Chapter 16 #5
Set along the far edge of the main building, the kitchen backed onto the woods, with only a single internal doorway connecting it to the assembly hall. The dining hall branched off from there through another doorway.
An hour later, most of the group had left the assembly hall and trickled into the dining hall, lured by the smell of food.
I was standing at the counter, serving up bowls of spiced lentil and tomato stew with couscous, when the doors at the far end of the dining hall slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame.
Garrett, Cole, and Levi stumbled inside, their faces pale in a way that instantly set something off in my chest.
“What’s happening?” Jesse asked, rushing over to them.
“I-it’s Piper,” Garrett said.
Sutton shot to her feet so fast her chair scraped loudly across the floor. “She’s here?”
Garrett didn’t speak again straight away. He just stood there, chest rising and falling, like he didn’t know what to say next.
“No,” he finally said. “I mean… she is here. But I don’t think she ever left. She… she’s dead.”
Sutton stared at him, her expression freezing, like her brain had simply refused to process the words. “That’s not funny,” she said flatly. “Don’t say shit like that.”
“We aren’t joking,” Levi said, his voice tight. “We just found her body.”
A ripple moved through the room. Shock. Denial. The beginnings of panic.
“How?” Caitlin asked. “Where?”
Garrett dragged a hand over his face. “We decided to search through all the buildings again, because we figured someone might’ve missed something the other day. Like a radio. Or just… anything.”
“We were in the director’s office, and we found some blueprints in one of the filing cabinets,” Cole added. “Really old ones, from before they built the camp.”
“Blueprints of what?” Wren asked.
“The original layout,” Garrett said. “Back when Erebus Lodge was still here. Before they tore it all down and built everything new.”
A cold, creeping feeling started to spread through me.
“The Lodge had tunnels running underneath the buildings,” Levi said. “Service routes. Storage areas. And cellars. It’s all mapped out in the blueprints.”
“No fucking way,” Jasmine breathed.
“The buildings are all gone now, obviously,” Cole went on. “But we wondered if the underground parts might still be there. Or at least some of them.”
“So we started looking,” Garrett said. “We figured the killer might be using them to sneak around.”
Levi swallowed. “We found a hatch, way at the back of the old supply building. It was hidden under a stack of crates. Like… completely covered. You wouldn’t see it unless you were actively moving stuff around.”
No one spoke.
“We opened it,” he went on. “There was a ladder going down. And… yeah. The tunnels are still there.”
There was a long, suffocating pause.
“And Piper?” Caitlin finally asked.
Garrett’s jaw tightened. “The tunnel we went into led to an old cellar, and Piper was there. Her throat…” He trailed off again, pressing his lips together for a second before forcing himself to finish. “Her throat was cut.”
“And judging by the condition of her body, she’s been dead for a while,” Levi added. “At least a few days.”
The words settled over us slowly.
“No,” Sutton said sharply. “You’re lying.”
Garrett looked at her, head wearily shaking. “Why the hell would we lie about something like this?”
“Because it’s not possible!” Sutton shot back. “She texted me, remember? After she left with Ian and went to Saranac Lake. So how could she have been lying dead in a cellar this entire time?”
“Sutton…” Maren moved a little closer to her. “The killer could’ve taken her phone and sent you that message. That way we wouldn’t realize she was missing.”
Sutton’s head was shaking wildly now. “No, you don’t get it! It was her. It sounded exactly like her!”
“He probably read through her other messages so he could mimic the way she talked,” Cole said.
Garrett nodded. “Yeah. We aren’t lying about this. We wouldn’t. She’s really dead, Sutton. I’m sorry.”
Grace was letting out strange wheezing noises from somewhere to my left. At first I thought she was crying again, but then I realized she was actually laughing. It didn’t seem like amused laughter, though. It was sharp and fractured, like something inside her had finally snapped.
“What the fuck?” Sutton whirled on her. “You’re laughing right now?”
“You all acted like I was crazy last night,” Grace said breathlessly, head shaking. Her voice had risen to a fever pitch. “But I was right all along, wasn’t I? There’s no one coming for us. Piper’s dead. Brad and Olivia are dead. We’re all fucking dead.”
As she spoke, a dark realization settled over the room in a slow, suffocating wave.
For hours, we’d clung to the hope that Brad and Olivia were just delayed, that help was on its way, that this nightmare had an end point just within reach. But it was past seven o’clock in the evening now, with no sign of them or the police, and that hope had finally collapsed into certainty.
They weren’t coming back… because they were probably dead. Taken down somewhere out of sight, just like Piper.
And that meant Grace was right. No help was coming.
We were completely alone out here.