21. Side Effects May Vary
Side Effects May Vary
Levi opened his eyes to dim light and the sound of a zipper, gasping, his hands grabbing at his chest.
“What are you doing?” Levi asked, one hand rubbing his chest where the skin still felt the echoes of the gunshot.
“Going to find Owen.”
He bolted up, the sheets falling to his waist as he tried to rapidly orient himself to the space and stop Asher from doing whatever he was planning to do. Outside the window the fog was there — grey, pressed against the glass, the shapes drifting in and out of view. “Asher, stop.”
“He’s three doors down. Or in the lounge. Wherever he reset,” Asher said through his teeth, pushing his hair back from his face. “I’m going to find him and I’m going to —”
Pull him back.
“Stop. Look at me.” Levi lunged forward from the bed, his hands reaching for Asher. He didn’t care that he was still naked.
Asher paused, his shoes in one hand, and he locked eyes with Levi, his lower lip quivering.
His eyes were wrong…the brown and green both too bright and too wet.
Levi had seen Asher angry, jealous, enraged.
..this wasn’t anger. It was raw and shaky and terrified.
It was the same way he looked when they ended up in the empty space after the sanitarium…
“What happened to you?” Levi asked.
“I always wake up with you.” He swallowed hard. “Every time. Every reset. If I’m not next to you, you’re somewhere nearby…that—that’s how it works.”
“Okay.”
“This time I didn’t.” Asher stared at the ground.
“I was — it was back there… just the white. And cold. And empty, Levi. I was alone in it and you weren’t there because of fucking Owen and I—” He shook his head.
“That’s never happened before. Or I don’t think it has. I can’t — I don’t know if it has.”
That was where we went when we beat the game. That’s the way out…why did he go there? Why are we still here?
“Come here,” Levi said.
“I need to find —”
“Come here. Please.”
Asher came. He sat on the edge of the bed and Levi put his arms around him from behind, resting his chin on Asher’s shoulder. Asher was rigid for a moment and then his body gave, his spine settling back against Levi’s chest, his hands unclenching in his lap.
“The fog first,” Levi said, quiet, against his shoulder. “We stop the fog. Then we deal with Owen.”
“He shot me, Levi.”
“I know. And we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But if you go kill him right now, everything plays out the same. The fog comes, someone breaks, people die. We have to fix the cause, not the symptom.”
Asher’s breathing was still fast, his head snapping to the door as he stared at the handle. “I can hear the lock still.”
Levi squeezed him tighter. “I need you with me, dovey. Not down the hall killing someone. With me.”
Asher’s hand found Levi’s wrist where it crossed his chest and just held it. “Okay,” he said softly. “Seal out the fog...then once all this is gone, we can be happy. Just you and me. Together.”
“Together.” Levi pressed a kiss to Asher’s shoulder and didn’t say anything when the sound of a ventilator echoed in his ears.
The hallway was different.
Not horribly so, but the runner going down the hall was a different color.
The windows were smaller. The walls were just wood paneling.
Everything looked more rustic and warm than before.
They would need to find the supply closet, the game always seemed to keep the essential items, but it might have moved.
Once they established where things had moved, they’d seal the windows, the vents, the doors.
If we can get ahead of it, all we need to do is wait. Then we can leave. We need to leave.
Levi glanced down the hall and saw the kitchen door swinging, its hinges carrying it back and forth in decreasing intervals.
The light from inside spilled into the dark hallway in a stripe that widened and narrowed with each swing.
Asher stepped in front of Levi, pressing a finger to his lips before rolling his shoulders and balling his fists at his sides.
Levi already knew what was waiting inside for them as they approached and the smell filled his nostrils: copper and waste, the smell of a body opened up.
Two staff members were on the kitchen floor in lodge polos.
One lay face down near the industrial sink, the blood pooled around his torso already tacky at the edges.
The other was slumped against the wall beside the service entrance, smears above him at chest height, his hands and face in strips of sliced flesh and muscle.
Asher grabbed a knife from the knife block as he approached the body by the sink.
“One of them is missing,” he said, nudging the corpse with his foot.
Levi pulled his gaze from the man with the ruined face towards the pantry, its door left wide open, and heard a soft sound. Wet. Rhythmic. Gasping. Like someone was crying quietly in the dark behind the shelves.
“Don’t.” Asher’s hand closed on Levi’s arm as he moved toward the pantry. “They killed the people in here. What do you think’s going to happen if you try to play hero right now?”
Levi yanked his arm back. “We don’t have time for this, Asher.
If we don’t go see, that means there is a murderer in the resort with us.
You heard what the ranger said. We have to try,” he said, his throat tightening.
“We were too busy messing around to notice that Owen and Tyler were falling apart before, and it got us killed. We can’t let that happen again. ”
Asher’s hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of Levi’s hair. “Don’t. Say. That.” He pulled Levi closer, his grip tightening further as he tilted Levi’s head back to force their eyes to meet, his cheek twitching and his eyes narrowed. “Don’t ever say that again.”
Levi grabbed at Asher’s hand, tears pricking his eyes as the sting in his scalp became overwhelming. “I’m sorry—”
“When we do things together, it means something, Levi. Do you understand me?” Asher whispered, his lips brushing against Levi’s. “It’s not messing around.”
“I’m sorry,” Levi said again. He forced himself to relax, to stop pulling at Asher’s hand. It’s the fog, he told himself. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Asher’s grip loosened as he pressed a kiss to Levi’s lips, then released his hair. “I know, baby,” he said, brushing the tears from Levi’s cheeks as his face settled. “I love you.”
Levi kissed him again so he wouldn’t say anything stupid. “Let’s see if the other person is dangerous and figure out what to do from there,” he said as he pulled away. “We just need to look. Nothing more.”
“If they try to hurt you…” Asher raised the knife he held in his other hand.
“Yes, sure, you can kill them, but not until we know what we are dealing with,” Levi said quickly, trying to ignore the little spark of delight on Asher’s face and the way it made his cock twitch.
You like seeing him happy, not the idea of watching him murder someone. This game is messing with your head.
The sound of crying was moving…but not towards them. It was growing fainter as they approached the pantry. Not someone sitting still but someone going deeper, the crying getting fainter, pulling away from the kitchen, away from them. Down.
They went into the pantry.
The shelves were deep — industrial kitchen storage, cans and dry goods and bulk containers.
At the back, behind a rack of cleaning supplies, there was another door — not a pantry door but a shorter cellar door.
Heavy wood, old iron fittings, the hinges dark with rust. It was open, and beyond it a set of stairs went down into cold air.
The sound was coming from below.
The stairs were narrow and steep, the wood old enough that each step groaned under their weight.
Asher went first, the knife held out in front of him, one hand stretched behind him on Levi’s chest like he was trying to keep Levi at whatever distance he deemed safe.
The air got colder with every step, the lodge’s heating not reaching the sub-level.
The floor at the bottom was concrete, the ceiling low enough that Asher had to hunch his shoulders and cobwebs still caught in his hair, pipes running along the walls — heating ducts, water lines, electrical conduit.
The massive old furnace squatted in the center of the space, unused.
The air smelled of damp stone and old metal and underneath those, something organic.
The sound led them toward the far end.
They moved through the cellar, past the furnace, past utility panels on the far wall.
The organic smell was stronger here — sweet and wrong.
Asher stopped at the panels, squinting at the electrical box, then at the wires running above his head.
“The amperage is wrong for this gauge wire,” he mumbled.
The concrete walls gave way to older stone at the back of the cellar, and set into the stone was a door that didn’t belong here.
Levi felt Asher go rigid and stop so suddenly he walked into his back.
It was a door that looked like it belonged in a nice house— solid wood, paneled, the kind of door seen in an old estate hallway, with a brass knob gone dark with age and a skeleton keyhole set into an escutcheon plate that still had its decorative etchings.
It had been beautiful once. It was still beautiful, which was why it was wrong.
Levi moved to Asher’s side and his stomach dropped. Asher’s face drained of color, every part of him still locked in place. “Asher?”
“That’s the lock,” he said, and his voice sounded smaller…younger almost. “That’s the sound. That’s exactly —”
The crying was coming from behind the door. Levi turned the knob slowly.
“Levi don’t—”
The door wasn’t locked. Levi pushed it open, the hinges protesting, the wood scraping concrete.
Beyond the door was a small room, like an old coal drop, stone walls and stone floor, with a ground-level window set into the far wall, the small hinged kind that opened outward into the gap between the foundation and the earth.
A woman in a staff polo was curled up beneath it, the lodge logo on the breast pocket.
Her head rested against her knees, her left wrist wrapped in a cloth that had been white and was now dark and wet.
The crying was hers, quiet now, almost spent.
She looked up when the door opened, her eyes bloodshot and flat.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whimpered. “You can seal everything. Tape every window. It doesn’t matter.”
“We can help you,” Levi said, already moving toward her. “Come upstairs. We have people. Warmth. You can tell us what happened.”
“It never lifts.” She looked up at the window. “They say it lifts. Three days, five days. It doesn’t. It just goes quiet and then it comes back. It always comes back and it doesn’t matter —”
She stood up and reached for the window.
No.
“Don’t —”
She pushed the window open.
The fog came through the opening like water through a hull breach, like a wall of cold grey that hit Levi in the chest and dropped him backward onto the concrete.
A weight came with it, pressing against his body and seeping into his ears, and suddenly he heard all of it at once.
The respirator. The heart monitor. The clicking of apertures and the shrieks of Dr. Faine’s monster and Asher whispering to him in the forest all poured into his skull through his ears and his mouth and the spaces behind his eyes.
The cold locked his muscles. He could feel Asher’s hands on his arms, pulling, trying to drag him back toward the door, and then the shadows came through with the fog and Asher’s hands were gone.
They were physical this time — dark shapes in the grey with edges that pressed and small hands that gripped, finding Levi’s arms and legs, holding him against the concrete floor.
Everywhere they pressed went numb, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn his head; he could hear Asher saying something, his feet scraping the ground. But he was slowing.
Slowing.
Thud.
The shadows pushed on his chest harder and harder.
He couldn’t breathe. Or hear. They kept pushing and he felt something give, his chest buckling inward, but his scream made no sound.
Fog poured into his throat as the shadows kept pressing, kept crushing bits of broken sternum and rib into each other, and Levi, for one second, could make out Asher’s face.
Oh…he’s angry…