The Elsewhere Files

Separate - Mission One

Camera is viewing the scene straight down, taking in the image of Kiera slowly crawling across a beam hidden in the darkness. Below her the Major and Captain Nguyen are tied to chairs, blind folded and gagged. A woman is moving around the room they’re held in, muttering and jabbering nonsense, clearly mentally unstable. There are animals in cages lining the walls; raccoons, stray cats, a few malnourished looking dogs and a very skittish looking coyote.

[Nguyen]: “I’m so glad we stuck to the plan.”

[Crowe]: stays silent

[Nguyen]: “This is another one of those shut up moments isn’t it?”

[Crowe]: maintains silence. The woman walks to one of the cages, the animal inside shying away. The moment the woman’s hands grab the creature, it starts to writhe and scream. Seconds later the creature’s neck snaps as she puts the cat out of its misery.

[Nguyen]: “Still planning on spanking the brat out of her after this?”

[Crowe]: “From the sounds of it, I’m going to have to more thorough than just spanking. We survive this, I’m handcuffing her to me and never letting her out of my sight again.”

[Nguyen]: laughs “Kinky.”

Kiera is seen shaking her head on the rafters, gently smacking herself in the forehead. What she doesn’t see is that their inexplicably relaxed conversation is disguising the sounds of Captain Nguyen trying to cut through the ropes with a small throwing knife. The camera zooms in on the Captain as he tries to cut without being able to see, or alert their captor and zooms back out to see the woman tracing a circle around both soldiers in the now dead cat’s blood. The Major’s head follows the sounds of the elder woman, tracking her movements and tapping on the Captain’s hands, warning him to hide the knife when their captor was passing too close.

[Nguyen]: “Hey, wicked witch, can I ask you something?” the EWOK keeps mumbling incoherent sentences and ignores them “I saw what you did to the poor bastard laying dead outside. I gotta know, if your touch is basically death, how the hell did you tie us up without killing us?” the Captain is back to cutting at the ropes, more frantically now.

The woman holding the soldiers captive pulls the blindfold off Nguyen, then the Major. She steps back, head tilted to the side while she examined them, as if she were unable to understand their words. The Major is looking around and the camera follows his line of sight, neither one able to see Kiera from the ground looking up. Both men inadvertently flinch when the ‘witch’ starts to splatter the cat’s still cooling blood over both of them, muttering in a garbled language.

[Nguyen]: “Sir? I think she’s not really with us.”

[Crowe]: nods “You see that?” gestures to a table in between cages. The wood table top is scarred by multiple knife marks and stained dark with old blood. A hunter’s table used to clean and dress the seasonal kill. On the wall over the table is a series of knives, all normally used in the same process. One happens to be missing, a small filleting knife.

[Nguyen]: frowns and nods, eyes scanning the room to see if he could spot the knife. “Think it’s in her pocket?”

[Major]: shakes his head “I don’t think you can risk trying to find out. Look at the cat.” The longer the cat stayed in the woman’s hands, the more desiccated it appears. The fur is starting to fall out in chunks, the skin is peeling and the muscles, flesh and innards are all falling to the floor with wet sounding splats as she paces. Once she stops physically contacting the flesh, the decay stops, but those pieces still in her hands were quickly entering the disgusting stage of rot.