Hush Little Hurricane

Chapter 4: Malevolence [Part 1]

The figure dragged the two unconscious girls' bodies through the snow to the shed not far away, where he left Tessa in a room inside the drafty building.

He propped her up against the vertical wooden beam central to the room and tied her hands tightly behind her back so she could not escape. Then he lashed her ankles together and gagged her with one of the bandages she so conveniently had wrapped around her hands. After standing back, satisfied with his work, the stranger exited the shed, dragging a still-unconscious Ashley behind him by the arm, and a large branch to scatter his tracks.

As he neared the turning off to the shed from the house, the man dropped the branch and continued down the path to the workshop, the looming silhouette of the shed disappearing into the blizzard behind him.

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Chris came to with heavy eyelids. It took a moment for him to remember what had transpired leading to him lying on the ground with a splitting headache and a purple lump on his head the size of an apple. Then it came to him: Ashley and Tessa!

Scrambling to his feet, Chris frantically scanned the kitchen looking for his friends, but they were gone and finding Ashley's discarded coin purse did nothing to alleviate his apprehension. But there was a trail, a trail of blood. It led out the door, down the steps ad into the forest. He followed the skids of blood out and down the path, taking a left turn where the shed was to follow the drag marks in the snow. 

A scarecrow erupted from the snow, shocking Chris to a halt. Its body was covered in the same sticky red liquid he had been following. Looking around the area, the increasingly panicked young man found a severed pig's head but nothing else. On the ground he also found a carven piece of wood with a black butterfly on the back. For some reason the object gave the dork a sense of foreboding, as if he were being held by the throat and could do nothing but kick helplessly. He recoiled and dropped it. 

Nearing a workshop further into the woods, Chris stepped inside to see the walls hung with an array of menacing tools and implements. 

Suddenly he heard Ashley's panicked voice.

"Chris?" She called with a sob.

"Ash, I'm here!" He exclaimed with no small amount of relief. He followed the direction her voice had come from through the ominous workshop.

"Please, help me!"

"I'm coming, Ash. Just keep talking to me. What happened?" Chris followed the voice of his captured crush.

"Chris, he tied me up... I can't move!" the girl sobbed exhaustedly.

"Ashley I'm gonna get you out of this, don't worry."

"I'm really scared, Chris! Hurry, please! Oh god, Chris, you have to get me out of here before he comes back!"

Just as Chris reached a chicken wire barrier, a light switched on in the room beyond, causing Ashley to yelp in fright as she was revealed to her crush. There she was chained to a wooden panel with a stirring Josh and a saw-blade o tracks directly in front of the both of them.

"Chris? Are you there?" Ashley whimpered.

Suddenly a metallic voice blared over a speaker somewhere in the room. "Hello," it said, "and thank you all for joining me."

Ashley looked over frantically at their friend who seemed to be just waking from his knock-out "Josh! Oh my god! Josh, wake up!"

Their comatose host blearily came to into an immediate state of panic. "Huh...? What...? What is this?" he cried in hysteria as Chris rattled the only door into the chamber he could see. It would not budge an inch.