The walls, ceiling, and floor were cement. There was a camera mounted in each corner…naturally, Daniel and his good friends would want to watch what was going on below. There were two other carts with glass aquariums containing rattlesnakes that I hadn’t knocked over. I also observed that rattlesnakes hadn’t been the only occupants-in addition to the snakes slithering through the broken glass, there were several tarantulas.
In fact, Charlotte had one on the back of her leg.
I tensed up, and then forced myself to relax and act casual as I walked over to her. “I need you to stay very, very still and very, very calm,” I said. I held the machete out toward her leg, ready to scrape the spider off, hoping my spider-phobic hand wouldn’t be twitching so badly that I severed her limb.
Charlotte glanced down at her leg, picked the spider up between her fingers, and tossed it with the others. “They’re not venomous, you know.”
“I know,” I admitted. “But they’re…big.”
“The one on your leg isn’t all that big.”
I swear to God I almost chopped my leg off. I spun around a couple of times, searching for the dreaded arachnid. There was nothing, and I sighed with relief.
“Real funny,” I said.
“It crawled up to your waist,” Charlotte explained.
I came very close to ripping the boxer shorts right off my body in panic. But there was no tarantula there, either.
Charlotte shrugged and grinned. “Just in case I die now.”
“I don’t think that was very clever. But I’m glad we’re keeping our sense of humor instead of getting all mopey. Now we should probably get moving.”
There was a long tunnel ahead, with brick walls rather than the cement. It was about eight feet tall and six feet wide, but the light from this room didn’t illuminate far enough for me to tell how far the tunnel stretched.
Walking side by side, we moved into the tunnel. There were two more video cameras, and numerous quarter-sized holes in the walls, irregularly spaced, and a sprinkler on the ceiling just ahead. The floor had a slight downward angle as it extended forward, and was completely covered with a thin layer of dry leaves.
“What do you think?” I asked, pointing at the sprinkler. “Death trap or safety precaution?”
As I took my next step, there was a sudden roar and I spun around to see the passage behind us closed off by a sliding cement door, casting us into complete darkness again.
Chapter 22
“LET’S LOOK at the bright side,” said Roger. “At least the rattlesnakes can’t get at us.”
We continued walking, the leaves crunching under our feet. Then a dart shot out of one of the holes in the wall, visible because of the unpleasant fact that its tip was on fire. The dart sailed across the tunnel, moving at a downward trajectory-it hadn’t been shot with much force. It hit the ground and the leaves underneath began to burn. We stepped over it and moved on.
Hey, I’d survived the other dart room with its cannon fire, I figured I could handle some flaming darts.
The sprinkler activated above us. It was a powerful one, shutting off after a couple of seconds but managing to do a fantastic job of soaking us in that time.
Unfortunately, the liquid we were soaked with wasn’t water, it was gasoline.
My nostrils burned and my various wounds (especially that damn shoulder) took on a searing new agony. Charlotte ’s sharp cry made it clear that the gasoline didn’t feel much better on her cut-up arm.
Now flaming darts seemed a bit more problematic.
One of them shot out in front of us. Fortunately, this situation had a fairly obvious plan of action to follow. Run like hell.
Roger and I seemed to understand this in unison, and took off down the tunnel. Darts continued to fly at us with every other step, but they weren’t firing quickly, and by running at top speed (or as fast as I could go in bare feet) we were able to avoid them. After a nice hundred-meter dash we reached the door at the end of the tunnel.
Unfortunately, Charlotte had elected for a slow and steady dart avoidance tactic, and we’d left a good dozen or so fires burning in her path.
A dart came so close to her that for a split second I had a hallucination of her bursting into flames.
“Just run!” Roger shouted.
Now the darts were firing more frequently. And faster.
Hot ashes from the burning leaves were swirling up into the air. How could we have been so stupid as to leave her behind? How could she have been so stupid as not to follow us?
And then I noticed a small control panel in the corner. I couldn’t be sure it was for the darts, but there wasn’t time to debate. I slammed the tip of the machete into it, sending out a flurry of sparks and half-expecting to be electrocuted.
The darts stopped firing. I remained unelectrocuted, though the gasoline fumes were making me sick and a little lightheaded.
Charlotte still stood there, soaked with gasoline in a burning hallway. There was no way she could avoid all of those ashes, so she hurried back the way we came. She leapt over the area where the sprinkler had drenched us, and I waited for it to go off, touching one of the flames and engulfing Charlotte in an inferno.
The sprinkler went off.
It touched one of the flames.
And Charlotte vanished into a huge inferno.
Roger and I stood there, absolutely stunned.
The ball of fire disappeared as quickly as it had come. And we saw Charlotte pressed tightly against the closed entrance, looking utterly freaked but miraculously devoid of sizzling flesh.
“Fuck both of you!” she shouted.
This appeared to be a fair statement, so we didn’t argue. Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and began shoving away the leaf cover, creating a gap that would let the fires burn themselves out before they reached her.
“What next?” I called out.
“I’m not going anywhere for a few minutes,” Charlotte replied. “You guys might as well go on ahead.”
“You think that’s a good idea?” I asked.
“Obviously I have no clue what’s a good idea in this place. But if the two of you want to check out the next room, that’s sure fine by me. I’ll just hang out here.”
I looked at Roger and he shrugged. “All right,” I called out to Charlotte. “Follow as soon as it’s safe.”
My immediate concern was that another sliding door might seal her off, but that didn’t seem likely since there was a regular door at the end of this tunnel rather than another open entrance.
I opened it. More darkness beyond. Wonderful.
“Enjoy yourselves!” Charlotte said, waving.
With the machete out of front of me, I walked into the next room. Another sprinkler went off, drenching us again. But this time it was ordinary water. Kind of refreshing, actually.
“How considerate,” Roger remarked. “I guess they’re not such bad chaps after all.”
“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be much fun if their victims passed out from gas fumes before the really nasty stuff could happen.”
While it would have been nice to take some water back to Charlotte, we certainly had some explosive residue left on us and the risk of running back down the tunnel was too great. So we opened the door and walked into the next room.
As we entered, some lights came on. Bright, colorful lights. Carnival music began to play. The room was huge, and the first thing we saw was a large, multi-colored banner: “Welcome to Deathworld!”
“All the effort he must’ve put into this place, and the guy can’t come up with anything better than Deathworld,” Roger muttered. “What a sad state of affairs.”
Two wooden poles held up the Deathworld banner. Each pole had an artificial corpse tied to it, the arms stretched out like scarecrows, the throats slit and the eye sockets hollow. There was a small yellow Post-It note attached to one of them.
I pulled it off and read it out loud to Roger: “ Replace with the real thing.”