"You're kidding, right?" Meg grumbled, uncomfortably stepping out of the bathroom. Tied around her face was a black sock with uneven holes cut out for her eyes and around her neck was a scarf that flowed downward like a cape. The horrendous costume was topped off with a pink leotard and a pair of cheetah print spandex shorts over top. She looked ridiculous.

The room erupted in laughter at the sight of the poor girl in the thrift shop mess of a superhero ensemble.

"I think it looks good!" Dana, one of the girls on the track team with Meg, remarked with a voice dripping in fake sweetness. Meg knew she was lying. Obviously the outfit didn't look good, the point was for it to be the definition of ugly- but she knew for a fact that Dana had a secret agenda to outcast Meg from the team in any way possible. Every morsel of that stereotypically wicked jock wanted to see her crash and burn one way or another.

That's why Meg was going to impress them in their little hazing ritual that they had prepared.

"What's our supervillain's name?" Asked Chelsea, one of the nicer girls on the team. However she too seemed to be having a little too much fun making Meg feel like she was an outsider who they could bend and twist at their every whim. Did everyone seriously have to do the outlandish hazing? Or did it all begin with Meg?

"Street Rusher!"

"No, Super Blaster!"

"How about Dare Diva?"

"Whatever, they're all stupid. Just choose a name already!" Shouted Dana as she rolled her icy blue eyes, framed by clumped lashes.

Chelsea put her hands up, spreading them apart as she announced her sacred title. "Dare Damsel…"

Meg chuckled. "Okay, okay! Dare Damsel, holy shit." She stepped toward the front door. "So I seriously have to go slash some poor person's tire and bring a piece back as proof?"

All of the girls nodded in unison, each wearing a vile grin.

"Okaaaay, can I please get something to do it with? I'm not the Hulk."

Hannah, who was the girl that lived at the house they were all hanging out in, got up and ran quickly to a room down the hall, returning with a flimsy pocket knife.

"It's my brothers, try not to break it!" She pleaded. Meg raised her brows and looked at the girl with a heavy load of doubt. There was no way that butter knife was going to make it through the whole ordeal but she would nevertheless treat it with care.

"Alright," Meg sighed. "I'll be back."

She slammed the door behind her.

It didn't feel real. It couldn't have been. She wasn't able to grasp the fact that it was true… that it was her reality. Whisked off to some demented place with a crazed murderer on the loose. Why them? Why were they the ones damned to the horror? Meg wracked through her brain, trying to make sense between the haze of terror. Were they kidnapped? Did she have enemies that would put her through something like this?

Every time she attempted to claw at some sort of realistic, logical reason, it was slashed in half by the evidence that things were not… normal. She woke up without a single memory indicating how she was brought to the campfire. Then, totally conscious, she witnessed with her own eyes the black fog fade in and fade out, at which point they were all transported to an entirely new and unknown location.

Something was seriously wrong. It was all wrong.

Meg wanted to throw up. The way her insides twisted with anxiety every second was beginning to take a physical toll on her body and she wasn't sure how much longer she could keep herself going.

She mentally pleaded with herself and begged whatever motivation she had left to hold on a little longer.

Her legs carried her far away from everyone's screams and cries of utter agony. She eventually spared a look behind her, seeing that she was once again alone. No Dwight, no killer and definitely no Jake and Claudette. But she didn't stop running until she was unable to.

There was a wall- but not just any ordinary wall- there was a massive gate situated right in the middle of it. On the left side was a lever system with three bulbs above the dingy metal box that housed the lever itself. She approached it, keeping her surroundings in check as she did so. Deeming the coast to be clear, Meg inspected it closely.

The lever squealed metal to metal as she yanked down on it. Nothing happened. But it did make her wonder… was this a way out?

"C'mon," she said frantically as she continued to pull the lever down with all her might, thinking maybe it needed a little elbow grease. "Please, please, please!"

The results remained the same. She took a discouraged step away and snooped around the gate. Maybe there was more than just the lever. That was when she noticed that there were thick wires leading up to the supposed exit, some going into the lever box and others going into an opening above the gate.

She stood there silently, thinking intensely when- The generator! It was meant to power the gate! But that meant there had to be more if it didn't activate the lever…

"Shit!" Meg exclaimed hopefully, seeing if she could trace the wires to their respective generators but found that after just a few feet or so they began to disappear underground. "Ugh are you fucking kidding me. Nooo!"

She tried digging up the dirt but it was so rough and cemented together it was no use. That would waste ages of her time when she could just wander around and find them. Of course, that was easier said than done when she was being hunted by some monster. It already got one of them…

That part kept hitting her like a sack of bricks every time she thought about it. Flashes of Jake crying with blood all over him invaded her thoughts. She shut her eyes tightly, desperately attempting to block the images from her mind but it was useless- they were burned into her eyelids.

When she opened them, she unintentionally noticed the mini dot of Claudette's blood stained on the top of her sneaker. There was something so disturbing about it, to have the blood of somebody else on your body. It wasn't right. None of it was right.

There was a searing hatred within her, one that despised how badly she had lost control. Her life hung in the balance and there was not a damn thing she could do.

The one thing that she could control, however, was her drive to make it out of this alive. She had a strong feeling about the generators and now knew where a possible exit gate was- so she moved back into the depths of the labyrinth, slow and calculative. This was her ticket out, she needed to play her cards right.

Suddenly a blood curdling scream tore through the silence of the night. Off in the distance, a few crows to Meg's left flew off, signaling to her that it had come from that direction.

Much to her horror, it sounded like Claudette…

Meg shivered. Was she dead? Did that monstrous thing get her? She didn't really want to go and find out, despite there being a chance that Claudette was still alive. She figured it could only be a matter of time before the killer murdered them both given that her and Jake were miraculously still living.

"Meg!"

She whipped around. It was Dwight sprinting over to her.

"Hey I-"

"We have to help Jake and Claudette," He tells her urgently. "They're strung up on these hooks and I think that we can pull them down. They're alive!"

What the fuck? Hooks? She hadn't seen any of these hooks he was talking about. What kind of torture was this place built for? First the bear traps and then now there were hooks for hanging people on?

"Okay- where did the thing go?"

"The Trapper? I don't know but I think it's gone."

"Trapper?"

"Yeah," he said. "Y'know it's setting bear traps."

She nodded, unconcerned with the name of it. "Let's go quickly then, before he gets back."

They ran together, Meg following Dwight closely behind all the way up until they were met with a chilling scene.

It was Jake. She could see the tears streaming down his face, making little clean trails in the blood and grime soaked on his paled cheeks. The whole right side of his body was red and torn up- the same as it had been when he was first struck with the cleaver. The only difference now was that a massive hook was pierced through his right shoulder, suspending him off of the ground by a few feet. It was attached to a thick metal chain that was then connected to a makeshift metal support beam. It looked like a twisted version of hangman.

Her and Dwight briskly made their way toward him. As they drew closer, Meg spotted… something. A black substance that crackled and slithered at the base of the hook, oozing upwards like a large inky vine.

"Dwight look-" She pointed. "What is that?"

His glasses fogged up as he covered his mouth, not sure what to say about it.

"Let's just get him down." He urgently replied, prioritizing Jake above all else. "You're gonna be okay Jake," Dwight told him reassuringly. Meg grimaced as she got a close up on… everything. It made her feel sick to see his torn flesh through the ripped up holes of his jacket, swollen and sloppy with blood.

Dwight then reached up, putting one hand around each of Jake's arms and attempted to lift him up like he was a kid. He was so heavy that Dwight heaved a few times until finally he freed Jake's flesh from the hook, the smushy sounds of his body slipping off of the metal sending a jolt of nausea through Meg.

He sputtered, blood droplets landing on both of them stood in front of his pitiful figure.

She eyed just how bad of shape he was in. He needed a doctor- which Meg knew wasn't going to happen because- well it was pretty fucking obvious why. Yet she didn't even know where to begin with treating a wound of that capacity. She was positive he had broken bones and probably a foot long laceration up his torso, not to mention the three inch hole punch in his shoulder.

Honestly, how was he even alive?

Heavy footsteps thudded behind the group. Then a breathy growling sound that swept right up their backs like a cold chill.

Meg turned and was met nearly face to face with the monster and its cleaver swinging right into her body. In the blink of an eye, she dodged it by a mere centimeter at most, throwing herself on the ground before scrambling quickly back to her feet.

She watched as Dwight and Jake fled the area, the so-called Trapper setting its sights on her.

The dread was debilitating. It felt like someone had their hands around her neck and all Meg could do was have an out of body moment where she realized this could be it. This really could be death. There were no second chances. No way out of this one. It would be painful, slow even, and she couldn't do anything to stop it. Just like that her life would slip away from her battered and mutilated body as if she never existed at all.

She didn't want it to end like this. There were so many things she was living for, it couldn't end like this…

Like a punch in the gut, Meg's mom flashed over her mind. She saw their hands clasped together. The soft words of her mother as she read a story with her, cozy in bed together. It was so sweet and kind and she wanted to see it again. She needed her mom, and her mom needed her.

As if struck by a sudden bolt of lightning, Meg was invigorated. She was going to survive to see her mom again. She had to.

Her fists clenched together as Meg promised herself that she would not quit until she was back home in her mother's embrace.

The Trapper, breathing heavy and hoarse, took fast and resounding stomps directly toward the girl.

She gritted her teeth and dashed away.

Meg took a knee, staring up at the Colorado Police Station past the tinted window of the police cruiser that she was taking refuge behind. If they wanted a piece of a slashed tire, well, they were gonna get it.

With trembling hands, she snaked the feeble pocket knife from her waistband and snapped it open. The blade glinted in the moonlight, looking somewhat menacing as Meg hesitantly brought the tip of it against the hard rubber of the tire.

This was it. There wasn't any coming back from this, that was for sure. Was this whole thing really important? Like… honestly. She was on the team already, she had a choice in doing this. They could easily get in trouble for coercing Meg into doing something as stupid as this.

The girl peered down at her hand, leading her gaze up to the knife. She thought about Dana and the way her face always twisted in jealousy around her. A smirk graced the track star's lips.

Imagining that Dana's face was the tire, Meg thrust her arm backward before launching it straight into the rubber. A loud burst of air emptied from the slice she made there. With all of her might, Meg sawed down and cut a big line all the way down to the rim. She went back to the top and heaved the knife down again on the other side.

By the end of it Meg was sweating from head to toe, having to put in a lot of work to make that little slice of rubber happen- yet she stood up straight, victorious with the slashed piece of tire in hand.

It was at that moment two police officers exited the station and began walking toward the car she was standing behind.

"Oh FUCK." Meg cussed to herself, wasting no time in frantically dashing away from the officers. Clearly she was hard to miss in her ridiculous costume, so the two men immediately tracked their eyes on her. They shouted, telling her to stop. Sure, they didn't know what she did but the guilty way she fled the scene was all they needed to know that Meg was up to no good.

She could hear the footsteps pound as they tried to catch up but soon they stopped, not being able to keep up with the sheer speed of Meg. She was light as air and seemingly floated past the buildings in town, the setting shifting into neighborhoods before she skidded to a stop in front of Hannah's house.

Meg kicked the front door open, dramatically walking in before brandishing the sliced tire, holding it up high for all the girls to ogle at. The room erupted in applause and cheers.

"This," she announced loudly, "came directly from a Colorado Police Cruiser- so consider me Dare Damsel from here on out."

They shrieked with excitement and disbelief, looking up to Meg as if she was some sort of Goddess. The victorious girl scanned the room, her gaze landing on Dana who stood in the corner appearing miserable, arms crossed with a disgusted frown on her lips. Meg locked eyes with her, shooting her a somewhat devilish smile.

It was about time she started to take down the bad guys for once.