Curtis and Mark walked down a set of stairs and instantly saw Mike’s body by the elevator as soon as they reached the platform, and both reared back from the scene.
“Is this some kind of sick joke?” Mark asked, his voice cracking more then usual. Before Curtis had the chance to give his opinion on the scene, Grim Reaper jumped out from behind the stairs with a knife in hand, and rammed the knife through the back of Mark’s neck and out the front, a large amount of blood suddenly shooting across the platform.
Curtis stared dumbfounded for a second when Grim Reaper removed the knife, and saw that Mark was still alive. Mark clutched his neck as he stumbled across the platform, blood squirting out of the wound every time he tried to breathe, with more blood trickling from his wound and running down his shirt. Disgusted, Curtis backed away and then turned and ran down the stairs, almost tripping.
Mark fell over, finally dead. Grim Reaper turned and walked away in a different direction from the one that Curtis ran.
***
Dillon ran down a hallway and passed by the Office. He saw that the Janitor’s door was opened and walked inside, seeing Allison’s grade sheets on the floor. He heard the sound of approaching footsteps and quickly looked up.
They were getting closer.
He ran back out of the room and down the hall. He turned a corner and ran down that hall, passing by a room marked ‘Industrial Arts’ on the door.
***
Passing by the Office and janitor’s room once more, Jeff, Allison, and Danny turned off down another hall and after a couple minutes, neared the Industrial Arts room.
“What exactly is the plan?” Allison asked. “We can’t just keep running around aimlessly until the power comes back on.” Just at that moment Grim Reaper walked out from the nearby Industrial Arts room and pointed a finger at them.
In a muffled, hissy, whispered tone, he said, “Prepare yourselves for Death.”
“Running seems like a pretty damn good idea to me!” Jeff yelled in response to Allison’s previous comment, and the three rushed off once more.
In Grim Reaper’s gloved hand was a sharp circular blade that had been taken from the I.A. room’s only band saw. When he threw it, it didn’t take long to gain on the distance between Grim Reaper and the fleeing students, and impaled deep into the back of Danny’s head.
As he fell down dead, Jeff and Allison reached a point where the hall split off into two directions. Without stopping or hesitating to see which direction the other was going to go in, Allison ran one way while Jeff accidentally went the other.
***
Drew, Brad, and Jimmy stopped next to the Office to catch their breaths, and Drew looked over.
“Hey guys, I have an idea…” Drew trailed off as he walked into the office, the other two close behind him and wondering just what the heck he planned on doing.
As Drew rooted through the drawers behind the main desk, Jimmy picked up the phone, but got no dial tone. Drew came up from searching in the drawers with a set of keys dangling off his finger.
“We can use these to get into the gym and hide out until the power comes back on,” he explained. “Without keys of his own, there’s no way the killer can get through those doors. They’re metal and lock automatically when they close.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jimmy stated, with Brad also agreeing by nodding his head. And so the trio headed back out into the halls.
***
Curtis ran down a hall faster then he’s ever ran before, and crashed right into another person. He let out a very high-pitched scream, but when he realized he was still alive, he stopped and looked. Thankfully the person he ran into was only Allison.
“That hurt, you big oaf!” Allison fumed as she painfully climbed back to her feet from being knocked over by Curtis. Then she added in a nicer tone, “I’m sorry. I’m on the edge of my nerves right now.”
“Where’s Jeff?” Curtis asked. “Did he ever find you?”
“We…we got separated.” Allison thought back to that moment, and then it suddenly hit her that if Grim Reaper wasn’t following her, then that meant he went after Jeff.
“Oh God,” she added in a whisper.
***
Jeff ran into a big room that was designed much like a video store, with aisles of movies. Only none of these movies were for entertainment. All of the movies in the room were either educational videos or various movies used for the English courses, mostly based off famous books.
Jeff glanced behind himself to see if Grim Reaper had followed him, but there was no sign of the killer. When Jeff looked straight ahead again, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and didn’t dare breathe a single breath. Only centimetres away from his own face was Grim Reaper’s hood.
When Grim Reaper swung his scythe, Jeff ducked, just narrowly missing the blade. He turned and ran away down one of the many aisles. Part way down, Jeff switched and went down another aisle. He put his back up against the aisle, bending his knees so he was bent down close to the floor.
He must have known about another way in, Jeff thought to himself. After a few seconds, Jeff rose up slowly and peeked over the top of the aisle. He saw Grim Reaper walking towards the aisle that he was in.
Still bending down low, Jeff moved quickly over to another aisle, and then another, putting his back up to it, trying his best to hold his breath. He looked to the side and saw the shadow of the killer getting closer and closer.
Crouching down still, Jeff ran over to a nearby fire extinguisher and removed it from the wall before rushing back to his previous spot. It wasn’t long before Grim Reaper appeared from around the corner and looked down at Jeff once he noticed his victim was there.
Jeff jumped to his feet and with a battle cry, slammed the extinguisher with as much might as he could muster, right into Grim Reaper’s gut, causing him to double over. Jeff then slammed the device up into Grim Reaper’s head, sending him reeling back and falling to the floor onto his back with a grunt.
Jeff dropped the extinguisher as he ran around the fallen body and out the room, slamming the door behind him.
Grim Reaper stood up once more and pushed over an aisle of movies in anger.
***
Curtis and Allison walked up to the main front doors and stopped by them. “We should stay here,” Curtis stated. “The second that the power comes back on, we can leave. Plus we aren’t pointlessly running around either. If the killer does show up, we can always run then.”
“We aren’t going to make it out of here alive,” Allison stated in a monotone voice as the realization dawned on her.
“Of course we…” Curtis stopped talking as his body straightened up. Wondering what the matter was, Allison turned to look at him and let out a short whimper. Blood trickled down from Curtis’ mouth, to meet with the growing blood stain on the front of his shirt.
Curtis’ body crumpled to the floor and behind him stood Grim Reaper with his blood-covered scythe standing up straight in one hand.
“**** you!” Allison screamed at him, tears streaming down her face in turrets. Grim Reaper dropped the scythe sideways into both hands and swung at Allison. Allison backed up and tripped, causing her to fall down and the scythe blade to just miss her. She began to get up as the blade came down on her.
More out of instinct that actual fast reflexes, Allison pushed herself backwards at the last second before the scythe slammed into her flesh. However, even then she was still not completely fast enough and the sharp blade sliced down through her shoe and into her foot, pinning it to the floor. Allison emitted a deathly scream as the blade retracted up. Allison looked down painfully at her blood-stained shoe.
Grim Reaper raised the blade again, preparing for the final blow, but before he could swing down, Allison tripped him with her good foot and he fell down backwards.
While he was distracted, Allison stood up and limped away as fast as she could, trying her best to hold back her tears.
***
Jeff ran across a hall and over to a glass case built into the wall. Inside the case was a matching fire axe and water hose. He slammed his fist into the case and shattered the glass, but not without cutting his hand up pretty badly. Little flecks of glass stayed embedded in his skin, and the spots where the glass came loose were replaced by oozing droplets of blood.
Painfully, Jeff reached in and grabbed the cold metal handle of the axe, pulling the weapon out and grasping it in both hands.
“Yeah, that’s right! Come and get it!” Jeff shouted out as he raised the axe and slammed it against the floor. His voice echoed far down the empty hall.
***
Brad, Drew, and Jimmy had reached the gym and were now hiding in the darkness of one of the gym’s windowless changerooms. They sat on the wooden bench in silence, neither one really having anything to say. After all, what could they say after the day they’ve been having?
Suddenly in the silence, they heard the feint sound of a distant door being unlocked. “He’s coming!” Brad shouted as he jumped to his feet. “He’s going to find us in here and we’ll be trapped!”
“Settle the **** down,” Drew whispered at him. “It might just be Mr. Codarre.”
But Brad was too freaked out to listen. He took off running out of the changeroom.
Drew and Jimmy remained silent, not wanting to draw any attention to the room in case it wasn’t Mr. Codarre who had entered. They sat in more silence, listening to the footsteps steadily growing nearer.
The changeroom doors opened and Grim Reaper appeared in the doorway, Brad’s lifeless corpse stuck to the end of his scythe. Grim Reaper shook the body off and it crashed into a locker and toppled to the floor.
“****ing leave us alone already!” Jimmy shouted as he and Drew got to their feet and backed up, pulling the lockers down in front of them so that the lockers hit the other wall part-way down and remained as a barrier. Grim Reaper easily sliced his scythe through the cheap thin metal of one and then simply walked over the lowest parts of the rest, getting closer and closer to his victims.
He swung the scythe at Jimmy, instantly knocking him to the floor as the sharp hard blade slammed into and sliced through his soft body. Grim Reaper raised his scythe again and brought it down again. He did that over and over until he was satisfied that the body was dead.
By the time Grim Reaper was done however, Drew was gone.
***
Jeff was walking down a hall slowly, axe in hand, when Drew ran up to him from another adjacent hall.
“The killer’s back there!” Drew shouted. “In the gym!”
“I lost Allison. I need to find her,” Jeff stated to him.
“**** her! I want to find a way out of this hellhole! Come on!”
“I’m not leaving without her,” Jeff stood his ground. It was odd to him. Up until this crisis, Jeff didn’t realize that he had genuine feelings for Allison, but now that they had come to the surface, Jeff had to make sure that no harm came to her.
On the wall next to them was a window which revealed that it was pitch black outside, but that the snowstorm had died down to a light flurry fall. Drew glanced out the window, knowing that it would be impossible to break the double-panned plexi-glass as well as get through the wire mesh between the glass.
“We better find her quickly,” he stated, grinding his teeth.
***
Crying, Allison painfully limped down a hall, using the wall as support. She passed a plastic sign on the wall that had the word ‘Gym’ printed on it, along with an arrow pointed in the direction she was headed.
Suddenly Grim Reaper walked towards her from out of the darkness in front of her. She turned down a side hall and ran as quickly as she could with her bad foot, and then turned down yet another hall.
Grim Reaper walked quickly after her, easily gaining. Then all of a sudden, the hall lit up as the lights came back on and the power was restored. Grim Reaper paused and stopped on the spot, looking up at the lights, startled.
Allison’s face filled with relief as she moved around a corner and ran over to the elevator. She did not fail to notice Mike’s dead body or the blood streak on the doors, but knew she had to go on if she wanted to survive. She kicked his body out of the way and pressed the button on the wall. The doors opened right away and she looked behind her to see Grim Reaper practically running around the corner with his scythe tightly in his grasp.
Allison got into the elevator and when the door was just about to fully close, Grim Reaper slammed his hand inside and allowed the door to touch the back of his hand, making the door automatically open again.
Allison punched him in the head, knocking him back several feet. The door closed safely and Allison quickly pressed the button for the basement, planning on hiding out as she knew she could not outrun the killer with her injured foot.
***
Jeff and Drew were running down a hall near the entrance doors, but stopped when the lights came back on, temporarily blinding them as their eyes adjusted.
Drew smiled the hugest smile he could muster. “****in’ A!” he shouted. “We can leave!”
“Go ahead if you want,” Jeff said. “But I’m staying until I find Allison.”
Drew couldn’t believe his friend! He pointed to the entrance doors not far away. “But…but just a few more steps and we can leave and be safe from this ****in’ killer!”
“If we leave now, the killer can come back after us at any time,” Jeff argued. “I don’t know about you, but I’d rather stay and see closure to it now.”
“How the hell are we supposed to take him on?”
Jeff pointed to his head, “We’re smart.” Then he pointed to the axe. “And I’m not afraid to do what must be done.”
Drew sighed, giving in. “Let’s finish this.”
Jeff and Drew ran back off down the hall, away from the doors; away from freedom.
