GAME
Chapter 6
The Pit

"When you fall into a pit, you either die or get out" - Chinese Proverb

It was horrible to watch Garcia and Hotch as the room filled with water, and not being able to help. Hotch opened the door and he and Garcia were washed into the next level. Garcia wasn't breathing and they saw Hotch giving her CPR. Whether he succeeded or not they didn't know as the clip ended before she revived.

So they didn't know if she had survived or not.

Dave and Morgan were sickened by it. Kevin was beside himself.

'Oh Pen, please wake up!' he whispered as the clip ended. 'I need you to come home.'

Morgan put his hand on his shoulder.

'She's a tough one, is Garcia.' he said. 'She'll pull through.' but Kevin noticed his voice was shaky. Morgan was scared too.

-0-0-0-

Garcia cuddled up close to Hotch and closed her eyes. Hotch looked about into Level five.

There was no key visible, no exit door, and no box. He gave an involuntary shudder as the cold ran through him again, and his teeth chattered as he shivered, trying to bring his temperature up. He had no idea what this room was going to do to them (for that is how he saw it – almost at a sentience) and he had to wait for Garcia to be ready to guide them through. He hoped that she would have some ideas on how to proceed. He had no clue.

He rocked back and forth with Garcia in his arms. She seemed to be warming up slowly.

'Garcia, do you have any ideas how to tackle this level?'

She opened her eyes and looked around. 'There's nothing here.' she said. 'That usually means there's a hidden door or passage.'

'How do we find it?'

Garcia stood up on shaky legs.

'I don't know.' She began to feel her way around the room, running her hands over the wall. Hotch began to do the same going the other way round.

'Any change in how the wall feels.' she said.

Hotch ran his hands over the walls of their prison. He was about half way round when the floor gave way.

Garcia swung round when she heard Hotch cry out as he fell through the floor. He clung onto the edge by his finger tips and his legs hung in nothingness. Garcia ran across the room and laid down, grabbing him by the wrists. She winced in pain as her injured arm took some of his weight. Slowly his hands pulled through hers, as she desperately tried to hang on to him. He looked up at her with his dark expressive eyes.

'Finish this...' he said as her effort to hang on to him finally failed, and his hands slipped out of hers. He fell out of her sight into the blackness. She heard a sound as his body hit the bottom of the pit, but he made no sound. She called to him, and waited there, lying on the floor with her arms hanging into the hole, afraid to move, and afraid to stay where she was.

'Hotch!' she called to him. 'If you can hear me, please answer me!'

Nothing.

Slowly she moved away from the edge of the pit, tears in her eyes and her body trembling. He couldn't be dead!

She crawled over to a corner and pressed her hands into her eyes and cried. She cried out of fear of being alone, and she cried for Hotch, not knowing if he was dead or alive.

It was hard to imagine that the gesture of stopping to help her when she broke down had led directly to his death........ No she couldn't believe he was dead.

She went back to the pit and called him, but there was no answer still.

Tears streaming down her face, she carefully carried on her examination of the walls.

There had to be another way out.

-0-0-0-

Hotch had landed badly. He was in a deep black hole, the ends of which he couldn't see. He was lying on his back as he had landed, his breath knocked out of him, and he didn't think he was going to be able to move. The only light was coming from above, a square of light through which he had fallen. It cast a rectangle of light on the wall a few feet above him. He tried to call out to Garcia when she called down to him, but his chest, which hadn't fully recovered from the near drowning, hurt like hell. He thought he might have broken some ribs on the impact, and tentatively he pressed his chest. He almost screamed when he found the broken rib, the pain shooting through him like a knife. A gasp of agony escaped his lips and he rolled onto his side and tried to think of what had just happened.

Was he out? Had he failed the Game? Surely the UnSub was not going to let him go that easily. Maybe this was one of the secret ways that Garcia had told him about. As he lay there thinking, there was a creak and a bang, and the trap door closed and he was bathed in total darkness. Maybe this was 'game over' for him. He would just sit here and die.

The unbroken darkness un-nerved him. He thought of how Reid was fearful of the dark, something he could not understand.

That is until now.

Painfully and slowly he crawled backwards to the edge of the pit. When he had found something solid for him to lean against, he felt somehow less afraid and even comforted by the protection the wall offered. He had hit his head on the wall on the way down, and he touched the wound. It was bleeding again, and he felt dizzy with pain. He wondered how Garcia was managing on her own.

He stood up. If there was a way out of there, he wasn't going to find it sitting on the floor. As he stood a wave of nausea flooded over him and he fell down onto his knees.

He thought that maybe there was a gas of some kind being pumped into his tiny prison. He rested forwards onto the palms of his hands and hung his head forwards, breathing deeply, trying to get rid of the sick feeling but the more he fought it, the more nauseated he felt. His tee shirt was stiff with blood from the bite which was still bleeding. The water had washed the blood away, but when he fell both his head wound and the bite started to bleed again.

Something in the dark brushed against his hand and it was all he could do hot to cry out loud. He grabbed at it but whatever it was slithered silently away.

'Oh god....' he breathed, trying to keep a grip on himself. He shivered with the cold of his wet clothes, and rested back on his heels, his head down and his eyes closed.

Come on SSA Aaron Hotchner. You are an FBI agent, not a school girl afraid of the dark! Think like an FBI Agent, and maybe you'll survive this......

-0-0-0-

When the trapdoor clanged shut, Garcia jumped. Her tears were clouding her vision as she continued to try to find another way out.

She had to survive this game. She needed to get help for Hotch.

She moved round the room very carefully, aware that another trap door could open and if that happened they'd both be out of the game, and she couldn't imagine what that would mean.

On her second circuit of the room she found it; a slightly depressed area about the size of her hand. She pressed it but nothing happened. She marked the spot by leaving the bottle of water on the floor below and continued her search.

-0-0-0-

When Reid called Dave to say that they had found the Eight State Killer as he had been dubbed by the media, Dave was relieved. He called them back straight away. They needed all heads on this one.

Kevin had drawn a computer model of the drawing that Morgan had found, and they could see from the model that it was the drawing for the game that Hotch and Garcia were now playing. Now they had something to look for.

But there were thousands of aircraft hangars that Lomax could use, and apart from it showing the levels for the game, it wasn't a lot of help. Kevin was on level five now for the second time. The first time his avatar had fallen into a hidden pit and died. This time he was carefully looking for the way out of the room without springing the trap.

Rossi was watching over his shoulder when his phone announced an incoming video.

With some apprehension, Dave played back the clip.

The first thing they felt was relief when they saw Garcia. Hotch had managed to revive her after the near drowning. But when the floor fell away beneath Hotch's feet they watched in dumb silence as Garcia tried to pull him back and he slipped from her grasp. The clip ended just after the door closed.

Kevin found the pit Hotch had fallen into on the computer generated three dimensional plan.

'I can't see the way out of the hole.' Kevin said. 'When my avatar fell down the hole, it came up with 'game over'.'

'I cannot believe that Lomax would let that be 'game over' for Hotch.' Dave said.

'It is possible that Hotch wasn't meant to be in the game.' Morgan said. 'Garcia's car had been sabotaged. I think Lomax had planned to go to Garcia's 'rescue' when Hotch turned up before him.'

'That's all together possible.' Dave said thoughtfully. 'His car was round the corner. When Hotch stopped, it would have messed his plans up.'

'This is a one player game now.' Kevin said.

'Which is what Lomax Planned from the start.'

-0-0-0-

Hotch was worried about Garcia. He realised that as a gamer he was more of a liability, but he was duty bound as Unit Chief to protect her, especially as she was not a field agent. That and the fact that she gave him a warm feeling. He wanted, needed to get back to her. But he had no idea how.

He was breathing light shallow breaths now, his broken rib was sticking into places it had no right to, and every movement felt as if something was tearing. The skin around the bite on his neck was hot and tender, and he thought it was probably infected.

On his hands and Knees he did as Garcia had shown him. He began at the bottom of the walls, and ran his hands carefully over the rough surface. If there was a way out he had to find it; he couldn't just sit and hope Garcia would get to him.

The grinding of rough stone on stone brought him up short. It came from above him, and he reached upwards to find that there was a ceiling now on the cell he was in, and it was just above his head.

He suddenly realised to his horror that the ceiling was lowering onto him. He braced his back against the slab which if it didn't stop, would kill him in about ninety seconds.

The pain in his chest was excruciating as he used all his strength to slow the inexorable crushing.

But still it continued, and he was now on his knees, and the slab was across his shoulders, and still lowering.

Oh god help me!

Hotch felt a fear he had rarely ever felt. He was going to die here, not quickly or easily but slowly and in dreadful pain.

Game over, Hotchner, Game over......... no no no!

Close by, in the bright sunshine, someone was watching the ordeal on a remote video screen, a control button in his hand, echoing Hotch's thoughts........

.......GAME OVER