The Hunt

Televised Murder

This chapter was written by SebJenkins

Abby lingered in her cell for a few moments, her legs planted to the ground as if layered in cement, hardened by pure fear. She couldn't move. She daren't move. Moving meant taking one step closer to her death, and she wasn't ready to accept that.

There was no victory out there for her. There was no fairy-tale story. Either she died at the hands of sadists, or she lived at the expense of them, only to fight another day. Either way, it was a dead end. She could keep tunnelling through rock with a teaspoon to extend her precious life by seconds more, or she accept her fate.

Abby was never one to lie down and take it, and she wasn't about to start now. She couldn't bare the thought of dying, but she couldn't stand the thought of going out like a coward even more. If it was to be a teaspoon against knives, she would jam that spoon into the nearest eye socket she could find.

Alas, she had no real weapons. The cell has been specifically designed to warrant no home-made blades, with it's concrete walls and thick steel door. The camera could be taken apart and used for something, but Abby knew neither what or how to do it.

Out was her only option, there were just two meanings of the word.

As she crept through the open doorway, the silence beyond was deafening. People always painted war as loud and explosive, filled with gunshots and grenades, but this was quite the opposite. It was somehow even more unnerving as an entity. At least with noise you could hear the threat coming and prepare yourself accordingly. In this place her life could end any second without so much as a flinch or an echoed footstep.

Make-shift partitions had been erected all around her, towering metals walls on every side. It was a maze. A modern maze with all green and beauty removed, replaced with the dirty steel, made by the hands of murders.

The walkways between the metal sheets were narrow, with just enough room for two bodies to squeeze past each other. The maze had been designed to force close encounters, and the cameras whizzed around on cables above to catch every drop of gore from every angle. Orchestrated horror. A food chain fixed by man. Abby hadn't been given a chance.

A metallic taste lingered on her tongue. She told herself it was just the heavy-duty walls surrounding her, but she knew blood hung in the air like a red mist. It was unmistakeably, unforgettable, and utterly terrifying. Even prisoners on death row were granted one last meal, poor Abby's last taste would be that of blood.

But no matter how thick the mist hung in the air down here, it would never be enough to satisfy the taste buds of those in charge. Violence incited violence. Murder incited murder. Power incited a need for more.

The lights above flickered dimly, perhaps in an effort to keep energy consumption low, perhaps to add to the dark nature of the games. After all, those running The Underground would be desperate to keep their operation location off the books of the government bigwigs. Or maybe not? Maybe they were in on it to? If you lined the right pockets, you could do pretty much anything in life. Everyone has a price.

Abby inched forwards, unwilling to turn a corner unless she absolutely had to. If she locked eyes with a hunter, she was already dead. The only chance she had was to catch one passing a corner as she approached it, giving her a split-second to disarm them. It all seemed rather pointless, like an act of pride rather than survival. It was unlikely that Nick and the resistance would be able to find her in time to save her, but if they did storm this place, she wanted them to find tapes of her fighting until the end. That would be her legacy.

As she approached a junction, Abby noticed a gap of a couple of feet at the base of the wall in front. She bent down slowly and peered through the gap, just about making out the glimmer of tracks, and the shadows of wooden plants.

For the first time, Abby realised exactly where she was, and she couldn't help but be a little impressed. The creators had converted an abandoned underground station into an arena for their twisted sport. It was a large enough area, some form of electrics would have already been in place, and, most importantly, it wasn't in use by the wider population. They had forged their own little bubble below ground, a bubble in which they created the rules, and they decided who wins, and who dies.

Maybe the only real winners were the creators themselves. Down here, you had to become a killer, or submit to become the killed. Neither side really won. As much as many of these people wanted to participate in The Hunt, Abby was sure that the reality of taking a life would haunt them forever. She hoped anyway. There had to be some kind of down side, didn't there?

Maybe not. Maybe she was living in a fantasy world. Maybe there wasn't a clear barrier between good and evil, and maybe horrific actions didn't always mean horrific consequences. Bad things happened to good people, that was the reality. Human history in a nutshell, summed up in a sentence, the most depressing reality of all.

She didn't deserve this. She knew that much.

Just as Abby prepared to skulk around the next corner, the gap below the wall was suddenly filled with the bulging bloodshot eyes of a stranger. Abby leapt back instinctively, tripping and crashing into the wall with a metallic, rippling echo.

The man scrambled his way through the gap, apparently unaware of the sharp edges of the wall cutting into his back. Hunger acted as an anaesthetic to pain.

As the stranger scrambled to his feat and ran towards the startled Abby, she noticed a lack of weapon in his hand. One further glance confirmed her theory, those wide eyes were not ones of hate or rage, but fear. He was like her. Sentenced.

The man brushed past Abby without so much as a word, but those red, bulbous eyes screamed 'RUN' as his gaze locked with hers. In created a strange feeling on comradery, as if she wasn't in this alone, but in reality, the only realistic reason he left her alive was to provide extra bait for the chasing hunters. It was in his best interest for her to be alive. And it was in his best interest for her then to die.

It was amazing what unrelenting survival instincts the human brain possessed. With no possible chance of escape, or even survival, the human form clung onto every last second with dear life. It was as if somehow, seeing out an extra few moments would bring them greater purpose, or perhaps in was just a sheer inability to accept the direness of the situation.

Abby crept on, purposefully turning away from the gap in the wall. The last thing she wanted to do was run into whoever that desperate face was fleeing from. That's what feared her the most, the look in his eyes. Something told her that these deaths wouldn't be quick, kind and painless. They were the kind of death's that would make you crawl through glass and nails for just an extra millisecond of respite.

As she rounded the next corner, Abby's heart sank with realisation that her prognosis had been disgustingly accurate. Before her, a dismembered body lay still on the ground, a pool of red, sticky, glistening liquid the only sign of movement as it seeped into the cracks in the concrete. The head was nowhere to be seen. That's what made Abby's stomach churn most, that's what made her want to hurl up her very heart. It meant the hunter had taken it with them. It meant the hunter was carrying around a dismembered head.

Abby had given them too much credit. These people wouldn't be plagued with guilt after the games were done. These hunters fed off the power of taking lives like a bee to nectar. Whoever had killed this person had done in inch by inch, enjoying every second, soaking it in, as if absorbing the life via osmosis.

The next three seconds changed Abby's life. They changed the way she looked at herself, and her understanding of true desperation.

In those three seconds, she finally found a weapon to wield against these maniacs. Then she despised herself. Then she took a deep breath and followed through.

Three seconds, three thoughts, a sickening crack of bone.