The Cabin in the Woods

“Curt?” she shouted. If he’d made it down into the basement by now, perhaps he was on the other side of one of these walls. She concentrated, trying to position herself in relation to the outside wall of the cabin, but the geography of the room above them had become confused.

One or both of them will be down here soon, she thought, and the seconds seemed to tick away like memories of her life.

“Anything?” Holden asked.

Dana shook her head.

“No.”

He crossed the room toward her. He’d been tapping, too, and she saw a shadow fall over his face even though he tried to fight away his own desperation. He’s doing it for me, she realized. He’ll never say it’s hopeless.

“Hidden rooms were a staple of post-civil war architecture,” Holden said. “There’s gotta be a—” And when he was directly below the trapdoor a shadow swung in, a spiked metal smile on the end of a long chain, catching him beneath the left arm and across the back of his shoulder.

Holden’s eyes went wide and he screamed.

Dana reached for him as the slack chain tightened and he was lifted from the floor. He swung a little as his feet left the dirt and knocked her back, and she clasped his hands and pulled. Above and behind him she saw up through the trapdoor where Matthew’s huge shadow loomed, shoulders flexing and arms working as he pulled. The rusted teeth of the bear trap were embedded, it was only going to take a couple of seconds to haul Holden from the basement room, and then…

And then there’ll just be me, Dana thought. She did not want to die alone.

She tugged at Holden’s hands, knowing that each movement would be jarring those cruel metal teeth gripped within his flesh. But if she let the zombie drag him up and out he was finished, and Holden knew this as well.

Teeth gritted and bared he jerked his shoulders, stretching forward to help Dana each time she tugged. On their third try the shadow above them slipped and fell forward, and Holden dropped to the floor.

Matthew’s girth lodged him in the trapdoor, his upper body hanging in the basement, hands still reaching for Holden where he’d fallen. The lamp swung wildly beside him, and the shifting light danced shadows across his face, almost as if he had expression. But there was no expression there. He moaned slightly, but that was the only sign of effort as he twisted and turned, futilely reaching for his prey.

Holden had managed to tug the broken bear trap away from his back, dropping it to the floor and slumping over weakly, when one of Matthew’s questing hands snagged a fold of his ripped pullover. Holden’s eyes went wide as he was snatched backward, and Matthew hissed in triumph.

“You like pain?” Dana asked. She stepped around Holden and stabbed hard with the crowbar. It punctured Matthew’s face amidst the remains of his nose, driving him against the wall and pinning him there. Dana screamed into his face, “How’s that work for ya?”

Holden fell free.

Matthew’s hands grasped at the bar and started pulling, and Dana heard the sound of metal scraping against bone.

He’s not dead, she thought, bar through his head and he’s not dead, not yet, not dead, not yet—

She plucked a long carving knife from the torture table and stabbed at Matthew’s chest, neck, throat, face, head, hacking at him a dozen times, shaking with rage. She went for his heart, not knowing for sure that it beat; his brain, uncertain of whether he even thought in the normal sense. His hands finally swung down and he hung limp, but she kept stabbing anyway. She was furious at his lack of blood. If he’d bled, perhaps she would have felt… happier?

She wasn’t sure; didn’t think she could ever be happy again. She buried the knife deep in his left eye and hung on, exhausted.

“Remind me… never to piss you off,” Holden said. And through everything, Dana finally managed a smile.

EIGHT

Hadley was standing behind Sitterson, watching the action on the giant screens that rose before them. He’d been pacing nervously for the last couple of minutes, and Sitterson had to resist the urge to swivel in his chair and tell him to sit the hell down. Things were going to be okay. The kids were doing pretty well in comparison to other occasions, true. But they’d gone from outside to inside, and inside to down, just as was intended.

And now that they’d got the better of the huge zombie Matthew, their defenses would be lowered for a while. They’d feel a flush of success, celebrate their resilience, rejoice in their humanity. Who knew, they might even fuck. It had happened before.

“Oh yeah,” Hadley said. “Nothing to worry about. He looks dead… ”

Sitterson smiled, worked at his keyboard, and turned a dial a quarter-clockwise. A graduated display on the small screen beside the dial showed a steady increase in power.

“And what do we do when the dead guy stops moving?” Sitterson asked. He was aware of Truman standing off to their left, more enrapt than terrified now by proceedings.

That’s good, Sitterson thought. He’s learning fast.

He pushed the button beside the dial. The charge peaked, then purged and dropped to zero. And on the screen—

•••

—Dana jerked her hand back from the knife, staring at her fingers and palm. Holden could hardly blame her. The damage she’d done to that thing, that zombie, was sickening. Whatever it was now, it had once been human.

She turned to him with a frown, hand still held out, and she was about to say something when he took her in his arms and held tight. He felt tears burning but swallowed them back. She relaxed into his embrace, her face slick with sweat and a sheen of blood down her left cheek, and he took as much comfort from the contact as she. Even the pain where her hand pressed against his injuries was refreshing, because it made him so alive.

“You smell good,” he said, remembering their tender kisses and tentative caresses.

“I stink of blood and sweat,” she mumbled against his neck. “Yeah. Blood. Sweat. Mmm.”

She felt good, as well, but he didn’t need to tell her that. Her hands pressed against his back, never quite still, and she was feeling the solidity of him just as he was with her.

“Holden…” she said, her voice quivering, and she started to shake.

He should have comforted her. The words came to his lips but when he tried to speak they emerged as a sob, and in this silent pause when violence was no longer upon them, he felt his barriers beginning to tumble.

“Come on,” she said, edging him toward the back of the room. “Come on.”

The hanging shape of the slashed-up zombie was starkly illuminated by the dangling lamp, casting a horrific shadow against the far wall. His big hands almost touched the torture room’s dirt floor. The chain wrapped around his wrist bit in deep, and the half-moon curve of the broken bear trap glistened and glimmered with fresh blood.

Holden frowned, because he wasn’t aware he’d been injured that badly. There was so much blood on there.

“Come on,” Dana said again, “we’ve got to try and—”

A rumble came from the wall, and for a moment Holden through it was another of those troubling earth tremors. But then he felt the vibration through his feet and heard the sound coming from a very definite direction.

Then a section of the wall started to fold away. “Back!” he shouted, hauling Dana behind him in some deep- set belief that he should be protecting her. She’s the one who killed the zombie, he thought, and he barked a brief, mad laugh as Dana dashed to the table and brought up a heavy, curved