The Kill Factor, page 8
“Kester!” Emerson called, scanning the colorful ocean of material for her brother.
“Hey, Emerson,” a new voice said, and she turned just in time to see Kodi shoving her over the edge.
Somehow the handcuffs were gone, and she fell. She fell for the longest time, turning and spinning through the air, and she knew that when she hit the ground, it wouldn’t be water. No, it would be the pavement outside Ingleby’s Burger Palace, where she and Kester had eaten their last meal together.
She hit the ground.
And woke with a start.
Her head hit something solid. Something close. Too close.
Emerson raised her hands to feel the welt on her forehead, but they too hit a low ceiling.
She was in a confined space, surrounded by nothing but pitch darkness that felt as though it were pressing down on her.
The elements of the dream were fading away into a cloud of muddled memories.
Only one thought was clear: was there someone else in the school that night other than me and Marvin? But there was no time to dwell on it. The Producer’s words were coming back to her.
… please, raise a glass, for when you next wake up, the competition begins.
It had begun. Whatever was happening right now was the first game.
As if to confirm her conclusion, she heard a series of three loud, high-pitched beeps from somewhere high above her, and then the voice of the Producer blared out, amplified, played through large speakers.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to The Kill Factor!”
The Kill Factor? Emerson tried to breathe.
“Each task in these games is designed to reform you. It is designed to make you a better person, to remove the criminal element from your character. This is the first task. It is designed to teach you Self-Worth. The last person to escape their coffin will face the public vote. Good luck.”
A loud buzzer sounded, and the Producer’s voice disappeared into an echo.
Kill Factor? Emerson thought. Kill Factor—what happened to Retribution Island? I’ve been buried alive. Oh God, I’ve been buried alive.
“Okay,” Emerson said, forcing herself to steady her thoughts and to ignore the adrenaline that was pulsing through her. “This is it. Stay calm, try to think.” But she could already feel the grip of claustrophobia tightening around her, squeezing the composure out of her. She held on for a few seconds longer, but that word, coffin, replayed louder and louder in her mind: coffin. Coffin. COFFIN! Until, finally, the panic overcame her.
She raised a knee, smashing it against the wooden lid of her sarcophagus. She heard the ripping crack of splintering wood, and then felt dry sand pouring through the gap she had created.
“No!” she hissed as visions of herself suffocating, breathing in fine particles of sand until her lungs were full of the stuff, flooded her mind. “Stupid! Stupid! That was so stupid!” she muttered, trying to plug the flood of sand with the same knee she had caused the damage with.
“Got to think! Got to think!” she said, but it had all happened so suddenly. One minute she had been on the ship, sitting with Tiger and Never, listening to the Producer speak, and then she had awoken in a coffin.
It’s just a TV show, though, she told herself. They won’t let us die. They can’t …
But that wasn’t true … more memories were coming back now … the champagne had been drugged, Kodi had been injected because he had refused to drink it … the Producer had said … the only thing I failed to tell you is that we cannot … will not guarantee your safety or survival …
The claustrophobic fear turned into something entirely new, something Emerson had never felt before: a need to survive. She was so electrically alive and present. Her brain was firing like it never had before. She had to get out, she had to live.
Think, think, damn it! she demanded of herself.
And then she froze. A sound came to her over the rushing of blood in her ears and the trickle of sand that was falling like an hourglass.
She lay there, perfectly still, eyes closed, waiting for the sound to come again. And it did. The sound of waves crashing against a shore.
“I’m on a beach,” she told herself, and was surprised by the calmness in her voice.
She opened her eyes, and for the first time, she saw a tiny green light down by her feet. A camera. A sudden burst of rage overcame her, and she kicked the small piece of recording equipment as hard as she could with the leg that was plugging the gap. The camera shattered, and a flood of sand came pouring into the coffin, covering the lower half of her body and spilling up onto her chest. The weight was terrifying. Breathing became an effort.
She was overheating.
You’re going to have to dig, Emerson Ness, she told herself, and the idea scared her more than she had ever been scared. You’re going to have to dig your way out.
She did not know how far it was to the surface. She did not know how much sand she would have to shift to get out of here alive. She did not know if it was even possible. She took three deep breaths, mentally preparing herself to go, and then … nothing. She lay there in the darkness and thought about what it would be like to suffocate.
Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, she knew that the oxygen inside the coffin would not last much longer, but the more prevalent thought in her mind was that if she started to dig her way out, she might be instigating her own death.
If you do nothing, you’re going to die anyway! she yelled at herself internally.
“Wait. Just wait a minute,” she said. “Think about this.”
But there was nothing to think about, and Emerson knew it. She was just scared.
She listened to the sound of the waves crashing against the sand and thought about Tiger. She hoped that the little Topsider was safe. She thought about how Never was doing, and if Teller had found a way out.
But something happened to snap her out of her thoughts. Her ankles became wet.
Emerson craned her neck as far as it would go and looked down, but she couldn’t see past the pile of sand that had grown since she had last looked.
The fear that she had pushed down came back to her now. Something was happening, something bad.
She heard the waves crash above her again, louder now, and the cold water hit her lower legs once more.
The tide is coming in.
The survival instinct came back. She had to dig right now, or the sand would become wet, and heavy, and impossible to get through.
Emerson clenched her fists at her sides, let out a frustrated and terrified scream, held her breath, and began hammering on the lid of her coffin.
Something dug into her backside. The bottle lid that her brother had given her was in the back pocket of her jeans.
Kester.
Immediately, the tiny space of the coffin was filled with sand, and the panic that Emerson was feeling doubled.
Go, go, go, go, her mind rambled as she punched and dug, scooping away at the never-ending sand that poured and poured and poured down.
The middle fingernail on her right hand tore away, but she barely felt it. She didn’t care. She just kept on digging, up and up. The waves continued to crash. The sand became wet and heavy and hard to move.
Faster, damn it! Go! she demanded of herself.
But she was slowing. She couldn’t breathe. She had used up almost all her energy, all her oxygen. The sand was becoming more and more difficult to shift.
If I hadn’t chosen these stupid waterproof boots, she thought hysterically, I would’ve felt the water on my feet earlier!
She had dug far enough up to be at a crouched standing position, using the hard floor of her coffin to push up as she clawed at the heavy sand.
Not going to make it, you’re not going to …
But her left hand broke through to the surface and a spark of hope ignited in the fading light of her courage. She found a tiny reserve of strength, forcing her exhausted arms to dig. Her right hand broke free, and she pushed sand aside, scraping and scrabbling for life.
She was high enough now to turn her face up and break the surface. Half-covered in sand, she opened her mouth and tried to breathe in the fresh air, but she couldn’t. The weight of the sand all around her was crushing her now. With no coffin to provide a barrier around her, her chest was compressed, and there was no room for her lungs to expand. The best she could do was tiny inhalations that only made her more desperate for air.
Three tiny camera drones zipped over to her and recorded her near-death experience from a variety of angles. Emerson ignored them and forced as much oxygen into her constricted lugs as she could. She made one last enormous effort to escape the sand. She moved her hips from side to side, tore at the sand around her neck, and shifted her shoulders in ever-growing circles, forcing the sand to loosen around her. Her vision was beginning to gray out. Her arms were growing numb.
Emerson freed herself up to her waist, and lay on the damp beach, gasping in the warm, beautiful air.
She lay like that, legs still buried, for a full minute, crying into the salty sand, waiting for her racing heart to slow, and then she sat up, looking at her surroundings.
The first thing that she noticed was a wooden grave marker with her number, 16, carved into it. The sun was a huge orange globe sitting low in the sky, and as Emerson’s eyes scanned the place, she was aware that the landscape was strange and unnatural, but she didn’t have time to fully take it in, because all around her the young contestants of Retribution Island—no, The Kill Factor—were fighting for their lives.
There were motionless arms hanging at unlovely angles out of the coarse sand; dips in the beach where the tide had come too far in and covered the poor people beneath. All around her came the cries and screams of desperate kids. All the while, camera drones moved around, filming every little detail.
Some of the graves were closer to the water than others, and Emerson had a second to notice that hers was the closest to the crashing waves. In the short time that she lay there, the water had already seeped its way down, filling the grave she’d just escaped. But she didn’t consider why that might be. Instead, she forced her exhausted legs out of the sand and crawled over to the nearest grave. The crashing waves had reached the groping hand, and soon it would be too late for whoever was below the surface.
Emerson grabbed the hand and hauled it upward. The person below barely moved at all, but Emerson could tell by the way they gripped her that they were terrified; it transferred through to her like electricity.
“Come on!” Emerson screamed as she pulled harder.
She let go and began to dig at the sand surrounding the hand. Her fatigued muscles pleaded with her to stop, but she kept going, ignoring the agony.
The hand protruding from the beach fell limp. Emerson dragged great handfuls of sand away faster and faster, and when she thought there was enough leeway, she pulled at the arm again, but there was not enough strength left in her body.
“No! Please!” she yelled through clenched teeth, but it was no use. She had failed.
Sand kicked up beside her as Kodi slid to a stop. He grabbed the arm farther down.
“Go!” he screamed, and both of them pulled with all their might until the body slipped out of the sand. It was the boy named Jorgensen, the boy with the scar around his ear.
“Do you know CPR?” Kodi said, but Emerson was in a state of shock and could only stare at the dead boy. “Hey!” Kodi said, turning her face to his. “Do you know CPR?”
Emerson thought back to her days in high school, before she was expelled, and recalled something about chest compressions to the beat of a song. She nodded.
“Good. Help him.”
And he was gone, sprinting across the sand to another person who was screaming for help through a gap in the sand as the saltwater waves crept up on them.
Emerson clambered to her knees and began pressing down on Jorgensen’s chest.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she said, unaware she was talking at all.
Over and over, she pushed down on the boy’s chest, waiting and hoping for something to happen. As she worked, the waves began to cover her feet, and somewhere in the periphery of her awareness she realized that one of her boots had come off in her escape from her grave. She looked up at the chaos of the beach and saw at least three bodies lying on the sand, half in and half out of their shallow graves, camera drones recording their lifeless faces, getting artistic shots of their limp hands bobbing in the surf.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
Never was lying on her back on the wet sand, her chest rising and falling as she stared with terrified eyes at the purple twilight sky above. Teller was still digging his legs out of his grave. Imelda—the girl with the silver hair—was screaming and laughing at the hole she had climbed out of in a fit of madness. Kodi had his arms around the boy with the blocked nose (Skiba? Emerson thought), and was pulling him to safety. Contestants numbers 48 and 50 were scanning the wooden grave markers until they found number 49, and then began to dig furiously. Finally, Emerson’s eyes rested on Tiger, who had one hand and half her head free of the sand and was breathing out of her nose as her terrified eyes—still somehow wearing her glasses—scanned the beach. And the waves crashed ever closer.
“Help her!” Emerson screamed, and Kodi looked around. Emerson lifted one of her hands off Jorgensen’s chest, and pointed to Tiger. Kodi was on his feet and sprinting toward the little Topsider before Emerson had restarted her compressions.
She pressed down on the boy’s chest, hearing ribs crack and watching his limp body shake in a dead way.
For the first time, Emerson looked beyond the crashing, foaming waves, and saw that the cruise ship was anchored about two hundred yards from the shore. The lights were all still on, and it looked like a specter through the heat haze filter.
She looked again at Tiger, watching Kodi dig her out just as the waves began to fill the hole she was in.
“Come on, wake up! Wake up!” Emerson muttered as sweat dripped down her face, but the boy was still and pale. Gone.
Never had gotten herself together and was helping to dig out someone who Emerson recognized as the violet-haired girl from the mall area of the ship. She too was lifeless.
“He’s gone. Help with the others.”
Emerson looked up at Kodi standing over her, his hair wet with sweat. “He’s not gone! He’s going to be okay.”
“Emerson, look at me. You can’t save him, but you can save others if you go now!”
Emerson looked back at the dead boy. His lips were blue; one eye stared lifelessly at the sky, flecks of sand covering the gray-blue iris. He hadn’t taken a single breath since he had been pulled from the sand … How long had it been, three minutes? Four? More?
“I can’t leave him,” Emerson said through exhausted gasps.
“Okay,” Kodi said, and was gone, running across the sand once again.
There were teams of kids now; each team was helping others, pulling people free, trying to revive the unresponsive. Emerson continued to press on Jorgensen’s chest, willing his heart to start beating, willing his lungs to suck in oxygen, but he did not stir.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Jorgensen.”
And she stopped.
The boy was dead.
A drone filmed the tears welling in her eyes. Emerson clenched her jaw and snapped out a hand. She grabbed the hovering device, crushing it and screaming in rage as the drone crunched between her fingers.
She got to her feet, throwing the destroyed drone aside, and running away from Jorgensen, running away from the guilt of leaving him there with one eye open and one closed, lips blue, no thoughts in his mind, no feeling in his body. Nothing, he was nothing now.
She ran past Teller, who was crawling on his hands and knees toward a red-haired boy who was free up to his shoulders, but the tide was making it hard for him to breathe as the sand became heavy around him.
Emerson sidestepped the corpse of a young boy and joined Never and two other contestants as they worked to free an exhausted girl from the sand.
It took ten more minutes for the tide to kill anyone else who had not managed to get free from their grave.
Kodi and a few others had dragged all the bodies who were not left underground to the top of a sand dune so that the waves would not carry them out to sea.
The remaining contestants sat on the beach and cried, or were silent, or mumbled incoherent words to themselves. What they had been through, what they had witnessed, had done something to them. It had changed them forever.
Emerson sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, watching the relentless waves crash down on the shore, and she could only think about Jorgensen’s one open eye, covered in sand, seeing nothing forever and ever. She had been so sure that he would suddenly sit up, gasping for air, and be okay, just like in the movies, but he hadn’t, he had just been dead, and dead, and dead, no matter what she did.
The sky had turned from purple to a deep blue as the orange sun disappeared below the level of the sea, and Emerson had time to wonder just how long they had all been unconscious. It had been dark on the boat when they had drunk the champagne, so it must have been at least twenty hours. And how on earth had the season changed so dramatically? It was December. It had been freezing cold when they had boarded, but here, on this beach, it was warm even now when the sun was setting. How far had they traveled?
Emerson looked around at the strange island they were on. It looked man-made, a perfect circle surrounded by nothing but ocean as far as the eye could see. Three hundred and sixty degrees of beach leading inward to sand dunes, which gave way to trees that were entirely made out of plastic, and in the center of the island was a building: a huge circular prison made of gray bricks. Rows of tiny barred windows dotted the walls, presumably the cells that the losing contestants would spend the rest of their lives in.
