Silent Hill fic: Outbreak - Chapter 16: Amber

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 16: Amber is taken to a fog-shrouded island. She's pretty certain she's never going to leave it.

September 27, 2016

Amber did not feel well.

None of them had been feeling well for weeks, now. But she’d at least reached what felt like a… stable kind of unwell.

So it felt very strange to be jostled awake by silent nurses in the wee hours of the morning, her bed being wheeled out of the room she’d spent the last weeks in.

“What’s going on?” she asked, still sleep-dazed.

“Nothing, dear,” one nurse replied. “Just go back to sleep.”

“I don’t need any testing,” Amber protested, that being the only possibility her mind seized on. “Those have to be scheduled first. I don’t have anything scheduled.”

The second nurse, who she recognized then as Nurse Shorey, the head nurse, readied a syringe of something, which she injected into the IV port at Amber’s elbow. “To help you relax,” she said, as Amber felt the sharp sting of the new liquid entering her arm. “You have been chosen, and isn’t it wonderful?”

---

Amber had the vague recollection of cold air, time passing, and then a rocking sensation for a while. The not painful, but deeply uncomfortable feeling of something shifting inside her skin as her IV was removed. She wasn’t entirely asleep, but the impressions of the things around her faded in and out, leaving her with singular images that made little coherent sense. There were others with her, when she looked to her side, but none of them were moving. She tried to speak to them, but her mouth wouldn’t move, and she couldn’t do more than force a quiet breath of air through her lips.

Then the cold was back, a miserable, frigid chill that wasn’t discouraged in the slightest by the thin hospital blanket she was still wrapped in.

She was only partially aware of being moved, carried a brief distance, then placed on what felt like unpadded ground. She could hear water. Then the figures of the nurses left, and she was alone in the cold.

When the fuzziness in her head finally cleared, it was like waking up, despite not having truly been asleep. She was indeed on the ground, lying on an uncomfortable mix of small rocks and sand. Struggling to sit up, she looked around at the unfamiliar landscape. It wasn’t completely dark, though there was no clear light source. It was like the thin light of pre-dawn, and at some point a thick fog had rolled in, obscuring everything even more.

“Hello?” she called, getting stiffly to her feet. At least her voice was under her control again.

A cough greeted her.

Walking toward the sound, she almost tripped over another blanket-wrapped figure that blended into the fog.

“Kim?”

The other girl coughed again, but also rolled over. Amber banged both her knees hard into the ground as she crashed down to her girlfriend’s side.

“Kim, are you okay?”

Kim finally rolled over enough to push herself upright, nodding and gasping through her coughs. In a few moments she was able to choke out, “Amber?”

“I’m right here.”

Kim awkwardly shifted her body up and threw her arms around Amber, clinging tight.

Amber just held onto her for a few minutes, hoping her chilled body could warm Kim’s.

Finally, Kim relaxed her hold long enough to look around and ask, “Where are we?”

---

They were on an island, nearest Amber could tell, although they didn’t walk the entire perimeter. Kim was too weak and exhausted, and Amber wasn’t willing to risk getting separated. But assuming it was an island, and they’d been brought by boat, that would explain that rolling motion she remembered after having been taken from the hospital. And Kim and Amber weren’t the only ones who’d been brought here. There were six total patients that had been left on the shore.

There was one woman a few years older than them, who introduced herself as Grace, and then sat and prayed, refusing to speak to them further. There was a slightly older man whose hospital bracelet said his name was “Darian Toumas”, but he wouldn’t wake up. Then there were two children, Marcus Rinwald and David Templeton. Amber knew David; he was her friend Blake’s younger brother, and had been one of the kids in her group at summer camp.

With Darian unconscious and Grace refusing to interact with them, Amber did her best to take charge, keeping Kim and the two kids close. They all had their thin hospital blankets, but those did next to nothing to protect against the omnipresent fog, which soaked into everything, pushing the chill further into their bones.

With no tools, Amber had no hope of building a fire or anything like that, but she did her best to keep them as warm and dry as possible, as painfully relative a statement as that was. She kept them all away from the waterline, and had them sit on branches instead of the cold sand and rocks that leached what little body heat they had.

There was nothing to orient them. Amber tried to look for the lighthouse, which should have been visible from anywhere on Toluca Lake, but she couldn’t see anything through the fog. None of them had anything to keep time, no phones or watches, but she thought it had been hours since she woke up.

It was almost a blessing that they were as sick as they were, because they were all tired enough to stay still. All of them had gotten used to just letting time pass while they’d stayed in the hospital. Even the children just napped, despite how miserable they had to be.

Amber was still well aware that six sick people on an island weren’t going to last long under these conditions. With no medication, no painkillers, nothing to keep them warm, no food, no water except lake water… it was possible they would die overnight.

Kim was a constant weight against her shoulder, sleeping. They each had a kid asleep on their other sides.

Amber racked her brain for any tidbits she remembered from the first aid classes she’d taken before becoming a camp counselor. But wound care and the proper way to deal with bee stings and poison ivy wasn’t the same as trying to keep a group of deeply ill people alive overnight in what amounted to wilderness.

“Maybe someone will come back for us,” Kim said, shifting against Amber’s shoulder.

Amber leaned over and pressed a kiss to Kim’s forehead. “Maybe.”

“You don’t think so, though.”

Amber shook her head. “No. The nurse who knocked me out in the hospital said that I’d been ‘chosen.’ So I guess we all were. I just don’t know what we were chosen for.”

“We have been chosen by God.”

The statement was unexpected. Grace hadn’t said a word to any of them for hours, and Amber hadn’t realized she’d even been listening.

“What do you mean?” Amber called to the woman, who was still kneeling in the sand, facing out over the lake. “I don’t think God chose to stick us on an island.”

“I have been here before, in visions,” Grace said. “She has chosen us to be her sacrifice, and it is a wondrous honor. Through our Faith will Paradise be affirmed. The sickness in our bodies cleanses our souls.”

“This has nothing to do with God,” Kim snapped. “You say it’s an honor, my mother tells me I’m being punished. God has no part in it. We’re just sick.”

Now Grace looked back at them. Her nose was bleeding, but she’d done nothing to wipe the blood away, so it ran down her face, coating her lips and chin. “We shall be as modern Saints. Sacrificed and martyred for the glory of God and the protection of all.”

“I can’t listen to this crap,” Kim said, struggling to her feet. “Let’s walk. See if we can find anything else on this damn island.”

---

Amber carried David, piggy-back style, while Kim held Marcus’s hand as they walked more of the island. They were all weak and tired, but Amber had remembered one thing about being lost in the wilderness: you had to assume you were only going to grow weaker. That meant anything tiring like creating shelter or scavenging for something should be done early, while you still had the energy to do it. They’d already wasted what felt like most of a day in a stupor.

This time they headed directly into the trees instead of around the shore.

If the fog hadn’t been so thick, it might not have been too terrible, but it obscured everything, making it almost impossible to tell where they were going, or how far the trees extended. The visibility was so poor, it was by total chance that they stumbled into the campsite.

The wreckage of a campsite, anyway. There was a single tent, partially torn and collapsed, more torn fabric visible inside. Some of it appeared bloodstained. A pair of folding camp chairs were overturned, at least one with the frame bent and broken. An electric lantern had tumbled to the side, the case cracked.

Amber felt herself grow cold, in a way that had nothing to do with the clinging fog.

“This is where those guys went missing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Kim asked. She was surveying the wreckage, nudging at one of the broken chairs with her toe.

“You know, the two college students who went missing at the end of the summer. Their campsite was found on an island on the lake, but they never were. This is that campsite.”

Kim scoffed. “It can’t be. The police would have cleared it. Taken things in for evidence.”

Amber shook her head. “I’m telling you, this is just how the campsite they found was described. Torn up tent, bloody sleeping bags…”

Kim looked around again, a new expression on her face. “Let’s get out of here,” she finally said. “This is fucked up.” After the swear word slipped out she glanced at Marcus, but he wasn’t paying attention.

Amber bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, but reached out to take the camp lantern. Taking anything seemed like a mortally bad idea, but if it still worked, they might want the light.

The four of them retreated back to the shore, deeply unsettled. Amber supposed they could have also taken the non-destroyed chair, or the sleeping bags, regardless of what they might be stained with. It was probably foolish to be squeamish about it, but… it would have felt wrong on a more visceral level than taking the lantern did. At least it wasn’t bloodstained.

Returning to stare out over the water still felt like the wrong choice; they hadn’t found anything to truly help their situation. They needed food and shelter and warmth… but whatever had killed Kyle and Andrew—and Amber didn’t kid herself, she knew they had to be dead—had probably done so on this island. She didn’t know why the campsite was still set up here, as if it had never been found, but roaming around it with two sick kids was a capital-B Bad idea. It would have been a bad idea even if she and Kim had been healthy.

“Fucking ghosts,” Kim muttered. “So many ghost stories in this town, and we’re in the fucking middle of one.”

Amber didn’t have any way to refute it.

---

Darian Toumas died. Amber had been checking on him, but he never woke up, and finally she couldn’t find a pulse, and his skin felt even colder than it had before. She spread his hospital blanket over him like a shroud. Never having met him, she couldn’t say much about him and had never been religious, but she whispered a few words about hoping he would be at peace.

The quality of the light through the fog changed, so slowly they didn’t notice it at first. It was still diffused through the thick fog, but there just seemed to be less light to go around. Then it was dimming with every passing minute. The camp lantern worked, if not especially well. Amber still turned it on, just to chase away a bit of the darkness, though it reflected back from the billowing fog only a few feet away, making anything farther than that paradoxically harder to see.

As the dark crept in, so too did a feeling of utter dread. Amber held Kim close, feeling David and Marcus clinging to them as well. Grace was a slightly paler patch in the fog just at the edge of the light from the lantern. The blanket over Darius was another pale blot in the fog in the opposite direction.

“What’s out there?” Kim murmured in her ear.

Amber shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“It feels like something… stalking us,” Kim said.

“I don’t know,” Amber repeated, though Kim wasn’t wrong. It felt like something watching them.

It reminded her of the feeling when she’d scare herself into thinking something was chasing her, making her desperate to run faster up the stairs from her darkened living room or the like. But that was always silly, knowing it was a ridiculous feeling. Right here and now there was no way to rationalize that fear away. There had to be something out there. Something had killed the two young men. But she didn’t want to say so. She thought both the kids were asleep, but she didn’t want to scare them if they weren’t.

“I’m turning the light off. Just in case something can see us,” Amber said. For all she knew, the light was the only thing keeping whatever it was away, but at the same time it felt like it was creating a target around them. Without the lantern, their visibility dropped to only a foot or so, barely any light filtering down through the fog.

Against all reason, they both eventually fell asleep, unable to sustain their panicked wakefulness in the dark.

The feel of sudden motion jarred Amber awake, as Marcus suddenly stood up and bolted. He rushed up the shore toward the trees, swallowed in the fog mere feet away, though they could hear him crashing through the underbrush.

“Marcus, no! Come back here!” Kim cried, on her feet in an instant, Amber just behind her.

They both took a few stumbling steps after him, but were stopped by the oppressive terror that seemed even worse as they moved up the beach. Amber retreated and groped near where they’d been sitting, trying to find the light. She managed to switch it on, though it didn’t do much, just barely illuminating the space up to where the thicker plant growth started. They couldn’t see Marcus, or even where into the underbrush he’d gone.

They heard another sound in the brush, and then a scream, high and young. The scream was cut off with a choking gurgle. Amber held a hand to her mouth, forcibly stopping herself from screaming too.

Kim collapsed to her knees, staring toward where the boy had vanished.

Finally Amber pulled her back, just a bit farther onto the sandy shore, away from what had happened, and they huddled together with David, too afraid to do anything else.

They could hear motion outside their small ring of light, something crunching in the sand of the beach, but couldn’t see what was out there.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Amber never really slept after that, though she fell into a stupor in which she wasn’t fully aware, either. The light through the surrounding fog gradually lightened, and she numbly switched the lantern off, all too aware that its batteries were likely to die.

“There are bones on the beach.”

“What?” Amber shook her head, trying to wake herself up. She looked up at David, standing next to her.

“There are bones on the beach,” he repeated, and pointed behind him.

Amber swallowed, mouth and throat painfully dry. She got to her feet. “Show me?” she said.

Kim followed, seeming as numb as she felt.

David was right. Tangled in dried grass and driftwood, there were bones at the tide lines. Some were small fragments, but others were larger. Amber tried to convince herself they were deer bones, or maybe beef and pork bones from people’s picnics, but she was terribly afraid they were something else entirely.

“Don’t touch them, okay?” she told David, then took his hand to lead him back to the small spot they’d sketched out as ‘theirs’. It wasn’t until they got back that she realized they hadn’t seen Grace, who had been kneeling on the beach all the previous day and into the night. Walking a bit farther the other way, she realized Darian was gone, too.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“I don’t see them either,” Kim said, voice grim.

The sand where the dead man had been was churned up and too dark, but both of them refused to get close enough to examine it. There was no sign of Grace. Neither of them was willing to head up to the trees where Marcus had vanished.

---

Anticipation was worse than anything else. It felt like they were just barely holding on, forced to wait for night to fall again, when whatever thing was out there would come back and finish them off. If it even bothered to wait. The creeping dread was certainly still present, even in the pseudo-daylight.

They were all starving. The last lingering traces of pain medication had stopped working. All three of them were coughing more, and coughing harder. Kim and Amber both had nosebleeds that took too long to quit, while David started scratching at his skin until it bled.

Finally, David fell asleep, and Amber couldn’t wake him. She cried, even as she thought that at least it was a kinder end than whatever had happened to Marcus. Kim held her, and they both held David’s still form, until he finally stopped breathing.

Amber forced out words of apology between her sobs, to him and to his brother, Blake, telling him how sorry she was that she hadn’t been able to save him. That he’d died while she was trying to protect him.

Kim tried to soothe her, but there was no real comfort to be had. They were both growing sicker, too. If something came for them, they wouldn’t even be able to run. They’d just have to wait.

Finally, when Amber couldn’t even cry anymore, she just curled up with Kim, as close as possible. Even touch hurt, skin oversensitized by the painful blisters, but the human contact outweighed it.

“I love you, and I’m sorry,” Amber whispered into Kim’s hair.

“None of it’s your fault,” Kim told her. “I love you. You know, if we’re going to die, right now I’d rather die with you than with my mother hovering over me, blaming me for it.”

Amber choked out a bitter laugh. “I don’t want us to die. But I’m glad I get to see you again.”

“Me too.”

They curled up together, in the cold sand and colder fog, no energy to move, even as time passed.

Kim suffered a racking coughing fit, and then it suddenly stopped. She was too still, not even breathing.

“Kim?” Amber rolled over to shake her shoulder.

Blood seeped from Kim’s nose and the corner of her mouth. Amber searched frantically for her pulse, but couldn’t find it. She bit back a cry, continuing to shake Kim’s shoulder, despite knowing it was hopeless.

After that, she just went numb. She couldn’t even summon the energy to properly cry. She was alone. She wouldn’t be here for long.

Stepping up into the trees still felt foreboding, though it wasn’t quite as overwhelmingly, oppressively terrifying as the night before. She aimed for the campsite, since it was the only target she knew of. If she reached that, she could at least wrap herself in the bloody sleeping bags and die warm.

She found the clearing, but the remnants of the camp were gone, no more collapsed tent or torn bedding.

Instead, there was a stone monument.

It was almost identical to the one she’d seen dozens of times, the one Kim had thought of as they grew ill, the one she’d told the nice epidemiologist about. This one looked slightly less worn, but that wasn’t the difference she focused on. No, the difference that caught her attention was in the words.

In memory of the hundred and seventy-four
who died of illness and now sleep
beneath the lake.

She stared at the words, letting them sink in.

It was a slow realization, the same way the growing darkness had been, the same way the fear had taken hold, but she became aware of figures in the fog all around her.

Amber turned and made her way back toward the shore, feeling a curious disconnect between her body and her actions, like she was watching herself walk, or like something else was moving her.

She saw Darian, the man she’d never met awake, standing and facing the water. She saw little Maddie Merrick, Jessie’s best friend, standing next to her father, Paul, some ways away. There were so many others, some with vaguely familiar faces, others she knew she’d never seen. Some looked like they were dressed for historical reenactments or something.

She found Kim, just standing there, like she was hypnotized, unblinking. Amber stood next to her, and watched as the lake water began to wash up farther on the shore.

[previous chapter] [next chapter]