Emily doesn't think when she sees the figure with the flamethrower; she just runs.
She ignores it calling after her as she takes off through the cave, jumping over the gaps in the wooden bridge and trying to ignore the pain that shoots up her leg every time her foot touches the ground.
She stops short when she comes to a dead end, eyes scanning the cavern walls for a way out or a place to hide, and ends up ducking behind a wooden frame as she holds her breath and does her best to calm the shaking in her hands
The footsteps that echo through the cave seem louder than they are as the figure makes its way around the cavern. She fights back the urge to scream as it comes closer and closer to where she's hiding, finally stopping right in front of her and looking right at her.
"What do you want with me?" she cries, but they respond by reaching out and clamping a gloved hand over her mouth.
Emily protests, muffled but panicked, until the figure pulls the mask down from their face and the goggles from its eyes and it's Beth.
"Emily, shh!" she hisses, eyes glancing back towards the cavern they came from. "You can't be so loud!"
"I- you're-" Emily sputters, trying to form a coherent thought from the mess in her head. Her entire brain feels jumbled and upside down, her thoughts seeming to swim lazily rather than come together. "I thought you were dead!"
"Well, I'm not," Beth replies, some of the earlier bite gone from her voice and replaced with something softer. "And I don't know why you can back to the lodge but-"
A screech comes from somewhere deeper in the cave and Beth's head turns to the sound, swears falling from her lips.
"You need to go," she says, shoving a bag into Emily's arms and pushing her off into the tunnel. "You need to get back to the lodge."
Emily opens her mouth and tries to respond but she’s tumbling down the tunnel and further down into the mines.
//
Emily bursts through the door to the lodge, scrambling to slam it behind her before stopping to catch her breath.
Her mind is racing so fast she can barely hear the questions they're asking, let alone process them. Her heart is racing and her chest is heaving and-
"I saw Beth!" she blurts.
Her words are met with silence, everyone gaping at her in various states of disbelief. Nobody seems able to speak for a moment, too stunned to respond.
"You did?" Sam asks finally, her voice uncharacteristically small. Emily has to swallow the lump rising in her throat as she nods, watching the way Sam’s face twists and cracks at her words.
"Em, are you sure?" Chris asks, skepticism painted over his face and dripping from his voice. "I mean-"
"I'm sure!" she snaps, folding her arms over her chest. "I'm not crazy Christopher, I know what I saw!"
"Okay then,” he says, holding his arm out as if trying to calm an angry animal. "Was she alive?"
"Yes!"
Sam lets out a small gasp of air, reaching a hand out and holding the wall to steady herself as she stares out the ground, eyes wide. The entire room is quiet as they wait for her to say something, too afraid to upset the blonde.
"Is she okay?"
"I'm not sure," Em replies, making a point of doing her best to ignore the tears welling in the other girl’s eyes. "She pushed me down a tunnel, threw me a bag with a flare, and told me to run."
Sam takes a breath, nodding her head and murmuring something in a voice to soft for anyone else to hear. Emily turns her gaze away, glancing at Chris and Ashley once before running a hand through her hair and heading for the living room.
//
They're gathered together in the living room when the knocking starts, shattering the silence. Sam instantly jumps from her seat and to the door, only to have Mike stop her.
"Wait," he says, reaching out and grabbing her wrist, stopping her from going for the door. "We have no idea who that could be out there."
"I do," she replies. "Beth."
"We can't be sure," he protests, standing up and pulling to gun from his pants.
"Mike, what the-”
"I'm not going to shoot them," he stops her. "Whoever it is, I’m not going to shoot them unless I have to. This is just for safety."
Sam's nostrils flare and her jaw clenches as she crosses her arms, but she doesn't protest as he steps toward the door, motioning for Chris to follow.
"Alright, you cover me and I'll open the door," Chris says. Mike nods in conformation, holding the gun up and aimed for the door, but the blond stays put, not making any move to open it.
"Jeez, you gonna open the door or not?"
"Unless you want to give me the gun-"
"No, no I do not. Open the door already!"
"Alright, alright," Chris says, holding his hands up in surrender before reaching out, taking his sweet time in gripping the door and twisting the knob.
The second the door swings open, Beth steps in with a hand on her hip and her eyebrows raised as she takes in the gun pointed at her face.
“Michael Munroe, you are not holding me at gunpoint in my own damn lodge, are you?”
His arms go limp, falling in front of him as the gun nearly slips from his hand. There is shock painted over his face, from his wide eyes to his slack jaw. Chris wears a similar look beside him, the blond only able to blink at the girl in front of them even as another person, definitely male, steps in behind her and closes the door.
Ashley is the first to even make a sound, letting out a soft gasp of air in surprise. Beth’s gaze shifts from the boys to Ashley and her face shifts, seeming to lighten a bit in comparison to the hostility she’d regarded Mike with. It’s after Ashley that she notices Sam, and her eyes switch completely, anger and irritation draining to something far more vulnerable.
“Beth?”
“Sam?”
Emily watches as they stare at each other in silence, neither willing to even blink. Sam looks almost like she’s breaking, tears welling in her eyes, and she can see a flash of relief in Beth’s face before it hardens and she turns her head, tearing her gaze from Sam and over to the man behind her. They share a look and a nod before the girl turns back to face the rest of the group.
“Listen up, because we’re here to save all your asses.”
If they all weren’t already watching her then they would be now as she steps further into the living room, brushing right past Sam to stand in front of the fireplace, the man that came with her following only a foot off her heels. He looks gruff and largely disinterested, as if he were irritated he had to be here in the first place.
“You guys should have never come back here,” Beth states, folding her arms across her chest. “And I don’t know why you did, after what happened last year, but here you are, having flung yourselves face first into danger and idiocy and wendigoes.”
“Wendigoes?” Chris repeats, brow furrowing.
“The hell’s a wendigo?” Mike asks.
“There is a curse that dwells in these mountains,” the man says, the prickly look on his face carrying over into his tone. “Should any man or woman resort to cannibalism in these woods, the spirit of the Wendigo shall be unleased.”
Mike lets out a low curse, dropping his head to ground as troubled look twists his face.
“You’re going to need to find somewhere safe,” the stranger adds.
“The basement might be okay,” Sam suggests, pointedly avoiding looking at Beth and trying to mask the dismal look on her face.
“Okay, all of you get down there, now,” he instructs, and turns to Beth as he continues speaking. “All of you, and wait.”
“What, why? For how long?” Sam asks. Her question is directed at the man, but it’s Emily who answers.
“Until dawn.”
Both Sam and Ashley seem to sink back into their seats at that, but Mike stiffens instead.
“Guys,” he says, a twinge of fear seeping into his voice. “I ran off and left Josh when I heard screaming.”
“Josh?” Beth yelps, head shooting up to look at Mike. “Josh was left where?”
“In the shed,” he answers, hand coming up to old the side of his face,
“Your friend will already be dead,” the stranger replies.
“No!” both Chris and Beth holler, the former jumping to his feet.
“He can’t be, no,” the blond babbled. “I just saw him, he can’t be-”
“A lot can happen quickly on this mountain,” the stranger says in way of explanation, lips twisting into a grimace. Beth turns away and shakes her head.
“We have to go get him!” she cries.
“You can’t go out there, Beth!” Sam protests, standing also.
“I’m his sister,” Beth argues. “And thanks to you, he’s the only family I have left. I’m not leaving him to die.”
“She’s right,” Chris adds. “We have to go get him. I’m supposed to be his best friend and I let him down!”
“No, he let you down Chris,” Ashley butts in. “He let all of us down.”
“You all are in no position to talk about letting people down,” Beth snarls, and the redhead falters under her glare.
“I don’t care,” Chris declares, shaking his hands out in a weird sort of brushing motion. “I’m going to get him.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” the stranger says, taking a step forward.
Chris narrows his eyes. “I don’t need your help.”
“Going alone is suicide,” the man states. “You aren’t going by yourself.”
“I’m going too,” Beth insists, returning the glare the man gives her. “He’s my brother, and I sure as hell am not letting him get taken by her.”
“Fine,” Chris agrees, shaking his head in defeat.
“The rest of you, get down to the basement,” the stranger orders. “Be safe. Don’t go outside again until we’re back.”
Sam throws one last glance over her shoulder as the majority of the teenagers head off for the stairs, leaving only Beth and Chris standing beside the man.
“You two better listen to me, and do everything I say,” he demands. “If either of you do something stupid and get yourselves killed, it’s your own damn fault. Do you understand?”
They both nod, Beth seeming far more confident than Chris.
“You need to follow me and do everything I tell you.”
//
The stranger says nothing as they trek through the snow, Beth and Chris lagging a couple feet behind him. The blond is holding tight to the shotgun he was handed, giving an occasional glance to the flamethrower nozzle in Beth’s hand.
She seems… harder, less frosty than she had inside but still closed off, eyes focused on the path ahead. The quiet seems unusual from Beth, nothing like his memories of her from before. He feels awkward and pressured under the weight of the silence, and he finally clears his throat.
“Hey, um- I… I’m glad you’re alive,” he forces out, stumbling over his words. Beth actually gives a small chuckle at his words, lips twisting into an almost rueful smile.
“Thanks,” she replies. “I guess I could say the same about you, at least.”
“Just me?”
“Well, when a bunch of people you thought were your friends play a prank on your sister than causes her death and you getting stranded on a mountain, you might not be all the overjoyed to see them again,” she points out.
“Touché,” he agrees. “Still, you seemed pretty cold with Sam, and I know you two were like, a thing…”
“Yeah, and she was Hannah’s best friend,” Beth adds. “Which makes what she did to her all that worse.”
“Wait, what?” Chris says, doing a double take at her words. “Sam wasn’t a part of the-”
“Shh!”b
Both of them look forward to see the man ahead of them holding a finger to his lips as he glared. “You two need to be quieter than this if you want to survive!”
Chris actually feels a little embarrassed under the man’s gaze, almost like a child being scolded, and he has to force down the lump in his throat as he nods. Beth seems mostly unaffected, only crossing her arms over her chest and picking her pace up with a small sigh, leaving Chris to jog in order to catch up with the first two.
They can see the top of the shed in the distance, and he hurries along faster, desperate to get Josh and make a break back to the lodge. Beth seems even more eager, speeding up to the point of a jog, passing both Chris and the stranger to get there. It’s hard to see being so far away, but he can still make out Beth’s figure collapsing onto its knees and bending over, causing him to hurry his own pace as the beating in his chest picks up.
He comes to a stop beside a hunched over Beth, examining the remains of a broken stool in her hands. There are red stains on the wood, and it’s not hard at all for Chris’s brain to come to a conclusion on where they came from.
“Shit,” she mutters. “No, shit, no.”
Chris runs a hand over his head, fingers tangling in his hair and he tightens his grip hard enough to feel the pull on his skull. “Oh no,” he mumbles. “Oh my god, Josh.”
“She got him,” Beth whispers, grip on the wood tight enough to turn her knuckles white. “Not another one, I can’t hunt another one, not both of them.”
The way she talks begins to make him nervous, dread pooling in his stomach. He reaches out to place what he hopes is a comforting hand on her shoulder, nearly pulling his hand back when she jumps on contact.
“We should go back to the lodge,” the stranger says, looking almost awkward as he stands in the door less entrance to the shed. Beth looks down, dropping the piece wood back onto the scuffed floor before brushing herself her hands on her pants and striding off. Chris can see the way she grips her edge of her coat in her fist to stop her hands from shaking as he gets up to follow her, unable to help the nausea that swells in his stomach when he glances deeper into the shed and sees the decoy body still dangling from the wall, fake blood pooled on the ground beneath it.
The stranger looks almost sympathetic to the emotions raging on Beth’s face, but Chris can see the anger starting to twist behind her features. She’d always been fierce growing up, and most of her negative emotions tended to translate into various degrees of rage. Beth on the warpath was somebody everyone would rather avoid then confront, waiting until the anger fizzled out into tears before they’d dare approach her. Sam used to be able to calm her some, turning her from a raging panther to more of a hissing housecat, but Chris doesn’t want to see what would happen if Sam tried talking to her now.
Nerves bubbling in his stomach, the blond follows the other two as they turn back for the path down to the lodge, but they’ve barely made it more than five steps before the man stops, sticking his arm out and hissing out for them to be quiet. Chris stops dead, foot still in mid-step as he watches the stranger scan the tree-line.
He mutters something to them that he can barely hear over the blood pounding in his ears. The leaves rustle somewhere too close for comfort as he holds his breath, trying to keep his cool and stay still.
He fails.
His foot, which had been hanging in the air just a few inches from the ground, drops down, causing him to almost stumble as a loud crack! from a twig beneath his foot fills the silence. Something from inside the forest screeches, a flash of movement from the trees slipping into the clearing and before he knows it, the stranger’s head is tumbling from his body and into the snow, red dripping onto the white below it.
“Go!” Beth shouts. “Fucking run!”
Chris takes off without waiting for any further instruction, holding the shotgun even tighter than before. He throws a glance over his shoulder to see Beth spewing fire from the spout in her hands and dousing the creature before turning and following after him.
“Go!” she repeats, as if he weren’t already running. He catches a glimpse of the creature rising up from the flames before he whips his head back around to the trail ahead of him, determined not to do something stupid, like trip over a root and get himself killed. There’s a whoosh as Beth pulls the trigger and sends more flames pouring over their pursuer. Chris can see the lodge door in the distance, Ashley staring at him from the other side with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide as she stares at the two of them and the monster chasing them.
“Get the door!” Beth calls out, and apparently Ashley hears her, or is at least able to understand as she throws the door open just as Chris and Beth reach it, the pair practically falling through the door as Ashley slams it behind them.
“Chris!” she cries. “Oh my god, what happened?”
“We need to go,” Beth interrupts, stepping between them. “Get down to the basement, now!”
//
“Oh my god, guys!” Emily cries the moment she sees them step through the door. “Thank God!”
Chris feels a little thrown at her sudden spike in concern for them, but he knows Emily’s always cared more then she tends to let on. Looking around, he can see them all wearing similar expressions of relief, especially Sam. She seems to hold her breath as she glances up and down Beth’s frame, presumably for any injuries, but looks away the second the other girl catches her.
“What took you so long?” she asks, looking over at Ashley and Chris instead.
“It’s not so good up there right now,” Chris answers.
“Understatement of the night,” Mike mutters.
“Where’s the flamethrower guy?”
“Uh, yeah… he-” Chris stutters, stumbling over his words.
“He’s dead,” the youngest Washington answers, cutting him off. Ashley gapes in shock, while Emily puts her head in her hands and groans something under her breath.
“What happened?” Sam asks
“The Wendigo got him,” Beth replies, and even though her voice is nearly monotone, there’s an undeniable tinge of sorrow and guilt on her face. “Cut off his head,”
“Oh god,” the blonde whispers.
For a moment the whole room just fades into silence as everybody tries to take it all i
n, Chris hopping up onto a table and folding his arms across his chest while Beth shoves her hands in her coat pockets and leans back against the wall.
“Alright,” Mike says, cutting through the empty air as he begins to walk around the room to the entrance. “Are these all the doors?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirms, barely looking up from the floor to answer.
“Are you sure?”
“What are looking for?
“Another way out.”
“Mike, I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sam replies. “We should stay put, right here, until dawn. At least we’re safe down here.
“Oh? Yeah?” he fires back. “All wrapped up like a little present with a bow on top for that thing to tear us apart on Christmas morning?”
“People will come for us!” Sam protests. “In the morning.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“That is what’ll happen, right Em?” Sam asks, turning to the brunette as her voice begins to shake some.
“Yeah, I mean, right?” the other girl replies.
“You know what?” Beth interrupts, straightening up. “You all do what you want. I have to go get my brother back.”
“I’m coming too,” Mike says, raising his hands. “Josh has the key to the cable car on him, and I don’t want to have to wait for dawn to get off this goddamn mountain.”
Beth folds her arms over her chest and gives him a skeptical once over before shrugging. “Fine, whatever. But you better not cause me any trouble, or your ass can defend itself.”
She pulls the spout of the flamethrower off of her back and makes for the door, Mike falling into step behind her. They’re walking out the door when somebody stops them.
“Wait!” Sam calls, her voice barely more than a strangled cry. They both turn to see the blonde standing there, her mouth hanging open but no sounds coming out. Beth narrows her eyes, looking borderline furious, but Chris can see what looks like unshed tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.
“What?” she snaps, and when there’s no reply, her jaw sets in a hard line as she turns on her heels and stalks off, grabbing Mike by the wrist and practically dragging him along with her.
//
Beth and Mike don’t speak once to each other for the first fifteen minutes of their trek. If he’s being honest, Mike still feels caught a little off guard at seeing her alive; he isn’t even sure what he could or would even say to her. I’m sorry about your sister? Glad you aren’t dead? Why are you so mad at Sam?
“Do you have a plan?” he asks eventually.
“Find my brother,” she replies. “Take out as many wendigoes as I need to. Don’t get killed.”
“Solid,” Mike replies with a nod of his head. She turns back to look at him, eyebrow raised, and he only shrugs back.
He lets another minute go by before trying again. “Hey, so, it’s nice to see you,” he tries. “Alive, I mean.”
“Thanks.”
“And I’m sorry about, well… you know…”
“Where you played a prank that caused me and my sister to fall into a mineshaft and disappear?”
“Yeah, that.”
Beth makes a small grunting sound he supposes is some form of acknowledgement. She doesn’t say anything else, and something about the silence makes him feel stifled, and he feels the need to speak again.
“Just so you know, we never meant for anything bad to happen.”
“But it happened anyway,” she replies, tints of anger seeping into her voice. “You played a cruel prank that turned me into this and Hannah into something worse than dead. And then you apparently left my brother alone in a shed to get taken.”
“Hey, Chris and I were only doing what we thought was best!”
“Wait, Chris? Chris was helping you? He’s supposed to be Josh’s best friend!”
“Well that didn’t stop Josh from tying Chris to a chair and forcing him to pick between himself and Ashley!”
Beth stops dead, turning full around to face him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Why do you think we tied him up in the first place?” Mike asks, voice growing louder. “He was trying to fuck with us all night! He pretended to die and made Chris think it was his fault before he dressed up as a killer, tied him and Ash to a chair and made Chris chose to shoot one of them! He also stole all of Sam’s clothes, forced her to walk around the house alone in a towel, locked her in a theater and forced her to watch a video of his death before knocking her out and tying her up in the basement. Who knows what the hell he would have done to her if I hadn’t been stumbling around in the tunnels and found her?”
Beth’s jaw drops in shock as she stares at him. His chest is heaving and he got louder than he intended but it feels nice to list it all, to lay everything out on the table. It’s all been making his head feel like he’s going to explode and Jess still hangs at the back of his mind, crying out for him as the elevator falls and she goes down with it.
“That can’t be true,” she whispers, shaking her head and taking a step back.
“It is,” he says, his voice more gentle than before. “Chris said that he’s probably off his meds. He wanted to get revenge on everyone for you and Hannah, but he didn’t do a very good job of it, considering the fact that Chris and Sam weren’t even part of the prank.”
Some of the shock in her eyes turns to more disbelief. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that he really only messed with Chris, Sam, and Ash,” he replies. “Ashley I get, however twisted it was, but he was messing with Chris and Sam, too, even though Chris was just as passed out as he was and Sam was trying to stop the prank from even happening in the first place.”
“Sam was trying to stop the prank?”
“Yeah. She thought it was really cruel and told us she didn’t want to be a part of it. She even tried to warn Hannah, but by the time she had found her it was too late.”
Beth sighs, squeezing her eyes shut and she runs a hand through her hair, knocking the beanie off of her head as she grips at her scalp.
Mike shifts his weight from one foot to the other as he waits for her to do something, feeling more awkward than he ever likes to as she stands there muttering to herself. Finally, she lifts her head and fixes him with a steely look.
“Come on, we have to get Josh and get back before anything bad happens.”
//
Sam flips through the book in her hand, eyes skimming through pages for anything useful. It seems to flip between being something like a guide to wendigoes to something more akin to a journal, recounting specific things that happen to him over time. She pays careful attention to sections about combat and defending against them, and maybe more on the section where he mentions running into Beth. A couple of tears slip down her cheeks when she comes to a part mentioning Hannah.
I tried to convince the girl to go back down the mountain and her family. She says she can’t, not until she puts her sister ‘out of her misery’. I tried to tell her that nothing about her sister was still there, that she was just as gone as she would be if the Wendigo were too, but she insisted. I cannot argue, after all, I was here for the same reasons, and I guess I still am.
There’s a section on bites, which is actually a big relief for not only Emily but Ashley, who looked like she was going to have a meltdown when she saw the bite on the other girl’s shoulder, but what concerns her more is the section on the wendigoes he had locked up somewhere in the Sanatorium.
Nobody else seems as concerned as she is when she mentions it. Chris seems almost catatonic in the corner, giving a small shrug and nothing else, still too horrified by the sight of a man getting his head decapitated.
“Beth might already know,” Emily points out, brushing a piece of dirt from her coat. “But I guess you can go warn them or whatever if you want to.”
“It may not be that big of a deal anyway,” Ashley adds quietly.
Sam holds the book in her hand, glancing over the pages once before dropping it onto the table and grabbing the gun sitting there instead.
//
The silence between them is back as Beth and Mike trek up into and through the Sanatorium. There’s a mutual feeling of shock that ripples through them both when they see the damage done to the main lobby area. There’s parts of the ceiling collapsed that they can both swear weren’t on the ground earlier tonight, and the dogs both seem to be missing.
Beth takes one look at his empty hands and pulls him over to one of the doors on the side, pulling a key from her pocket and shoving it into the lock. She pushes the door open with a loud creak and beelines straight for the table, wasting no time as she begins to shove things into his hands, starting with fistfuls of shotgun shells before handing him both a shotgun and a torch.
“You’re gonna need something to defend yourself with, after all.”
He nods, pulling the lighter from his pants and flicking it to life, lighting up the cloth wrapped around the end of the torch. It goes up quick, casting an orange glow across his face and over the room. Beth nods in approval and turns around, beckoning for him to follow behind her as she strides across the room.
“Can you shoot that open?” she asks.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, aiming the end of the shotgun at the latch on the door. He pulls the trigger and sends the lock flying off in pieces. With both of his hands full, he nudges the door open with his knee, allowing Beth to step in first.
There’s panting coming from somewhere in the room that sets off his nerves, but any worry he has turns into relief when he sees the head of the wolf from earlier appear around the edge of a table, perking up at the sound of footsteps.
Beth seems pleased too, from the looks of the grin that pulls at her lips as she crouches down. When he sees her, the wolf gives a small, almost gleeful yelp, padding over and nuzzling his head into her outstretched hand.
“Hey Alfie,” she murmurs, scratching the fur behind his ears. “Where’s Georgie, huh?”
“Alfie?”
“Yeah,” she says, lifting her head up to look at him. A part of her smile disappears but her lips stay curled up at the edges. “I call him Alfie. Jack found him in the woods one day and he’s been hanging around here ever since.”
“Jack?”
She sighs, rolling her eyes a little. “He was the ‘flamethrower guy’, as you all put it so descriptively. His name was Jack.”
“Oh,” Mike mutters, looking down to the ground. Beth turns back to the wolf, patting him on the head. “Let’s go, boy.”
She turns back to Mike and nods ahead. “I’ve seen maps before, this way should take us through the psychiatric wing that’ll put us right outside the mine.
“Sounds like a plan.”
She leads him down the hallway and out into the snow, their path marked off by a chained fence that goes over their heads and connects to the other side in an arching pattern. The wolf, or Alfie, which is apparently his name, trots at her side and leaves paw prints behind him in the snow.
He ends up walking off ahead of them when they get back inside, slipping between a small bend in the bars low enough for him to fit through. Mike eyes the hole warily, doubting he could slip through it. Beth gives him a once over and apparently agrees with this, turning instead to lever on the wall. She seems to hesitate, her hand hovering just over the handle before she grips it in one hand and yanks it down.
The metal door behind them slides shut and the one ahead opens. Well, opens is a bit off an understatement when the door only moves a couple inches, not even reaching a foot, earning varying levels of exasperation from each of them. With a huff, Beth rolls her shoulders back and slips through the gap, barely touching the door as she slides through. Mike feels a small level of irritation at his own hulking frame as she tries to squeeze through. It’s easier than he had pictured, but it still requires a fair amount of sucking in his stomach and holding his breath to make it to the other side.
Alfie seems pleased at them for both making it through, giving them both what looks like almost a happy look before he begins padding ahead of them, expecting the two of them to follow his lead as he plods down a flight of stairs.
“What’s down here, anyway?” Mike asks, seeming to pick up on the little bits of unease prickling over Beth.
“I think Jack traps the wendigoes down here,” she answers, trying to play her response off with nonchalance, but Mike can sense the worry behind her words.
“No shit,” he mutters, eyes wide as he goes from alert to hyper-vigilant, fingers tightening around the torch in his hands. She gives a small shrug in response, eyes still trained on the halls in front of them as Alfie lopes on in the lead.
The wolf comes to a screeching stop with a whimper, and Mike looks up to see the other wolf from earlier, body plastered up against the bars with his head hanging from a mangled neck and his torso split open. Beth whispers a small ‘oh no’ under her breath, face twisting with sympathy, and Mike even feels bad despite the way it had snarled at him earlier on in the night.
Alfie’s ears perk up, and he goes from whining to barking. The wolf takes one last look at the body before turning down the corridor and scampering off.
“How does he even know where to go?” Mike comments under his breath.
Beth shrugs. “Beats me.”
They follow the wolf, who seems to be determined to get out of the Sanatorium as fast as he can, hurrying down along the halls and nearly slipping from their sights multiple times. After what he just saw with the last wolf, he doesn’t blame him, but Alfie’s rush is making it hard to keep up with speed-walking after him.
A far off screech seems to rattle the both of them, shaking them both out of whatever state of lower tension they’d slipped off into. On instinct, they both move closer to each other, pulling their weapons closer to their chests and taking deep breaths.
“We should be fine,” Beth murmurs, sounding as if she were trying to reassure herself just as much as him. “They should be locked up, they won’t be able to hurt us.”
They turn the corner to find Alfie having already disappeared into the next hallway. The wolf’s sudden disappearance makes Mike feel all the more uneasy, but they catch up to him quick, finding him sitting with his tail wrapped around his paws waiting for them.
“Good boy,” Beth praises, reaching out to stroke his head without taking her eyes off the path ahead, nerves still racing. Her eyes only widen when they hear another screech, much closer than the ones before. She meets Mike’s gaze and the hint of fear behind her eyes makes him all the more nervous.
Still, they push on forward. The sound of skittering catches their attention, Mike swiveling around to aim his gun at a safe lying useless on the ground. He holds his breath as he waits, turning his gun on the noise and letting out a deep exhale when a rat skitters from behind it. He turns his attention back on the path ahead and nearly lets out a cry when he finds a wendigo perched on the table and staring at him.
“Shit!” he hisses, turning the barrel of the shotgun on the creature and firing as it leaps for him. The creature goes flying back from the attack, and they take the opportunity to run.
Mike stomps up the stairs, Beth on his heels and Alfie only a foot behind them. He can hear the wendigo snarling behind them as Beth shouts something, pushing him into a room on the left and slamming the door behind him. The torch goes out as Beth grabs hold of a locker, grunting as she pushes it over and in front of the door. No sooner has it hit the ground that the wendigo appears in the window, head sliding through the bars and it reaches for her. Mike remembers the machete in the back of his pants, pulling it out and smashing the end of the hilt into the creature’s face.
“Let’s go!” Beth says, taking off through the next doorway. Mike closes it behind her and slides the lock into place, releasing the breath he’d been holding in his lungs and rubbing a hand over his face as he tries to calm himself. Alfie makes his presence known with a yip, and it occurs to Mike that for a moment he hadn’t even noticed they’d lost the wolf. He was more than a little confused at how he had managed to end up back in the room with them but he brushes it off: they have a much bigger situation at hand.
The room around them is expansive, and a quick “get down” from Beth is all the prompting he needs before dropping behind a desk and peering out from the corner. Another wendigo jumps up onto one of the tables, head swinging around to scan the room before hopping to the next table. Mike freezes, stiffening as the wendigo’s gaze sweeps over him and Beth, and he waits as he holds his breath.
Don’t move, he chants in his mind. Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move.
The wendigo snarls, leaping to another table and turning its back on them. Mike doesn’t waste a second, moving as fast as his crouched position will let him to get across the room. Once they disappear around the corner and out of the wendigo’s line of sight he lets his shoulders relax a little.
“Come on,” Beth urges from behind him. “We need to keep moving.”
Mike only nods, not quite trusting himself to speak.
The hallway that looms before them seems more than a little ominous, and they creep down it slowly. Mike makes sure to stay no more than two feet behind Beth at all times, feeling oddly comforted by the fact that Alfie pads along right by his side, close enough for the wolf’s pelt to brush his hand.
He’s caught off guard by a clawed hand that swipes only inches from his ear, and he jumps back to see a wendigo reaching out for him through the bars. He raises his gun in defense but doesn’t fire.
“Keep moving,” Beth repeats. “They’re locked up, we should be fine. Just stay towards the middle of the hallway.”
One reaches out for her ankle and she kicks it off, stepping further from the bars and keeps walking. Mike does his best to avoid the grabs they make at him, breath catching at every surprise limb that nearly fastens itself to his body. He nearly loses his hit completely when a wendigo seems to jump out of nowhere and lunge for him, only to be pulled back by the chained collar around its neck. On an almost instinctual reflex, Mike pulls the trigger and sends it flying back into its cell, ears ringing from the firing of the gun.
They’re almost out of the holding cells when a screech catches both their attention. There’s a wendigo advancing on them, leaping across the bars with another right behind them.
“Mike, get the door open,” Beth commands, pushing him between herself and the exit. He goes right to throwing his weight against it as an orange glow appears on the edges of his vision, the telltale sound of the flamethrower whirring behind him.
The door gives after a couple of shoves, him falling inside and Beth jumping in after him, slamming the door behind her. She barely gives him a moment to catch his breath before she’s pushing him forward again.
“We can’t stop moving forward now,” she states. “Josh might not have that long.”
//
Sam stares up at the cliff face ahead of her. She can see a ladder near the top, but it’s nowhere near reaching distance from the ground.
“You can do this, Sam,” she whispers to herself. “It’s like a rock wall at the gym. It shouldn’t be all that hard.”
She takes a deep breath as she approaches the wall, reaching out and grabbing the rocks with both hands. It’s not all that hard to scale her way up, pulling up with her arms and pushing off her feet.
And sure, maybe she climbs a little risky. She takes leaps and grabs onto a questionable wooden platform that, sure enough, splinters under her weight. She takes more than one short-cut in the interest of time, and a rush of pride surges through her when she pulls herself up over the top of the wall.
“I beat you,” she mutters. “I fucking beat you.”
//
They end up basically burning a hole in the Sanatorium to get out, Mike firing into one of the barrels and setting off an explosion that sends them flying out the doors. Thankfully, the snow, while cold, also provided itself as a cushion for their collision with the ground and making it far easier to pick themselves up of the ground and keep moving forward.
They keep up a good pace as they jog down into the mines, but it soon becomes apparent that blowing up the far side of the Sanatorium was not enough to kill both wendigoes when they find one chasing them, charred but still capable enough to run even with the flames covering it’s body.
They burst through a door and almost manage to shut it behind them, but the wendigo pushes through and leaps onto Mike, sending the two of them to the ground.
Beth panics; the only weapon she has on her is her flamethrower, and she can’t use that without burning Mike to a crisp alongside the wendigo. Her mind races, grappling for a solution, and she’s just settled to bash the skull of the wendigo in with the nozzle of her flamethrower when there’s yelling and a pipe comes out of nowhere to do the job for her.
She jumps back as the creature’s head goes flying, the body falling off of Mike and onto the ground. Beth looks up to see Sam, brandishing the pipe in her hands and breathing heavy, eyes first skimming over Mike and then Beth herself. Mike jumps up onto his feet and shoves the door closed, slotting the shotgun into the handle to prevent anything else from shoving the door open.
“Are you guys okay?” he asks, as if he were unsurprised to see Sam here. Beth nods her response, only glancing at him before her eyes land back on Sam.
“What are you doing down here?” she asks, feeling like she’s having to heave the breath into her lungs to get them moving.
“I was on my way to warn you about the wendigoes locked in the Sanatorium,” the blonde replies. “But from the looks of it, you already know.”
“Yeah,” Mike breaths. “Thanks, though.”
“No problem,” Sam murmurs, as if it weren’t a big deal that she just wandered through the mines, alone, to find them. Beth wants to fling herself forward and hug her, but her brain is still reeling. Something inside her, the majority of her, feels an almost crippling relief and seeing the girl in front of her alive, but there’s still the voice in the back of her mind that whispers What about Hannah? After spending so long thinking that Sam had pranked her sister, a year of placing blame, trying to take it back felt like a bit of a struggle. But her chest also ached at how she had treated Sam, so cold and unwelcoming after a year of the blonde thinking she was dead.
God, she feels like an asshole, and if it weren’t for the threat of her brother’s safety on the line, she’d probably have a breakdown right then and there.
“Guess we should find out way down to where that fucker lives, huh?” Mike suggests.
“Yeah,” Sam replies. “Guess we should.”
//
They walk through the mines in relative silence, Mike and Beth on pace with each other and Sam a foot or two behind. None of them really seem to be able to come up with anything to say, but Beth wishes she could come up with anything to break the air. Sam seems to draw in on herself and away from the other two, specifically Beth, and Mike seems all too aware of the tension between them to risk saying anything.
Beth casts a quick glance at each of them as she realizes if any conversation will be started, she’s going to have to be the one doing it.
Before she can rethink her decision she drops back and falls in step with Sam, who looks more than surprised. Beth doesn’t blame her, considering the frosty way she had treated her and the hostility she’s regarded her with.
“Hi,” she murmurs, unsure of how else to start a conversation.
“Hey,” the blonde replies, tucking her hands into her pockets.
Beth’s mind seems to almost stall, unable to come up with anything to say. A couple moments pass before Sam speaks up herself, her voice smaller than before.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispers.
Beth gives a small flinch at her words. “I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you come back?”
“I couldn’t.”
Sam shakes her head, and Beth can see the tears welling at the corner of the blonde’s eyes. “Why not?”
“I, Hannah-“ the shorter girl tries to explain. “I couldn’t just leave knowing she was stuck here like this.”
“Like what?”
“Hannah turned into a wendigo.”
Mike, who had been not-so-subtly listening in on their conversation, stops dead, turning around to look at her with wide eyes. “Hannah’s a wendigo?”
Beth nods, trying to swallow the lump in her throat and force the tears back down.
“And if we don’t hurry, Josh might be too,” she says, her voice shaking. “So let’s go.”
//
They end up having to wade through the water, which is far colder than any of them would like. Sam makes a hissed comment about not being able to feel her fingers, to which Mike replies by glaring at her, holding up his bandaged hand and showing off the remaining two fingers he had. If the situation weren’t so serious or unfortunate, Beth would have laughed.
The further through the cave they’ve gotten, the bigger the pit in her stomach grows, and when they pull themselves out of the water and onto the shore, she’s almost certain there’s something bad waiting for them on the other side of that door.
It turns out she is very, very right when they pulls it open and water comes pouring out, carrying multiple heads along with it.
She recognizes them both, one easier than the other. It’s Jack and Matt, the latter of the two she hadn’t even realized was here. The small flood ends up knocking them all over, Beth and Mike onto their asses while Sam falls forward onto her knees.
“Oh whoa, whoa,” one of them mutters, while another whines out an “oh god.”
Beth doesn’t even know if one of those voices is her.
Sam is the first back on her feet, backing away to the door and letting out a high sound, a mix between a cry and a moan. Beth stumbles away from the heads and over closer to the blonde as she does her best to get standing, grabbing the other girl’s hand on instinct. Mike is scrambling up and to their sides with horror painted over his face, and they’re all practically tripping over each other to get through the doorway, unaware that the scene only gets worse from there.
They come face to face with two hanging bodies to match the heads, limp and dangling from chains on the ceiling. Despite what she’s seen down here before, Beth has to fight down a wave of nausea at seeing their mangled corpses. These were people she knew, faces and bodies she recognized. Matt’s trademark jacket was torn and spotted with blood, while Jack’s headless figure still wears those godawful yellow pants she’s always hated.
Sam’s grip on her hand grows tighter as she starts to mumble something under her breath that sounds very much like “no no no” and Mike’s hands are twisted into his hair. There’s a collective moment of both shock and panic as they all take in the bodies, terrified but somehow unable to look away. Beth herself is only able to pull her attention away from them when Mike starts talking.
“Wait, hold on,” he says, peering through the wooden wall. “I think I saw something.”
Beth drops Sam’s hand as she looks through the wood slats. There’s definitely something standing there, murmuring something, but it takes her a second to realize it’s her brother, trembling and backing to the wall as if he were afraid of something.
“Josh,” she breathes, voice soft before she repeats his name again, this time much louder. “Josh!”
She doesn’t wait for the other two as she pushes through the door and heads straight for her brother, calling his name. He looks up at the sound of her voice, and while his eyes are looking at her, she tell he doesn’t see her, not really.
“You’re not real,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re not real. You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not real-“
“I’m real,” she says, taking a step towards him. “Josh, it’s me, Beth. I’m real.”
“No, no, no,” he protests. “This isn’t real.”
“Josh, it’s me,” she insists. “Look at me, I’m real.”
She reaches out and rests her hand on his cheek, shaking his head gently. It seems to pull him out of it, eyes widening when he focuses on his sister.
“Bethy?” he murmurs, tears welling in his cheeks as he lurches forward and falls against her chest in a hug as he breaks out into sobs.
He looks so broken weeping in her arms as she reaches up to cradle his head with her hands. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”
Eventually his crying dies down as he pulls back to look at her. “Where’s Hannah?” he asks.
“She’s not-” Beth starts, voice cracking up and dying out in the middle of her sentence. “Hannah’s not… Hannah’s not human anymore.”
He shakes his head, the intensity and weight of his gaze as it rests on her almost making her want to look away. He must get what she means from the way he swallows hard, eyes scanning over the cavern walls and then dropping down to his feet.
“We should get out of here,” Mike says, clearing his throat with an awkward cough. “It isn’t safe down here.”
“Mike’s right,” Sam joins in, gesturing to the space behind her. “Do you see that light? That means there’s a direct way out of here.”
“We should go,” the jock says, taking off for source of the light and leaving the others to follow behind without protest.
The source of the light turns out to be a nearly vertical slope that Mike takes one look at before declaring that there’s no way Josh would be able to climb it. Beth is inclined to agree, despite that fact that she doesn’t very much like the way the taller boy seems to fancy himself a leader all of a sudden.
“Okay, if you help me up, I can go back to tell their others we’re okay,” Sam suggests. “And you can bring Josh back the way we came.”
“Okay,” Mike agrees, the same time as Beth shouts “No way!”
“Beth-” Sam starts, but the shorter girl cuts her off.
“Going alone is dangerous!” Beth argues. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”
“They need to know we’re okay,” Sam insists, a rueful smile tugging at her lips that tells Beth she’s not winning this discussion, so she grabs the blonde’s wrist and drags her past the boys’ hearing range.
“You know this is an idiot move, right?” she hisses.
“So was any of us coming down here in the first place,” Sam replies. “We still did it anyway.”
“That was different.”
“I don’t want them to be scared.”
“They should be scared, Sam! There’s a bunch of wendigoes on a mountain with them!”
“But they should be scared for themselves; I don’t want them to be scared for me.”
“You have to be safe,” Beth pleads.
“I always am,” Sam assures her. “Number one rule of climbing.”
The shorter girl gives a dry laugh. “Climbing dork,” she mutters.
“Love you, too,” the blonde replies, and Beth can’t help but notice that hers still shine the same way the use to when she said it, and that’s the last thing she registers before one of them is leaning in and they’re kissing.
Kissing Sam feels like it always has, clutching the back of the taller girl’s shirt and trying not to fall over under the pressure of the other girl’s fingers on her neck. Hannah teased her about it once when she tried to explain it, telling her that she was no better than the cheesy romance novels she liked to complain about. The conversation had ended with a pillow to the older twin’s face as they dissolved from conversation to a pillow war that had them in fits and giggles.
The dank cave walls and minor sense of impending doom fade under the pressure of Sam's lips, and it’s easy to let her worries disappear until she has to break for air. She pulls back at she sees that look in Sam’s eyes, the one she’s seen on countless movie heroes before they charge off into something reckless. It’s that look that says “I may never see you again, but God, do I love you”.
It feels like falling down that cliff all over again.
“I’ll be okay,” Sam promises, and something within Beth chokes.
“You better,” she replies.
She watches as Mike gives the blonde a boost high enough for the girl to grab onto the ledge above and start climbing, scaling the rocks as if she had been born to do it. Beth shakes her head and tears her gaze away, focusing instead on Josh and Mike.
“We need to get out of here,” she says, ushering them forward.
They make their way back through the way they came, Beth making sure to stay close to Josh’s side and letting Mike take the lead.
“You didn’t have to hit me, man,” her brother says in a quiet voice, Beth tensing behind him and shooting daggers at the other boy’s head.
“I know, I’m sorry man,” Mike replies, and there’s an actual note of sincerity in his voice. “I thought you killed Jess.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
Josh doesn’t do so well going back through the room with the bodies. He doesn’t recognize Jack’s body but he does recognize Matt’s, and his face crumples as he begins to mutter something under his breath. Beth reaches out and grabs his hand, squeezing it to get his attention. He calms a little when he turns to look at her, and she gives him a small smile that he doesn’t return.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs, just loud enough to hear, and she hopes for both of their sake’s that she’s right.
//
Things go to shit when they get in the water.
Mike goes first, still playing the role of pack leader as he finds their way back out. Josh gets in next, giving a small yelping noise when he slides into the frigid waters, and Beth jumps in behind him. Her brother takes off to catch up with Mike, eager to get out of the water and back onto dry land, but Beth lingers a few yards behind, eyes sweeping over the room as she tries to ignore the pit of dread rising in her stomach.
Josh is just catching up to the other boy when Mike disappears into the water, giving a cut-off cry of profanity before being pushed under water. Josh takes a couple shaky steps back and nearly jumps out of his skin when a wendigo bursts out of the water with a screech.
“You’re not real!” Josh shouts, shaking his head. “No, you’re not real!”
Beth stands frozen in the middle of the lake, the words ‘don’t move’ echoing through her head. She feels like her feet are glued to the floor, leaving her stuck and unable to help her brother, but oh God, she can see the tattoo on the wendigo’s arm, it’s Hannah-
Josh notices it too, crying out her name as what’s left of their sister reaches out and grabs him.
This is it, this is why she’s down here. There’s a flamethrower strapped to her back and Hannah’s right here and she should be doing something but she can’t. She only watches as her tattered sister grabs Josh and drags him away just, stares as what’s left of her family disappears into the cave, brother calling her name and begging her to help him.
Their eyes meet before he’s dragged off into the shadows, and Beth’s never felt sicker with herself.
Mike slips out from behind a boulder, eyes wide and a look of horror painted over his face. There’s a look of guilt that she knows is mirrored in her face and in her gut as she fights not to throw up the contents of her stomach.
“Holy fuck,” Mike mutters, shaking his head. Beth whirls around, mouth open and an insult ready to be fired, but it dies out in her throat. What can she say to him? How can she possibly even judge Mike when they’re both guilty of the same thing?
She froze. She fucking froze. She’s been up this whole time trying to put Hannah to rest and all she’s done now is let Josh fall into their sister’s arms.
God, he’s probably dead now. She’s probably going to kill him, or worse.
You’ve done it again, her mind whispers. Let another sibling fall prey to the mountain. What are ya gonna do now, huh?
“No,” she whispers, putting her head in her hands. “Not again, not again.”
“Hey,” Mike murmurs, grabbing her shoulder and giving it a small shake. “There’s nothing you could have done, unless you wanted to burn them both to ashes, okay?”
She can feel the tears welling up in her eyes, hot and wet as she looks him in the eye.
“It would have been better if I had,” she says.
//
There is screeching behind her and Sam runs.
The snow is slippery beneath her feet, and she nearly runs face first into a low hanging branch, managing to duck just in time to avoid it. Sure, she’d always been big into track and rock climbing, but she didn’t think that running from cannibalistic monsters would be the future challenges she applied those skills to.
She makes it down to lodge door only to find that it’s locked, leaving her to pound on the door and shouting.
“Open up!” she calls. “You guys, it’s me, open the door!”
Her heart is racing and her blood is pounding and oh God, she can hear it behind her-
“Sam,” somebody says, and she turns to see Mike and Beth standing there, Mike’s face scratched and red while Beth looks… lost.
“Oh thank god, it’s you,” she pants. “You guys look awful.”
“Gonna look worse if we stay out here,” Mike replies.
Sam nods, looking at the door once before turning to scan the ground, her eyes land on a rock, and she picks it up, t3esting the heft of it in her hand. She only pauses a second before picking it up and heaving it through the door window, breaking the glass with a small smash! Careful to avoid the pieces still hanging in the frame, she reaches in to grab the door handle, twisting it and letting out small, relieved sigh when the door opens without protest.
The three of them step inside and close the door behind them, stopping to look at each other for a moment. Sam takes in the two of them and Beth’s broken expression when it clicks.
“Where’s Josh?” she asks.
The youngest Washington shakes her head, looking down at the ground. Mike fumbles with his hands before clearing his throat. “He, um… it got him.”
“Oh God,” Sam whispers. “Beth, I- I’m so sorry.”
Beth gives a weak shrug, gaze staying focused on the ground. She barely responds when the blonde reaches out and grabs her hand, only acknowledging the gesture by wrapping her own fingers around the other girl’s.
“We should go down to the basement,” Mike suggests.
“Good idea,” Sam agrees. “Hopefully they’re all still down there.”
They make their way down the stairs in silence, quiet enough that it reminds Sam a little of a funeral parade, marching in silence. They step into the movie theatre only to have the other door burst open, Chris flying past them with Em and Ash behind them, the former pushing the redhead behind her. Mike bounces in place once before taking off after them, following the shouting group. Beth seems to come alive, pulling at Sam’s hand and tugging her towards the others, but she lets the other girl’s hand go and rushes for the door, clicking it locked before she runs for the living room, Beth at her side.
They both come to a sudden halt when the find everyone else standing frozen, watching the giant metalwork ball hanging from the ceiling. There’s a wendigo perched on it as it swings back and forth,
“Don’t move,” Mike hisses. “Don’t fucking move a muscle.”
Everyone stays still as the wendigo looks from side to side at them all, and it’s only another moment or two before more wendigoes come pouring in from the lower level, all jerky movements and low screeches. Sam can hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears and the way Beth’s breath comes out shaky beside her. She can see the brunette out of the corner of her eye, wearing a stricken expression and eyes staring off into the distance, a sure sign she’s racking her brain to come up with a plan.
The wendigoes in the room begin to fight. The biggest one, which Sam realizes is Hannah from the butterfly tattoo on its arm, seems to almost rear up as it stands, grabbing the other one and smashing it into the main staircase before throwing it at the fireplace. A pipe comes dislodged when it hits, and a low hissing sound fills the room as a nearly invisible gas comes seeping out. Sam, Mike, and Beth all take notice of this and look at each other, Mike looking over to the lightbulb on the wall before back at them. It takes a second but they get the message easy enough.
Break the lightbulb, and they can let this place go up in flames.
Mike starts creeping along towards the back wall as the wendigoes continue fighting, making his way toward the light. When he reaches it, he wraps his hand around it and squeezes, shattering the outer bulb beneath his fingers.
It catches him some attention, one of the wendigoes scrabbling over to him and stopping in front of him. Sam can see the panic that rises in his eyes, and she knows that if she doesn’t do something, he’s going to make a fatal mistake.
“Hey!” she cries out before she can reconsider, and Hannah turns from looming over Mike to looking in her direction, making its way closer to Sam and stopping right in front of her. It lets out a screech, barely two feet away from her. When it gets no response, it turns its head and sweeps its eyesight over the staircase. Beth takes that opportunity to grab Sam’s hand and pull her behind one of the columns, recatching the wendigo’s attention. Sam can feel Beth’s breath against her skin as they stand pressed against each other, doing their best not to shake or move at all. Hannah screeches again, an attempt at scaring them into moving or giving their position away.
They can hear Hannah as she jumps away, and Sam pulls Beth with her as she ducks into the behind the stone wall, flattening them both into the corner as the wendigo comes leaping back toward them. It gets close this time, distorted mouth less than a foot away from Sam’s ear when it screeches.
The blonde barely flinches, eyelids squeezing shut and her grip on Beth’s hand tightening. Beth’s own eyes are wide open, and when the creature lurches away again, she takes that moment to run, pushing Sam in front of her and sprinting.
One of the wendigoes come bounding after them, leaping just moments before they reach the door. She can feel its claws scratch the back of her neck before its jerked away and she manages to flip the light switch on their way out.
The lodge goes up behind them and they go flying through the air.
//
Everything is dark for a moment, but her eyes blink open to white and red and blonde.
She’s lying in the snow, cold powder on her cheeks, with the lodge burning in the background. Sam is lying on her back a couple feet away, arm thrown over her body and her eyes closed. Something flares up in Beth’s chest as she pushes herself up onto her knees and crawls towards the other girl. The blonde’s eyes blink open as Beth leans over her, and she can feel relief bubbling in her chest.
“You’re okay,” she murmurs, reaching out and grabbing Sam’s hand. The other girl gives a small smile as she laces their fingers together.
“I can hear helicopters,” Sam says. “We made it.”
“Until dawn,” Beth adds.
Ashley gets to her feet in the distance, Chris crouching down to offer her a hand. Emily sits up on her knees, and Mike is still lying on his back, looking up at the burning lodge ahead of them. Sam stares up at the sky with a grin stretching across her face.
“You’re alive,” she whispers. “We’re alive.”
“Yeah, Sammy,” Beth murmurs back. “We’re alive.”