Hour 26

Emi listened as the voice on her phone regurgitated its ugly exposition, "Your final challenge will be Finders Keepers. The rules are simple: All you need to do is take another person's phone, and they will die while you gain a point. You are permitted to kill them before taking their phone, but be warned you must still take their phone to get a point. If you kill someone but another takes their phone, they will get the point. Also, point totals aren't carried over, so for example, if someone with 5 points is killed by someone with 1, they will still only earn 1 point and therefore have 2. The first person to 15 points or the last one standing is the winner."

Her phone clicked, indicating the other line had hung up, but she didn't move. Was this game not just another arbitrary fight to the death? She didn't have time to consider any of the nonsense; nothing leading up to this moment made sense, so she couldn't expect it to now. She appropriated her backpack from her bedside, but as she walked through the common room, a noise from the bedroom she had just left grabbed her attention. A voice croaked in a slow, gargling drawl, "Emi... Emi..." The voice was set in a disgusting inflection much like the one that had just narrated these new rules to her, but there was an uncanny familiarity underlying its pitch and flow. A pale, sickly hand flicked its wrist out from behind her bedroom door and latched onto its frame. Emi saw her mother's ring on its skinny finger just as she came to terms with the fact she was hearing some bastardized rendition of her voice. She didn't stay to find out what happened next, she had been a participant in this game long enough and had seen a sufficient amount of horror movies to know the only logical response. As she fled her hotel room and rammed the front door closed behind her, she saw the hallway had turned into a riot. A man with messy brown hair and a blue denim jacket snatched a woman by her hair and used a butcher's knife to divide the flesh of her throat with a single grisly rotation of his blade. The fresh cut was so clean it took a second for her skin to give in to gravity, but just as a torrent of blood pushed past her loose flesh the man in the denim jacket saw Emi step out of the safety of her room. As their eyes locked, the rigid hold that he pressured the woman's scalp with relaxed, causing her head to droop sideways in his slack grip with a flat, cold stare. Emi had the urge to look behind her to confirm his gaze was meant for someone else, the hatred in his eyes brimming with such evil she couldn't rationalize it was meant for her, someone she had never met before. His lips tried to form a word, puckered, then relaxed as he spoke, "You, it was you..." The head that had been held between his fingers fell from his grasp in a pallid twirl and hit the floor with an unnatural flexibility as he bellowed, "You! You killed my dad!" Emi couldn't begin to comprehend what he seemed to so fervently believe, but as he hurled his body forward in such a manic sprint her instincts involuntarily demanded she draw her Beretta. She tried to fire it but was only greeted with a hollow reverberation; the gun was empty. She knew it was counterproductive to distance herself from the group of people in front of her with all their phones and possible points, but the malice in the man's eyes, combined with her gun refusing to help signaled a primal warning for her to run. Fortunately, as she barreled down the hall, she noticed the door to the stairs Rico had claimed to be locked was ajar. She doubted he would lie about such a detail, so she knew this was probably some vile extension of the game, but she ran through it anyway.

Sasha had already obtained 2 phones by killing 2 people with a fancy carving knife from his kitchen by this point. Having been a prison warden in maximum security death row he had been surrounded by the most sinful and wicked specimens humanity had to offer, and though there were obvious circumstantial differences, he felt miserably close to them, closer to them than he ever had before. The feeling of skin pulling at the knife as he took it out, the instant a person's eyes transitioned from focusing on him to nothing in particular, the way some bodies jolted at the moment of death while others quietly accepted it. Even though they had rushed him and had been the aggressors, it still ate away at his soul, at his humanity. He couldn't stop thinking of his deceased daughter, especially when the nature of these awful games had necessitated he kill young women more than once by this point. As he guarded his hotel door he wiped an uncomfortable sweat from his forehead and noticed a man chasing Emi. He instinctively wanted to help her but hesitated. In his hesitation, he felt a small prick on his arm, something only just tangible enough to register as pain. His gaze fell to his forearm, and he saw a small, scarlet drop of blood rise from his skin. He hadn't settled on an appropriate response when gunfire was exchanged in the hallway and he ducked for cover... Only as he tried to reposition himself, he fell on his side. The unexpected fall stunted his breath and his lungs ached as they painfully fought for air. He suddenly felt like he had no strength; he could feel the weight of his head relaxing on the floor against the direction his neck demanded. As he tried to make sense of what was happening, he noticed a strange imprint on his carpet floor... No, more than a single imprint, two shoe-sized indentations walking towards him that denoted themselves with a uniquely human gait. While he couldn't move, a flash of recognition surged through his mind as he remembered the dead bodies he had come across in the murky swamp during the last race... Bodies with no obvious trauma, because they had been poisoned, poisoned by someone using invisibility. The invisible steps were just in front of him now, and as he felt a tug at his pants he knew they were looking for his phone. With a vision of his daughter, he summoned every last bit of strength in his old bones and threw the hand that still held the knife out in a short yet potent jab. A weak but obvious spray of blood was unleashed as the blade minced the person's ankle, causing them to trip backward. As they tried to regain their balance, they grabbed Sasha's canvas, which buckled under their uneven weight, forcing them to the ground. As the figure stood up, they were clearly outlined in an oil of slick color, and Sasha watched them as they limped for the door, abandoning him as a target.

Margaux had planned to wait the game out a bit before leaving her room, but as gunshots exploded in the hallway she peeked out her door to survey the area. As she did, she witnessed Rico decapitate another man with an abhorrent efficiency right in front of her. A few others already fighting it out near Rico saw his performance and decided to disregard their current battle and flee, running towards the door housing the stairway on the opposite side of the hallway that Emi had taken. Rico threw away the head he had claimed in an indiscriminate toss, much like someone might dispose of a bruised piece of fruit they no longer craved. His eyes had immediately been drawn to the people running from him like a predator stalking its wounded prey, but Margaux, silently observing him, halted his gaze. It was already impressive that she hadn't run or closed her door, but her eyes also had a cold indifference that he respected. He couldn't begin to guess her life story but it had led her to him, and right now, her look of not fear but pure dedication to survive excited him beyond words. Killing people who had accepted death was boring, this is what he lived for. Rico rushed her with his machete, planning to fake her out with a downward strike, but she impressively read his moves and blocked him with the handle of a solid steel hammer she withdrew at the last second. Rico licked his lips in excitement, his tongue dancing over the scar on his upper lip as he noted the dents in the hammer handle meant it had deflected many attacks, attacks from people who were no longer alive. He knew she probably couldn't understand him without her phone acting as a translator, but he said in his native Spanish language flavored with a rich Colombian accent, "You're pretty good for an old lady." Margaux clenched her teeth as she forced Rico backward, using every ounce of strength she had to repel his single-handed strike. Rico braced himself easily as he took a step back and twirled his machete in his hand in an elegant arc as if to show her that her defiance hadn't amounted to anything. Far behind him, he made out the distinct metallic singing of an elevator opening its doors. He only had a second to look back and watch a drunken pair of distant footsteps walk into the elevator, an invisible body smeared in some kind of color, before Margaux tried to bring her hammer down on his skull. He eluded her strike but the head of her hammer still passed through a portion of his hair, tearing it from his head and tangling it around the base of its cold steal. Rico rubbed his head as the elevator doors closed and thought with pure joy, "This is it; this is what I live for!"