Cabin Fever

[Emprexx Plush]

The camera, and by extension everyone borrowing its eye, was looking for someone. That's what every camera here did. Outside of the game's context it could be capturing any aspect of the room it covered but here and now without a single person on screen it served no purpose. There's noise in another room so there's got to be somebody here; it'd make sense to switch off and find them, but stay here a minute. The room offers a story. The still footage we have here is a summary and a list of questions that can be definitively answered with the review of hours to days of footage. An investment for sure, but one we can afford. The story isn't going anywhere. It finished long before any digital vision on loan could entice us with it. Open to interpretation but never to change. Predictions, not premonition. You dig?

Okay. Let's start with what the room is not and see where we leave off.

The room isn't incomplete like many others in the village. Four solid walls, a bed, a table, some cardboard boxes, all in various states of decomposition. You could imagine someone living here based on the layout, maybe even kinda comfortably if you forget there's no heat or plumbing. Everybody's seen worse apartments! Clean it all up like it used to be, put in some lights, it's no big deal. Make every house look like this and you can probably bill it as rustic housing for one of those adult summer camps. Taken just by the furnishings it was a fine place.

Back to the light though? The room wasn't bright. Only one window and it wasn't facing the right way to get direct sunlight. Adjust your mental image above to be five to ten times glummer. That's why you've got to refigure the lighting situation, rustic sells but this space feels sad. Isolating. No wonder whoever's off in the other room isn't hanging out here, even though you should also adjust that mental picture to include two bags in the corner by the overturned bed.

Overturned, yep, that's where the story starts to come in. Some incompetent carpentry balanced with recreational potential isn't a story, but it sets the mood for the chaos that's been wreaked in here. From this angle the boxes' contents would be unknowable if they didn't look like they'd been tossed all around them. Clothing, linens, pamphlets and small books, rotting just the same as the boxes they were in. If you'd missed the table don't worry, it wasn't so obvious now that it'd been split down the middle in two uneven chunks. The bed has been flipped over on its side, a old grey blanket that probably wasn't originally that color piled up at its head. Remember though, we're still talking about what the room isn't, and with all that context you've got to understand that this room isn't marked by violence. The way things are going in this neighborhood half the buildings would be packed the the rafters with bodies in a couple more weeks, but there's not so much as a bloodstain in this room.

What happened here happened clean.

Mostly.

This is where we should talk about what the room has that the others like it don't. The bags on the other side of the bed frame are a couple dozen years too new to belong here, but too dry to have been outside all that recently. Same for the wadded up black silk scarf, laying next to the table's missing leg and corner instead of with the older discarded clothes. That gave away that someone had been here recently and hung around long enough to be dodging the torrential downpour, and that helped, but they were kinda boring compared to the most interesting sign of life, revealed only by the bed's disturbance.

DONT GET HURT

STAY +VE

BELIEVE

IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII II

The last mark went jagged, then curled, dipped, swerved, jerked, collapsed into itself and dragged back out all in a messy chaotic pattern that ended at the floor. It probably caught your eye before the words, yeah? So it's not a surprise that there was something written above it all, well above where the bed frame would have sit. Every other message was etched into the fading paint of the wall, while this one was went over it in a modest peach, barely perceptible without the right light unless you were looking for it.

GOOD MORNING! :)

There's movement in the doorway.

A girl rushed in, reddish blonde hair looking a tangled mess, eyes red and puffy, mouth hanging in the prelude to a scream.

Freeze frame.

Yep. That's her.

You're probably wondering how she got here?

((Nikki Nelson-Kelly Continued From Sink Or Swim, Better Dive Right In))

Let's recap from where we left off.

Nikki had a plan. A super killer plan. Nobody had disputed that, good strong buy-in all around. Honestly there was no reason to be modest, she'd pretty much cracked the whole thing wide open! They had a way to organize without getting caught and it was all thanks to her. Nikki: 1, Terrorists: 0 was the big take-away. The shelter wasn't that hard to put together, you could pop 'em up and take 'em down all over the island and have a sneaky shack for whenever plotting needed doing. Would they get suspicious? Pfft. There was like a hundred kids to keep track of, nobody was going to notice a few cozying up a couple times a day somewhere private. Huh. Implications. Ignore those! She'd put together a team! Y'know, once you trimmed off the ones who weren't contributing anything but negativity. It came together like the opening credits of a movie:

Nikki, The Brains. She'd cracked the code on how to hide their movements and brought everybody together. With her encouragement they'd tough through all the rough spots, gather anybody who could be an asset, and be out of here before their parents could enjoy the retrospective alone time. That's networking baby. Nikki'd never suspected she had The Skillz for it, but it was coming in natural and who was she to argue with results?

Mike, The Muscle. Mike, uh, wasn't the most imposing boy in school? But he was an athletic type and had her back, plus he hadn't gone screwy like some other people she could name. He'd keep them safe enough to cut and run at least, and that's all they needed right? He didn't have to hurt anybody, keeping anyone from hurting them was enough. Slam dunk on that front, or should she say...home run? Nailed it.

Camillelei(?)y(??)lalla(!!!), The Mouth. Camilla(boom first try) was their connection to their most important asset, the nerve center of their whole operation. Nikki wasn't real sure what else she brought to the table but that was probably enough, right? I mean, she could hold the walkie talkie herself but Henry seemed to like her and that was important? Synergy! Team work! Logistics! Buzz words! Get this bread!

Last but certainly not least...Henry, The Brains?

Wait.

They all need to have a Thing, and Henry's Thing was definitely Brains but that was already Nikki's Thing. They couldn't both have the same Thing and she deserved to be a Brain Thing, it was her plan! Henry was super smart though, so he deserved it too...oh, she was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Take it from the top.

Nikki, The Right Brain.

Mike, The Muscle.

Camilyia, The Mouth.

Henry, The Left Brain.

Flawless. Obviously a few more of these rendezvous were in order and Henry'd need to make something like this with whoever he was hanging with, plus they'd have to come up with some more elaborate supplies if they were gonna deal with these things on their necks, but it was really coming together! She could see it now, the first collar popping off as they hunker down in safety; it should probably be Henry's, with him walking somebody through how he figured it all out in case they could tell something was up? As long as he was safe he could take care of everyone else. Next should be her because hey, she did all the initial heavy lifting, she was allowed to be a little selfish with wanting to survive right? Once they had enough people free in clear they could start putting together some kind of escape, maybe there were some boats hidden somewhere they'd normally pop for peeking in, or even a helicopter...

When Nikki checked back in from her daydream everyone was gone.

Okay.

Remain calm. Nice, deep breaths. That's why they'd all stepped out in the first place, get a little air, take the call, figure it out from there. She missed something, probably, and The Crew was springing into action. They'd be back for her. Any minute now, someone would run up to update her after whatever they were working on. Yep. Yepperoo. Noooooo doubt about it.

Right around the corner.

Just about...now.

Okay false alarm but for real, now.

Any minute.

Really.

You could hear them coming if you listened close enough.

Working hard at the plan but coming back to headquarters, had to come back to headquarters or how would they figure out the next step of the plan?

Good times, quiet times, times to clear her head and think so she'd be ready when they came back, they'd understand that too, this was all lining up right like they'd discussed. What good hustle. What a great team! That's why they didn't talk to her, they didn't need to, it was all understood.

Clear.

Crystal.

Crystal clear.

Any minute now.










































Oh.

My.

God.

They'd seriously ditched her! And the hide-out! And her good good insights! Were they ignoring The Plan? No, wait...were they stealing The Plan? That had to be it, they figured they'd got everything they needed out of her and now she was dead weight. Everybody wanted to be the first one saved and they'd all agreed to drop her to get them a little closer to that spot. She was speechless. Red in the face speechless. This was...how could...they deserved...

Deep breath.

Keeping it pozzy, right?

It was a misunderstanding. All one big misunderstanding. She'd link up with somebody later and it would all make sense. Nikki packed up everything she'd used for the shelter and carried it with her bags back towards home.

---

It was later that night when she'd scratched the first tick marks in. Two days in, however many to go. The announcements were supposed to mark the days but if she wasn't sure she could trust what they said how could she be sure they were marking accurate time? Yeah, it should be obvious from sunset to sunrise but time was already starting to go wobbly. She wasn't sure how long it'd been since she made it back here, just that it was dark now. This morning she'd done her best at guessing and maybe it was dead on, but there was no way to be sure. The tally would tell her. One every time there was an announcement, and if day and night synced up to that she'd know they were on the level about at least one thing.

After Nikk pushed the bed back into place she stared up from on top of it, looking at the space of wall she could see if she tilted her head back from its resting position. The flashlight clicked back on to illuminate the moldering paint; not the best sight to wake up to by far. If she was gonna be staying here, it needed some sprucing up. Rummaging through her personal bag left her clasping a narrow silver tube in her hand, a hint of the color to come peeking out of its head towards the wall. When she was finished it was sloppy for sure, but an upgrade.

GOOD MORNING! :)

Yeah. That'd help keep the vibe going.

---

Phillip and Danny were waiting to wake her up the next morning.

In that initial hazy, yeah mom I'm awake really space where she just wanted to fall asleep again, she thought she heard a blatant lie. 'Nikki...shooting Phillip...' Panic woke her up REAL quick after that, what were they saying about her? She'd done nothing but help out and Phillip was alive the last time she saw him, she knew it, they were making things up to make everybody paranoid! Which would be a great gotcha revelation if they hadn't just made sure everyone was gonna think she killed him! Oh god she was really in it now, Phillip wasn't crazy popular so she didn't have to worry about a bunch of vengeful friends kicking down her door but still, nobody would listen to her, people might attack her on sight just to stay safe, everything was going straight down the toilet, she was so totally screwed, she was gonna have to-'but in the process Terra managed to shoot her as well.'

wh

what.

Were they saying she was dead? That, that was stupid right? It'd fall apart the second somebody saw her. Some of her classmates were pretty dull but they weren't that dull, they weren't going to assume she was a ghost or something whacky like that.

She wasn't a ghost or something whacky like that, right?

Nope. Nope nope nope. Not doing this. This had to be...something, a weird dream or whatever. The last thing she'd heard before burying her head in the musty blanket was Danny's name. It spared her from the rest.

It didn't spare her from the gunshots though.

Her head jerked up at the first, snapped in it's direction far down the village path. Someone else must have heard it too. She heard them running outside in its direction. Okay. You handle that then. Better them than her, right? In a good way! They were clearly better equipped to handle this situation since their first instinct when they heard a possible murder was to chase after it, not scrunch up in the corner of a mattress and regret that they'd been too disgusted to use the bathroom in awhile because they definitely couldn't get up now. It was a compliment; no hero had ever been worried about the last time they peed, at least not one she could remember reading about. So Nikki stayed where she was, safe and secure that someone else had the situation under control.

There was a second gunshot.

Ooooooh no.

So much for playing hero. Looked uh, looked like Nikki had made the right call now! It wasn't cowardice. it was being practical. What was she going to do against somebody with a gun? Nothing, that's what. She'd be absolutely defenseless. Whoever ran off clearly hadn't thought about that, and where had it got them? Well, she didn't really want to think about that, but it couldn't be anywhere good. There were no more gunshots so she didn't figure for a fire fight. Maybe someone had gotten away. That was positive, yep, good call, everyone had run away and nobody had died, she hadn't seen otherwise so why assume the worst? What did she get out of that? Well, other than preparation that there might be someone with a gun stalking through the village looking for more victims, but that wasn't very useful. What could she do against somebody with a gun?

Nothing.

She was absolutely defenseless.

Nikki's breathing became very, very shallow. Every rusted spring whining under her shifting weight made her tremble. Her feet touched the floor as daintily as she could. The joints of her knees ached in protest with the slow crouch lower, lower, lower until her body could stretch out flat on the floor. It must have taken a minute...no, ten...no, thirty...no, no, no less than an hour, before she was fully hidden underneath. Her eyes held shut until the stress of darkness overwhelmed her.

DONT GET HURT

STAY +VE

BELIEVE

II

They were the first thing she saw. The nail was lying nearby. Another mark, that was something to focus on, be productive now Nikki. A little scratching wouldn't give her away.

III

Right. Three. Three days. Three days? Two announcements. So two days? There wasn't one the first day, nobody was dead, that wouldn't make any sense, but if they were lying anyway there could have been...it wasn't clear, and Nikki's breath was starting to get too fast to stay under here but she couldn't leave. It'd make too much noise to get back out. It'd be too obvious if someone came in that she'd just hidden again if she left now. She had to stay as long as it took to be sure that the crazed gunman was gone.

DONT GET HURT

As long as it took.

---

It hurt. That was a good sign. Ghosts didn't hurt. She didn't really believe it, of course not, that'd be crazy, but concrete evidence was a plus. Silver linings, something to add on top of not getting shot to staying down here however long she had been. How long had she been down here? No one had come, and there'd been no more announcements, which made sense cuz there was no way she'd been up a whole day. The nail twirled between her fingers, waiting to be used, but it wouldn't be for a long, long, long, long, long-

IIII

Hmm.

That didn't seem right. Three days, that was how many had passed, and she was pretty sure that's what she put down, so why was it five now? She didn't remember marking five. Uh, did she? Bed Time was all running together. She'd definitely maybe scratched at the wall a little bit, possibly, sort of, but not in any pattern. Totally not the most important pattern. Unless, well, she'd fallen asleep a couple times. There were half-remembered fragments of voices on the loudspeaker but she was 99.9% confident that those were when she passed back out earlier. Okay, 90%. Okay, okay, 75%. Fine, geez, 55% but no lower, back off! it had been two to three days, probably. Maybe four. Five. Maximum five!

Her hand was twitching with nervous movement.

IIII IIII IIII

Hoo boy. Nikki couldn't be confident of much, but there was no way that was right. She'd just kinda, got to thinking about how many tick marks she'd put down and then she'd really started putting them down and hadn't stopped. The whole thing was worthless now.

So why stop?

IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII II

By the last one she was super duper checked out, paint chipping this way and that as she dragged the nail wherever she could find space. It hit the edge of the floor and she just...you know what? She was stopping. She was stopping all of it. Nikki was just about done with this whole situation. The nail went flying before she pressed her hands into the floor to scoot her aching body out from under the bed, grunting without a care of who might here her because come on, if you waited around this long you probably deserved it, she'd give you a standing ovation before you blew her brains out alright? Some part of the frame snagged on her tee as she crawled out but she didn't notice before

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP

Her sleeve was ruined. The cherry on the crap sandwich that had been this whole day. Nikki saw red and let out a scream, her hands slamming into the side of the bed until it tipped up, up, up, and came back down with a crash. Nikki stared at what she had done, and started to laugh. She pushed it again, enjoying the thunk it made against the floor without understanding why, it let out a bottled up energy chained up in here for who even knew how long anymore. Not for long, though; a couple more rocking shoves and she was looking for a new target.

The boxes came next. Everything went flying, her hands grabbing whatever she could take hold of inside and dropping it in a messy heap. When there was nothing else to throw away she kicked them both a couple times, but the way the cardboard deformed wasn't satisfying. It was old and mostly collapsed all by itself. There was no release to it. She wanted something, something...her eyes caught the table across the room, looking like it could fall apart to a stiff breeze. They went back to to her bag near the bed. Gears started turning.

Nikki wasn't like, a fan of wrestling or anything like that? She couldn't name any of the fake people in any of the fake sports leagues that people seemed to get really really excited about online, but there were some things you couldn't avoid hanging out in the same spaces. Her biggest take-away was that wrestling involved a lot of furniture? Ladders, for reasons that were a total mystery to her, chairs, because you could hit people with them and they sounded cool, and tables because you can do all kinds of crazy stunts through them. The gifs she saw with the least context that weren't like, recurring memes or whatever, were the table ones. Usually because somebody lost an argument in brutal public fashion. Nikki wasn't a fan, we've been over that, and if she thought any of it was real she'd cringe every time she saw it, but nobody really got hurt. It was all acting, that's how she understood it, and when you thought about it like that it seemed like it could be kind of fun. Now, her bag was heavy. Not person heavy or anything, but that table was looking reeeeaaal unstable, huh?

She didn't think about it any further. it was in her arms, then in the air, then sailing through the middle of the table with a satisfying crunch at a blissfully fast pace. After the impact though? Slow motion. Pieces flying everywhere, a jagged line running roughly through the table's middle, legs on both sides splintering off and taking chunks of the corner with them. Nikki sank to her knees in the middle of the room taking it all in. When she was ready, she stood up and retrieved her bag from the wreckage alongside one of the broken legs. It'd make up for the branches she'd gotten too tired to carry on the way back here, and maybe if someone really did come in here after her it'd scare them off. Not uh, a gun or anything, but a regular person getting an eye on this warped out club, splinters sticking every which way? They'd think twice for sure. Speaking of thinking, Nikki's brain kicked back in about then. God, what a mess. It felt great though, like, really great, and maybe she should be worried about that? Was it psycho that this was the bright spot of her days so far?

...yeah, kinda. After getting taken advantage of twice and dodging death at least as many times though, maybe she'd earned some manic release. It felt good to take action instead of stay cooped up. Hey, maybe she should head out right now, gather up some people, get the plan back on track!

The silence of her own thoughts let Nikki realize how dark it was getting, and how rainy it was, for the first time.

Okay, forget all that and forget putting this together. She'd sleep on the couch and get to it in the morning.

---

That's where she'd been the morning of the next announcement. Her hair was a tangled, dusty mess. More tears had come on and off through the night as her circumstances set in, and hearing the crackle of the speakers had only reminded her of her predicament. Outside there were so many people who were certain she was a killer. It was better to stay in here. Safer. They hadn't forced her out yet and as long as they didn't no one would find her, there were too many houses to search all of them, just hole up here until it all blows over and hope when the others finish her plan someone takes pity enough to get her side of the story out. It'd be a nightmare, but she could wait it out. Nikki was strong enough to do nothing.

But they'd got her.

The heart of it all, their secret weapon, the nerve center of the whole plan.

Camilla was dead. Who could say what happened to her walkie-talkie, but if someone really killed her they probably weren't interested in helping out with the plan.

That sent her screaming back to her room where the camera's caught her. No more plan and no thought to the consequences if she was caught, because someone had to be out there picking up the pieces. The odds were stacked against her, but it wasn't like they were much better waiting here with no hope of salvation. Rock bottom worst outcome? The rest of the world would know the truth. She wasn't a murderer, and if she stepped up?

Nikki could be a hero.

After the rain stopped. Obviously.

((Nikki Nelson-Kelly Continued In Death and Artaxes))