Page 1 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

The Game

A bolt of lightning cuts a jagged line in the night sky, casting the abandoned hotel in a brief, white-hot flash. A violent thunderclap follows, rumbling the ground. The twisting man-made walking paths snaking all around the hulking structure have turned to rivers. Viscous, muddy water rushes, taking with it debris, its force sweeping away the campsite, toppling the tents, filling the fire pit. Wind bends the trees into painful, straining arcs, howling. Branches splinter, falling.

If you circled up, up, up into the storming sky, you’d see them, the players, scattered.

A woman is unconscious, bound in a subbasement of the crumbling hotel.

A muscular man rappels down an empty elevator shaft filling with rainwater. He might be too late to save her, or himself.

Among the other sounds, buried beneath the roar of the weather, a terrified keening. A woman, clinging to a balcony separating from a small structure perched on the edge of a steep cliff, is about to fall into the volcanic lake below her. Her grip is slipping, strength failing.

Rain sheets, unrelenting, a hundred timpani drums beaten by a cosmic drummer.

Someone who was hiding runs in the direction of the terrified screaming. Her body is strong and fit, even as she fights the current of the rushing water, the weather raging all around her. She climbs over a fallen tree as lightning cuts another electric swath through the night. She stumbles, coming to the ground hard, gets up, keeps running.

The hotel Enchantments, once grand and luxurious, now a ruin, groans. The rushing water, the impossibly powerful wind, the shifting ground is destabilizing the very foundation of the beast.

Inside, a beam falls, crashing to the ground, echoing with the next explosion of thunder.

In the middle of it all, someone waits. Stillness in chaos. Patience.

There was a plan.

Plots were hatched. Agendas run. Deception. A game. A stunning betrayal. A murder. All the things that people do best. But that’s all done now.

Now there is only the storm, nature in all its fury, doing what it does best.

Cleansing.

Washing away everything that doesn’t belong.