The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Opening scene

The bus door closes behind you and doesn't open again. Mara — you — stand in the gravel lot with the other eleven women, watching the taillights shrink down the mountain road until the trees swallow them. No driver. No tour guide. No signal: your phone shows bars that lie, and every call dies with a soft click.

The factory itself is a long, rust-streaked building wedged between two slopes. But the loading door stands open, and inside, impossibly, everything is clean. A kitchen stretches down the center of the building — stainless steel counters, a serving line with sneeze guards, trays stacked in perfect towers, a walk-in fridge humming quietly. It looks exactly like the cafeteria at the elementary school you attended, down to the faded mural of a smiling tomato on the wall.

Twelve hairnets sit folded on the counter by the door. Twelve aprons. One for each of you. Like it knows that there is 12 people here to put on the aprons. the whole building smelling of frozen food that was given to you as a kid.

Turn 1 of 32

check the time on your phone and feel it not there, its gone. the other 11 women have the same problem, no phone. everyone screams in panic before one of them sees a school clock on the wall and it says its 8:30 pm. she says they should get some sleep and see if anyone comes in the morning to help. you all agree as you find a room with just 12 tiny beds and a grey sheet. you all sleep after this.

You reach into your jacket pocket and your fingers close on nothing. Not a phone-shaped absence, not a loose pocket — nothing. You check the other pocket, then your back pocket, then the small zippered one where your charger cable should be, and the space is as empty as the gravel lot behind you.

Around you, the same discovery ripples outward. Dana is patting herself down like she's looking for a knife. Priya has both hands pressed flat to her thighs, staring at the ground.

"They're gone," someone says, and then it's all of them saying it, voices climbing on top of each other. "They took our phones. They took our phones, why would they — " A scream starts somewhere near the loading door and half the group joins it, the sound bouncing off the two slopes and coming back at you twice as loud.

It dies when Dana points at the far wall. Above the serving line hangs a round school clock, the kind with a plastic rim and a second hand that ticks too loudly. 8:30. The second hand jerks forward, and the tick is the only sound in the building.

"Okay." Dana's voice cracks, but she keeps it level.

"Okay. It's late. We're tired, we're — we're freaking out. We sleep tonight, and in the morning somebody comes. The company knows where we are. They have to know." Nobody argues. There is nothing to argue with.

You find the room through a door off the kitchen, a long dormitory you all somehow missed on the way in. Twelve narrow beds, evenly spaced, each made with a single grey sheet folded to the exact same height. No pillows. The mattress wire squeals under you when you lie down, and the sheet smells of bleach and, faintly, of frozen burritos. Around you the others settle one by one, whispering, then not even whispering, until the only sounds left are breathing and, from the kitchen, the low patient hum of the walk-in fridge.

Sleep takes you faster than it should. The last thing you see is the ceiling, cracked plaster in long grey veins, and the last thing you think is that you never decided to close your eyes.