No not that kind of bait, jfc. Remember the laundry lady’s scheme? After some debate, I took her up on it. The flickering man is the bigger problem and I could use some help getting rid of him.

(if you’re new, start here, and if you’re totally lost, this might help)

“If this is going to work,” she told me, gleefully rubbing her hands together, “we need to be able to control where we trap him - without being discovered in the process. Which means we need him to think it’s his idea to be where we want him.”

I could see where this was going already. We were meeting in the dorm laundry room. There weren’t any chairs, so I was sitting on top of a washing machine while she folded my laundry. While I have a lot of concerns about this temporary alliance, getting nicely folded laundry out of it is a decent perk I suppose.

I did tell her my underwear is off-limits though. That’s too far.

“You need bait,” I said miserably.

“We need bait!” she proclaimed, gleefully brandishing a sock.

“I’m the bait, aren’t I?”

“Of course you’re the bait. What else would you be?”

“I don’t know, I’d kind of like to be the heroine for once,” I muttered.

“Please. You haven’t suffered nearly enough for that yet.”

It was her disdainful tone that cut the deepest. I hadn’t suffered enough? After everything I did last semester? I curled my hands into fists until my nails bit into my palms, as if that small amount of pain could perhaps bleed out some of the anger I felt. Enough that reason could gain a foothold before I said something I’d regret.

It did not.

“I watched those students die,” I spat, my voice shaking.

“Exactly. You watched.”

She glanced back over her shoulder and shook out one of my shirts with a sharp snap. Her gaze was cold.

“You haven’t lost anything yet. Oh certainly, you have nightmares and you cried over them, but you’re still you.”

I fell silent. I understand what kind of loss she’s talking about. It’s the kind of suffering that redefines your world, a pain so profound that it will echo through the rest of your life. Every time you think it’s gone and done with, it comes back, bouncing down the corridors of your mind. It becomes background noise. Sometimes, in the silent parts of your life, you can hear it clearly again, reminding you that you’ll never be free. That pain is part of you. Forever. And you can mark the progress of your life at that moment. There’s a before-you and an after-you.

Like losing my dad. I became a different person.

I won’t let that happen here. Whatever loss I have to bear will be mine alone. I’m not letting Maria or Cassie or Grayson or anyone else get hurt because of me.

Even if that means I do all of this alone.

“Okay, fine, I’m bait,” I said. “How do we get his attention? Do I just go walk around in the rain?”

“Sadly, that won’t work anymore. He was keenly interested in you for a while. Followed you around every time it rained. He’s stopped doing that recently, though. I’m sure you’re relieved to hear that, but it poses a bit of a problem for us. I wish I knew why and I’m sure you don’t know either.”

It wasn’t a question, but I was glad her back was to me because I don’t think I was successful in keeping a straight face.

“No idea,” I said.

“Fortunately, I know his personality pretty well,” she continued. “He doesn’t like it when the status quo is disturbed. He doesn’t like it when meat starts to fight back. That might spur him into action again.”

I seized upon an idea. Clearly she intended for me to do something to harm or perhaps even kill one of the inhuman entities on campus. I’d already taken on the eyeball and earned the flickering man’s enmity, but going after another one of his kin would send a clear signal that I had no intention of stopping there. It would be a massive blow to the established order.

I chewed anxiously on a fingernail, which is a horrible habit, I know. I’d have to do this without the devil’s assistance, I thought. Let the flickering man think I’m acting on my own and don’t necessarily have inhuman protection watching over me.

Perhaps I could solve multiple problems at once. I just needed to guide her in the direction I was thinking.

“I could stop the thing that scratches on doors,” I suggested. “Would that get his attention?”

“Oh goodness,” she laughed. “Oh no. Not that one. You can’t stop it. Let’s start with something a bit more attainable, shall we?”

She turned to face me, a stack of my jeans sitting folded in her hands. Her eyes shone with triumphant malice.

“How do you feel about killing one of the swimmers?” she asked.

The laundry lady gleefully told me everything she knew about the swimmers. It felt more like she was trying to scare me, though perhaps she can’t help it. She is delighted by any prospect of violence, I’m finding. I think it's her entertainment. So she described in gorey detail what the swimmers were like. They hunt in packs, swimming through the rain, looking for vulnerable targets that have been separated from the herd.

(I knew strength in numbers was working!)

They take their time before attacking. They circle their prey for some time, swooping down to make false attacks to spur their victim to greater heights of fear. They cut off their escape routes, diving down to deliver a bite on an arm or a lash from their tails every time the person tries to seek shelter out of the rain. Then, once the blood is churning in the victim’s veins, they begin the final attack.

It isn’t one single blow, though. The meat isn’t the meal. The hunt is. The little cuts, the bites, the bodily impact that knocks their prey off their feet and onto the ground. Nothing debilitating on its own, but it slowly adds up, until finally their victim is rendered helpless under the weight of dozens of tiny injuries.

Then they feed. Sometimes the student gets lucky and they rip open something vital and they bleed out quickly. More often… they don’t.

“This isn’t helping,” I finally said, interrupting the laundry lady before she could go on any longer about how the swimmers eat their victims alive. “How do I kill them?”

“Oh, you just punch them really hard,” she said disdainfully. “That’s all there is to it.”

The flickering man isn’t the only creature whose strength is tied to the rain. The swimmers are the same way. When they’re in water, they’re like most inhumans - overwhelmingly powerful to the average mortal.

Outside of water, however, they were merely flimsy sacks of goo. Like a laundry detergent pod. Just give it a good squeeze and pop it open.

Her words, not mine.

All I had to do, she said, was go splash around in the gym’s pool until they showed up. Let them get a couple bites in. Put some blood in the water. The injuries wouldn’t be anything serious, she promised. If I was feeling squeamish about that, she’d even wait around my dorm room with a first aid kit and help bandage them up afterwards. Probably wouldn’t even leave a scar.

But the blood - once they tasted it, they wouldn’t give up the hunt. I could stay near the edge of the pool and haul myself up and out. If they were in a frenzy - and they would be, she promised - then at least one of them would try to make a leap at me.

Once it was out of the water and flopping around on the side of the pool, I just had to walk over and stomp on it a couple times. Easy.

I hated to admit it, but her plan could work. I’d already seen campus security squish a couple of these things, after all, and it seemed to be as easy as the laundry lady described. I had concerns about the first half of her plan, obviously, but if I could get out of the pool I believed that I could handle the rest.

“If I do this,” I told her, “I want something out of it. This is a lot of risk for me to take if the flickering man isn’t even trying to hurt me right now.”

Her expression soured, but I pressed on. There’s no way she’d agree to stop killing people - I’m not that naively optimistic - but I could perhaps get something that’d give my fellow students a bit of an edge in surviving her.

“You need to give people a warning,” I said.

She snorted in derision.

“Like what?” she demanded. “I stare at them and say they better put that away nicely - or else?”

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

She kind of has a murderous stare when she’s annoyed. Like. Really murderous. She stops being a nice lady the moment her brow furrows. It’s the kind of look that says ‘I will skin you alive with nothing but a nickel and determination’. Between a blatant warning and the list of rules that we’d distributed at the start of the year, perhaps she’d find it harder to find herself victims.

I don’t give a shit if she goes hungry. Heck, I’m not even sure if she will go hungry - she’s a revenge type creature, after all. Also, she obviously understood what I was trying to do and agreed to it anyway. So either she’s going to be fine or she hates the flickering man that much.

Whatever the reason, it worked. She’s going to give people warnings. That’s the best I can do for now.

Of course, this meant that I was now committed to the plan. I had to go to the pool and kill some swimmers.

Rule #8: If you absolutely must venture out in the rain, go in groups. Do not be caught in the rain alone. Similarly, never swim in the gym pool alone. They hunt in packs and are looking for easy prey.

The pool has set hours and finding it empty is actually fairly rare. I mentioned this to the laundry lady and she said she’d take care of it. Just show up an hour before the pool closes, she said, and she’d do the rest.

I think she stole everyone’s bathing suit. I mean, laundry is her domain, and when I was getting changed there were two other girls in the changing room that were very confused as to why their bathing suits weren't in their gym bags when they swore they’d just packed it before leaving their dorm. And since it was close to when the pool closed for the night, there was no reason to go get it and come back. They just left. I’m sure a similar scenario played out in the men’s changing room.

No, I’m not sure if they ever got their bathing suits back and I have no way of finding out.

Anyway, I had the pool to myself when I went out there. My heart was pounding as I dipped a toe in the water and then descended the steps. My plan was to stay in the shallow end of the pool so it’d be easier to escape. If I couldn’t get to the stairs, I could grab hold of the edge and pull myself out pretty easily. I’d ignored pool rules and brought my gym bag with me with some supplies. Clothing so I could immediately leave and wouldn’t be bleeding all over the changing room. First aid kit to buy time so I could get back to the dorm. And finally, I borrowed a 15 lb. dumbbell from the weight room and hid it inside my gym bag.

Just in case I needed extra blunt force.

I didn’t see the swimmers until their first attack. They were nearly invisible in the water. I saw a strange pattern in the water, distinguishable from the reflection of the overhead lights only because it was moving towards me at an unnatural speed. I only had time to freeze, to brace for pain, when it struck.

It veered right before reaching me. It swerved sharply and I had a second to wonder if perhaps it was only trying to scare me, before its tail snapped free of the water. It arched, trailing a sheet of water behind it, then it cracked like a whip and struck me in the chest.

It didn’t break skin, but the welt it left behind was a long, red line of swollen flesh just underneath my collarbones. I sucked in breath and edged closer to the side of the pool. The laundry lady said that they needed blood.

I didn’t intend to just sit there and let them take their time about it, though. I watched the water, noticing now how there were disturbances in the water, near the bottom of the pool. Large shapes, nearly invisible, that left subtle ripples in their wake. The second one that came at me slipped between my waist and the side of the pool, bodily slamming into my hip to push me away from easy escape and towards the deep end. My own fault. I hadn’t seen it coming until it was almost on me.

But by the time the third one made its pass, I’d gotten the hang of spotting them. The third one I kicked in the face.

It was like kicking a rock. Pain lanced up my shin and I yelped in shock and staggered backwards, towards the side of the pool, thankfully. The swimmer, however, was enraged. I felt it latch into my leg and it shook itself back and forth. Its teeth raked through my flesh and tendrils of blood floated gently into the water.

The pool began to churn. The water sloshed against the sides, up over the edges and onto the concrete. The swimmers were coming. All of them were coming.

They’d drag me into the deep end and tear me apart.

I grabbed hold of the side of the pool. I heaved - but my body was so much heavier than it should be. My arms almost buckled at the effort.

The swimmer wasn’t letting go of my leg.

I could hear them coming. The water frothed with the mass of their bodies. I had to get out of there now. If another one grabbed hold, there was no way I could hold onto the side of the pool. I realized how fragile my path to safety really was. One mistake and it would be snatched from my grip.

I heaved with all of my strength, fueled by raw desperation, and I dragged more of my body out of the pool. I got my knee up and that gave me the leverage I needed to push myself the rest of the way out. I dragged my captured leg with me, not feeling any pain through the adrenaline rushing in my veins.

But the weight and the pressure didn’t lessen. I screamed in strain and with one last pull, I dragged both myself and the swimmer out of the pool.

I landed on my stomach and desperately kicked at the ground with my free leg, pushing myself further away from the pool’s edge. I twisted around, staring in horror at the creature that was still latched into the muscle of my calf. It covered the lower half of my leg like a blanket, cold and soggy. Its tail lashed about and its wings flopped uselessly on the cement. I could see its teeth through its body and the streaks of blood smeared down its underbelly.

I didn’t feel the pain. It couldn’t be that deep if I couldn’t feel the pain, I thought distantly.

My gym bag was within reach. I grabbed the strap and dragged it towards me. The swimmer was flailing about, its fins slapping wetly on the concrete. It jerked itself back and forth, wrenching at my knee painfully, trying to drag both itself and me back into the pool.

I didn’t even try to get the weight out. I just heaved on the strap of the bag, swinging it up into the air like a flail, and then let it carry over my body and fall onto the ground right on top of the swimmer.

The creature exploded.

Like.

Just… exploded.

Bits of gelatin splattered all over the ground. It was on my face. It was in my hair.

And the pool continued to churn in a frenzy, the swimmers oblivious or uncaring of the fact that I’d just slaughtered one of their brethren.

I didn’t feel any sort of satisfaction. I didn’t feel much of anything at the moment. Like my mind was still catching up to my body.

I dragged myself to my feet. My leg was dripping with blood and I was finally starting to feel the pain. It burned. I took mental inventory of everything I needed to do - get gauze over the bleeding. Get dressed. Get out of there. I did all this with shaking hands, growing light-headed by the minute. I began to panic.

How bad was that bite? I couldn’t see it clearly - I couldn’t even look at it without feeling like I was going to faint, there was just so much blood. Did I need stitches? Was the laundry lady’s first aid kit going to be enough?

I made it out of the gym on sheer adrenaline and then once I was outside, my nerve broke. It hurt to walk. I could barely put weight on my leg. I was crying and I wanted to throw up. I found a random student and limped up to him, sobbing, and pulled up my jeans to show him my leg while asking for help and he were like uhhhh fuck it and literally picked me up and carried me to the student health center because it was like really close.

I didn’t need stitches. The punctures are deep but not long so instead I have to clean them like a lot so they don’t get infected. And they put me on antibiotics. Also.

It’s obviously a bite wound and when they asked me what bit me I panicked and said a dog figuring that’d be the safest answer. But guess what? It’s not. Because I said the dog ran off and since they can’t find the dog they have to play it safe and assume it wasn’t vaccinated.

So now I’m getting rabies shots.

And I hesitated on when my last tetanus shot was so I got that boosted just in case and now my arm hurts so bad I can barely move it.

I stg this had better work, the flickering man needs to get wrecked for everything I’ve suffered because of him. [x]

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