Episode I: Night on the Mountain
-Chapter IV: Isolation
Hu Juxiang's Apartment, South District, Taichung City, Taiwan, January 29, 2019…
Hu Juxiang was thankful for his time off as he ate a late-night snack and watched videos of his favorite TV show on his laptop. Abruptly, a red light on his laptop began to flash a warning, and a small siren sounded, informing him of a vital satellite transmission.
"What, a message from the Crusader? At this time?" He groaned and typed in the access code. A fingerprint and iris confirmation later, the laptop received the message:
To Warrior:
Soong and the Clerk are dead
Hostile presence confirmed
Civilians in danger. Your friends?
Someone- or something- destroyed the communication lines, the bridge, and disabled the cable car
You're all that's left of Crusaders to call on now
I sent word to the Freedmen and Purists too, but no idea if they are able or willing to come
-Crusader
Peace Lodge Living Room, Heilin Mountain, Xinyi Township, Nantou County, Taiwan, January 29, 2019…
Peiyun rummaged around in her bag to uncover several cups of dried ramen. "Jun-yuan, are you hungry?"
"Yeah, it's been a bit since dinner," Jun-yuan commented. "Good time for a midnight snack."
"OK," Peiyun took a portable cooker from her luggage and powered it up. "I have some ramen. By the way, want some wine?" She pulled a bottle out of her luggage.
"Sure thing!" Jun-yuan looked eager. "A nice drink before bedtime is always nice."
Peiyun poured a cup for Jun-yuan, and went to take care of the fire. "I wonder what Youru, Max, and Tim are up to?"
"League of Legends or whatever that game is called," Jun-yuan groaned.
As the two chatted, neither noticed the silent figure wearing a demonic clown mask peering down at them from the top of the stairs...
Path to Peace Lodge Generator…
As Yuxun, Melody, and Yi-Hsin walked down the trail leading away from the lodge, none noticed that a masked figure was slowly watching them from behind atop an upstairs window of the lodge.
"It's like a little adventure!" Melody piped up, pulling out her cell phone and started playing some music.
"Isn't there like, no service up here?" Yuxun questioned, as he and Yi-Hsin clambered down a ledge and a flight of stairs after Melody.
"Luckily, I have a lot of songs stored here then," Melody grinned.
"Whoa, police tape..." Yi-Hsin's attention was diverted by the yellow strips dangling from a nearby tree.
"From Elena and Yu-Ting…" Yuxun breathed.
"You'd think they'd clean it up…" Melody muttered, her spirits deflating.
"Well, they never closed the investigation." Yuxun shook his head sadly.
"Okay, I'm getting the creeps now." Melody shivered.
The three came to a fork in the road, where a huge steel sign labeled "Mount Heilin Recreational Area, Nantou County Government Bureau of Tourism" demarced the directions, and they took the left path toward the generator.
Abruptly, although very faint, what sounded like a low-pitch shriek reached their ears, causing Yuxun to lurch back, instinctive fear flashing through him momentarily.
"Ummm… Did you hear that?" Melody asked, noticing the sound over her music.
"I heard… something. Yeah," Yuxun dismissed his unease, and the three kept onward.
"Hey there's something odd over there!" Yi-Hsin indicated, pointing ahead at a slight bend in the path.
What looked like a shrine was mounted on a set of crates set between two were some burnt-out candles, a Native American dreamcatcher, a deer skull nailed to one of the trees, feathers hanging on string suspended between the trees, and several esoteric pictograms drawn on wooden boards. And it looked new.
"Holy bat cave," Yuxun muttered.
"It's got to be aboriginal, right?" Melody conjectured.
"It looks recent," Yi-Hsin pointed out. "But I don't think it was the Rangers getting their arts n' crafts on, no."
"It looks a shrine or something." Yuxun pointed out the obvious.
"A shrine to what?" Yi-Hsin lifted and eyebrow.
Leaving that question unanswered, the three decided to move on beyond the mysterious display, and saw a strange concrete outcrop ahead.
"Oooh! Binoculars!" Melody squealed, running over to a stationary binocular stand.
"Ah, I recall Youru mentioned the rangers were building a new tourist observation platform here." Yi-Hsin nodded.
Melody swung the binoculars every which way. "Gonna look at the trees… gonna look at the clouds… gonna look for the generat- " She froze still, then stepped back from the binoculars. "Uh. Whoa."
"Y'alright?" Yuxun asked offhandedly.
"I just saw someone at the generator." Melody sounded shocked and a little scared.
"Okayyy? Let me see." Yi-Hsin grabbed the binocular stand as Melody stepped back as if a little dazed. She scanned the generator and the surrounding area… but there seemed to be nothing but tons and tons of trees.
She was about to give up, when suddenly, a grotesque face, possibly a mask, leaped out, obscuring the view momentarily with its big eyes and thin, wide grin.
"AAAAHHH! Oh, god!" Yi-Hsin leaped back, and rushed to the railing of the outcropping, scanning the tree-covered slope below. "It was right there! I just saw it!"
"Saw what?" Yuxun scoffed, chuckling. He peered into the binoculars and scanned for a long time, looking forward, up, left, right, and down. After perhaps a minute, he stepped back, and shrugged, partly-confused and partly-amused. "Sampling the old eggnog again, girls? There's nobody up here but us."
"Uh… maybe…" Yi-Hsin conceded unsurely. "But I could have sworn…"
Melody just stayed silent. She looked back through the binoculars again, but then shook her head slowly. "Nothing but goddamn trees…"
"Okay, we've wasted enough time already," Yuxun chastised the girls, a bit unnerved by the girls' reactions. Part of him wondered if they were pulling a prank on him; another part stirred with instinctive fear that they'd actually seen something. "Even… if there was a guy, it would've been a Ranger or something."
Yi-Hsin had scouted ahead, and shouted back, "There's a huge fallen tree blocking the path."
"Crap!" Yuxun ran over, Melody in tow. "Goddamnit! Couldn't the Rangers at least have cleared up this path?
"Really?" Melody looked amused.
"What?" Yuxun looked annoyed.
"I didn't figure you guys for the glass half-empty type."
"You got a better idea?"
Melody raced forward and scaled the log limberly.
Yi-Hsin sighed and followed reluctantly, as did Yuxun, where they found Melody staring at an old, abandoned tractor parked on the path. "Looks like the Rangers were here- they must have abandoned this…"
"I don't know… it looks ancient." Yi-Hsin pointed out. "I don't think it has functioned in years. Someone must have towed it onto the path. But why?"
Melody pulled on the handle of the tractor door, but it was locked shut. However, in a millisecond, a terrifying skeletal face abruptly appeared in the window.
"AHHH!" Melody screamed, leaping back, and tripping backward.
"Whoa! Christ!" A bit further back, Yi-Hsin suffered a sudden shock as well, and breathed heavily to regain her composure. "That scared the blue out of my jeans."
Yuxun had been looking another direction at the tractor's engine, but was still slightly startled and turned at Melody's scream and saw the skeletal mask in the window. "What the hell is that doing in there anyway?"
A scream interrupted them and punctuated the night air, more closer this time.
"The hell was that?" Yuxun froze.
"Was it… someone screaming?" Yi-Hsin proposed.
"Naw, no, probably just a… squirrel… or something," Yuxun shrugged unconvincingly.
"Brrr… Creep-town." Melody shivered.
"I… think we should keep on going…" Yi-Hsin mentioned hesitantly, and they continued trudging forward.
But whatever was out there wasn't going away…
A sudden snarling, slashing sound came from the woods to their right.
"Whoa!" Yi-Hsin exclaimed.
Melody round the corner and froze. "Eek!"
"What is it?" Yuxun rounded the corner and saw a deer twitching, apparently in its death throes. Blood flowed freely from several deep gashes the shape of claws sunk into its neck. "Damn…"
"It's horrible." Melody muttered.
"I don't think it's going to make it," Yi-Hsin stated.
Suddenly, a loud snarling, scrabbling sound erupted to their right, and a sudden, violent force yanked the dying deer into the woods with terrifying speed.
"AHHHHH!" Melody screamed, bolting for it.
"Whoa- " Yuxun fell back, panicking.
"RUN! RUN!" Yi-Hsin screamed to the others. She and Yuxun took off as fast as they could.
"Oh my god, what the hell was that?!" Melody screamed.
"I don't know…!" Yuxun exclaimed.
"It's a bear, gotta be a bear!" Yi-Hsin babbled as she ran.
"Let's make for the trees!" Yuxun suggested. "We'll lose it!"
"Stay on the path, we're almost there!" Yi-Hsin countered.
"Look! Look! There's a bridge! Over here! Over here! Yuxun!" Melody pointed to broken bridge spanning a ravine. Reaching it first, she leaped over the gap, and turned around, waving for Yuxun and Yi-Hsin to do the same.
Yi-Hsin made the jump, followed by Yuxun, and the three barrelled down the path all the way to the generator.
Melody tripped over the small steps into the generator building, and fell flat on her stomach.
"Come on, we gotta go!" Yi-Hsin yelled, running back to help her up, as Yuxun flung open the door.
"I am!" Melody shouted, clambering up, and the two girls ran inside after Yuxun.
Yuxun slammed the door shut and heaved, "I think we lost it."
"Holy crap, I feel like I just ran a marathon," Melody coughed amidst her gasping breaths.
"Was it a bear?" Yi-Hsin wheezed.
"Yeah, probably. Those things are crazy fast." Yuxun gasped.
"Well… I didn't see it," Yi-Hsin peered out the window reluctantly.
Melody wasn't listening, instead, scouring her pockets in a panic. "Oh, shit! Fuck!"
"What?" Yuxun looked concerned.
"Ahhh, oh crap!" Melody threw her arms up, clearly upset.
"What?" Yuxun repeated, walking over to her.
"Where is it?" She exclaimed, scanning the floor, and running over to the window to look outside.
"What? What's wrong?" Yi-Hsin asked.
"Gone! It is gone, ok?" Melody was on the border of being hysterical.
"Melody, slow down, what is gone?" Yuxun tried to sound consoling.
"My freaking phone!"
"You can't find it?" Yi-Hsin asked.
"Crap! No! I must have dropped it."
"Ah… shit…" Yi-Hsin muttered.
"I can't lose my phone, my parents will kill me…"
"You can always get a new one- " Yuxun proposed.
"That was a new one!" Melody exclaimed.
"Okay… okay… well, I'll help you look for it- but I don't think we wanna go back for a little bit," Yi-Hsin declared, with a hint of finality in her voice. "We can comb through the trail on the way back."
"Then let's get to work on the generator first," Yuxun remarked, turning his attention.
Meanwhile, several hundred meters outside, breathing heavily in the woods, a predator stalked them, watching their movement through the window of the generator building...
Back at the Peace Lodge…
Youru threw down her last card and pumped a fist into the air. "Ha! I win!"
"I swear, you must have peeked or something," Tim shook his head in mock disapproval. "No one beats me that quickly at cards!"
"I wonder how you guys can be amused by cards for so long," Max commented dryly, continuing to play League of Legends.
"And I wonder how your computer still has juice."
"I have a lithium power pack," Max held it up.
BANG! CLANG! CLANG! A cacophony of sounds erupted from the basement, and Youru stood up nervously. "You hear that too… right?"
"Yeah…" Max muttered.
"Definitely," Tim sounded unsettled.
"Maybe we should… you know, check it out?" Youru proposed nervously.
"Why?" Max shrugged, unable to totally conceal his unease.
"I dunno, what if it's like a pipe that's about to burst, or the furnace catching fire?"
"Unlikely…" Max dismissed.
"I'd rather not be caught in a fire," Youru pointed out.
"Yeah, well… okay," Max conceded.
Tim had already gotten up, moved cautiously toward the door, and opened it slowly.
"Let me grab my flashlight," Max reached into his backpack, before he and Youru followed Tim's lead and began to make their way into the living room.
"Oh wow..." Max muttered sardonically as they passed the fireplace. Jun-yuan was sprawled on the rug, apparently unconscious, and Peiyun was fast asleep on the couch. Two empty wine bottles and two empty bowls.
"Should we wake Jun-yuan and Peiyun?" Youru asked.
"Nah, let them sleep," Tim dismissed. "It could be nothing, and we'd been disturbing them. If there's really a fire or something, I think the ruckus we make will wake them."
"I think it was down in the basement…" Max mentioned cautiously.
"Then let's go," Youru said with bravado. She walked over to the open basement door and walked through it.
Max and Tim followed her down the steps and into the basement.
"Whoa- is that- " Youru strode rapidly to the right of the stairs, next to the furnance, where there was a board on the wall that was tacked full of little notes and papers.
There were pictures of Yu-Ting Qiu and Elena Zhang, newspaper clippings about their disappearance and the police investigation, posters about the missing friends. And below it all, dabbed in red paint were the words, "Never Forget".
"Creepy," Tim muttered, unsettled. "Who could've done this?"
"Weren't we here to investigate some banging, clanging sounds?" Max reminded offhandedly. "We haven't found out what was causing them. We can deal with this later."
"OK, gotcha," Youru nodded, and the three turned to walk through an open doorway, where they saw a small bedroom with a moldy, ancient-looking bed.
"Whoa, what is this place?" Youru looked around, asking no one in particular.
"Haven't you been through this lodge before?" Max questioned.
"Yeah, but this door's always been looked. Never seen it open like this. Does someone sleep here?"
"Could be just an extra, or decrepit bed put in storage or something," Tim proposed.
There was another door, and Youru went ahead through it, climbed down a flight of stairs, turned a corner and found themselves in another corridor that was lined with bookshelves.
As Max and Tim followed her down, Max noticed something propped up on the nearest bookshelf- it was a board posted there, with eighteen pictures of people on it.
"That's us!" Youru exclaimed, when Max shone his flashlight on each face- Yu-Ting Qiu, Elena Zhang, Yuwen Chen, Xie Wanzhen, Lily Lee, Emily Lio, Yuanxin Chen, Sheila Huang, Youru Lai, Tim Tsai, Max Guo, Kun-Lin Lee, Titus Ding, Peiyun Chen, Yi-Hsin Lai, Jun-yuan Hsiao, Yuxun Lai, and Melody Yang. Three of them- Yu-Ting Qiu, Elena Zhang, and Kun-Lin Lee were violently crossed out with red paint. At least they hoped the red liquid dabbed over the pictures were paint…
"What is this, like a fucking hit list? Christ!" Max exclaimed.
"Why is Kun-Lin crossed out?" Tim inquired. "Is he okay?"
"He should be- " Youru frowned. "He went with Sheila and Titus to get Sheila's bag…"
They turned and kept going.
Max opened another door, which creaked awfully, and shone his flashlight cautiously. An even longer hallway stretched ahead of him, with holes littering the walls, ceiling, and floor. The eerie glow of moonlight shone through the badly-splintered roof above them.
"Wh- What is that…" Tim stammered, pointing, his feet firmly rooted to the ground.
Max turned his flashlight to where Tim was pointing- there was a dark red splatter on the ground. "Not good… not good at all."
"Calm down... everything's okay, I think," Youru held up a hand to steady Tim, who was looking pale and liable to faint. "Someone… might have been slightly injured, that's all." Her words sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
"Ummm… what about that?" Tim pointed to a massive splatter of blood on the wall a few meters away. It was still fresh, and dribbling down the wall.
"Aww shit! No!" Youru noticed the devastating amount of blood, dread beginning to color her voice.
"This can't be happening," Time muttered, barely audible.
"AAAAHHHHH!" A disembodied, piercing screamed interrupted them.
"Whaaa- ?" Youru leapt back in fear.
BOOM! A picture frame flew off the wall and crashed onto the ground in front of them, seemingly all by itself.
"Oh, shit!" Tim exclaimed.
"What did that?" Youru cried out, heart pounding in terror.
"How does a picture just jump off the wall like that?" Max blurted out.
"Wait a minute," Tim spotted a piece of paper on the floor that the other two had overlooked. When he picked it up, he saw that it had Yu-Ting and Elena's pictures printed on them.
"What did you find?" Youru asked, turning around to look at him.
"I thinks it's... " He flipped it over. "Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit! Oh my god! You- you guys need to see this!"
"Tim, what is that?" Max demanded.
"It- it's a threat…"
Youru and Max huddled over to read the blood-red scrawlings…
I WILL TAKE THEM AND BLEED THEM LIKE PIGS and RIP THEIR SKINS, FLAYING THEM ALIVE! A FUCKING YEAR I WAITED! I WILL KILL THEM ALL!
"Fuck! This is serious!" Youru exclaimed. "We have to warn Peiyun and Jun-yuan that all this insane stuff is going on!"
There was a creaking sound behind them, seemingly from a door, and a thin gust of cold, drafty air swept by their feet.
"What was that?" Tim grabbed Max's arm nervously.
"It came from back there," Youru pointed to the door leading into the room with the old bed. She turned around, and that's when she saw a translucent white figure of a familiar girl standing in the doorway before walking away.
"Wait! Max! Tim! Someone! What the fuck is that?!" Youru exclaimed hysterically.
"Ahh!" Tim had turned too, and a half-scream, half-gasp choked in his throat, causing him to stumble backward in panic, before he composed himself. "Did- Did you just see that?"
"What?" Max looked puzzled. "Did I see what?"
"A see through shape! Like a ghost!"
"Oh boy," Max looked disbelieving.
"Didn't you see it?!" Tim exclaimed.
"...no…" Max muttered.
"Get faster reflexes, you dip!" Tim cried out, whacking him on the shoulder. "There's a freaking ghost after us!"
"Calm down everyone, you- "
"You're not paying attention!" Youru waved her arms wildly. "We saw the ghost and it looked like Yu-Ting! It looked like Yu-Ting!"
"Ok, so maybe you guys did see something…" Max conceded, still highly skeptical. "Let's… just go back, okay, and warn Peiyun and Jun-yuan. We need to get everyone back together."
The three friends walked back through into the room with the old bed, and that's when it happened.
"AAAHHHHH!" With an inhumane shriek, a ghostly-white monstrous face of Yu-Ting leaped out of nowhere. Her clothes were tattered rags, her skin was rotten, her eyes milky white and sightless, her mouth wide open and smeared with blood, and a bloody gash marked her forehead.
Youru screamed and fell over on her back.
"Goddammit!" Max cried out.
"Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!" Tim screamed incoherently.
"RUN!" Youru bolted back down the hallway, Max and Tim sprinting behind them. They barrelled through the door into the furnace room, slamming the door behind them.
"Hold the door!" Tim pushed against the door and called out to Max, but Max just kneeled and heaved.
"There's nothing chasing us," Max asserted, as he composed himself.
"But you did see it, Max. For real." Youru pointed out.
"I saw… something. But- But where'd it go?"
"This is ridiculous," Tim ground his teeth angrily as he let go of the door.. "You know what you say. Now, I'm going to go up there and tell Peiyun and Jun-yuan. He ascended the steps up from the basement.
Youru and Max, stayed in the basement, watching the door nervously and catching their breath. A couple minutes later, they heard Tim coming down the steps again, and saying, "Hey, I can't find Peiyun or Jun-yuan… do you know where they might have gone?"
"What?!" Youru blurted out, and she began to walk toward the stairs, Max close behind. They failed to notice a masked figure climb out of hiding in the shadow of the furnace and sneak behind them. Abruptly, one hand grabbed Max and he only managed to cry out once before a gas mask was forced over his face and a nauseous, chloroform-smelling gas filled his mouth and nostrils.
"Max!" Youru yelled as she wheeled around the see her friend falling limp, gripped by the menacing masked figure.