The Cabin in the Woods (16 page)

Fisting her hands, she felt the tackiness of Jules’s blood between her fingers and on her palms.

“What
is
that thing?” she cried.

“I don’t know,” Curt said. “But there’s more of them.”

“More of them?” she asked, glancing at Marty.

He nodded.

“I saw a young girl. All... zombied up. Like him.” He nodded at the door, seemingly unembarrassed by his choice of words, and no one mocked him. “And she was all ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ too, but she’s missing an arm...” He trailed off, frowning. Even another impact from big-zombie couldn’t upset that brief, loaded moment of silence among the four of them.

It can’t be
, Dana thought, but at the same moment she knew it was.

“Oh God,” she said. “Patience. That diary we found... ”

“‘The pain outlives the flesh,’” Holden quoted. “She must have... bound a mystical incantation into the text
so someone would come along, read the diary aloud and—”

“And I did it,” Dana said quietly. She glanced at Marty. “You told me not to, but I did it.” Marty only shook his head, his expression sad, not accusing. But she didn’t need someone else blaming her in order to feel the sudden flush of guilt.

“Look, brainiac,” Curt snapped at Holden, aggression hiding his terror. “I don’t give a limp dick
why
those things are here. We gotta lock this place down!”

“He’s right,” Marty said, nodding. Shivering. Dana could see them
all
shivering now, and she felt it in herself. For now it was adrenalin coursing through them, and they had to take advantage of that. Once the shivering became due to fear and pain, their bodies would grow cooler, their muscles would weaken, and whatever chances they had at survival would grow much less.

Wham!
Another impact against the door. The frame shook, wood cracked, but the sofa was wedged tight beneath the handle.

“We’ll go room by room,” Curt said. “Barricade every window and door.” He headed toward the back of the cabin, alone, then turned and waved them to him. “Come on! We gotta play it safe. No matter what,
we have to stay together
!”

Damn right!
Dana thought. The thing outside impacted the cabin again, and again, and she couldn’t imagine being alone.

Crash... crash... crash...!

Dana turned her back on her friend’s dead stare.

SEVEN

S
itterson knew that Hadley would be panicking right now. That was just his style. Once the real game began, he became edgy and nervous, seeing the few obscure ways things could go wrong, instead of the many ways they were going right. It was Hadley’s way of working, that was all. How he kept focused, maintained his composure.

But that still didn’t prevent it from pissing off Sitterson.

Least
they could do was enjoy themselves a little.

Hadley slumped down in his chair, one hand to his forehead.

“Calm down, I got it,” Sitterson said as he tapped some keys. “Watch the master work.” He brought up three new windows on his computer, then tapped a switch on his control panel array.

“There.” He sat back in his chair, hands laced behind his head, and glanced across at Hadley.
“What?” Hadley asked.

Sitterson sighed and nodded at the large displays.

“Eyes on the screen,” he said. “The camera never lies.”

•••

This is so fucked up,
Marty thought. Things had gone from laughter to panic in a matter of minutes, and now there was running and shouting and screaming and dying, and he wasn’t sure just when things had changed. Seeing Curt outside, of course... bleeding, panicked raving... that had been when reality had become more terrifying for him. But he had a feeling that everything had begun to change much earlier than that.

Curt’s behavior with Jules had been so unlike him, and even earlier, down in the basement when they’d been looking through all that weird old stuff, something had seemed not quite right. The stuff down there was stacked and piled and stored so haphazardly that Marty couldn’t help but see some order in it all, as if it had been placed that way. Maybe he was the only one who
could
see that, and it was his laid-back approach to life that encouraged him to find order in chaos, but he thought not. Not completely, at least. There had been something more.

Something like design.

Now Curt was leading them to the back of the cabin to make sure all the doors and windows were secure and blocked up. And though Curt was the jock
everyone looked up to and respected because he was cool, good-looking, and generally a great guy... even that felt wrong.

Holden and Dana moved close together, not holding hands but touching fingers as they walked. Marty coveted their security.

Thump!
The thing hit the cabin again, and Curt came to a halt just at the beginning of the corridor, looking around as if suddenly lost.

“What’s the matter?” Dana asked, her voice terrified.

Curt seemed confused. He shook his head, frowning, running one hand through his hair and spattering a dozen tiny blood droplets onto the cabin floor.

“This isn’t right...” he muttered. Then he looked at the others almost as if he no longer trusted them, face hard but eyes afraid. He settled on Marty. “This isn’t right. We should
split up.
We can cover more ground that way.”

Hold on now...
Marty thought.

Holden and Dana swapped a glance, and Marty saw something change in their stances. The fear was still there, the tension, but for a few seconds... it looked as if they were listening to something else. Some inner voice that whispered things they did not understand.

Are they hearing voices too?
Marty thought, but even thinking it made him feel slightly ridiculous. He was the dope-head, as Curt was always so keen to tell him. He was the one who heard the fucking voices.

“Yeah...” Holden said, and Dana nodded at him. “Yeah, split up. Good idea.”
“Really?” Marty asked. And behind them, the living room window exploded inward. He ducked and span around in time to see glass slivers jingling to the floor and timber frame shards spiking inward. And through the ruin of the window protruded big-zombie’s arm. His fist was clenched around a handful of glass and wood, but there was no blood.

Beyond, his shadow pressed close.

“I got it!” Curt shouted, running at the window. “You guys
get in your rooms!”
He shouldered into a bookcase and it started sliding toward the window, screaming across the floor, books tumbling, while the zombie’s arm thrashed to clear more broken glass and framing.

“Wait...” Marty said, but his voice was lost amid the chaos.

Dana and Holden shared a glance, a nod, and then Dana said, “Let’s go!” They headed for their separate rooms on the left, parting without even a hug, and for a moment Marty couldn’t move.

This isn’t right
, he thought. He looked back at Curt, who was now shoving against the bookcase while big-zombie leaned in the window and pushed back, seeking entrance even while Curt strove to prevent it.

“Go!” Curt screamed at Marty, angry at his indecisiveness. So Marty went, because there was little else he could do. Maybe Curt was right. Maybe they should all check their windows and doors individually, then go back and help him fight that big fucker.

But even as he entered his room and dashed to the
window, it was almost as if he could foresee what would happen next.
We’ll be locked in,
he thought. And he turned back to his door.

•••

“Told you,” Sitterson said, perhaps a little too smug.

“Yeah, okay,” Hadley said. On the big monitors they saw the three kids dashing into their rooms as the fourth tried to hold back Matthew. Sitterson, humming, tapped a couple of keys and the views changed without a flicker, shifting to inside each room.

Dana entered her own room and dashed to the window, Holden stood in the center of his and took a few deep breaths, and Marty was the last, frowning, head shaking.

Curt was still battling Matthew the zombie.

Well, let him.
Sitterson wasn’t concerned. His placing right now didn’t matter too much, and if things went too far at that end of the cabin, he could still be lured across to the other.

“Peas in separate pods,” Sitterson said, raising his hands in triumph.

“Lock ’em in,” Hadley said, and he was smiling as well. For now. He’d find something else to stress about soon.

Sitterson tapped a key and—

•••

—Marty’s door slammed shut behind him. After the slam came the slide and
thunk!
of locks ramming home—not just in his door but in the others, as well.

He gasped and held his breath, listening for more. Weak light from the single light reflected from one half of the window, making the darkness outside even more complete. The other half stood wide open. He’d unlatched and opened it earlier when he was laid back on his bed smoking pot, having some vague idea that the fumes could spread through the air outside and chill the forest. It had been a little too
looming
for his liking, a little too
forceful.
Trees should be just trees, and shouldn’t wear the shadows of guardians.

Locked in,
he thought.
We’re all suddenly locked in.
And glancing down at his door handle he couldn’t even see a keyhole. There was a handle, that was all. So the locks must be.

“On the outside,” he muttered. But that felt wrong, too. He tried to recall what the doors looked like from out there, and he was pretty sure they were the same— just a handle, nothing else.

No keyhole.

No lock.

In which case...

The cabin shook again with another terrible impact. Curt cried out from somewhere and more glass broke, and Marty’s window suddenly seemed larger than ever. He moved then, slowly to begin with, two small, quiet steps, and then in his mind’s eye he saw zombie-girl’s face intruding through the window. He leapt the
last few steps, grabbed the handle and pulled it close, flicking the latch to secure it shut. Something shattered behind him and he shouted, turning around and hardly prepared for what he might see.

He must have knocked the table with his leg as he rushed by, and the lamp on top had wobbled and smashed after he’d turned the latch.

Not that glass and thin wood will do much good against
—

He looked down.

What the fuck is that?

It was a moment that punched him in the gut. Amongst all the chaos, thumping, shouting from outside, and his own terrified panting, it was the sight of the smallest thing that finally succeeded in knocking Marty’s breath out of him.

The remains of the china lamp were splayed across the floor, and from its plastic heart a white cable led to the plug socket in the wall. The bulb had survived— shielded from impact by the bent-out-of-shape shade— and in its glare he saw a
second
wire.

It was thin and black, and there was something about it that seemed all wrong.

The wire snaked through the remains of the broken lamp, its end pointing directly at him.
An
end
? Shouldn’t it be plugged in somewhere? Shouldn’t there be a fixture?
But Marty’s bullshit detector was on full, and he knew this was something that shouldn’t be there.

He bent and picked up the wire, squinting at its end, and thought,
fiber optic.
The sense of being
watched was suddenly very real. His place in things shrank to an almost infinitesimally small point. And he stood and looked around the room, thinking of the one-way mirror.

Curt’s weird behavior.

Jules’s brutal death.

“Oh, man,” he muttered.

•••

“That’s deep,” Hadley said. “‘Oh, man.’”

“He’s not there for his philosophical insightfulness.” The guy’s face filled the screen now as he stared into the hi-tech camera, distorted by the closeness to the domed end of the cable, and for the first time ever Sitterson experienced a glimmer of fear.

It’s almost like
he’s
watching
us.

He shoved it quickly down. He wasn’t here to empathize.

But he couldn’t ignore the obvious.

“Uh-oh,” he said, “that’s not good.”

Hadley flipped down the microphone on his headphones and flicked a switch. “Chem, I need five hundred cc’s of Thorazine pumped into room three,
now
—”

“No no no,” Sitterson said, because he’d seen movement elsewhere.
Oh we’re just too fucking good,
he thought, pointing at the large screen to the left. “Hang on.” And yes, the movement was manifesting into a shambling, pale thing in the darkness, passing
between the silent statues of trees and seeming to emerge from the very darkness itself as it approached the cabin.

Sitterson checked a few settings and smiled.

“Judah Buckner to the rescue,” he said. And the brief pity he’d had for the kid was eaten away by the sight of Buckner’s zombified face.

•••

He could have mouthed obscenities or flipped them the finger, but that wouldn’t do anything to help him right now.

Now, he needed answers, and perhaps some clue as to how the hell they could
get the fuck
out of Dodge. But...

As he pulled the wire taut and started following it around the room—across the floor, along the skirting to the corner, then up to where a small hole was drilled in the ceiling’s corner—the realization dawned that he’d been made to look like a complete dick.

He stared up at the ceiling and smiled.

Of course
things had been out of kilter. The cabin was fake, maybe even the woods all around them were unreal, and everything they did and said was being monitored.

“Oh my God, I’m on a reality TV show.” Every breath they took, the booze they’d drunk, the almost biblical amount of pot he’d already smoked, the kissing couple on the sofa, everything was for public consumption. The stuff in the cellar really
was
a
set-up, planted there by scene designers who must’ve had multiple orgasms when they saw what was required of them in the shooting script.