Mystery story setup chapter (Part 6)

The next time the sound crept up from the floors below was when she was done installing the first two traps, placing them on the final stair step that led from seventeenth to the eighteenth and removing the safety mechanism from both boxes. She was not exactly sure what manner of hunting people did with those kinds of things, or if they did use them for hunting at all, but she had seen Rick teaching his clients to manipulate them enough times to remember how to set them up herself. After a minute of taking off the safety, the boxes would become active and react to vibrations in a small radius around them, what “react” meant Jane was not entirely certain, she had heard Rick say something about electricity but she had always dismissed that as nonsense, you had to be disgustingly rich to have anything working with electricity, and even then you only got pretty lights around your house at night instead of torches or candles and a personal telegraph machine.Her most optimistic fantasy pictured the boxes blowing up and sending them to whatever hell they had crawled from, but in truth she expected no more than a small distraction; she had no choice though, since the rest of Rick’s equipment was too large or complex to get ready in such a short amount of time, Jane gave a final and hopeful look to the boxes, then wiped the sweat of her forehead and sprinted towards the nineteenth floor.

She stared curiously at the last two boxes, trying unsuccessfully to figure out or get at least a clue as to how they worked or what they actually did, but she dared not poke them more than necessary in fear of setting them off, so instead she just prepared them like the previous and removed the safeties before running off to the last floor. Her body however, had different plans when about a third of the way her legs refused to respond and she fell hard to ground, the bandaged arm in front of her worked as a semi-cushion and prevented her head to get slammed too violently against the ceramic, but the hit still left her disoriented.

No…no, please no – She tried to crawl to keep going, her goal waited for her right in the floor above and she was not about to give up, but her left arm would not move now either, even her attempts at screaming ended up with no results, Jane soon felt her entire body numb and quickly after she felt nothing, nothing but the tears rolling out of her eyes and the torturing pain of her right arm. My arm – She thought as her sight began to get blurry again -It can’t be blood loss…poison?- Her mind drifted during the passing seconds, thinking on everything and nothing, thinking about her mom and about her neighbor’s annoying cat, thinking about the twentieth floor and the last piece of chocolate, thinking about pretty lights and the man she had killed; the last thing her mind processed before passing out was the sound coming up from somewhere in the floors below.