It's 2027. The luxury resort built on what was once Hackett's Quarry Summer Camp has folded and wants to close out their accounts - which include paying off the debts of the former camp and damages to the nine counselors nearly killed in the "bear a...
It was decided that Jacob would go to investigate the explosion, taking with him both Max and Nick as they had medical training and experience with accidents. Dylan and Ryan were to set out to check the vicinity immediately around the hotel on the outside chance that Braden was still there somewhere and that the explosion did not involve him. Anton and Grace went with them.
The remaining four - Kaitlyn, Abi, Laura, and Emma - returned to the hotel with the objective of finding a landline phone with which they could contact authorities to report an explosion.
Abi and Kaitlyn scoured the office and other rooms on one side of the ground floor, while Emma and Laura looked in all the accessible areas of the other.
"If that Grace didn't go look for Braden," Kaitlyn joked, rifling through a box in the small supply room off the manager's office, "I'd be pissed that they stuck us girls looking for a phone."
Abi closed an empty filing cabinet door. "That was a wild card, huh? Those two dropping in out of nowhere? Did you see Ryan's face?"
Kaitlyn smiled at the visual while ripping open another box, batting dust out of her face as she flipped it open and found nothing. She stood with a disgusted snort.
"Okay. This is frigging weird. I mean, they have all these phone jacks all over the place and not a single phone. What, did they take the phones with them when they moved out?"
"Maybe they boxed them all up, you know. Together in one place."
Abi, following her own suggestion, slipped into the small hallway that separated the manager's office from two smaller offices. Meanwhile, Katilyn turned a box out onto an empty desk and was about to start throwing things.
"What the hell? Electric pencil sharpener and all of North America's calculators, but no goddamn phone."
"Oh, Kaitlyn?" Abi sang from the hallway. She returned with a box marked corded handsets and speakerphones, SCLH Ground Floor East. That and a victorious smile.
The two dropped the box on the floor and tore it open like two kids on Christmas morning, only to freeze when they saw what was inside.
Kaitlyn sank to the floor shaking her head incredulously. "You're fucking kidding me right now,"
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The entire contents of the box appeared to be easily fifteen to twenty different landline telephones. However, they had been mangled, smashed, snapped in half, and the cords cut. There were not even enough undamaged components with which they could assemble one single functional phone.
A sour feeling settled in Abi's stomach as she beheld the destruction. "Why?" she asked. "Just why?"
Kaitlyn knew what Abi was thinking. She was thinking it too. It was too much like forethought. Too much like sabotaging routes of communication to the outside world. Too much like taking preemptive measures.
