The Killer Among Us: Part Three

Paisley stretched her arms out, a mere attempt to shield the person behind her. Although she had to be brave one, or try to at least, she couldn’t tell the difference between protectee’s tears or her own.

Pearl loomed over them with a wire cutter. Multiple horrors could be done with those things. She had to have killed Yvette, and Paisley would be the next victim.

“Back away!” Paisley choked out. She didn’t want to die. No one did. But she didn’t understand the fact why a human being would need to slaughter another.

“Don’t be afraid,” the girl with the weapon said. “I won’t hurt you. That would get blood on my hands. I definitely don’t want that.”

Paisley tried to question everything between her heaving cries. But before she could get a full sentence out, a piercing pain dug into the middle of her back.

She doubled over on her hands and knees, impaled. Lost for words. Lost for breath. Confused. Shocked.

Betrayed.

So many, too many emotions at once. It was all jumbled around with the icy inferno that boiled inside her. She was loosing blood. Lots of it. She was going to die.

Everything was blurring.

Until…

***

“She was stabbed in the back.” Cooper said, laying a white sheet over the corpse. “Time of death: could’ve been from thirty minutes to an hour ago.”

Garrett, Oaklynn, Bryce, and I stood around the room in silence. Even before the alarm went off, way before Pearl’s death…

Paisley had been dead all that time.

“So,” I said after a bit. “Diva killed Paisley, along with Yvette.”

Cooper sucked air through his teeth. “That’s the thing.”

“Woah, hold up.” Bryce took a defensive stance. “What do you mean by thing? What thing? Pearl sabotaged the ship, along with—”

“Either Pearl had an extreme grip for those dainty hands of hers,” Cooper pushed up his glasses. “or we’re not out of this nightmare just yet. Yvette’s death was caused by a whiplash. And a whiplash needs strong hands to pull off.”

“What are you saying?” Oaklynn questioned. “Are you saying that… that there’s someone else on this ship trying to kill us?”

“That’s exactly what I just said.” he replied blandly.

Absolutely perfect. There had been three deaths already, two of them murders. Not to mention that the communication and navigation had been completely destroyed. And even though one threat was just… gone…

There was someone else that needed to be worried about.

“If… if I remember correctly,” Garrett started, his hand on his chin in a thinking pose. “The only ones left here are me, you four, then Levi and Bernard. Only the seven of us.”

I folded my arms, adding on to his thoughts. “And this other killer on the ship… whoever that person is can easily kill us off one by one if they wanted. That’s probably what they want.”

Dumb Blond made a sound that was a mixture of a sigh and a groan. “No. No. I am not having anyone else die on this ship. On my ship. I don’t care what it takes. We are getting out of here, alive. Rashida.”

He waited till I met his gaze. Believe me, our bitter expressions towards each other matched.

“You’re going to the communication settings room. There’s supposed to be radios in there. Apparently those ‘vintage’ things are your forte, so you are most likely to get a signal, then get us out of here.”

I scoffed, folding my arms. “You’re not wrong. But I’m not going on my own. It’ll make it easier for this second killer of ours to kill me.”

I snuck a quick glance at Garrett, the slightest hope that he’d offer to go with me. But he only noted, “You’re right. It’s not safe for us to be alone. I think partners would be a great idea. Uh, Bryce. You can go with Rashida, just to make sure she’s doing things correctly.”

Garrett gave me a quick wink, and I would have smiled if Bryce didn’t give me a sneer look. I fought the urge to roll my eyes.

“Keep an eye out for Bernard.” He continued, making his way towards the door. “He’s the only one that we don’t have account of. I’m going to go look for Levi.”

Oaklynn bounced after him. “I’ll go with you.”

I couldn’t tell if she was going for Levi or just to be with Garrett. But it didn’t matter that much anyway. All that mattered was getting this ship working enough to get us off of it. And away from these dire deaths.

***

“Radios. And they’re supposed to be in here?”

Bryce flicked on a switch, dimly lighting the room. “Yeah. Keep an eye out for them. Those things should be like big boxes. Multiple of them. And a pair or two of headphones and wires too. I can’t remember the—”

“You mean this?” I opened the first closet on the wall, revealing the radios and such.

“Oh. Well, yeah.” He took down the first one, not meeting my eyes. I knew he didn’t want to admit I found it first.

Dumb Blond.

Bryce set it on the table. The long chords with headphones connected dragged behind. He turned back to me and asked, “Are you gonna help or not?”

I gave him a face before lugging the second one next to the radio he placed down. We both stared at it for a moment, not knowing what to do. Bryce cleared his throat.

“Come on. We have quite a bit to do and not a lot of time to do it.”

“Right.” I began examining the radios, trying to get an understanding on how they worked. I sighed. “Because out of the seven of us left, one person on this ship still wants us dead.”

He dropped the headphones with a clang. “Can we just focus on getting contact with people outside of this ship?”

“Says the one who dropped a vital piece of equipment on purpose.”

Bryce groaned. “We really don’t need banter right now.”

“I didn’t start anything. You’re the one that’s getting offended.”

“Here we go,” he muttered. “I’m just trying to get us out of here alive. I don’t need you messing things up by thinking you’re better than everyone else!”

Excuse me? My voice rose.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to stay alive because some freaking psycho is out there, probably plotting to kill one of us right now!” My hands balled into fists, my knuckles growing lighter. “Paisley and Yvette—innocent lives—are now gone. We thought it was Pearl but no, there just had to be someone else with the same evil intentions.”

He started flailing his hands around the room as he spoke. “Can you please just focus on the task at hand? I’m stressed enough as it is!”

“Ha! You? Stressed? C’mon,” I bit back: “we all know that someone like you can’t be stressed. In fact! In fact, it’s weird that you’re so collected at a time like this. Heck, you could’ve even lured me here just to kill me off! It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Bryce pinched the bridge of his nose. “How does that make any sense? Try having an entire ship, actual people, and their well being placed all on your shoulders. And then having three of them turning up dead!”

I slammed my hands on the table. My emotions were getting the better of me. But I didn’t care. Because…

“I don’t want to die!”

Bryce neared in close, his face still scrunched up from the yelling. His voice was quiet, but I could hear the heated emotion behind it.

“Neither do I. So are we going to fix this problem at hand or not? From the looks of it, you not doing anything towards getting help seems a little suspicious to me.”

My mouth fell open in shock. How dare he accuse me of being suspicious? I was going to retort, but out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something standing in the doorway. I blinked.

“Levi?”

The boy just innocently stood there, not saying a word. The next few minutes consisted of awkward silence and glaces between each other. That was, until Bryce cleared his throat again.

“Do you… you wanna help us with this radio, buddy?”

Levi shrugged as he strutted over to the desk. “Sure.”

Come to think of it, a lot happened in the past few hours. I knew Levi had been sleeping for most of that time, recovering. I guessed he’d just been in the back of my mind since then. But of all the people who should be freaking out right now, he had the greatest right to do so. And still…

He just silently played with the chords, seeming unbothered by anything. He was the one who found Yvette’s body, her dead body.

The kid’s only seven.

Seven.

I wondered what was going through that mind of his.

Levi turned back to look at both of us. “What do we do with these things?” He questioned, picking up the headphones.

I sighed. “Well, let’s get to work.” I crouched beside him, explaining what I knew about the radios, and how they were going to help us. He responded with little questions and remarks here and there. Even Dumb Blond joined in as we solved the puzzle together. It gave me peace whenever we completed it after about fifteen minutes.

“You can be the first to test it out,” Bryce noted, placing the oversized headphones over his ears. He whispered, “What do you hear?”

Levi’s face scrunched up in confusion. “There’s a lot of sssshhhhh sounds. I think it’s broken.”

I repeated the sound he made, trying to grasp what it was. “You mean static?”

Bryce took the second pair. “Definitely static.”

“So, it’s broken?”

I smiled. “Well, not really, kid. It just means that we have it on. That’s progress, I guess.” I started playing with the dials on the device. “We just need a signal—”

“You know, that word you said earlier?”

“What word?”

“You know, that big one. Sus…?”

“Oh, you mean suspicious?” Bryce jumped in.

The boy nodded. “That one. First, it’s too long for my taste. So we should just legally change it to sus. That makes it easier to say.”

I smiled, something I hadn’t done in quite a bit. “Sus it is. Did you have something else in mind?”

“Yeah, actually.” He began playing with some pens on the ground as he spoke. “I feel like someone on this ship seemed sus. You know the emo guy?”

I raised my eyebrow. “Bernard.”

“Yup. When I woke up from this loud noise, and everything was like flickering red, I couldn’t find anyone. So then I tried to find someone, and I walked past the place where it has all those screens for the cameras. Bernard was literally hunched over the desk cuz he was playing one of those videos over and over again.”

Bryce and I exchanged glances, both of us equally confused. “Go on.”

“I squinted to watch the video,” Levi continued. “It was Pearl in front of Paisley, and Paisley was protecting someone behind her.”

Oh. That was when she died… so Pearl killed Paisley.

“You said Paisley was protecting someone else, right?” Bryce sat in a thinking pose. “So there had to be a witness to the death.”

“I’m not finished with my story.”

I snorted. “Continue.”

“She was crying a lot. But then she stopped. And then she fell over and I guess she died.”

“Wait, hold up.” I asked, going over everything he’d just said. “How did Pearl kill Paisley? I mean, if she just fell over, it might’ve been a poison, or a gas—”

“And who was behind her anyway?” Dumb Blond interrupted again. “Pearl might’ve threatened them to not tell anyone, or killed them off. But that doesn’t make any sense since Paisley was the only body who showed up. And everyone else had been accounted for…”

“Um, Pearl didn’t kill anybody.”

Okay, what now? Nothing made sense. I tried piecing everything together again.

Pearl was in front of Paisley, who was crying, most likely because she was about to die. But then the victim just… fell over? And the killer didn’t do anything?

“Paisley was protecting someone behind her,” Bryce noted, adding on to my thoughts. But when our eyes met, everything clicked.

The person Paisley was protecting… betrayed her. And whoever betrayed her, that person was the second killer. But who was it?

Before I could ask anything else, a gunshot rang out.

A gunshot.

My heart dropped, and I froze in place. Whatever sliver of peace I had was gone now.

“Rashida.” Bryce snapped me out of my fright when he said, “Grab the child.”

With that, determination filled my veins. I knew what we were going to do. We were going to catch this killer once and for all.

I swooped Levi into my arms and dashed out of the room after Bryce. Everything was happening too fast and still felt like an eternity at the same time. The gunshot came from the cafeteria. Once we got to those doors, Bryce immediately started punching in the numbers. I looked down and immediately regretted doing so as I gasped.

Red liquid seeped through the bottom crack.

Blood.

I was dreading when the doors would open. Who would it be this time? When the doors unlocked, I shielded Levi’s eyes from the gruesome sight.

Bernard lay on the ground. The hole in his head gradually drowned him in a pool of his own blood. His eyes were dreadfully empty. And then I saw the traitor. The second killer. The last person we’d have to face to survive.

The person holding the gun was Oaklynn.

When Oaklynn saw us, her mouth gaped open like she didn't expect us here. “He-he tried attacking me! He was going to… to kill me!” She ran over her words. “Bernard killed Paisley! I had to stop him. Please believe me.”

Her eyes tried searching for some sliver of hope that we’d believe her. But… we saw what she did. She killed Bernard. From Levi's story, Bernard's alibi checked out.

Now he was dead.

“Where’s Garrett?” I asked at the same time Bryce instructed, “Put the gun down, Oaklynn.”

Oaklynn chuckled in shock. “You think I'm lying?”

“That’s not—”

“You think I’m the traitor here…”

That’s because you are, I wanted to bite back. We all knew the truth. But she had the gun, and the upper hand. One wrong move could trigger the unwanted outcome.

Bryce’s voice rose again, commanding almost. “Put. The. Gun. Down.”

Oaklynn stood still, frozen it seemed. Her eyes darkened, knowing that persuasion was no use.

“What’s going on?” Levi whimpered quietly in my ear. “I don’t understand…”

I tried to comfort him by shushing him and holding him closer. Bryce kept inching closer to Oaklynn, chiding her to calm down. I needed to do something. If any one of us got shot, we'd all be dead.

Searching around the room, I found a familiar cyan color hiding behind one of the tables. Cooper. He saw me and Levi in my arms. He slowly signaled something—it was the smart move.

I slowly let Levi down, silently instructing him to reach Cooper. If things went south, I would have a free hand.

“Stay back,” Oaklynn warned, pointing the gun at his chest. “How do I not know that you could be the killer? How do I know you’re not manipulating me?”

Ah, yes. Playing the victim. Annoying and ineffective.

Something flashed in the corner of my eye. “Garrett?” I whispered. He came up behind Oaklynn. He was going to tackler her. This wasn't gonna end well.

“Wait—”

It was too late. Garrett tackled Oaklynn from behind. She let out a yell. Then...

BANG.

Another scream, this time Bryce’s. My legs bolted to the scene as Bryce fell.. By the time I got there, Cooper was already by Bryce’s side.

He’d been shot in the shoulder, and it was bleeding furiously. Cooper looked up at me as he dragged him away, “I got this.”

“Rashida!” Garrett yelled for me. I ran to his side, pining Oaklynn down. She was thrashing and screaming at the top of her lungs.

"Let me go! You traitor!"

Garrett struggled to get the gun out of Oaklynn’s grasp, while I pinned her down. She began cursing our names.

“Shut up!” I spat. “You have no right to call anyone a traitor when you KILLED BERNARD AND PAISLEY YOU—”

“He’s loosing a lot of blood,” Cooper’s voice somehow stayed steady. He turned to the boy. “Listen very carefully Levi. Go to Medbay. Get me the supplies I tell you.”

Levi took one last look at the scene with a teary eye, nodded, then briskly ran off. I took another look at Bryce. He grunted in pain. And what was even more painful was he was trying to hide it. Trying to be strong for the rest of the group. I wanted to comfort him in some way but stuff like that just wasn’t my forte.

BANG.

A thick liquid speckled on my face. My heart stopped. For a second. I held my breath. Everything went silent. Ticking my head towards Garrett, I found him staring blankly at his bloody hands.

“I didn’t mean to…” he whispered, his voice lost. “I swear, the trigger... it just slipped.”

I nearly cried. I didn’t believe my eyes either.

Oaklynn was now dead.

TO BE CONTINUED…