Dead Girl Playing

Chapter 3: Welcome to the Survival Game

POV: Willa

I fought.

I kicked backwards, connected with something solid, twisted my wrist hard and got nowhere. Whoever had grabbed me was stronger than I expected. I was thrown into a seat, not gently, and the impact knocked the air from my lungs and gave me a half second to look around.

The inside of the bus was lit now. Barely. Dim light from strips along the ceiling, the colour of old teeth. Rows of seats stretched back further than made sense for a bus this size, and every one of them was filled.

People. Dozens of them.

They sat with their hands in their laps and their eyes forward. Some were young, some older. Different faces. Different clothes. But they all had the same expression. Or rather, they had no expression. Pale and still and looking at nothing, like they were waiting for something that had already happened.

My chest tightened. I looked at them too long, and then I made myself stop looking.

I became aware of him when the seat beside me shifted.

He wasn't like the others. That was the first thing. He sat with one elbow resting on the window ledge and his eyes on me, not forward, not blank. Watching me with an attention that felt very deliberate. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. He looked like someone who had been awake for a very long time and had stopped minding it. There was something unsettling about the way he wasn't afraid, about how settled he looked in a place that should have terrified anyone with sense.

"You should stop screaming," he said. His voice was calm. Low. The kind of voice that had never once needed to raise itself to be heard.

"I wasn't screaming," I said, which was a lie.

He looked at me for a moment without responding.

I turned away from him and looked at the others again. Their stillness had a quality to it I couldn't name. Not sleeping. Not waiting. Something further away than either of those things.

Then the voice came.

It didn't come from the speakers. It didn't come from any direction I could point to. It arrived inside the space the way cold arrives in a room, filling it from everywhere at once.

"Welcome to the Survival Game."

Nobody moved. Nobody reacted. Like they had heard it already, or like they were past the point of reacting to anything.

"Each of you is dead. Or very nearly. The margin is irrelevant."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"You have been selected as participants. You will be sent, one world at a time, to locations designed for your elimination. Survival earns continuation. Death earns erasure. There is no withdrawal from the game. There is no external appeal. These are not threats. These are the terms."

I was on my feet before I knew I had stood up.

"No," I said. Loud. Into the air, into wherever that voice was coming from. "No. I didn't agree to anything. I don't know what this is and I don't consent to it and you need to let me off this bus right now."

The voice said nothing else.

I looked around at the other passengers. None of them turned. None of them moved. One woman near the back had her eyes closed and her lips pressed together and her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone white.

"Does no one have anything to say about this?" My voice came out too high. I could hear it. I didn't care. "Does no one think this is insane?"

"They've had longer to process it than you have," the man said behind me.

I turned on him. "And you? You seem very comfortable for someone who just got told they're dead."

Something crossed his face. Not quite a smile. Something quieter than that. "I'm not comfortable. I'm functional. There's a difference."

"That's not helpful right now."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

I pressed my hands against the back of the seat in front of me and tried to think. Tried to find the edge of this, the place where it broke down, where the logic failed and I could push through it. But the seat was real under my hands. The smell of old fabric and something metallic was real. The sound of my own breathing was real.

"If you don't play," the man said quietly, "you die. Not hypothetically. That's just what happens."

"How do you know that?"

He looked at me steadily. "I've been here longer than you have."

Before I could ask what that meant, the screen at the front of the bus flickered to life. Old glass. Blurry at the edges. Text appeared in red letters, slow and deliberate, like whatever was writing it wanted to make sure we read every word.

NEXT STOP: DRACULA CASTLE.

I read it twice.

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the temperature of the bus.

I wrote horror for a living. I knew every variation of every monster that had ever been put to paper. And there was not a single part of me, not one rational or irrational or professional corner of my mind, that was not absolutely, completely terrified.

I sat back down.

Not because I was giving up. Because my legs had finally run out of the kind of energy that keeps a person standing on principle. I pressed my palms into my knees and stared at the red text on the screen and let myself feel the full weight of it. Dracula's Castle. A survival game. Dead or nearly. Sent to be eliminated for entertainment.

I had written this. Variations of this. I had built worlds exactly like this and sat in coffee shops typing descriptions of their cruelty and then gone home and made tea and felt satisfied with myself for imagining something dark enough to be compelling.

Now I was inside one of my own plots and I had absolutely no idea what to do.

"You went pale," Cael said. "Just now."

"I realized something."

"What?"

I looked at him. "That knowing about something and experiencing it are completely different categories." I paused. "I have extensive theoretical knowledge of what happens when a person goes into a vampire's castle. None of it is comforting."

Something shifted in his expression then. Just slightly. Not quite respect. More like recalibration, like he had been measuring me as one thing and was quietly revising his estimate.

"Then you have more information than most of the people on this bus," he said.

"Information doesn't mean survival."

"No," he agreed. "But it's a better starting point than nothing."

The screen glowed. The text stayed fixed. Dracula Castle. Waiting for us, or waiting to receive us, or both.

I had never been so frightened of something I had invented.