Thirty-One

Night has fallen on Lonely Pines, appearing to erase it.

At the campfire, old friends face and share final truths. Words are spoken. Wounds open. Others heal. Anger, love, forgiveness. A few wander off for private thoughts or conversations or kisses, and then they start dying.

One, two, three.

Panicking, the survivors try again and again to escape. They use reason and emotion, their bodies and their minds. They stick together and then split up. None of it matters. The eye sees all, and being seen brings doom.

For these people, there is nothing to appease or outsmart, no revelation that offers redemption, no riddle to unravel to achieve salvation. The story has only one ending for them all. The dream has become a nightmare with just one exit.

But there remains a chance, however slim.

Penny unlocks a final memory and bolts into the night. With feverish desperation, she ransacks the ruins. On all fours, she scrabbles at the dirt.

And unearths the amulet.

Clasping it to her heart, she makes her wish.

It is too late.

She screams their names, which echo back on the wind.

The dead town lies quiet. Her friends are gone, claimed by the dark.

And she realizes it was her all along. Her shame killed her friends. The idea that she does not deserve love and redemption. The survivor's guilt—the deep feeling that she should not have survived—that she projected onto them.

Producing fresh anger at herself that she flings back to the whole world.

Her wish has gone global.

Close-up on Penny's weeping face, which gradually twists into a menacing frown. The frown slowly, oh so slowly morphing into a hungry grin.

In the void, the eye flashes open, blazing with its own terrible light.

Music. Roll credits.

All this was supposed to happen. But the story is about to change.