and waited for it to come back. It did not.
More stars started to go out all across the sky. Hundreds of them, flickering and disappearing. The moon seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then it was gone too.
“What’s going on?” Emerson asked aloud.
The entire sky turned a hallucinatory shade of green, and an error message blinked across it in enormous letters.
And the island was plunged into darkness.
Emerson sat in the white maze, surrounded by blackness, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did.
The fake sky was gone. Every hidden light inside the maze was gone. Not a single sound broke through the deafening silence of the island.
And then there was something. A buzzing sound that was all too familiar to Emerson. It was a single camera drone roaming through the corridors of the maze. Was it looking for her?
For a while the buzzing grew louder, then quieter again, and then it came back, this time louder. Emerson could see the glow of its light approaching her, and she didn’t have the energy to run from it.
The drone came around the corner, spotted her, and zoomed toward her at high speed. It stopped, seemed to look at all the blood, and then hovered in front of her face.
It stayed there, presumably waiting for her to do something, and as she stared back at the little drone, she became more and more certain of what it was.
“Kester?” she asked, and the drone remained there, unmoving. Emerson held up her hands and signed his name instead.
The drone moved excitedly up and down, up and down.
It is you? Emerson signed, and again the drone moved up and down, up and down before gesturing down toward one of the corridors over and over again.
Follow you? Emerson signed.
Up and down, up and down.
Emerson gritted her teeth and let out a guttural sound as she pushed herself to standing. The effort alone made her nearly pass out, but she limped after the drone as it led the way into the maze.
The drone looked back, and Emerson signed for it to wait. She couldn’t leave without Tiger. The drone nodded, and continued to lead her through the winding paths. Emerson staggered and swayed on her feet, but the more she moved, the more she found she could move.
Finally, the drone stopped at a junction where six paths merged, and there was Tiger standing in the center of all the roads, like a ghost in the darkness.
Emerson hugged her and felt the girl’s arms tighten around her.
“Is it really you?” Tiger asked.
“It’s me,” Emerson said, and when she pulled away, she saw that she had left blood all over Tiger’s clothes.
“You’re bleeding,” Tiger said.
“I’m going to be okay. We’re getting out of here, okay?”
Tiger nodded, and Kester continued to lead them out of the maze.
It seemed to take forever, but soon they were walking past bloodstains that Emerson had made when she had first entered the maze, and then they were at the gray room.
They stepped inside. Emerson limped over to the white door and tried the handle. It was locked. The drone hovered over to the door, and after a few seconds, they heard a click. Emerson tried the door again and it was open.
When they stepped out, Emerson and Tiger both took one last look back at the enormous fake wall that made up the nonexistent prison in the center of the island, and then they moved as quickly as they could through the plastic trees and the artificial plants.
They had been making their way through the forest for about a minute when they began to hear a new sound. Footsteps.
“Go!” Tiger said, and Emerson ignored the electric pain in her leg every time she took a step.
Panic drew them onward. The sound of more than a dozen footsteps running through the forest was eerie, and was made doubly eerie by the fact that the pursuers did not say a word; they just ran after Emerson and Tiger with terrifying speed.
And then Emerson did hear a sound, a sound that she wished she had not heard. One of the chasers laughed, as though this were a child’s game. And the laugh was terrible, almost demonic.
“Run!” Emerson screamed.
They had made it to the beach, and Emerson’s heart broke at what she saw.
She had forgotten that the island itself had risen up out of the waves until it was so high that no one would survive the jump off the edge.
“No!” Tiger screamed.
More of the hunters were laughing now. To them, this was a joyous thing. It was a thrilling hunt, and when they appeared from the trees, Emerson was certain they would be hideous creatures from the depths of nightmares, all pointed teeth and black eyes.
Emerson and Tiger continued to follow the drone as it made its way to the edge of the towering island. But it froze, hanging in the air.
Emerson got there first and saw what the drone was showing them: The enormous mechanism that had ratcheted the island up and up into the air could act as a kind of ladder all the way down to the water.
“You go first,” Emerson told Tiger, knowing that there was no guarantee that her pierced leg and shoulder would hold out long enough for her to make it all the way down.
Tiger’s pale face turned even whiter as she looked down to the water, but there was nothing else to do. Tiger lowered one shaking leg onto the cog-like strip of steel that ran all the way down, and began to lower herself, one step at a time, to the water.
Emerson went next, placing a weak foot onto the greased-up metal and praying it would hold her.
The last thing Emerson saw as she too lowered herself down was a hundred indistinct figures bursting out of the forest. They may have been human. They probably were human, but in that moment, they could have been monsters.
The climb down to the water lasted a hundred lifetimes, and by the time Emerson was close enough to just let go and fall into the freezing waves, her arms were burning, and the muscles in her legs were ready to give up completely.
As she lay on her back in the water, she looked up one more time. A dozen faces stared down at them. Human faces, of course. They didn’t seem to be panicking about the contestants who were escaping; they only watched, curiously, to see what would happen next.
There were a few moments, during the swim to the cruise ship, that Emerson came very close to losing consciousness, and by the time she had gripped the cold rail that led all the way up to the top deck, her vision was graying out at the edges.
