Crawlers

10:49pm

'How - how did that happen?' asked Samantha, panting, pointing at the door. She looked around the room, eyes wide, waiting for an answer. 'What just happened there? Can anyone tell me?' 

'I guess they were waiting for us,' said Jasmine, sitting on the floor. 

'You "guess",' Samantha echoed. 

Jasmine shrugged, too numb to face an argument. 'Who can say for sure?' 

Samantha scowled. 'You know what, Jasmine? I've heard enough words from you for one night. I don't want to hear any more "I guess" - not from you, not from anybody. I want to hear some facts, and I want to hear them now. What the hell are we going to do? How are we going to get out of this? I mean, one second that boy was standing there by the door, and then...' She lashed out at the lockers with her foot: blam! 

Everyone flinched. 

'We're getting picked off here - that's two of us down now. Who's going to be next, do you think? Who's next?' 

'OK, Samantha,' said Josh, 'that's enough.' 

'What did you say?' said Samantha heavily, rounding on Josh, eyes flashing. 

'I said, that's enough.' 

'No,' said Samantha, pointing at Josh and smiling mirthlessly. 'No, no - you don't get to say anything. I mean, whose idea was it to open the door in the first place? Who sent him out there? Whose fault is it that Hugo's gone?' 

'Now - now just wait a second...' Josh stammered. 'We all agreed we wanted to get rid of the crawlers, right?' 

Nobody answered. 

'We all agreed,' he repeated, with great emphasis. 'You can't turn round now and say it's my fault. You just can't!' 

Still nobody spoke. Everyone was staring at Josh - Ben included. He had never before seen Josh look less than completely confident and certain. But now...

'How was I to know that was going to happen?' asked Josh. His voice had gone high and scratchy, and his lower lip was trembling. 'How was I to know they were going to grab him like that?' He shook his head. 'It's not my fault! It's not! It's not my fault!' 

Josh's shout seemed to echo in the tiny space of the room. His handsome face was creased with misery. His cheeks were red. He was blinking back tears. For another long second he just stood there. Then, to Ben's astonishment, he ran into the monitor room, banging the door shut behind him. 

The end of Josh's leadership should, Ben supposed, have made him happy. But it didn't - he just felt sick and empty inside. They'd lost Hugo; Lisa still lay unconscious on the floor where she'd been left; now Josh had gone to pieces. Samantha was right: who was going to be next? 

'My arm,' said Robert, breaking what had been a long silence. 'I... I think it's broken.' 

'You're kidding,' said Samantha in disbelief. 

Robert looked at her. 'No,' he said heavily, 'I'm not. And I don't know why you're so surprised. After all, it was you who kept slamming it in the door.' 

He had sat up on the floor, cradling his left arm with his right. Slowly, grimacing, Robert now took his right hand away, revealing the sleeve of his white school uniform shirt, now red with blood. 'I can't move my fingers,' he said. 

Ben could see why. They were swollen and they had gone a strange grey colour too. 

'Oh my God!' said Lauren helpfully, pointing. 

'Well, does anyone know first aid?' asked Jasmine. 

'Anyone else, you mean,' corrected Ben. 

Jasmine fell silent, as did the rest of the room, again, as they thought about Hugo. He had known first aid. And this probably wasn't going to be the last time that his skills or his strength were going to be missed. 

'Well,' said Jasmine, forcing her thoughts back to practicalities, 'I guess first of all we need to clean the wound. Then we'll need bandages of some kind, and, um, splints?' She did her best to give Robert a sympathetic smile. 'I don't know first aid, but some sort of sling might help at least-' 

'Yeah, there you go again,' said Samantha bitterly. 'And just out of interest, where's all that stuff supposed to come from? We're trapped, stupid!' 

'OK, that's it,' said Jasmine, standing up. 'I've heard enough from you, Samantha, and I think the rest of us have too. If you had something constructive or helpful to say then fine, I'd be happy to listen. But you don't, do you? All you can do is stand there fussing.' 

'Is that right?' 

'Prove me wrong,' said Jasmine. 'Go on, say something useful. You can't - can you? You haven't got a practical thought in your head!' 

'Just one,' said Samantha. 'A question. How come you fixed the cameras so we couldn't see what was going on out in the passageway?' 

Jasmine blinked. 'What? That wasn't deliberate. I just wanted to-' 

'Hugo walked into a trap' - Samantha stepped closer to her - 'because of you. And we're stuck in this room, because of... who? Oh yeah: you.' 

Jasmine crossed her arms. 'What's your point, Samantha?' 

'My point,' said Samantha, 'is that Lisa had a crawler on her the whole time she was in here with us - right? My point,' she repeated, getting right up in Jasmine's face, 'is, what if she wasn't the only one?' 

'Wait a second,' said Jasmine. 'You're telling me that because I chose for us to come in here, and now the screw-up with the cameras, I'm... what, Samantha? What are you saying, exactly?' 

'Maybe another of us here isn't what they seem,' said Samantha. Having got the rise she wanted out of Jasmine, she was grinning now, triumphant again. 'Maybe there's another traitor in the group. Because the only one of us we can be sure wasn't bitten,' she finished, looking around the room, 'was Hugo.'