"We are all sticking together," Robin insists. "There's only five of us left. We're just going to sit together, in a group, backs to one another, and waiting this out until morning."
"So the plan is, if I understand," Graham says, his voice dripping with annoyance, "we just sit here and wait to be attacked?"
"Everyone has been picked off when they strayed from the group," Regina reminds. "Robin is right. We should stay together."
"Of course you agree with him," Jefferson scoffs.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Regina feels her cheeks heat, in anger or embarrassment, she does not know.
"Oh what do you think?" Graham sighs, "Come on, we all know you two sweat over one another. If you haven't fucked yet that poor man's balls must be purple—"
"Okay that's quite enough," Mal interjects. "Office gossip aside, Robin has a point. Plus in every bad horror movie, the idiots who leave the crowd get picked off, and this night has been nothing if not a bad horror movie. So let's be novel for a change and stay put, huh?"
And that's what they do.
For a little while.
Time passes. They silently lean against one another, but they get restless. Nothing has happened for over an hour.
Their killer, it seems, has also gotten restless, and it's taken everything in their being to not take the bait and run towards the sounds of squeaking and creaking in the dark.
More time starts. And then sounds start coming from the walls that doesn't quite sound human.
It takes her awhile to realize that it's comin from the walls— over the walls.
It's the intercom. And it sounds like a creepy halloween score, with creepy noises of wind and branches scratching against window panes, muffled voices that say something in a language that is definitely not English, the subtle whispered whoooos that you'd expect to hear out of a cartoon ghost.
"Maybe we should investigate," Graham mutters, after a few minutes.
"No splitting off from the group," Robin insists. "Everyone's sticking together. It's 2AM, daylight is in four hours. We can do this. If we stick together, we can fight off whoever comes at us."
"No we can't," Jefferson resigns. "Whatever is killing us off isn't a person. I said this before. It's killing victims, disappearing bodies moments after we leave them… really, Robin, do you honestly believe one person is able to do this—"
"It is probably more than one killer. Maybe a team," Robin concedes, "But they haven't been attacking us as a team yet. So the best thing we can do is stay together and wait this out."
Jefferson sighs. "I still think that means we will just all die together, when they come for us."
"Who do you think is coming for us?" Regina asks, quietly.
Jefferson takes a deep breath. "Did you guys ever study the history of this town?"
"Um," Regina thinks, trying to gently broach the subject of hysteria and how it might be setting into Jefferson. "I studied a bit, why?"
"The Shawnee tribe and pilgrims fought the battle of Big Neck here. Right here. The bones of hundreds of slaughtered Indians are beneath this building."
For fucks sake.
"Jefferson," Robin says carefully, "You're not truly saying—"
"That the ghosts of Native Americans have come back to claim what is there's on All Hallows' Eve? Yes, I am saying that. Look at the evidence. Listen to them," he nods at the ceiling, and the muffled spooky voices over the intercom. "Disappearing bodies, the fact they want to get rid of all of us, how they seem to appear out of nowhere— how did they get Mary Margaret with none of us seeing him? And now he's using the intercom - how did he get there? Oh and the power is out, how can the intercom even be working?"
"Portable generator," Robin muses, "and as for the rest, I think we've established there may be more than one killer."
"Someone who knows us," Jefferson reminds. "Knows about Mary Margaret and her affair. Knows about the jokes we make about Emma blowing hot air. Someone who has been watching us…"
"Oh for fucking hell Jefferson, it's not only ghosts that are capable of observing. We all knew Mary Margaret and David wanted each other. And … it's hardly something that takes detective work to uncover that Emma's full of shit sometimes."
"Full of hot air," he corrects. "We always used to say that about her. And frankly, she wasn't much acting like that tonight, was she? She was uncharacteristically quiet."
"She was worried about Killian, so she was a bit off." Mal notes.
"Exactly. This someone who has listened to us enough to know the jokes we make about Emma!"
"If someone has been watching us that carefully they also know you are prone to believing in ghost stories," Regina notes, "they are messing with you, with us, because they know our plan of sticking together is spoiling their plan of killing us one by one. So let's keep doing what we are doing until daylight."
I think together we should try to contact the spirits that are haunting us and apologize," Jefferson states, "look, I get it, I sound crazy…"
"You sound like Zelena, " Graham says simply, "Zelena, the only one who accidentally killed herself before the killer got to her."
"I'm not being her. I'm being… look there is a history of unexplained events around indian burial grounds," he says excitedly, "there's an atypical amount of homicides on ground where indians have been massacred, you can't debate that—"
"Can't we?" Mal drawls, "where's your proof?"
"If we could get online I'd show you the numbers!" he says "Wikipedia. Paranormal Facts dot com. Statistics don't lie."
"No, people do," Graham responds bitterly, "Jefferson, I get it, we've all been something...horrible. But we have to keep it together. We have to wait this out."
"We need to contact the dead," he insists, standing up briskly. "I have a device, I hid it—"
"Jefferson, get back here," Robin directs, "don't lose your cool, man, stay…"
"I've been worried about this for awhile," Jefferson mutters, "I have a ouija board. I hid it, but sometimes, when I'm working late, I hear noises. I brought in the board, and it's helped. There's a spirit, his name is Migisi—"
"For fucks sake, man up!" Graham grumbles, "There's no damn Migisi."
"There is!" Jefferson insists. "I'll show you!"
He walks towards the storage closet with purpose, Opening the door in a mad rage, and then…
THWACK!
Graham's flashlight acts as a spotlight for the whole sickening thing. The moment the door opens, something springs, and an axe crashes from it's place above, plummeting through Jefferson's skull.
The door was booby trapped.
Waiting, it seems, for him to open the door.
"Shit!" Robin cries "He could still be alive, he could… someone help!
Regina flies to his side, to the corpse, because it's just a corpse now. The gash in his skull is so deep, it's stuck, it's…
There's no pulse. He's gone.
She looks for Graham, for his assistance, but he's freaking out, on the other side of the door, cringing and muttering something about looking for more traps. But she can tell, Graham is sick to his stomach.
An axe to the head is not the prettiest sight, after all.
"Robin," she tries, holding her hand on his limp arm, shaking her head.
Mallory is by their side, witness to Robin doing something she wouldn't have the strength to.
But they need the weapon, after all.
So that's why Robin is bent over Jefferson's body, pulling to free that axe out of their coworker's skull.
She's unable to look away from the horror, and so is Mal.
And that's how neither of them see the figure behind them, grabbing Graham, covering his mouth with chloroform cloth, dragging him off in the darkness.
When the axe is finally freed, they are yet another man down, with only a handwritten memo page left behind.
9 DOWN, 4 TO GO
"Graham?" Mal calls out, timidly, and then a more forceful, "GRAHAM?"
Flashlights dance around the office, frantically in search of their missing friend.
They find a separate note, thumbtacked to the far wall.
HE'LL BE BACK
(DON'T YOU WORRY)
"He's somewhere close," Robin warns, "But we're not playing this game anymore. We're going to sit right here and we're going to wait."
He looks down at the bloodied axe in his hand, bits of brain matter stuck to the blade and adds, "at least we have a proper weapon, now."
