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Jake lay on his back next to the crackling campfire. He stared glassily above, up to pinpricks of light that had ceased to look fake a while ago. He really didn’t remember what the difference was—he knew he used to look up at them and just get annoyed by the sight. That they looked so obviously false, like a lot of things did in the Fog.
The only thing he remembered about his old stars, the real ones, was the line of three. Orion’s belt, he was pretty sure it was called. Bright, always noticeable. They weren’t present in this sky. The stars here were scattered so randomly, and they changed. There were no constellations to stargaze upon here.
The forest was quiet, save for the insects and the frogs. It had been for a while. There was never anything here, never anything new.
Just him. Just him, and the sounds, and the spattering of night lights across the sky.
Jake felt a tingling in his leg. A trial. He knew what it was instantly, but he didn’t react. He just exhaled and glanced over at the crackling fire only feet away from him.
Several moments later, the Fog consumed him, and the next time he opened his eyes it was to dense woods.
He didn’t think about his actions as he performed them, searching for a generator and kneeling down beside it. He took wires in his fingers. Jake focused on the generator, on his surroundings, kept his guard up, but it was all neutral. Automatic, no real thought put behind anything he did. It was like his mind was in another place—not wandering, not quite. He wasn’t thinking about anything else. It was just like he was three feet to the left of himself. Detached enough to matter.
When the killer finally approached, he disappeared just as easily. He preferred just slipping away, always had. Some people liked to run, preferred it over the anxiety of waiting and hiding and hoping, but Jake was not one of those people.
The trial went poorly, and quickly. Not for any particular reason, not one single person’s specific mistake, but just one of those trials. The unlucky ones. His teammates fell, and were sacrificed. The last of them had been on their first hook when they were caught.
Jake had not bothered to save them. It didn’t matter, in the end. They weren’t surviving this one. He didn’t know them. They’d never get the chance to get on to him, anyway.
No one had gotten onto him for his selfish actions in a long time. Maybe that was why he kept doing them.
The ground rumbled beneath his feet. It split into burning cracks and the realm warmed. The killer had closed the Hatch. He’d been banking on that for escape. Automatically, his wandering shifted to head straight for one of the large steel doors. He pulled the switch and did not look behind him.
The alarm had sounded twice before heartbeats pounded in his head. He glanced over his shoulder to see the hulking form of the Trapper stepping towards him. He met eyes with the mask and let go of the lever. The alarm stopped. The Trapper did not, approaching him with his bloody cleaver poised, and Jake didn’t run.
It didn’t matter. The gate wasn’t close enough that he could slip away and concoct some clever plan to get himself out of here. He was dead. He might as well not waste his energy running. Not, of course, that he had energy to waste.
The Trapper did not hesitate to cut him down with the heavy cleaver. The cut in his chest went from his collarbone to his stomach, and he stumbled back against the exit gate switch, caught himself for a moment, and then his knees buckled beneath him. He landed on his side, wheezing, breathing roughly from the pain. It hurt. It hurt, but it felt like it was happening to someone else.
He pried his eyes open to see boots. He followed them up with his gaze. The Trapper was just standing there over him. Looming. Cleaver dripping. Mask lit by the unearthly tones of the Collapse, embers singing his well-marred skin.
He finally leaned down and grabbed Jake by the collar of his shirt. The killer wrenched him up, until his feet weren’t even touching the ground, and Jake made eye contact with the eye-holes in the mask again before he closed his eyes in resignation, just waiting to be dragged to a hook and sacrificed, or killed outright here.
Neither happened, not yet.
The Trapper’s voice rumbled up. It had been a while since the last time Jake had heard him talk, and certainly a while since it was this quiet.
“Why not run?”
Jake opened his eyes and stared placidly forward.
“Why should I?”
He could make out no emotion behind the silence, behind the mask, that followed. A bell tolled and the trial burned hotter. The warmth was offset by the blood loss that chilled his fingertips.
“I see,” the Trapper said simply. Thoughtfully, maybe. He cocked his head to the side, studying Jake, and then he raised his cleaver again.
This death came fast. Like always, there was a sensation of nothing. A nothing that Jake was not aware of, but not unaware of. Outside of his consciousness but not entirely, a nothing that present-Jake felt but future-Jake would never remember. It was not painful, not really. Not any more than usual. He was not being sacrificed this time. He’d been killed by the Trapper’s blade, not by the Entity, and yet he felt its bitter talons in him all the same.
Weightlessness, but pressure. Like floating in the bottom of the ocean. This was nothing he remembered, but he knew, behind it all, that it was something that had happened to him a hundred thousand times over.
Something snapped in him. Something taut as a bowstring, something that just let go. In his out-of-body, unconscious state, he was struck with a fear. And then—a relief. Exhaustion. And nothing. A nothing that felt so much more real than it ever had before, and he began to slip. He began to let go.
And then he felt the Entity’s claws again. Tighter. Squeezing on him, his soul, turning nothing into something. Into pain.
The Entity yanked, and Jake was hapless to fight it back into the once-warm light of his campfire.