Hour 27

As Victor pursued Emi up the stairs, he was sure she was the one, the one who had shot his father, Richard. The voice sent him a video before the game had started, surveillance footage from a grocery store, and while it didn't have sound, he could see his father from above walking towards Emi. He knew his father had been despicably spineless and unable to commit himself to what mattered, one of the many reasons his mother had left him and taken Victor and his sister back with her to Croatia, but watching Emi ruthlessly gun him down as he was no doubt asking her for help ignited his fury. With each step that propelled him up the stairs, he could feel the muscles in his hands yearning to tear into her, to prove his strength, especially after Rico had made such a fool of him earlier. After Rico had tried to kill him and he screamed, he felt like a coward, like his father. His face folded into a sneering frown as wrath consumed him.

As Emi emerged on the next floor, she made a split-second decision to enter its hallway rather than continue up. She didn't want to get herself lost in this place or get too far away from the group of people below her. She could hear Victor right behind her as she took the first door to her right, hoping to find a way to slip his pursuit into the room and run back down the stairs to lose him in the crowd of people. As she pushed past the door though, her body stopped moving. To her utter shock, she was standing at the front entrance of her house. This second of hesitation caused her to be too late to react to Victor, allowing him to kick the door out of her control and send her stumbling forward. As she tried to recapture her stride he made a swipe at her with his knife that grazed the flesh of her shoulder. It wasn't a deadly injury, but the surprise caused her to trip and fall into the living room TV. He was already behind her, but she used the motion of her fall to grasp the TV and turn, forcing her body's inertia to bring it down on him. It wasn't enough to stop him, but it briefly slowed his attack allowing her to narrowly avoid a jab that would've split her neck. He grabbed her backpack as she tried to flee, but she shrugged it off in one fluid motion and continued to run. As she tried to gain some distance from him, she ran by the kitchen but was choked by an awful stench. That's when she heard the flies and noticed the towels she had thrown over her mother and Conners had been long removed by the wind filtering through the broken glass of the kitchen sliding door. Seeing her mom's decomposing body was bad enough but the pungent, rancid flavor of the sweet and sour air triggered her throat to issue a deep gag. Victor tried to slash her from behind, but her unintentional retching saved her life; as she doubled over, his swing missed her head. Involuntary tears still blinding her eyes from the dry heaving, she focused all her willpower and kicked his foot out from under him, interrupting his motion. He caught his fall with a single hand to the ground, but the broken glass decorating the floor made him wince in pain. She took the opportunity to kick the knife from his other hand, and as he slipped backward and tried to catch his balance she dove for the blade. As he stood up, she tried to take a chunk from his neck, but he protected himself at the last second, trapping the blade deep in his right hand. He threw Emi off with an animalistic grunt and, in the process, amputated his right pinkie and most of his ring finger, leaving it to dangle uselessly by a string of flesh. Emi tripped over her mother's body and slammed the back of her head on their steel refrigerator hard enough to dent it. She saw stars and fought the blurriness that invaded her periphery but wasn't lucid enough to prevent the knife from being yanked from her control. He attempted to mangle her face with a downward hacking motion, but she threw her own hands up much like he had. The blade missed her fingers but sliced through her palm easily, his next strike coming down before she could react and making half her wrist disappear. Before he could complete his next swing, she wobbled to her feet in a clumsy run, but he still managed to inflict a gash across her upper back, causing her to fall again and knock over a rack of kitchen utensils on the edge of the counter next to the pantry. As he dropped onto her for the kill she grabbed a pair of scissors that had fallen from the kitchen rack, and even though it was her left hand, she produced enough force to skewer them into the side of his neck. Without giving him time to react she hooked her fingers into the handle and forced the scissors open while still lodged in him, dispensing a warm wave of blood across her hand and down her arm. He tried to shove her away, but his legs gave out from the shock, and he slumped to the floor in a lethargic sway with the scissors still impaling him. He tried to crawl out of the kitchen, swimming in a rippling tide of his blood but made little progress. Emi drove her knee into his spine and clawed at the scissors in his neck but there was so much blood her grasp slipped. Realizing what she was trying to do and accepting he probably wouldn't live, he tore them out himself and stabbed her ankle with enough force to break one of the blades off in her foot. She tumbled backward into the wall leading out of the kitchen and knocked her father's photo off its designated spot, shattering it. Victor desperately tried to take his phone out and purchase something from the app store, but his overwhelming blood loss and slick hands made the simple action difficult. As Emi looked down and saw the broken portrait of her father, she forgot all about the pain crippling her. She turned Victor over, knocking his phone from his weak fingers, and took it into her own bloody hands. He had just enough time to realize what this meant and his eyes dimed while her phone buzzed to let her know she had just received a point. She realized she felt dizzy and understood she had also lost a decent amount of blood from her wounds, blood noticeably running off of her hand and pulsing from her gaping wrist with each heartbeat. After only receiving 17 hours for killing Victor, she had just under 40 meaning she couldn't afford to heal again, so she walked to her old bathroom in a woozy limp, the scissor blade in her ankle grinding against bone. She found the first aid kit they kept under the sink and wrapped her hand and wrist with fresh gauze before sealing it with the provided medical adhesive. The laceration on her back, from what she could tell, seemed minor in comparison to her hand. Using her handheld mirror in conjunction with the bathroom mirror allowed her to deduce the gash was only just deep enough to bleed, meaning it hadn't gone much further than skin deep. She sat on the toilet and examined her injured foot. After considering leaving the blade in she decided to remove it and wrap it up as best she could. Realizing she had wasted enough time here she carried the rest of the first aid kit with her and placed it in her backpack that was still by the cracked living room TV. She was just considering heading back for the butcher's knife when she heard a sloppy, disgusting sound from the kitchen. She looked behind her, and her mother was peeking out from the kitchen wall, a terrible, inhumanly large grin digging into the sagging flesh of her dead face. Emi staggered backward as her mother dropped to her chest and galloped at her in a horrific 4-limbed shuffle. Emi bolted for the front door, and as she reached it, she questioned how she had made it in time with her wounded ankle. As she turned to close the door behind her, her mother was standing in the living room, waving at her with a face devoid of any expression. With unflinching eyes she spoke in an inflection that sounded more like an obscene foreign tongue, "I'll be seeing you soon, Emi." Emi slammed the door behind her. The old Emi would've cried at this point, but not the current version of herself. All she could imagine was how she would get back at the ungodly voice for daring to defile her mother's body. 

This game was going to be over very soon, even if she had to kill everyone else to end it.

And then, she was going to kill that voice.