Chapter Text
They could hear the noises coming from the basement under the shack, creeping up the staircase like a poisonous gas. The whimpers and sobs and quiet cries and moans of pain, real pain, and even though they’d died down by now that didn’t make them any less like a knife to the ear.
The two of them hovered by the entrance to the shack, staring down into the dark, reddish depths. It felt metaphorical, and might have been, if they weren’t pretty sure they were already in hell.
“We have to help him,” Dwight said, but warily, like he wanted someone to tell him it was impossible.
“What can we do?” Claudette dug her fingers into the splintering wood. “If he’s that badly hurt, we can’t do anything for him.”
“We’ve survived some pretty bad stuff already.” His chest ached at the thought of it. Not just his shoulder, either. “I think … I think if we get him out, we can patch him up.”
“Will he want that?”
Dwight didn’t answer. He knew what he had to do next. Meg was already gone, and they needed a third person to get this finished. Jake was good with generators. He’d learned a lot from him already.
“He’d do it for us,” he said, and this time Claudette didn’t reply. She also didn’t move into the shack. He didn’t blame her. He sure as hell didn’t want to go down there, but someone had to.
Of course, he thought to himself as he slowly, carefully stepped onto the broken floorboards, would Jake do it for one of them? He’d called himself a survivalist, and in the past he’d left when the chances of two getting out instead of one weren’t in anyone’s favor. In a situation like this, with one person dead, one person hurt, and the killer somewhere they didn’t know, he’d probably leave them down there. Finish a generator. Draw the killer’s attention, and then let the last person help. That might be smarter, but he was already here.
“He’s not on hook,” Claudette whispered suddenly.
Dwight paused. She was right. And that was suspicious, but at the same time, that wasn’t altogether unusual, either. Leaving someone who’d done a little too much damage to bleed out was more painful than putting them on a hook, even if it was also more risky. But maybe that risk was negated down there.
He nodded and kept going. He tried to focus on what he was going to do once he got down there, but his brain kept throwing doubts at him like caltrops in the road down the stairs.
Why wasn’t Jake coming up? He could crawl up the stairs, couldn’t he? Maybe he was that badly injured. Maybe the pain had finally overcome even him.
Then why wasn’t he trying to tell them to leave? Even if he was on the verge of death, he could tell them to back off. Dwight could see a hint of him, some second sight, lying still on the floor just past the place where the stairs turned. Maybe the pain was too much again. Maybe his jaw was broken. Maybe he was blind and couldn’t tell they were coming. There were a lot of reasons.
But where was the killer?
Dwight paused on the landing. The next set of stairs was much shorter, and turned into the basement. He could see a hand with fingers curled against the filthy floor.
He listened as hard as he could, but only heard the misery nearby. So the killer had to be somewhere else.
Down the last few steps and he could see Jake fully. One knee had been mutilated beyond repair. The other foot and ankle were mauled, the leg of his pants nothing but bloody tatters, like he’d stepped in a trap and been pulled out without it ever opening. No wonder he was in that much pain.
He was still breathing. Dwight could see the stuttering rise and fall of his back. It didn’t seem like a salvageable situation, but maybe if he just got his hands under Jake’s shoulders, he could pull him up the stairs, get him to Claudette, wrap up the worst of things and maybe just … leave him somewhere near a gate so they could find him on the way back. The crows might get him eventually, but if the pain wasn’t as bad, maybe he could move enough to keep them away.
It was the only plan he could come up with. Cautiously, he stepped forward and kneeled down just close enough to try and grab Jake without going any further into the room.
“Hey,” he whispered. “I’m going to - try and get you upstairs.”
Jake turned his head away from the floor and looked at Dwight. There was blood on his face, and who only knew what else, but he still had both eyes. For a few seconds he looked like he was trying to focus, and then he looked to the side.
Not away, Dwight realized too quickly. He wasn’t looking away out of shame or pain or even relief that someone had come to get him. He was looking at something. Something just past the wall that blocked the room from the second, shorter set of stairs.
He looked over into the red-tinted darkness, and saw, as his vision adjusted to the dim light, that it wasn’t just darkness, but in fact was a figure, and there was leather, and iron, and bone, and breathing so slow and steady he couldn’t hear it over the horror of the basement, and a huge, huge cleaver that was already covered in two other people’s blood.
As the seconds dragged like years, he remembered that sometimes even the best hunters decided to use bait -
Claudette ran when the screaming started. She didn’t come back, even after it had stopped. Even after the hatch sprang open ten feet away from where the bodies were.