...So Below

#1

((Hailey Thompson continued from Dire, Dire Straights))

About the only good thing that could be said for the bowels of the ship was that Hailey hadn't run into Olivia and Lucia again here. That aside, it was dark, dank, and damp. She wished she wasn't here.

She'd started out in better environs. Up in the main part of the ship, there was plenty of space, endless rooms with beds and closets and cupboards. There was comfort, and Hailey had partaken of it for a while, lounging around waiting to see if someone would turn up. But they hadn't. She'd looked out the porthole, watched the sun dip lower and lower towards the horizon. She'd rummaged through drawers in search of anything useful or interesting, and just found a lot of laundry, not in her size. It would've been pretty gross, except the stuff had to have been put there just for this, right? Nobody would've just left all their stuff in some old decommissioned ship. It all seemed oddly clean, at least.

This all was to say, she'd gotten real bored and antsy after only a handful of hours. Her classmates were killing and dying in some grand onslaught of pain and hate and suffering, but it felt pretty distant. Even the gunfire felt kind of far off—

Wait, gunfire?

It was hard to say if the fear from the gunfire had supplemented the nervous energy of sitting idle, or if the inaction had given power to the fear, but whichever emotion was ultimately in the driver's seat had brought Hailey down below the waterline, to the dark gloomy maze of crates where she now lurked, trying desperately to remain silent as the aftermath of a murder played out.

She'd heard it, naturally. Heard it all. Well, okay, heard enough, from her position on the opposite side of a makeshift wall. Was it an accident? Was it an excuse? Who cared? Someone had gotten messed up bad, and someone had run off, and someone else was staying to tend to the victim, and that meant that Hailey, hidden away some indeterminate distance from the others and also from the presumed exit, couldn't just leave.

Her grip was tight on the cane. She could zap them, maybe? Just a little zap wouldn't be fatal. Of course, that was if she saw them, and if they didn't have something bigger and scarier, and if, if...

Some time passed, and she didn't move. Strange noises echoed through the gloom, and she couldn't say if it was the other people, or the ship's inner workings, or animals outside bumping into the hull, or her own imagination running wild. She crouched and closed her eyes, mouthed a prayer, and waited for it to clear up, or at least for something to change.

She should've been more specific.

The announcement was loud, and it too echoed, and at first she thought it a blessing because, hey, maybe there'd be a scoop on who was out there waiting, some environmental details to clear up the mystery corpse or corpse-to-be, some tip that would help her out. But there wasn't any of that, nor any hint as to what precisely had caused the air here to faintly reek of incinerated plastic.

Instead, there was an ultimatum. The first beep from her collar, fifteen or so seconds after the speech concluded, served as punctuation.

Okay. Okay, time to go, then. Hailey started moving quickly, her breath picking up, searching for the way out. She'd gotten in alright, granted before she'd wormed her way as deep into the maze as she could go, before she'd sought out the most inconspicuous of dead ends, before the others had come and caused her to curl up so tight. Getting out couldn't be that hard, could it?

After all, if they'd left...

She stopped abruptly. Had that beep from her collar been echoed?

Hailey held her breath as much as she could, listening. It took five more beeps for her to be sure, but yes, yes indeed: someone else's collar was beeping too.

She wasn't alone.

That horrible shock was followed a moment later by a further realization: if she could hear that someone else was down here with her, then might they be able to realize the same thing? It was a little distant, so maybe not... but could she stake her life on a maybe?

She'd wait, then. Not too long—she didn't have too long, not when this whole ship was off-limits and she was in the deepest darkest crevice of it—but whoever it was waiting didn't have too long either. They'd have to go, or they'd die. She'd be cutting it close, but she could race out the same way even, right? If she listened, she'd know just which way to go.

Except the other set of beeping didn't seem to be moving.

Hailey's fingers squeezed into her palms. It couldn't be worth it just to catch her, right? No way.

Or was she wrong to begin with? There was this abrupt moment of doubt in her own senses, because down here everything hummed and echoed. Could she be hiding from herself?

How much time that she didn't have had she wasted?

Stirred to action, she broke into a hustle, but the dim walls and stacks of crates made it impossible for her to figure out where she was going. She took turns, at first trying to follow some plan or pattern, then quicker, more desperately, at random. All the while, the beeping—both that around her neck and the faint echo that seemed strangely unmoving relative to her position—got faster and faster. She pulled out her flashlight, but aside from making her eyes hurt as she blinked in the glare, it accomplished nothing. And the beeping came faster and faster.

Around when she stubbed her toe on a protruding corner of box for the third time, Hailey realized she wasn't going to make it. There wasn't enough time. She hadn't even found a door out of this chamber of crates. The phantom beeps drew closer and further based on her movement, but all she saw was boxes and debris and low-hanging pipes, and she knew it was quite a ways to the closest exit from the ship once she made it up a deck. This was it, and she had to make what time she had left count.

She sank to the floor, closed her eyes. Praying for salvation from this inescapable trap seemed to much to ask, but maybe something more general?

The beeps came faster still, and Hailey sat there, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving silently, and she could almost feel the build, the inevitable culmination.

And then it stopped.

Her lips stopped moving too, mid-word. Her eyes snapped open. The flashlight, lying by her side, illuminated the blank slab of warped wooden box across the way. The echo or the other person or whatever it was had fallen silent too. The only sounds were her harried breathing and the ambient pinging and rumbling and the memory of those unstoppable beeps like ghosts in her ears.

Had they realized it wasn't fair? Had they decided to give her a chance? Or was this something more? Had she truly been saved somehow? Was the game called off? Or had she already died? Was this what came after?

She pressed a hand to the floor, and slowly, carefully made to stand up. The silence had lasted perhaps fifteen seconds.

She'd made it halfway when there was an abrupt explosion, and her body crumpled back to the floor.

MM11, HAILEY THOMPSON: DECEASED