Slashtag, p.30
Slashtag, page 30
While these two take their time catching up, I think of one last code to send to Tawny.
“Hey Wheels, you wanna drop the tablet?” Charlotte says, pointing the gun in my direction.
I lean over to drop the tablet on the ground, tapping my thumb against where I hope the send button is before letting it fall. As I’m bent over, I grab hold of the pistol on my lap that’s obscured behind a bank of servers.
“What are you going to do with us?” I ask.
“Todd’s about to get something that’s been a long time coming. You, on the other hand, are on reserve for one of the board members.”
“I knew it!” I shout. I was never meant to be a correspondent on Slashtag, and I’d rather die than go through whatever they have planned for me. I pull the gun up and point it at her, using what little leverage I’ve just learned I have. “You aren’t allowed to kill me, are you?”
Charlotte lets out an irritated sigh. “All right, you want to go down this road? Fine. No, I’m not supposed to kill you. That doesn’t mean I can’t hurt you.”
“So what?” I say. “If you shoot at me, I’ll just shoot you back. I’ll be hurt, but you’ll be dead. I’m not afraid of pain.”
She seems thoroughly unamused. “This isn’t going to pan out how you think. If you decide to shoot, before you even realize you want to tell your finger to squeeze that trigger, I’ll have you nailed in the shoulder. At that point, your shooting arm’s down, you got nowhere to go, and Todd gets one between the eyes. Either way, this ends with me taking you to Renshaw. One way’s just a whole lot worse for you.”
“She means it,” Todd warns. “Charlotte’s like, the third-scariest person here.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “It sounds like you’re saying that either way I’m screwed, so why not at least take a shot at killing you?”
“Because I can tell you’re a fighter, and you think you’ve got better chances of surviving if you don’t have a bullet in your arm.”
She’s not wrong. If I let her in close, I still have my stun gun, though given she has a pistol, there’s no guarantee she’ll ever get close enough for me to use it. I slowly start to bring my gun down but stop once the nozzle points directly at the server in front of me. “Okay, so how about this. I’ve currently got this gun aimed at the network’s central distribution processor.” I have no idea what I’m actually aiming at, but I’m hoping she understands this stuff as little as I do. “Without this, your broadcast is canceled, and I don’t think your bosses would be too happy if they learned you were the reason for that.”
Charlotte smirks. “Well, we can’t have that, can we?”
There’s a flash from her muzzle, and the small room explodes with the sound of gunfire. It’s deafening, so loud I can feel it like a shockwave through my own body. Next to me, Todd goes down. There’s a red hole almost exactly between his eyes. On instinct, I pull the trigger several times, but nothing happens. I aim the gun back at Charlotte and continue to uselessly pull the trigger as she advances, pointing her pistol squarely at me.
“Toss the gun, kid. It’s over. I’m only going to say it once.”
It all happened so fast, I can barely even understand what she’s saying. Reality comes crashing over me.
I’m not playing a hero in some movie. This is real life.
I have a real gun pointed at me, and I’m really about to get shot. Todd is dead.
My body starts to shake as I toss my gun on the ground in Charlotte’s direction.
She picks it up, then shows me a switch on the side. “Pro-tip, kid. Always check to see if the safety is on.” Charlotte tucks the weapon into the back of her waistband. “You ready to get this show on the road?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
After picking glass out of Britts face and consoling Shawn for the acts he committed against his will, we decide we need to put as much food into ourselves as we possibly can. The idea of sleep is still an ongoing debate. We’re beyond exhausted, but the thought of putting ourselves in such a vulnerable position seems like a terrible idea.
As we shamble into the kitchen, my phone buzzes one last time.
THERES HIGH TENSION IN HOLLEYWOOD
“What if we take shifts standing guard?” Britt asks. “Two people sleep, and one stays awake.”
Shawn opens a fridge and pulls out some deli meats and cheeses to make sandwiches. “I don’t know if we can trust any of ourselves to be alone.”
I’m barely paying attention to them. Instead, I’m focusing on processing what the message could mean. It’s not a quote from any movie I can think of, but the way Holleywood is spelled makes me think it has to be about Britt. It was the title of one of her shows. But what about her? We’re all in a really high-tension situation. Why point her out specifically?
Maybe it’s not about her being tense, but more about the wording. High Tension. There’s a French horror movie called High Tension, but from what I remember, it’s nothing like the scenario we’re in. I can’t find the connection.
That is, until I remember the twist.
It turned out the heroine of the movie, the small girl getting hunted in the woods while her friends got butchered, actually ended up being the killer in the midst of a psychotic break. She was the bad guy. I replay the last two days through my head, thinking about any situations in which Britt could have secretly been a saboteur. I think about our talk in the bathroom, where she confided in me a story eerily similar to mine, pushing me to keep playing the game.
“Who needs a drink?” I ask as we all assemble sandwiches.
“Now, there’s a bad idea I could get behind,” Shawn says.
“Hey, Britt, do you think you could make us another round of that sangria?”
“Totally!” she says, her eyes lighting up. “I’ll go find us the perfect red. I think I saw a bottle of Garancha yesterday that looked like it could be pretty tasty.” She rushes off into the dining room toward the bar.
“Shawn, I think Britt’s a spy,” I whisper, nervously tugging at my hair.
He laughs. “Come again?”
“Britt. I think she’s working for them.”
Shawn’s look of amusement turns to concern. “Are you being serious right now? Look, I’m all for believing you. If you say something happened, I’m there. But first you rip up potential clues, and now you accuse Britt of being a mole? Are you sure you’re not just so overtired and on edge that you’re seeing things that aren’t there?”
“No, I’m right about this.” The more I think about it, the more weird little things pop into my head. “Remember how she was super against going into the chapel? It’s almost as if she knew it was a backdoor to the mind totem.”
“I wouldn’t say she was super against it. I’d say that, based on previous experience, she had a reasonable doubt that messing with a locked door would yield anything.”
“What about her insisting on having her own room for the first night? Or all the time she’s spent on her phone, even before we started getting text messages? And where’s her trauma ghost? Everyone else has had some horrible thing from their past that they’ve had to deal with publicly, except for her.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t have any regrets?” Shawn says, sounding unconvinced by his own argument.
“Have you seen Drama Mamas? Landon’s father was a saint compared to some of the crap Britt’s mom said to her on that show.”
His face drops, like he just remembered he left an oven running at home. “Shit. What about when she found that hidden knife in the antler of the elk in the Hunter’s Hall. She only did it once she became Wilson’s target. Like she knew it was there the whole time but was waiting for some reason.”
“Waiting to put on a good show,” I say, holding my eyes firmly on his to show him my very real concern.
Britt bursts back into the room, holding a pitcher half filled with red wine. “I need some ice and fruit. What’s gotten into you two?” Her brow sharpens, clearly seeing the suspicious looks on our faces upon her re-entry. “What?” she repeats, forcing us to say something.
“How did you come to be on this show again?” Shawn asks.
“What do you mean?” she says, looking over to me.
I can feel her silently calling into question the entire pep talk she gave me in the bathroom. “You told me what I needed to hear to re-enter the game and follow their script. In fact, your goal this entire weekend has been to keep everyone on track and playing the game. When Shawn, Derek, and I tried to leave, you stayed, knowing that you were in danger.”
“I was right in the end, wasn’t I? There was no escape.”
“But you actively pushed for people to stay.” Shawn takes a step toward her, and whether he realizes it or not, his size can make his approach very intimidating. “Can you be real for one second? Did you know what was going to happen here?”
“Stop it, you guys. You’re really starting to scare me.” She continues to plead her innocence, but as she backs out of the kitchen, her eyes tell a different story. They’re darting around to every corner in the ceiling, as if calling for help from somewhere outside the game.
“So it’s true?” He advances toward her again, reading her body language as easily as me. “You were in on this the whole time?”
“I’m feeling very threatened by your stance right now,” Britt says, hustling backward to put a table between herself and Shawn.
“You’re feeling threatened? I’ve watched people die in here. I’ve been stabbed multiple times, by multiple people, had my hand melted in fucking tar, possessed by a serial killer, harassed by actual ghosts from my past, and you feel threatened?”
Britt backs up even further. She glances behind her several times at the hallway leading to the lobby, looking like a rabbit about to run. Part of me wants to de-escalate the situation, see if there’s a way to get Britt to confess without things getting out of control. Another part of me wants to give chase and see if she leads us to a hidden way out.
“Shawn, let’s calm down a little and give Britt a chance to explain herself.” I choose the diplomatic approach, remembering what happens every time the final survivors turn on each other in the last act of a horror film. It’s not a rule on our survival list, but if we make it through this, I’ll be sure to add it.
“I’m not going to hurt her. I just think we deserve an explanation,” Shawn says. “How about we all sit down, eat our sandwiches, and talk this out like adults.”
Britts eyes keep flicking around the room, signaling for help that will never come.
“They’re not going to save you,” I say.
The corners of her lips begin to tremble.
“Whatever deal you thought you made, you have to know by now that it was a lie. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you knew going into this that other people were going to die. What kind of future do you think you’re going to have with a face like that?” I point at the dozen or more lacerations across her face.
It’s overly harsh, I know. I hate using my own biggest insecurity as a weapon against her like this, but it’s the beginning of a thread I’m carefully trying to pull.
She reaches up and feels all the cuts, many of which are still leaking blood, despite our best attempts to clean her up.
“Do you know how hard it’s been for me to hide two little scars on my face for almost twenty years? You just got carved up in front of millions of people. The only life you have after this is, at best, one of sympathy. That’s not who you are. You’re too strong for that.”
“I can rise above it. Show how resilient a woman can be after surviving something like this. I’ll be an inspiration.”
I shake my head without breaking eye contact with her. “Not if everyone thinks you signed up for this willingly. Then you’re a fraud. A willing accessory to murder. A crisis actor. That is, of course, unless you were forced to be a part of this.”
Britt instantly picks up on where I’m heading and shifts her demeanor from guilty criminal to victim. “They threatened my family,” she says, forcing out a sniffle. “Some network producer called me into his office. He told me if I followed the rules, I would be the sole survivor and that no serious harm would come to me. I told him no, but he said if I didn’t do it, he’d kill my family. And then he brought out this man who made Arthur Wilson appear right in front of my eyes. He said he could make Arthur go anywhere, even in my parents’ home. I didn’t have a choice.” Her crocodile tears are perfectly crafted and even seem to roll down her cheeks on cue.
This is why she’s the queen of reality TV drama.
I look over to Shawn to make sure we’re on the same page. “That sounds horrible. Krentler has my sister kidnapped too. You know it really was her messaging me, right?”
She gives a meek nod.
“Okay, so we need to find our way out of here and get the police to go after them. Do you know a way out?”
She shakes her head.
“What about the spirit totem? Do you know where the Amulet of Duriel is?”
Britt gives more than a moment’s hesitation before nodding yes. “There’s a secret door in the barber shop. I can show you.”
I want to believe she’s telling the truth, but it’s impossible to know if anything she’s said this entire game has been real. Nevertheless, we have no choice but to follow her.
“All right, then. Let’s find the totem, then get the hell out of here.” We follow Britt down the hall, staying a few steps behind her out of caution.
“Do you think she’s really taking us to the amulet?” Shawn whispers.
“I’m banking on her doing whatever’s in her best interests, and right now, that’s making herself look like a victim to get out of here.”
From the lobby, we head under the stairs and take the first right. The barber shop sits on the far right corner of the hall, near the mirror door we shattered on our way up to the brothel.
She looks at the door with concern, then continues down the hallway.
“I thought you said we needed to go to the barber shop,” Shawn says.
Britt steps over the shattered glass door, then bends over in the black-painted hallway. When she rises again, she’s got her arm wrapped around the barber pole Derek threw into the mirror. With her free hand, she twists the metal cap of the pole until it pops off. “First, we need this,” she says, producing a small silver key from inside the barber pole.
For just a split second, I see myself slamming her head into one of the outstretched shards of glass still clinging to the side of the broken mirror’s frame. It was one thing hearing her admit to being a plant. Watching how easily she fetches our salvation makes me want to pour every ounce or rage I have into a single act of vengeance.
Deep breaths. Fix your hair. Cover the scar.
“Great.” I choke the word out as I swallow back my anger.
Britt returns to the barber shop door and opens it after a quick twist of the key. “I know this sounds shady, but we’re each going to have to do this one at a time.” She takes a seat in the further of the two barber chairs and reaches for a crank by the feet.
“Hold up,” Shawn says, placing his giant hand over hers. “If that’s the case, maybe Tawny or I should go first. No offense, but I don’t have a whole lot of trust in you right now.”
“Rule two of surviving a horror film is you never go alone,” I say.
“If this was a trap, wouldn’t I want Shawn to go down first?” she says candidly. “Then I could catch Tawny by surprise and be the sole survivor.”
“You know this really isn’t helping your credibility,” I say.
“This’ll take me down to the mining tunnels, and as soon as I step off, it’ll come right back up for whoever’s next. I swear.”
Shawn looks over to me for the final word, but honestly, I feel like this could go either way. In my mind, it obviously makes sense for her to do the right thing to help salvage her image, but I have no idea what else she knows that she’s not telling.
“It’s your call,” I say, leaving fate in Shawn’s hand.
“All right. I’m going to trust you. But you better be there when I get down.”
Britt nods. “I won’t go anywhere.”
Shawn takes his hand off hers. She pulls the crank.
Nothing happens.
She pulls it again.
Nothing.
“Whoops, it must be the other one.” She hops off the chair, climbs into the other, then pulls the crank.
“I don’t get it,” Shawn says. “What’s the punchline here?”
If this is a joke, Britt clearly doesn’t get it either. She keeps pulling the lever, growing more frantic each time. “No,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. She hurries back to the first chair, pulling that lever several more times. “No. This should work.”
My heart sinks. Either she’s putting on the performance of a lifetime, or her usefulness to Krentler Media has reached its conclusion.
“All right.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go back to the kitchen and get those sandwiches.”
“No!” Britt shouts, now in full panic mode. “Why isn’t this working?” Once again, she looks up at a corner of the room. Real tears stream down her face. “Let me out!”
“Looks like you’re stuck here with the rest of us rubes,” Shawn says, just a smidge of satisfaction layered on top of his obvious disappointment. “Come on, I’m hungry.”
Britt falls forward from the chair to the ground, breaking down. “I did my best,” she sobs, hands covering her face.
It’s starting to get annoying. While I was willing to be nice to the girl to get out of here, watching her late realization that she’s not exempt from the rules doesn’t really drum up much sympathy in me. I grab her by the arm and help pull her back onto her feet.
“Let’s go. We’ll figure out our next step in the dining room.”
“You don’t understand!” she shrieks, her voice rising to a falsetto as she pulls away from me. “All the rest of the clues in the house point to the barber shop. There is no next step!” She stumbles out of the room, looking completely punch-drunk.
