Limbo

Pandemonium

RACHEL:

When the blonde comes out to direct everyone inside the old mill, the guys manage to keep her distracted long enough for me to stick a piece of wood in next to the doorframe, so the door won't latch. She leads them inside, and I double back to the car for the bags, carrying them inside and hiding them in an old storage locker. Then I slip through the building until I figure out where they went, and as I get there, I hear a weird noise coming from the next room, so I peek inside.

I see my father's fuck-buddy, Jane, emerge from a curtained-off area in the corner and start back toward the room where everyone else is, but she makes a small detour and sort of genuflects toward something at the other end of the room. I look up, and see the same ridiculous image that used to hang over the fireplace back at the house, so I know that this is the chapel, and that this is where we need to be.

I head back to get the bags, and as I'm pulling them out of the locker, I'm completely startled to hear a familiar voice say, "Want some help with those, babe?"

I whip around to see Sawyer standing behind me, looking very solemn, and I say, "What are you doing here? I thought I was the only one!"

"No, we got stuck to that damn medallion, too, we just couldn't make anyone aware of us like you can," he replies. "We knew what was going on near the fucking thing, but we couldn't interact, I don't know why. But we don't need to worry about that right now, what we need is to figure out how to set this up."

"Right. Grab a bag, then, I found the 'chapel', so we need to get these things in there before they start piling in."

"Follow me, I found another door," a third voice, one I'd know anywhere, chimes in. "It's not directly visible from the other entrance, so they shouldn't notice us right away."

Sawyer grabs one of the bags, and I pick up the other, while looking past the bank of lockers at someone I haven't seen since I was seventeen, someone I thought I'd never see again. As we hurry to follow her, she glances back and gives me a faint, sad smile, saying, "I tried to come back for you, sweetheart. I wanted to take you back to the States with me, away from him, so the three of us could be together. I never meant to leave Evie behind, or you either."

"We knew that, Mom. We all knew that there was no way you would have gone off and left her when she was sick, that's why we were sure that he'd..." I can't make myself finish the sentence, so I just let it trail off.

"We'll talk later," she tells me. "All three of us. But now we just need to stop them from acting out whichever sick delusion he's fixated on now, and get them all behind bars."

She leads us into a narrow hallway, pointing out a metal door near the end. "That one opens into the space behind their 'altar'," she informs us, curling her lip up in a Billy Idol-type sneer. "Maybe you can let them loose there."

"But if anyone else is up there, they'd get hurt, too," I point out. "If the guys are right, and he's picked one of the other girls to take my place, it would be too dangerous. I was planning to grab the necklace from him, kind of lead him over to the bags, and turn them loose then."

As we open the door and enter the room, Sawyer looks around, and a grin flits across his face. "I've got a better idea," he announces, as he points toward the ceiling. "Get your squirmy little friends up there, and let me grab the thing from him. I'll let him chase it around the room a time or two, then I'll lead him right under you, and you can let 'er rip."

I see that he's pointing out a huge metal beam that spans the entire room, which is wide enough to set the gym bags on, so I nod, and he sails up off of the floor and places the bag he's carrying onto the beam. He comes back for the second, and I scurry up onto the beam, positioning myself right in the middle, directly in front of the altar.

Sawyer is hovering next to me as I unzip the bags, and I ask, "How are you doing that? I haven't figured that one out yet."

"I'm not sure, really. But like I said, I can't seem to make anyone else aware of me, so I guess it kind of evens out."

The door slides all the way open, and everyone starts filing in, with the blonde bitch and some guy pushing Ash and Jinxx, who are tied to a couple of chairs. I can't stop myself from giggling when I see Ash nearly bite off the tip of her nose, and then say something which causes her to glare at him and stalk off.

My father starts going on about what he thinks is going to happen, raving about all his usual shit about giving the demon an actual body, and then he finally pulls out the necklace. He's spinning it in front of his face, gloating, when Sawyer grabs it from him and starts floating around the room with it, just out of anyone's reach.

This freaks out the rest of his people, who are just now coming into the room, and he's screaming like a lunatic, ordering it to stop. I motion for Sawyer to lead him to me, and as he passes under the beam, I upend both bags over him. His shrieking goes up a couple of octaves, and he starts swatting at the snakes, which is exactly the wrong thing to do, and just makes things worse. He starts screaming for someone to help him, and a couple of them start moving toward him, but most instinctively start to run away.

Someone bursts in yelling about a police car, and Melissa says that it's her dad, and that he can help, but then the sound of a helicopter circling the place and the announcement that the RCMP are here kind of prove her wrong.

Nobody seems to know what to do at first, but then, even though he's been bitten several times, my father finally gets all of the snakes off of himself and starts booking toward the curtained-off area across the room, where all of the weird noises are coming from. He grabs the sleeve of a big bald guy and sort of wheezes, "Come with me now, and complete your task. Once it's done, even if they get in, it will be too late to deny the Master."

As they push their way through the crowd, I see Sawyer do a double take, and then he snarls, "Oh no, not gonna happen. I don't know what you're up to, motherfucker, but your ass is mine!"

This confuses me for a second, but then I look closer at the guy, and realize that I know him. It's Wade, and if he and my father have cooked up something together, it can't be good. We both grab a couple of the snakes and start following them, and as we do this, I see Mom drop an old metal bucket over the head of the guy carrying the gun. She bangs on it with some sort of stick, which disorients him enough that Bob is able to grab the gun and take it from him. Then Jake whips out a pistol, and the two of them start herding people toward the altar, while CC and Ash follow us.

Sawyer and I get to the partitioned area about the same time Wade and my father do, but Wade dives behind the curtain before we catch up. My father starts chanting, but trails off when I step in front of him, and sort of stutters, "You're... But how are...?"

"Doesn't matter how, daddy dearest," I inform him. "But here I am. And now why don't you do everyone a favor and rot in hell where you belong?" I shove both of the snakes into his face, and one latches onto the bridge of his nose, while the other bites his bottom lip, which causes his screaming to escalate almost to the point of only being audible by sonar.

Sawyer goes in after Wade, followed by CC and Ash, and it's almost instant pandemonium. I hear CC shout, "Holy fucking shit, what the fuck is this!?", while all I hear from Ash is sort of a growl, and Sawyer starts swearing a blue streak, using words I wouldn't have sworn that he even knew. Andy and Jinxx dash over as we start hearing the unmistakable sounds of fighting, and they have to jump out of the way as the folding screen crashes toward them.

And when it does, all three of us are shocked into utter silence by what we see. This particular area has been rigged out as a makeshift hospital room, and the noises we've been hearing are being caused by a ventilator and a heart monitor, which are attached to the body lying motionless in a hospital bed.

Mine.