Chapter 12: The Empty Jacket
Maya crawled slowly toward the discarded baseball jacket, her breath catching in her throat as the flickering strobe light cast erratic shadows across the fabric. The sleeves were stained with fresh, dark blood, and Tyler’s phone lay nearby on the concrete, its screen cracked down the middle with the display frozen on a live video feed directed straight back at the empty hallway.
She reached out with a trembling hand and picked up the phone. On the screen, the camera view showed the exact corridor she was sitting in—except on the phone's live display, she wasn't alone. Standing right behind her in the digital frame was the pale duplicate from the sub-basement, its dead white eyes staring directly into the camera lens with a wicked, predatory grin.
Maya gasped and dropped the phone as if it had burst into flames. She spun around, whipping her head back and forth across the empty hallway, but there was nothing there—only the harsh strobe light buzzing rhythmically overhead and the cold draft whistling up from the open stairwell.
"You can't leave through the exit, Maya," a voice whispered softly from the speaker of the dropped phone on the floor.
She scrambled backward until her spine hit the reinforced wall, her mind racing to find a way out of the nightmare. The front entrance of the community center was down the main corridor, past the old broadcasting archives. If Tyler had been taken, or replaced, just like the interns back in 1994, she was the only one left who knew the truth of the system.
May you like
She pushed herself up to her feet, ignoring the exhaustion weighing down her limbs, and sprinted toward the main exit doors at the end of the long hallway. The emergency strobe light flickered out, plunging the corridor into total darkness once again, leaving her to navigate entirely by memory and the dull, rhythmic thrumming of the mainframe vibrating up through the floorboards beneath her sneakers.
As she reached the heavy double doors of the main exit, she grabbed the brass panic bar and threw her weight against it—only to hear the heavy slide of an industrial deadbolt clicking firmly into place from the outside, locking her in permanently.
