Chapter Text
Follow your heart.
It was hard to think about what his heart was telling him when all he could hear was his body protesting his every step. It was hard to listen to his conscience whilst the weight of responsibility crushed the air from his lungs. Dwight had gotten got bad last round, he could tell, by the cacophonous rupture of the vessels netting his innards, and the swollen bulge of bruises across his middle. It was hard to consider listening to his heart while he held his stomach together with one arm, and blood sopped the sleeve of his sweater, which was tied tightly around his abdomen in an effort at manic self-first aid.
But that was the advice given to a thoroughly dissatisfied Dwight in the birthday inside a card written by none other than him. He’d drunk a beer while staring at the depressingly ironic card he’d picked off of the shelf at the pharmacy on the way home from his shift that night. It was the same advice he’d been given by his high school counsellor, who had made a decidedly sour face when Dwight asked her if she thought he could make it in engineering. It was the advice his mom had imparted to him after he’d become an early casualty of downsizing and was considering a career move, maybe into programming, or lending his body to dangerous medical experimentation. It was the same advice Dwight’d given himself over and over again for years, all-but begging himself to get his metaphorical together and make something of his life.
It was good advice when it came to choosing his next ill-fated occupation, but became categorically less helpful when running for his life from a deranged demon determined to bring him to his torturous end, and where every split-second decision meant the difference between freedom or an axe in the back.
Dwight paused in his ambling trek, leaning against a tree. Truth was: it had been so long since he’d heard from his heart, he wasn’t sure he even knew what it sounded like.
The wood around him seeped with cold, and not a cold that prickled the skin, but a heavy, wet cold that coated everything like a lacquer. He couldn’t even shiver, so overcharged were his nerves by the anxiety of the trial and subsequently worn out by the lull that came after victory. Victory it was, but narrow indeed, the four of them hobbling out on shaky limbs after outwitting the menace of the trial. The actual mechanism of his exodus was a blur to Dwight, for whom the countless trials were growing together into one passionless mass of unremarkable trauma.
His heart, or conscience, or the voice in his head telling him to do the “right” thing, was rather pushed into the background, behind the compulsion to just survive, to make it from moment to moment with the least amount of damage possible.
He knew that when he got to the campfire, his worries would ease, thanks merely to the proximity of his fellow travellers of the fog. They were plenty skilled in patching up, after regularity of practice bore their hands up firm and steady. Claudette had a knack for healing, and shared her techniques with Dwight, and anyone else so inclined to lessen their chances of bleeding out in the mud. His cohorts were all of them elsewise talented: good at evading the enemy, or distracting its gaze, or skilled at machinery and tinkering, or knowledgeable in wayfinding. Each of them had their own talents, and Dwight, well, his particular ability was something with which he was still coming to terms.
It was leadership, apparently. By virtue of his early arrival, Dwight was the leader of the group, to whom the others turned for guidance—and to blame when things went poorly. Besides regurgitating stellar advice, the like of which he didn’t follow himself, Dwight found his plans and plots were becoming scattered of late, with the addition of so many new faces around the fire, and it wasn’t the first time he’d come to think he was misrepresented among his fellows. After all, what sort of leader was he? Soft-spoken, naïve, maladroit, unremarkable in all senses—not exactly the stuff of legend.
Dwight shook his head, shivers coming in force, thrumming up his back and across his shoulders like hundreds of tiny fingers scritching at his skin. His diminished sense of self-image didn’t matter right now. What mattered was the pain in his middle. It called out to him in an angry voice, speaking notes of fiery agony across his torso. He needed the safety of the fire, where his wounds would quickly—if not painlessly—heal.
They were always spat out in some discrete location in the woods post-trial, forcing them to stumble back to the fire on their own strengths. It was an additional humiliation, Dwight decided, thought up by the maker of this place, the unseen thing that subjected them to torture. Usually, the trip back to camp was a short one, made easy after countless midnight hikes through the indistinguishable wood, following one’s nose. But sometimes it was too difficult to struggle back to the fire alone and so wounded, and campers would collapse a few hundred yards into the undergrowth, to be found by the others and carried to safety.
Beneath his feet was a solid, thick soil, pocked with stones and patches of fungi and moss. It was the deepest sort of wood, that which admitted no light and no sound, and even any wind that might’ve been blowing was choked by the wall of trees and their interlocked limbs. Dwight stepped carefully over uneven ground, built up by roots of unusual, coiling structure, scraggly, leafless brush, and hard mud. His worn sneakers were caked in dust which continued up the legs of his jeans.
At the height of his eyes the trees drove on and on in layers in the distance. He couldn’t yet see the orange-coloured corona of the campfire, but by some means he sensed he was moving in the right direction. There were senses besides the usual five, Dwight had learned, preternatural ones, which were strengthened by this continuous subjection to the unusual. In this space between life and death, Dwight developed a sense that was like seeing without his eyes, an ability to tell when his comrades were near and to see their silhouettes behind trees as clearly as if they were right in front of him. He could also sense when he was near to the safety of the fire, despite seeing nothing but dense wood around him. There was thick darkness, in shades of pewter and blue and black. He squinted to see the faint moonlight bouncing off the edges of trunks and denuded limbs.
His sneaker skidded on a knot and he winced as the jostling of his leg sent pain up his middle. He looked down at his waist; his button-up was tattered below his sternum, drenched in blood. He swore, gathering his footing once again.
He tried to envision the campfire as he trod alone. They’d built up quite a settlement there, his fellow travellers, stranded in the mist. They’d managed to scavenge bits from various places, stealing out of trials books, rope, broken appliances, candles, pillows, upholstery, and miscellany, in varied condition. When he arrived, his comrades would come hurrying to greet him—all but the four that were currently captive in a trial. They’d gather him up with the practiced surety of triage nurses, leading him over to a quiet spot to accept first aid.
Claudette or Nea or Yui would bandage his wounds while Jake or Meg assisted. He’d breathe a sigh of relief as his heartrate abated, and his pain leveled out under their patient hands. Ace would make some quip to lighten everyone’s moods. David would look at Dwight with a frown that belied worry, and finally just shake his head and pat Dwight coarsely on the shoulder. Kate would be playing a song at the fireside, or Adam might be favouring them with a story of cultural clash during his years abroad. Dwight could see all of their faces so clearly in his mind’s eye; it was left only to seek them now in reality. He trudged unceasingly, one foot scuffing the earth at a time.
Upon a slight turn, where Dwight sensed he should turn left, he heard a sound. Any sound in the empty wood was cause for alarm, but especially this one, which sounded like the crunching of footsteps, sent a chill up his spine.
He paused and ducked behind the closest tree, listening, heartrate leaping to a painful gallop. He clenched both arms around his middle, gritting his teeth as the pain doubled when he stood still. Try as he might, though, he heard nothing else after a soft jostle of leaves, like a branch had fallen—or someone was trying to move about very quietly.
He shook his head. There was no danger out here in the wood surrounding the fire. He did not have to fear any enemy. If anything, it was a fellow stranded who’d evaded his preoccupied observation.
Dwight came out from behind the tree and continued, whimpering just a little as his foot connected with a stone and sent a new jolt of numbing pain through his middle, and while doing so, noting the large mass directly in his path.
Dwight started, peering at the thing from afar. It was a…stone, or a pile of earth? He was too far and the darkness was too profound to tell the thing, but it perturbed him. It wasn’t…right. It wasn’t supposed to be here—nothing but trees and darkness was. In all his time in this place, and after all the unexplainable horrors he’d seen, that he knew for sure.
He gave the thing a wide wake, approaching cautiously from the side. He was compelled to just rush past it, situated as it was between him and his destination: the soothing, warming campfire. He bemoaned his luck. Why did it have to be right there? Why, out of every spot in this massive, godforsaken, soul-crushingly deep wood, did it have to be there, right in his way?
As he came closer he saw that the thing was big. He felt that he was looking at it without his glasses, and had to touch a finger to their frame to remind himself that they were in fact on his face. The thing was dark in colour, uneven in shape so it was not a fallen log—was it...?
A body.
Dwight’s chest gave a lurch. Was it one of the other members of the camp? Dead? Here? But whoever it was was not familiar, and had no light. He swallowed, finding his throat tight around a lump. He crept forward yet farther and saw that the body was larger than his cohorts by some margin, dressed in thick workman’s overalls, and metal protruded from the garments in stark, rusted blades. He was flat on its stomach, with arms above the head as if he were dragging himself by them before falling completely prone. HeHe was covered in injury, so much that it was hard to make out any other details beneath the gore. His shoulders were bare, and his face was a white, rough-hewn, carved open smile…
Dwight yelped and leapt back as he realized what he was seeing. It was a hunter—an enemy marooned in their woods. Their woods—these were supposed to be the safe stronghold of the fog travellers, uninvaded by the violence and horrors of the trial, in their many forms.
The Trapper—so they had named the enemy who stalked about on heavy limbs and wore a bone-coloured mask upon which his breath broke like a wild boar’s as he approached with all of the subtly of a freight train—was spread across Dwight’s path. His body was mutilated, stuck all over with implements of metal, and scars were fresh and bloody on what of his back was exposed. He looked more horrific dead than alive, Dwight realized, a thick swallow caught halfway down his throat—but there was something about the crumpled corpse he couldn’t tear his eyes from.
Dwight walked around to the front of the creeping corpse, so he could see the face more clearly. The mask was splattered in blood, too, and it dripped down the back of the neck. Dwight squinted for a moment, clutching his side while he snuck closer.
It reminded him of finding a dead rabbit in the road while on a walk—so recently deceased that its flesh was still supple and its eyes still glossy. There was something horrible about knowing that just moments previous, it had been living, bounding worry-free through the grass near the highway. Since coming to this place, Dwight’s relationship with death had been significantly altered, but still...
Looking at the hunter, there was an odd…simpatico. Contingency of another sort. Dwight felt a twinge of something, something that was primitive and sensitive and made him tense up at the sight of a bunny hit by a car during a jaunt across the road. Like this, the Trapper was not an invincible goliath bent on killing, but just a man, worn down by injury like anyone else would be.
The head of the Trapper was turned to the side, mask fastened so tightly over the face that the ropes connecting it dug into the flesh at the back of his skull. Then, without warning, he moved.
Dwight nearly had a heart attack when he saw the Trapper lift his head, indicating life still within the savage frame. Dwight leapt back, eyes so wide that they started to water. The enemy tried to lift himself up, pushing into his arms before collapsing again, chest hitting the earth with a thud. Again he rose, just to fall once more and go still, though not before stuttering out a word that could’ve been “help” or “get”, though Dwight didn’t stay to decipher it.
Dwight sprinted away from the body as fast as he could. He ran until he felt sick, though he couldn’t throw up, but neither could he cough forcefully enough to bring the air back into his lungs. The campfire finally, blessedly came into view and he all but threw himself into the fold, skidding to a stop too late and collapsing onto his knees and hands and panting so much he could barely breathe.
From a mix of the horror of the scene in the woods, and the pain of his injury, which was now gushing blood, spilling it down his midsection and the front of his thighs—Dwight was unable to return to his feet, and stayed there on his knees while a few of his fellow stranded gathered around him. Claudette put a hand on his back, and Jake knelt nearby and encouraged him to breathe, and when he could do so, Jake asked him if he’d seen a ghost. Dwight shook his head.
***
Around the campfire, they’d set up a sizable settlement, stretching no further than the reach of the fire’s light, but large enough to accommodate all of the two-dozen stranded who now gathered there. The camp was segmented into separate “apartments” for each person. Each corner nook had its own theme and aesthetic, decorated by blankets pulled out of Haddonfield, pillows filched from the shrine, and even lights snatched from the laboratory and powered by batteries from the wrecker’s yard. Among piles of scrap they found tools and tinkered until they had a working set-up—they even dragged a small generator out of a trial once, and refilled it with gasoline from the scrapyard when needed.
Camp was arranged in segments like the petals of a flower, with each segment housing a different person and the fire making up the glowing centre of the peony. The fire itself was a massive spirit of nature, now—once an unassuming little pit of embers, no taller than Dwight’s waist and no wider than something dug out at a beach, now it was a huge bonfire to be the envy of pagans on Samhain. It rose far over ten feet, and the surrounding space had also grown wider to accommodate it, in some magical way the woods themselves seemed to decide. With its growth, they lost a convenient meeting space, where the group could gather around in a circle and discuss their strategies or tell tall tales. Although, the group was getting rather large for those sorts of roundtable chats, anyway.
The items of use, like medical kits, were stored in a large stockpile for common consumption, a pile which now towered nearly as tall as the tallest of the stranded, with layers and layers of first-aid kits arranged in rows like bricks.
Dwight lay down on a blanket under a canopy of industrial lights, hung from the branches of a huge conifer. It was the “first aid” area, where they went to patch up after trials, outfitted with the most lights (the firelight simply wasn’t adequate for tending wounds) and within reach of the aid kits. He stared up at the flickering bulbs while Claudette tended to the wound on his stomach. Injuries healed quickly at the fireside, but not instantly.
He peeked down at Claudette as she soaked more gauze with his juices and then walked over to toss the soiled lot in the ever-burning fire. The flames consumed all and never choked or diminished. It was a thought as frightening as it was comforting—and while attempts to burn down the rest of the wood with the flame had outright failed, when they had attempted it, in desperation to be free of his moonlit prison, it was still a dangerous entity. Burns from the campfire were real, but not deadly, and healed like every other wound.
A piece of gauze caught a new suture and pulled, and Dwight winced and automatically put his hand over it. Claudette patiently lifted his hand out of the way and continued.
Claudette had changed so much since first they met. Dwight remembered a shy, big-eyed girl who rarely spoke and scarcely made eye-contact, and though while she still seldom looked someone in the eyes, she was certainly less hidden within herself than she had been. She had taken to the role of healer very much reluctantly, and even shared with Dwight, and even knowing how awful it sounded, that she wished that a doctor or someone qualified would become stranded with them and take away her crucial duty. But the fact was that she was the closest of them—the four of them that arrived first—to understanding the slightest bit about how to cure burns and dress wounds. She also had the advantage of understanding natural medicine, and some of the offerings found about the trials were serendipitously filled with soothing herbs.
Dwight thought about telling her what he’d seen. He had to tell someone—they had to go back out there and ensure that the enemy was…well, no longer a threat. Maybe they could even lug the body back to camp and…
For some reason, he couldn’t finish the thought. Still, the situation had to be attended to. He watched Claudette, observing the way the whitish industrial lights bounced beams off of her cheeks and nose as she concentrated, and wondered how she’d respond.
“Hey, Mr. Layabout.”
Meg peeked her head around into the healing space, shooting Dwight a frown he’d come to read as a mix of annoyed and pleased to see him. She plopped down next to him on crossed legs, taking up the side not occupied by Claudette, and surveyed his body.
“You gonna laze around there all day?” she asked, the common expression still not having gone out of use despite the, well, lack of day.
Dwight tried to crack a smile, but frankly, the pain was still too heavy on him. The sutures stung like beestings, and despite the herbs Claudette had supplied, his abdomen felt like it was going to explode out of him in a burst of broken vessels and pulverized bones. He’d heal soon, as the Realm never left them injured long—what was the point, after all, of subjecting half-dead chumps to a test of survival? Still, relief could not come soon enough.
“Hey, I think I’m doing pretty good for a guy who got sliced up like a Thanksgiving turkey,” Dwight joked, patting his chest.
“Lose anything important?” Meg asked, pursing her lips.
“You mean, like, my intestines?” Dwight chuckled, “or my dignity?”
“I said anything important—car keys, wallet?” Meg teased back, her face remarkably stoic. Only one person did deadpan better than her, and with Jake, it was much harder to tell if he was being a cold-hearted bastard as a joke.
Dwight laughed. “I think a kidney might’ve fallen out.”
Meg hummed. “Ah, well. That’s why we have three, right?”
He peeked over at Claudette. She seemed to be in her own little world. She got so deeply fixated, it was troubling, until you understood that that’s just how she worked.
“Why am I patching you up if you’re healthy enough to crack jokes?” Claudette intoned dryly.
“I appreciate it,” he replied, flushing and peering over at Meg like a scolded sibling.
Meg, with Claudette and Jake, rounded out his closest friends around the campfire, though she wouldn’t admit it if her life was on the line—which is an impressive display of fortitude considering how often it was. They’d known each other now for what felt to be years, and they could often be in each other’s company in complete silence, his head in her lap, or Meg resting across his legs while they listened to the crackle of the fire. Dwight had never before had friends so close, but he supposed the immediacy of death brought people remarkable intimacy.
“So uh,” Meg said, reaching for Dwight’s hand and twining one finger around the pinky. “Just wanted to let you know, but, David is being…a real fucker, lately.”
Dwight furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“He’s really badgering the shit out of the new guy, Felix,” Meg explained in a quiet voice. Distantly, Dwight heard the sounds of conversation, distorted by the obnoxious crackle of the bonfire. “I know that’s how he is, but I think something’s just getting…lost in translation.”
Dwight took a deep breath—though not so deep as to agitate his stitches—and let it out. Claudette was smearing some cooling cream laden with homemade herbal goop across his now closed wound. He was feeling to be on the mend, but still wasn’t exactly keen on going over and dealing with a rowdy David so immediately after being ripped open like a bag of chips.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Dwight assured, “David just needs to get used to people.”
“I know,” Meg replied, picking at the fabric of her leggings with her spare hand, plucking and letting the spandex snap back into place. “I just don’t want things to get out of hand, y’know?”
Dwight nodded. He’d deal with it. Not now, however. Right now, he had something bigger to worry about—bigger than David, even, by about a foot and a hundred pounds, by his reckoning—if it wasn’t the adrenaline of the trials blowing Dwight’s estimate of the enemy’s size way out of proportion.
He thought about telling Meg. She would probably have trouble keeping it to herself, and in no time cause a panic, which would then stir up an angry mob, led by a bloodthirsty Ash out for “dead-ite” blood, to take through the woods.
Dwight rested for a while longer until he felt he could sit up without wanting to scream. He prodded at his healing belly, finally doing the lower buttons of his shirt back over it before wandering over to his own place to change. The stranded each kept the strange offerings of clothes and accessories they were gifted by the Realm in their own spaces. Among Dwight’s were his uniform from the first pizza place he’d worked, and a nametag from the start-up where he’d made a fool of himself… Why these items appeared here was a mystery, though Dwight expected it was some other cruel joke.
He took off his ruined, bloody shirt (the sweater used to hold his guts in long since discarded) and wadded it up for disposal in the fire, and then put on a new button-up in its place. At least the Realm deigned to keep them dressed, even if it accorded them few other creature comforts.
He headed directly to Jake’s apartment, which was rigged the most efficiently with lights, screwed into the large tree that gave him privacy, and walled in with two tarps and a few blankets. Jake spent most of his time outside of trials tinkering with machinery stolen from the scrapyard. He was seated on a stool and playing with a ruined engine he’d snatched therefrom.
Dwight trusted Jake entirely, as he did Claudette and Meg, the four of them having a unique bond between them.
Dwight cleared his throat sheepishly as he stood at Jake’s back. The man shot a glance over his shoulder, then gave a short, “what?”
Dwight had expected no more than a one-word answer, and smiled fondly. “I gotta tell you something.”
Jake looked over his shoulder again, then, spotting Dwight’s anxiousness, put aside his project with a sigh.
Dwight sidled into the space, looking it over as he entered. It was liveable, but certainly not beautiful: workable, unadorned, a lot like Jake’s fashion sense, or even the way he portrayed himself. He was no-nonsense, but quick-witted as all hell, and not even the slightest bit selfish. Self-possessed, perhaps—one of the phrases he was most fond of was “it’ll be easier if l just do it myself.”
Once they were private, Dwight looked Jake heavily in the eyes, finding the gaze that was returned to him just as severe. Perhaps Jake had been suspecting something ever since Dwight dismissed him when he first dragged himself back to camp, looking like he’d seen not just one ghost, but a whole convention of them.
“I saw one of the hunters out in the woods,” Dwight explained softly, and Jake’s eyes widened instantly.
“By woods, you mean…?” he asked.
“Out here,” Dwight clarified, “the woods.”
“What the fuck, man?!” he hissed, his nostrils flaring, “why the fuck didn’t you say so right away?”
“He-he was injured,” Dwight explained further, “passed out. H-he’s probably dead by now. It was like he’d just been picked up and dropped right in the middle of the woods. And he was in bad shape.”
“Oh, great, yeah, that’s awesome,” Jake balked, “a maniac running loose in the woods, and he’s injured. You know what an injured grizzly is like, Dwight? Just about as friendly as a non-injured one.”
Dwight shook his head. “I mean he was seriously injured. The state he was in, he’s not ‘running’ anywhere.”
A noise pricked their ears and they both turned towards the fire. An errant spark popping was enough to set Dwight even more on edge. His heart was starting to race just at the recollection. That crumpled, mangled body, soaked in a sheen of blood, in the middle of nowhere, no trace as to how it had arrived… He didn’t want to go anywhere near it again, yet he needed to return to make sure that it was truly the non-threat he was insisting it was.
“Just…come with me to check on it,” Dwight said, “I’ll show you where it was.”
“What do you expect me to do about it?” Jake balked, holding a gloved hand in a manner as though he was expecting an answer to fall into it, “cut it up for meat?”
“I-I don’t know,” Dwight scrubbed a hand through his hair, mussing it into a flurry of wayward spikes. “Maybe we can…figure out how he got here. Like a clue, or something.”
“Jeezus,” Jake hissed, shaking his head. He moved his hands to his hips. “Fine. Lead the way.”
They left the fireside as informally as possible—as was getting easier with the larger crowd. Quentin, seated on a log, nodded at them as they passed, but no one else paid them any mind. Going for a walk—that was the excuse Dwight held under his tongue, like a spy might hold a cyanide pill, in case someone asked. He hated being so secretive, but if anything warranted restraint, it was dealing with the fact that a hunter—one of the beasts that haunted their steps—was somewhere in these dark woods.
“Which one is it, by the way?” Jake asked, when they were out of earshot of camp.
“The uh…Trapper,” Dwight replied, and Jake guffawed.
“Oh, that’s just great.”
Dwight led them in the direction he’d come in from. It wasn’t hard to find his way, the landmarks so vivid in his mind’s eye thanks to the adrenaline of the harried trip into camp. There was a rock here, a tree with wide roots there, a patch of sludgy lichen here—and finally, there was the place he’d found the body.
As he approached, he had a lump in his throat. He wasn’t sure if he was more worried that it would still be there—or that it wouldn’t be.
They crept closer, Dwight raising a hand to caution Jake to move carefully, step by tiny step.
The body was still face-down, unmoving. One of the arms was reaching forward and the other stuck beneath the belly, the masked face was turned into the dirt, and the shoulders, back, arms, and legs, were painted in dried blood.
“Shit,” Jake said as he stepped around Dwight to get closer to the body. Neither of them went any closer than an arm’s reach, somewhat expecting the hunter to at any moment leap up and grab them like someone’s unfunny uncle on Halloween, waiting on the porch for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters with a sack over his head. “How the fuck…?”
Dwight couldn’t lift his eyes from the body. His wounds were extensive, and while some of the metal implements Dwight knew to have been there, sticking out of the shoulder and arm before, some of them seemed recently applied, and with an extreme lack of delicacy.
Looking at the finer details of the body, from the rough, leather-like skin, the shards of shrapnel invading the flesh, to the arm twisted unnaturally out of the socket, Dwight noticed something else: he was breathing.
It couldn’t be. Dwight was torn between leaping forward to inspect and running for his life, so he ended up stock-still, drawing in a sharp gasp. The—he—couldn’t’ve survived what was done to him. He was practically raw, butchered flesh barely held together by ruddy overalls and a bunch of overlarge skewers. He couldn’t be alive. Couldn’t.
“He’s breathing,” Dwight got out, amazed. Jake turned to him in horror before looking for himself.
“Oh shit, you’re right,” Jake yelped, leaping back.
“He’s not dead,” Dwight whispered, shaking his head. He stared. What kind of will to live was struggling on inside this man that he could continue to draw breath? His large body was rising and falling ever-so slightly with it, his back expanding and shrinking again like a flag in some haunted breeze. Dwight went nearer. He had to see…
“Whoa, hold on,” Jake took him by the elbow, “you’re not gonna actually…?”
Dwight gently removed himself and continued.
Dwight crouched beside the body. It resembled a normal man—one that bled and breathed and maybe even talked and dreamed and was afraid like any other man. They couldn’t leave him here, face-down in the dirt to die alone. Because he would die, out here. Dwight knew it. He knew what getting lost out in the immortal woods meant. And while the Realm always seemed to pick up stranded and put them back on their feet, no matter how bad shape they were in, something wanted this one dead. Dwight was distinctly aware that if they didn’t help the man, no one would.
Maybe, for once, it was apt for Dwight to follow his own advice and listen to his heart.
“Look, we can’t leave him here like this,” Jake said, coarsely. “Does he have a weapon with him, or…?” He peered around the surrounding ground.
Dwight looked over his shoulder at Jake. “Why?”
Jake’s posture was stiff as a tree. “What if he gets up and comes after us? This is supposed to be our safe place. We can’t have—”
Dwight shook his head. He too had thought about being rid of this menace for good, watching the body burn on a pyre—but now, the thought was unconscionable. “We can’t just kill him, Jake. Are you serious right now?”
“Are you serious?” Jake rebutted, eyes wide. “This guy—he’s killed us more times than we can count. He’s evil. Dangerous.”
Dwight wouldn’t hear it. “He’s an unarmed, injured man. It would make us no better than the hunters.”
“I think I’m fine with shedding a little more of my morality,” Jake answered, “for our safety. For all of our safety.”
Dwight didn’t reply for a long moment. His eyes burned and his head pounded so much that the lingering pain in his abdomen was an abandoned afterthought. He just kept watching the Trapper’s slow, shallow breathing and thought about the nastiest part of the trials: how it felt to be abandoned by teammates when the circumstances were too dire to allow for rescue. How it felt to bleed to death, unable to so much as crawl on his belly like a salamander too long out of water, while the people he called friends walked away and left him.
“We…we gotta help him,” Dwight affirmed, getting back to his feet. He made fists at his sides.
“What?!” the soft-spoken Jake nearly yelled. “You can’t be—”
“Maybe he can tell us something,” Dwight said, trying for the pragmatic, since he certainly couldn’t explain all the levels of illogic going on in his head right now, “if he got in here, then maybe…we can get out of here?”
Jake shook his head. “He’s an actual killer, Dwight.”
“Well,” Dwight replied, “I’m not.”
Jake ran a gloved hand down his face, quickly composed again. He wasn’t about to take a machete to a sleeping man, after all. “Do what you want. But you’re telling the rest.”
Dwight nodded. “We can’t carry him with just the two of us, anyway.” With even both of their strengths, Dwight doubted they could even turn the hulk of a man over on his side, much less drag him near enough the fire to exploit its healing effects.
Jake shook his head. “Nah, man, you’re on your own.”
***
Dwight called the stranded together, in the collection of logs that worked as their fire circle, near to the looming bonfire but no longer surrounding it. Looking among the other stranded, he saw that David, Kate, Min and Felix were absent, and breathed a sigh of relief. This would likely go more smoothly without the biggest personalities absent. With all eyes upon him, he pondered how he would break the news, before Jake decided for him.
“So, one of the hunters is out in the forest, all beat to hell,” he said, arms crossed as he stood at Dwight’s side.
The group’s calm quickly devolved into horrified chatter, protests, mumbles, moans, and questions hurled at Dwight like confetti. He looked at Jake who offered him only a shrug.
“It’s okay,” Dwight announced over the clamour, “he’s completely passed out. He’ll be dead soon, without help.”
“Help?!” Quentin shouted, getting to his feet. “Why the hell would we help a hunter?!”
“Are you kidding me?!” Nea chimed in, stomping a heel into the dirt. “Why didn’t you say something right away?!”
“We’ve gotta do something!” Jane cried, waving her hands. A chorus of agreement swelled up like a wave.
Dwight raised his hands for quiet, though he may as well have been gesturing at empty space. Everyone continued to complain, and Dwight could feel his resolve weakening. Being a decent leader meant having a fair amount of empathy, but…
He climbed up onto the log and yelled loud enough to be heard over the tumult.
“Listen!” he exclaimed, and when the group quieted, lowered his voice in turn. “The way I see it is this: if he’s here, he’s not out there.”
Thus he gestured with his hands, placing the mimed hunter inside and then outside of camp, and the stranded gathered about paused to consider it. A hunter in their company was one less out there trying to kill them.
“Okay, okay, maybe. So we bring him here—then what?” Steve asked.
“Treat his wounds,” Dwight said, feeling distinctly like a snowball rolling down a hill, half like he was going out of control and half like he was gaining momentum, “figure out what he knows. How he got here.”
“My friend,” Ace piped up, his arms crossed neatly over his chest, “I admire your kindness, I really do. But have you ever heard of a deer that nurses a wolf back to health?”
Dwight chewed his cheek. “Maybe, if we help him… you know lion with a thorn in its paw?”
“Is that what this is about?” Adam stepped forward. “Are you expecting he’ll be so grateful for our help that he just…come over to our side?”
Dwight wasn’t sure what he was expecting. In his mind, the choice was a pragmatic one: a hunter in their custody was one less hunter to screw them over. And surely, the Trapper had some intimate knowledge of this system and how it worked. How he would work that knowledge out of the observably mute, potentially blood-crazed hunter was a different question.
“I need at least three people to help carry him back to camp,” Dwight said, considering the debate closed, at least for now. If there was one thing the lot of them had in common—and maybe it was only one thing—it was the propensity to improvise.
“Not into camp, surely,” Jane said, shaking her head, looking aghast.
“Fifty yards out, alright?” Jake spoke up, to Dwight’s slight surprise. He looked first to Jane, giving her a nod, and then to Dwight, with whom he locked eyes and gave a severe look.
“And restrained,” Bill said, then, and moved towards his quarters with a look like he had the intent to do the deed himself. He returned shortly with a length of rope, which he snapped demonstratively between his hands.
***
Steve, Nea and Meg joined Dwight in his effort, either out of loyalty to him or to morbid curiosity, he didn’t know or really care. It wasn’t out of the kindness of their hearts, he was pretty sure, because even he struggled to feel sympathy for the hulk of a man. This was the sort of man whom you crossed the street to avoid when you saw him marching down the sidewalk; he was so big and frightening, just muscles and anger. And the effort it took to carry him even a few yards at a time was enough to inspire ire.
Each hefted one colossal limb, the men at the arms and the women the legs. They had to lower the limp Trapper to the ground every few steps, so heavy and unwieldy his body was. The body was also slathered in blood like barbeque sauce on meat, so much that it seeped into their clothing and stained their arms up to the elbows. But that wasn’t something the stranded were unused to.
They lowered the limp, unconscious body to the dusty ground, Dwight taking note that he was still breathing and fairly warm to the touch, so their efforts were not in vain. They shook out their sore limbs and stretched out tall for a moment’s rest.
Meg was crouched and studying the bone-coloured mask with intense curiosity, poking at the jagged teeth with a fingertip. She’d wanted to take it off and reveal the face underneath, but Dwight had stopped her.
“Why the fuck not?” Meg hissed at him, affronted like a teen who’d been caught smoking out her window when Dwight reprimanded her.
“Like… imagine if someone tried to strip you while you were asleep,” Dwight explained.
Meg shrugged, though her hand covered automatically around the zipper of her top. “So we’re respecting hunters’ privacy now?”
Dwight didn’t answer. It was more pragmatism, he insisted in his head: if they were to expect any cooperation from the Trapper, Dwight expected ripping off his mask while he was helpless wouldn’t be the path to it. Or, maybe Dwight was just scared as hell of what might be under it.
They hefted the body again on a count of three, shuffling awkwardly with bent knees and hunched backs and to a clearing adjacent the strandeds’ own, from where they could see the fire but likely he could not see them. They placed the hunter up against a broad tree, careful to avoid braining themselves or losing eyeballs on the pieces of shrapnel that sprung from his shoulder. The Trapper’s upper body flopped over towards his lap, folding him limply over his midsection.
“What do you suppose happens if he dies here?” Steve asked, hands on his hips while he panted out the effort of lugging what accounted for a tranquilized gorilla out of the woods.
“Same thing that happens to us, maybe,” Dwight mused, “he gets put back where he came from.”
“Think the hunters have a campfire?” Steve asked, a sassy smile caught in his cheek.
Dwight shrugged. He thought about it a moment and couldn’t imagine the hunters being able to spend any time around each other without ripping each other to shreds. He didn’t know where hunters went outside of trials—until now, he supposed they were always in them.
Meg and Steve wandered back to camp, their sleeves and fronts soaked with crimson, while Nea stood over the body for a moment, head tilted in thought.
Dwight shifting the Trapper’s legs so that they stretched out in front. Massive boots caked in blood and mud were separately larger than his head.
“I’m just wondering,” Nea tilted her head in the opposite direction, “who hunts the hunter?”
Dwight looked at the sordid mask.
Dwight brought Bill and Ace over to restrain the Trapper by tying his arms behind his back around the tree. Bill fashioned cuffs for around the wrists, not too tight as to cut off circulation, but enough to secure them, then he tied the two wrists together behind the tree’s trunk with the finesse of someone well-versed in knot-tying for its various purposes. Dwight watched with slightly worried fascination.
He and Ace lifted the Trapper to sit up, and then Bill wound the rope around his chest to keep him upright. The masked face still lulled forward into the breast, but the breathing seemed to deepen, then, like a man in a restful sleep. Gashes on his chest and shoulders were unsealed and still dribbled blood, but still he breathed and persisted with a tenacity Dwight could almost admire.
Dwight crouched by the body when he was left alone with it. There was still that dead-rabbit-on-the-side-of-the-road queasiness, but there was determination, too. This was a goal, a project for him to work on. He rolled up his sleeves and sat with his arms on his bent knees.
Other stranded came by to look, out of morbid fascination, at the captured hunter. Jane huffed and turned the other way the moment the mangled body came into view. Nancy had that deer-in-the-headlights look, but that was more-or-less her normal expression. Claudette stood at the Trapper’s feet, staring wordlessly down at the body.
“You don’t have to help me,” Dwight said softly to her, when it was just the two of them alone in the clearing, minus their mute captive. “Really. It’s not your responsibility. I mean it.”
Claudette paused a long minute before replying with a solemn nod. She wandered off, and Dwight did not expect her back again, until she was there hefting armfuls of medkits and gauze. He nodded back.
They started by simply cleaning the Trapper’s wounds, wiping away enough blood to see what there was to work with. They soaked up so much blood, they could’ve built another man out of the wads of gauze. The gashes across the Trapper’s chest were extensive, but some of them were very old, and only a few of them deep enough to really cause harm. The wounds were superficial, and no doubt would burn like hornet stings when they washed them out with alcohol-impregnated gauze, but the wounded Trapper gave no sign of pain, nor waking.
They pasted butterfly tapes over the narrower gashes and packed gauze into the wider ones. They clipped him out of his overalls, letting the straps fall loose into his lap, to expose his chest and back to their care. Revealed was a broad chest belying tremendous upper-body fitness (Dwight supposed swinging a cleaver and hefting stranded over the shoulder like bags of rice was quite a workout). Based on his body, Dwight put the Trapper at 40 years old, maybe younger, and aged instead by circumstance. It was hard to tell for sure with the mask on.
It came soon to the shrapnel in his shoulders, which was again applied somewhat superficially, and only some of it newly. Whoever or whatever had done it had done so with the intent to scare, to punish, to torment, not to kill. Or, not to kill quickly, at least.
“What do we do with this?” Claudette asked, silently scrubbing the Trapper’s meaty arm with a soft bandage, careful not to disturb the protrusion of iron that burst from the skin.
Dwight sat back on his knees. “Pull it out. It doesn’t look that deep.”
He went and consulted Jake, who provided him with a pair of pliers and a judgemental look that might’ve caused a Dwight to second-guess himself on other occasions.
He stood beside the hulking body, finding that seated, Trapper was nearly his height while standing. The thought made him a little queasy.
Dwight fastened the plyers around a piece of shrapnel that looked like an iron rod, the handle of a tool of some sort, broken off in the flesh. He pulled, finding it took a fair amount of effort to rip the thing out, and watching when it finally came free a rush of blood flooding from the hole it left.
Claudette moved to sop up the blood, and they continued in that manner through the remaining pieces, of which there seemed to be dozens.
“I appreciate the help,” Dwight said, panting lightly from the effort of his task. Another spike of metal slid free from the meat of the Trapper’s shoulder, opening a round hole gushing brown-red blood. “You really don’t have to feel obligated, though.”
Claudette stuffed a wad of gauze into the fresh wound, and then went to open another medical kit. The emptied ones were piling up beside her like shed skins from a beetle. “That’s not exactly what you said when I first got here. Do you remember?”
Dwight felt his stomach drop a little. He couldn’t remember what he’d said back then; the adrenaline and the nasty desire to fight and survive was so heavily in his head he couldn’t think straight, in those early days, before they’d learned the system, and before the rest had arrived.
“You told me to suck it up and patch myself up. We were in a field, I can’t remember where, I’d just gotten hit—I think I was crying,” Claudette explained, “and you said there was no time for crying, we just had to survive.”
Dwight winced. He’d been a little harsh back then, for sure, and sure, some of those old compulsions hadn’t gone: he vacillated between anxiety-riddled inaction, and spontaneous rash outbursts; such had been his problem since way before this place. What had lost him a few jobs in his previous life plagued him still now—he’d hardly hesitated before deciding to drag the hunter back to the fire.
“Sorry,” Dwight answered sheepishly.
“It’s fine,” Claudette replied, “it was decent advice. You have to put your feelings aside to get the job done. Listen to your brain instead of your heart.”
Dwight pulled another obnoxious spike from the Trapper’s body, watching with horror how long it took to completely pull out, realizing how deeply it had penetrated. Sometimes he had to flinch. And watching things get stabbed through shoulders was particularly traumatizing to him.
He moved down the arm, and finally all of the metal was removed from the Trapper’s sagging body. He still breathed, slowly and deeply throughout it, like a horrid creature in hibernation. Dwight and Claudette wrapped the arm in bandages, as difficult as it was with the man restrained, it was not impossible, and they were not about to untie him, even unconscious as he was. They stepped back to look upon what they’d done.
Dwight looked at his hands to see them stained with blood, in the same way the Trapper’s were up to the elbows. He would go for a wash in the icy-cold river just aways out from the fire, once he felt comfortable enough giving up vigil. There was something horribly uncanny about seeing the hunter so incapacitated, as still as a doll, slouching on a child’s shelf.
“Thanks,” Dwight said softly, “I’ll stay here, see if he wakes up.”
Claudette nodded, and took her armfuls of emptied medkits to the fire to dispose of.
Dwight looked at his captive—was he captive? Prisoner?—pondering deeply. What manner of man or creature had done what it did to the Trapper? The man stood over six feet, was built like a train, though less spry—how could any man or beast get advantage over him, enough to injure him so gravely?
Dwight went closer, heartbeat skittering upwards as he crouched beside the Trapper and looked him hard in the eyeholes of the mask. Behind the bone-coloured shroud were two closed eyes and a firmly shut mouth, hiding whatever secrets he held inside.