Nea didn't know what to do. Her head was swirling. There were sounds of fright and agony echoing all around her. Between Meg's whimpers, the Nurse's bone chilling screeching and the thunderous footfalls of Dwight's running- She was descending into madness. The world was closing in on her, the stale air was suffocating and her body was so scared it forgot how to breathe it in. The edges of her vision blurred, a staticy wall of gray seizing her ability to see.
In other words, she was about to pass out.
Thankfully it meant that she didn't have to stare at the obliterated red mess all over Meg's back. Her stomach was doing flips. She could feel bile edging in her throat at the sight of the wet injuries; The main contributor of her nausea being the disgusting, squelchy flesh that didn't even look real, and her bloody muscles which writhed and twitched. Nea didn't have what it took. There was absolutely nothing in her life that could have prepared her for the sick and twisted scenes she would witness.
Her body began to tip forward until a force stopped her. A pair of hands were suddenly there, gently grabbing her shoulders and tilting her back upright. It felt like Nea was floating for just a second before being balanced on her knees once more. Then one of the hands went and grasped Nea's face, fingertips digging into her numb cheeks, making her turn to the side.
"Stay with me," Said a voice. If drifted around Nea like a stray slip of smoke as she fought to return to her senses. "Meg needs your help."
Like a snap echoed in her brain, she was back. Nea's vision cleared, her senses were keen and she sat up, looking to find Claudette had been the one who'd willed her back from the spell of nausea and shock.
Nea nodded at the botanist, recalling the fuzzy words. Meg. Meg needed her. As soon as she proved her coherence, a medkit was placed in her hands. She opened it. Claudette's blood caked finger pointed at a purple bottle and then the needle and thread.
"Try this stuff first, I'm not sure what it does. If all else fails, use the needle and thread," She told her in a hazy voice. Then Claudette grabbed the flashlight from Meg's nearly limp hand, the batteries too.
"I'm going to help Dwight," Claudette said over her shoulder, then took off toward the direction of Dwight's shouts.
The pressure to save someone's life was immense. However some of the information Dwight had tried to convince her of back at the fire was beginning to click.
'We always suffer just enough to keep going. It pushes us just past the limits of survival, but not enough to kill us unless we are left behind. I don't know how to explain it right… We are still figuring it out ourselves.'
Nea hoped that it meant Meg would be okay. As she stared down at the medkit's contents, she did her best to swallow the anxiety and pull it together to do what needed to be done.
Like Claudette instructed, she grabbed the container and popped the cap off, discovering there was a white powder inside, then scooted over the rubble so that she was closer to Meg. The redhead laid there crying into the brittle grass, digging her fingers into the soil to help deal with the mind numbing pain.
"Meg, I'm gonna- I'm gonna put the powder on," Nea announced, feeling comfort in talking herself through her own actions. Meg nodded with a grunted, 'Mhm'.
There wasn't a ton of powder in the container but Nea did her best to evenly sprinkle it all up and down the giant gash along her back and the smaller slice in her shoulder. She was shocked to find that it was hardening the blood, entwining liquid and skin together. Right before her eyes, the wound seemed to level itself out, no longer looking like a canyon of horror along her backside.
Meg's breathing started to slow, then miraculously she stiffly sat up and gave Nea a look of gratitude. "Thanks. Feels a lot better."
"Uh, yeah," Then she looked into the powder container. None left. "I used all of it."
"It's okay. There's a chance we will find more."
Then Meg stood, closed the med-kit and beckoned Nea to follow her toward Dwight and Claudette's last whereabouts. They ended up being lured by the sweet song of thumping pistons, near an arrangement of benches and hedges. There they found Dwight and were quick to identify that he was in shitty shape. His injuries weren't much different than Meg's previous ones, yet somehow he was sitting there powering through the generator. Beneath him was a pool of blood that had gathered from a stream slipping down his back as he begrudgingly repaired the gen, the metallic surface of it being blemished by his blood.
Nea stayed back while Meg walked up and knelt beside him.
"Let me patch you up," She said gently to him. He continued to work, gritting his teeth.
"We should finish this first," He responded as he fought the pains of the lacerations. Meg sighed. She didn't want to argue, so she waved Nea over and the three of them repaired the generator until completion, at which time Dwight finally sank down into the dirt, letting the weight of exhaustion and blood loss take over.
As Meg finally opened the medkit, she glanced over at Nea. "You need to go find Claudette while I do this."
After everything she'd seen so far, that sounded like the worst possible idea to Nea. She wasn't about to wander off into the unknown, all naive and fresh to the sick games, being nothing but an easy target for the killer to obliterate into a million bloody pieces.
"No, no," Nea told her with a shaky voice. "I'm not going out there alone."
Meg sighed, looked at Dwight with wasted eyes, then stood to face Nea.
"We stick together in pairs. It makes the most se-"
"The last guy died, right?"
Tension dumped into the air, cascading like a broken dam. Meg stiffened, predicting what Nea's next words would be.
"I'm guessing that's why I'm here. I'm the replacement? Well I'm not going out like him. You can take the pairs and shove it up your ass, I'm not going anywhere alone."
Given everything that Meg had gone through during the trials, she was sort of at her wits end, and for Nea to be outright disrespectful in her delivery… Meg wasn't happy. Jake didn't die because of a faulty system. He died because they had the unimaginable working against them. Jake died because he was chosen, the same as them, to be a pawn in the machine of misery that they were all trapped in. While his outcome may have been different depending on Meg and Dwight making better choices at the gate, she was beyond torturing herself over him because at the end of the day, they didn't have the control.
But she didn't feel like explaining that to Nea. Instead she walked right up to her, shoved the medkit into her chest and moved in close, getting face to face.
"Fine. Stay here, fix him up. But I'm going to tell you something right now. No one here wants to be doing this. Okay? No one wants to go off alone anywhere. But we have to. If it was you on a hook, someone would be coming to get you off, either with a pack of fifty fucking people or alone. The one thing we don't need is a rat with a bad attitude. So shove that up your ass and get used to it."
Meg let go of the medkit and walked off. Nea and Dwight were left to suffer in a rigid silence. She awkwardly scooted beside him and opened the medkit, seeing all that was left was the needle and thread. Nea succumbed to the realization that none of it was easy. She didn't want to go off alone, but she also didn't want to do what she was about to for Dwight. The word rat had her ensnared. Nea knew she could be a dick most of the time. She was the product of a tough crowd that dabbled in illegal hobbies and mischief, so she wasn't exactly a goody-two-shoes with a matching preppy personality. But one thing that Nea never wanted to be was a rat.
The branding from Meg cut deep. As deep as the wound on Dwight's back. While she prepared the needle, she was plagued by that word. Nea didn't want to come to the conclusion that she was being selfish, but she was forced to. There was no other way around it.
"I'm sorry man, but I gotta stitch you up," Nea grumbled toward Dwight, who laid on the ground in front of her. He looked like he should've been a corpse. If it weren't for his hyper breathing, Nea would've considered him a goner.
"Just do it," He said quietly.
Nea brought the needle down to his scarlet flesh and pushed it through.
The crows scattered and flew away up ahead. Claudette's screams shredded through the air, at which point Meg crouched down behind some rocks and eased her way toward the wails. She didn't hear any screeching or other signs of the Nurse, not serving as a sign of comfort by any means. She'd prefer to know the location of the killer rather than guessing. Given the lack of information, she allowed a painfully slow minute to pass to ensure the Nurse had vacated the area. Eventually, Meg deemed it safe enough, so she crept out from her spot and headed over to the hook.
Claudette dangled and wept as the redhead neared.
"It's okay," Meg whispered, then did the usual maneuver to get her off. Once her feet were on the ground, she went to help prop Claudette against the wall. There was a sopping, red tear in the top of her thigh that glittered gnarly in the moonlight. Thankfully there was still the medkit tied at Claudette's hip that they could use. Meg went to reach for it, but instead of accepting the help the botanist pushed Meg's hands away, separating the two.
"Just get me out of here," She told Meg in a voice that sounded as if it were only mimicking the Claudette she knew. Like the girl was lost somewhere deep down.
"You don't want me to patch you up?"
There was no reaction from Claudette. She reached down and grabbed her flashlight from the ground, then walked off, presumably in search of a generator, looking more like a wandering ghost than anything else. Their differences aside, Meg was worried. Deeply worried. Claudette's bleak disposition was a stark contrast from who she'd been before.
Meg tried to wrap her head around how much time had passed since they ended up there. The survivors had no way to keep track other than to go off of how long it'd felt like. Could it have been only… five, six, seven hours? And they had already been dealt four trials. Four separate nightmares before a single day could pass. It really started to make her wonder if this was eternal suffering. Were they actually experiencing Hell? Was this it?
The point was, Claudette had lost herself so fast. Like, alarmingly fast. Meg was in no way blaming her for being in that mental state, as she herself was a moment away from ending her life if it hadn't been for Nea. But they realistically hadn't been there that long and they already were transforming into voids. Just shells of who they once were. Souls defiled.
The thought was so terrifying that Meg's eyes snapped up, focusing on the world again with a tremble wracking through her. She looked around, devastatingly realizing she was still at the hook and hadn't followed Claudette, being too deep in her thoughts.
"Fuck. Fuck me, idiot," She muttered to herself in agitation, knocking her own head with her fist a couple times until she picked a random direction to walk in. She didn't make it very far when she heard it.
Huuuuuuuugh…
It was her haunting wheezing, coming from somewhere behind Meg. So she ducked down immediately and moved into a wall cluster, cramming herself beside a sizable crate with a bunch of junk stored within. Her elbow bumped into something. She looked down and saw there was a strange formation already occupying the corner. It was a trio of skulls, which were attached to three sticks that created a triangle at the base, that of which it stood upon. It was a pretty trivial yet confounding structure that she barely had time to regard before she heard another ragged breath nearer to her location.
The Nurse was close. Meg squeezed tighter into her corner, fighting to keep herself quiet. But the skulls! Their brittleness made them susceptible to break. When Meg leaned on them, one of the skulls cracked and in the dead silence, it was a piercing sound.
She forced her body to be still, still as a corpse.
Huunaaugh…
It was terrifying because the Nurse floated through her path of misery, so there were no footsteps to be heard, no announcement of her spectral image. Meg waited. Waited and waited, then with no other indication, the Nurse whisked around the wall to Meg's right, appearing somewhat aimless as she hovered there for a moment. Then her head snapped. She was trained on a locker that was directly across from Meg. The Nurse then approached the locker and opened it, only to shut it right away once seeing there was no one hiding within.
Meg was sitting there stiffly, every muscle in her body being strained so that she didn't move an inch. Not two yards away was the Nurse, back turned towards her. All she needed to do was continue on past the locker and everything would be okay. There was no reason for her to turn around.
But… As fate has it…
Much to Meg's horror, the Nurse began to turn around at an almost deliberately slow pace, ramping up the suspense tenfold while all Meg could do was watch, too frightened and shocked to run.
She turned, turned, turned- Until they were face to face, hardly any distance between Meg and her ghostly form. Both were frozen for a single second, just looking at one another. Believe it or not, Meg felt that she'd just witnessed a spark of humanity emerge from somewhere deep in their killer. Even though violence would surely ensue outside of their moment of assessment of one another, Meg couldn't help but to wonder why the Nurse was there? Were these once people too? Did the Nurse have a life outside of these trials?
Meg didn't get to consider it for long, for the Nurse's bonesaw was suddenly lunging right for her. The redhead scrambled and climbed over the crate she'd been sitting aside, hearing the bonesaw collide with the wood where she used to be.
As she ran, Meg couldn't help but to wonder if the Nurse was once a survivor but became twisted with madness over time and now hunted what she used to be. The possibility made her sick to the stomach. Meg didn't want to fall from grace. She didn't want to end up on the other side.
She prayed it wasn't true.
Reality was out of focus. There was a bleak veil of gray cast over her eyes, making every sense fuzzy. She couldn't see right, couldn't smell or feel like she once did. Thinking was a chore. It was easier to just let the processes of her mind flow at their dampened pace. Trying to speed it up or make sense of everything didn't seem to matter anymore. What other contributions could she make? They all were going to die anyway.
Claudette didn't really know what part of her still occupied her own flesh. She might as well be operated by some black void. Deep in the pit of her stomach certainly was filled with such a dark emptiness. It was taking over.
She didn't even need to think as she worked on the generator. Her limbs were tired and hung with the weight of death as her soul seeped away, muscle memory doing its job to finish the machine off. The thumping of the pistons didn't ease any excitement into her. She was a blank slate. No longer Claudette Morel, with all the dreams and the fantasies and the purity of fascination. She was gone.
When she finished the generator, she sank into the dirt beside it and just sat there. No tears, no cries of helplessness. She laid her head against the metal frame and stared into the sea of walls and rocks and twisted trees- Everything that the trials were composed of. Claudette decided that it wasn't worth fighting any more. They were all no different than a thread of grass there. They belonged to the trials, just like the generators and the chests and the hooks did. Their spilled blood wasn't a travesty in the nightmare. It just was… normal… written into the fabric of their reality.
A scream.
Claudette looked up. Meg was right in front of her, face to face. Her bloody and wet hands were slapping Claudette's cheeks, trying to snap her back to reality, but she was already there.
"We need to go! She's coming!" Meg shouted, yanking on the botanist's arms urgently, desperately. But she was like a dead weight. Claudette didn't budge. She didn't even pay mind to the searing pain in her shoulder as Meg continued to pull on her arm.
Then there was a splatter of blood that went everywhere, smothering Claudette's glasses in red. As she took off her glasses and cleaned them robotically, she peered up to see a blurry shadow standing above her. Putting the frames back on, Claudette realized it was no longer Meg, but the Nurse that was stationed there, hovering by her feet. Her gaze dropped, seeing Meg on the ground a couple feet away, crawling with a trail of blood shining in the grass behind her.
Back up. Claudette stared blankly at the Nurse. Without a reaction, her tired eyes watched as she slowly raised the bonesaw.
A single tear slipped down her blood streaked cheek.
Dwight and Nea were halfway through their gen when they heard Meg's screams echo a short distance away, a scattering of crows marking the location. She was probably hooked. Those screams were always the loudest and most gruesome ones.
Typically it would be within Claudette's responsibility to save Meg, but Dwight had a bad feeling in his gut. With everything going on with Claudette, he didn't want to take any chances. After all, none of them knew each other. What if Claudette flew off the deep end and was angry enough with Meg and him that she would go out of her way not to save them? He didn't peg her as the type to do something so malicious- But he could easily imagine that the constant terror could transform just about any decent person into a self-serving animal.
Somewhere deeper yet, Dwight knew that he needed Meg. He needed her a lot more than he left on. To have her life in his hands felt far better than haphazardly leaving it with anyone else.
He cast Nea a look. When she noticed, she shot him a confused one. "What?"
"I'm gonna go get Meg," He mumbled as he stood, fresh pain ripping up his body as the stitches twisted in his sore flesh, making him wince the whole time he rose.
"Why? Can't Claudette do it?"
He shrugged with uncertain, crinkled eyes. "She hasn't been herself. We also don't even know if Meg and her found each other."
Nea snaked her hands out from the generator. "Well… Maybe you should stay."
Dwight just looked at her.
"I'll do it," She told him, not sounding as heroic as she would have liked. He noted her reluctance.
"You sure?" He asked. He honestly wasn't sure that he was willing to trust Nea with saving Meg. There was the chance that she would flake out. She certainly demonstrated her inability to follow through with clear objectives. A large part of Dwight struggled to blame her for that, in fact he sympathized with her, but that didn't stop them from needing to perform.
Nea nodded, but he continued to look at her sternly. "Nea, listen to me. Please do not let anything happen to her."
"Who, Meg?"
"Yes."
"Okay- Alright," Nea said awkwardly before turning away from the generator.
"I mean it, Nea."
She looked over her shoulder, seeing Dwight and the terrified look in his dark brown eyes, little abysses that were swimming with doubt. Nea normally would've become defensive, but she realized that if it were Stella, she would've been giving one hell of a speech to whoever was in charge of saving her. Nea wasn't sure if Dwight and Meg were friends or something more- but she understood. The internal need, the deep desire to have someone, to have that one person at your side in the midst of a shadowed world. She understood it well.
Her nod this time was serious, she hoped it conveyed to him that she would make sure Meg was alright. It must have, because his lips drew into a thin line but his eyes softened, then he turned and continued to work on the generator.
Nea entered the unknown. Her skin flooded with goosebumps at the unsettling silence, as if it was brushing up against her skin, taunting her just as her mind started fabricating dangers around her. Every crow that flew off, every crumbling piece of brittle brick had Nea whirling around in fear that the Nurse was right there. But she never was.
The journey to Meg felt years long. Nea grimaced when she finally saw what Dwight had meant when he was rambling about the hooks back at the fire.
Meg dangled there, drool pooling from her mouth as she whimpered, suspended by a giant hook which was punched straight through her shoulder. As Nea neared, she held back a gag.
"Meg?" She asked. The redhead's fingers twitched.
"Get me… down from here," She gritted painfully.
It was quite the task, but Nea successfully managed to bring Meg down from the hook. With Meg somewhat slumped over Nea's shoulder, she couldn't help but notice the base of the hook structure as Meg was no longer obscuring it. There she watched a black, organic substance shifting up the metallic beam, emitting a light sizzling sound as it climbed upward.
Nea frowned deeply and was about to question Meg about it when she remembered that her priority was to keep Meg safe, not to badger her with questions.
Nevertheless, she kept her eyes on the inky thing until she and Meg rounded the corner of the brick walls they had nearly been encased in.
She was sure where they should go, but Nea was relieved to find Meg was relying on Nea for support less and less as they continued to walk. They were almost returned to where Dwight and the gen had been when Meg tensed up and forced them both to stop.
Meg unlinked herself from Nea and took a step away, putting a bloody hand over the hole in her shoulder. With a pained face, she looked at Nea.
"We have to get Claudette," She panted.
"Okay, I'll go get her, but I'm gonna take you to Dwight first."
Just as Meg was about to nod in agreement, a generator, clearly visible to them and within a close distance, suddenly turned on and thumped with all four pistons. They both looked at it and then at each other.
"It's done," Meg said with an ounce of enthusiasm, "The gens are done."
"We have to find the way out-"
"Claudette comes first. We can't leave without her." Meg's eyes were stern, while Nea's were conflicted. Dwight probably already left the generator, so there was no sense in wandering to find him in order to drop Meg off. The more time they dedicated to not looking for Claudette, the more the botanist would probably be in danger. Above all else, Nea didn't want anything to happen to Meg. But her options were slim. The only thing they could really do was get Claudette and then pray they found the exit before the Nurse found them.
"Okay," Nea sighed.
Off they went in search of Claudette, wandering through the labyrinth of the trial. It took longer than what Meg would have liked, but they eventually came across Claudette- And something else that rivaled the terror of the Nurse.
The botanist was dangling from the hook while simultaneously grappling with a set of black claws that extended down from the top of it. Before they could do anything, Meg and Nea watched as her bloody hands slipped up one of the claws and its sharp point embedded into her abdomen before pulling away.
Meg gasped then ran as quickly as she could. As she drew near, the claws writhed slightly and pulled away from Claudette, giving Meg the opportunity to pull the girl off.
Claudette wasn't given any chance to exhibit her earlier melodrama. Meg latched onto the botanist's wrist and gripped it tight. She barked at Nea from over her shoulder.
"Let's go!"
Meg didn't want to have any repeats of what happened with Jake. They trio walked in a tight formation and they did it as quietly as possible, Meg and Nea being the ones with their heads swiveling around in the hopes of spotting an exit gate.
Echoing from a distance away was the mechanical scrape of the exit gate switch, then the first ringing of the one-third marker of the gate's opening completion. It was a lovely sound that lured them in its direction.
They walked faster, the sound of the halfway ringing being louder yet. But as that note rang out, it was instantly followed by the Nurse's bone chilling screech- And it was right behind them.
A cloud of blood sprayed forward, momentarily hazing the space in front of the survivors. Meg looked to the side, seeing the base of Claudette's neck go from just having a gnarly gash in it to suddenly leaking damn near a gallon of blood. She craned her head further back where she found the Nurse right behind them, winding up her bonesaw for another deadly strike.
She swung but the blade whooshed through the open air as the first shot had already plummeted Claudette to the ground. Meg fell with her, having not had a moment to calculate that she needed to let go of the botanist's hand.
"NEA HELP!" Meg cried at the top of her lungs, scrambling on the floor as the Nurse prepared another strike. Meg dug her heels into the dirt and pulled Claudette's body forward, though only a futile foot away. She needed Nea to help her get the girl up so they could move faster.
From afar, the third ring of the gate resounded through the air, then the ground shook with the little strips of molten ash forming over the floor, signaling the gate was open. They just needed to go a little further and they were out.
The Nurse swung a third time. Apparently she changed targets, thus cleaving deep right in the center of Meg's shin bone. The blade became caught within the thick of the bone, so as the Nurse yanked it back, Meg's whole body buckled forward and nearly lifted up before the blade finally came loose.
Of course, the pain was indescribable. All brain function went out the window. The only thing she could do at that moment was scream her head off. Fading in and out of the haze of horror was Nea's voice right in Meg's ear.
"Meg, c'mon! Get up, up!"
She could feel Nea's hands wrap around her arm pits, then Meg was being dragged away. But Claudette was still writhing on the ground, no one there to help.
"STOP!" Meg screamed, trying to get up but she was too weak and in pain due to her leg. Nea heaved, pulling Meg further away from the scene.
Meg blinked away her tears, trying to focus but she couldn't stop crying and panicking. Through the blurry filter of tears, she could see that the Nurse was moving toward Claudette, where then she slowly turned to look at her. Meg's heart sank, still being dragged away by Nea all the while Claudette was exposed and vulnerable and alone, choking on her own blood. Claudette's head tilted back, grim yet scared eyes landing on the three of them as they moved further away from her.
A second pair of hands grabbed onto Meg's body. She was hoisted upwards and made to balance on her uninjured leg.
"Don't look, Meg," Dwight told her gruffly as he struggled with her dead weight.
She couldn't help but to watch. As she did, all Meg could scream was, "No! No, no!" Her arms thrashed but Nea and Dwight were too strong.
The Nurse blinked and was suddenly on top of Claudette in one swift motion, the sinister wisps of smoke unfurling off of her body and fading quickly into the air. The bonesaw was gone. Using just her hands, the Nurse wrapped them around Claudette's neck. She must have instantly administered full pressure, because Claudette's body immediately tensed and her eyes bulged, mouth agape as she wrapped her own bloody hands around the Nurse's wrists. There was nowhere to run. A field mouse caught beneath the claws of a cat. She had no chance. It was the inevitable end.
Claudette reached out. Her arm extended upward, a trembling hand making its way to the clothed face of the Nurse. Juxtaposing the suffering was the soft, gentle caress of Claudette's hand down the side of what would be the Nurse's cheek.
Meg wailed as she watched in disbelief, being hauled further and further away from Claudette as she witnessed her die.
Slowly, Claudette's hand sank and fell away.