Chương 61: Book Two - Chapter 11: Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Anti-piracy note: If you are reading this on any platform other than Royal Road or Amazon, this has been pirated/STOLEN. If the author who wrote it has any name other than ShawnD or ShawnDePasquale, it is STOLEN. Please report this book if you are reading it ANYWHERE other than Royal Road. Thank you for helping to fight piracy.

ZONE TWO INCINERATION: 0 3: 52: 07 Gen had a Stabilizer Wrap in her inventory and used it on Kane's missing claw before we left the room. Maltheris had let them keep their inventory and skills even after they lost their first zone and got tossed in here to be tortured. Gen explained their HUDs were locked until we set them free, and that the moment she was off the operating table, it all came back. She even had a LifeLine. Her position as a Final Girl became an instant obsession—I couldn't stop comparing notes.

Gen's LifeLine was nearly identical to mine, without the Zone Two map upgrade. I assumed this meant the system had registered her and Kane somewhere between NPC and Player. They'd failed her run, were presumably punished for it, and yet, Maltheris kept them alive long enough to be rescued. Because pain and punishment are the point, as Plaxx said, and you can't feel either if you're dead. There was also the lingering mystery of the bloody surgical instruments we found next to Gen on the operating table.

Were they just decoration? Had something been done to her? If so, she showed no outward signs of surgery. She'd been fully clothed when we found her, although there could be surgical marks on a part of her body I couldn't see. With no way to know the maze's actual size, we couldn't gauge how long it would take to complete. That unknown kept me pushing the group forward instead of grilling Gen with the hundred questions I'd stacked up.

The other thing keeping me moving was that at sixty percent health, my body was a wasteland of fractured bones, as if I'd been flattened by a steamroller and then reinflated with my bones all wrong. Especially my lower back. My spine was wired to a battery, and every step I took shot a jolt of agony deep into my bones. Our supplies were dangerously low, so I worked overtime to hide my pained expressions whenever a wrong step sent a hot spasm of pain to my tailbone.

We'd all agreed finding a cache was the priority, which it was, although a part of me worried that was the point. Mentioning the caches at all was just another distraction. Didn't really matter. We needed the heals too badly to care if it was a trap.

"Wait, so you guys were in Ireland?" Tre asked Kane. They'd been exchanging war stories as we continued through the maze.

"Jein." Kane walked with a small limp, obviously favoring the foot that hadn't been declawed.

"Family were in Disneyland Paris when the bugs came out of the ground, so. Gen and I... we woke up in a holiday cottage up in the Wicklows."

"What about your kids?" Kane shook his head, voice dropping to a whisper.

"Keine Ahnung, wo die sind." We all looked at Gen for a translation.

"We lost'em." Gen's face held very still.

"Damn. That's heavy, bro," Liam said from behind Kane and Tre. Gen walked beside me up front, Isabel a few steps behind us. Five minutes in and we'd barely covered half the corridor. The map showed two more turns before a long hallway with a couple of divots. Tre theorized they might be alcoves, and one was likely a cache. I held my doubts. The group didn't need me to shit in their cereal.

"What about your weapons?" I asked Gen, gesturing at her empty hands as we walked. An iridescent shard of glass jutting from the end of a piece of metal pipe appeared in her hand. Her fist wrapped around the pipe. The blade extended six inches from where the hilt should be.

"All I got left is this," Gen said dully, as if she wasn't holding the coolest thing I'd seen in my life. I examined it. STROBE BLADE Weapon Type: Melee/Defensive Damage: Low (applies Disoriented) Reach: Short Durability: Low Abilities: The Dazzler: On swing, emits a burst of disorienting light. Intensity scales with swing speed. Nearby enemies are Disoriented (5 sec)"Cool. How's the dazzle of it all work out?" Gen tilted her head back, sighing.

"It's a pain in the arse. I swung all I had, so I did, and all I got for it was a twinkle of light." I held out my hand, hoping she'd let me hold it.

"Is it too heavy?"

"Ah, no. She stabs like lightning, but swinging'er feels like I'm underwater," Gen said, handing the weapon to me. It weighed almost nothing and was balanced like a dagger.

"Do you mind if I try to swing it?"

"Go on," Gen encouraged, pointing her chin at the weapon.

"Give it a lash." I swung as hard as I could, and my arms dragged through the air. The feeling reminded me of the Nightmare Drag effect I'd experienced in Zone One.

"What a weird quirk," I said as I handed it back.

"Thought so too." Gen took the weapon into her inventory.

"But when I asked that one, Snaytch explained it like it was a grand feature. Maltheris wanted to, and I quote, 'ensure women worked harder for less result.'" If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I bit my lower lip.

"Fuckin' hate that guy."

"Down to the last drop of me." We exchanged similar grimly satisfied smiles.

"Sorry. Did you say Snatch?" Tre asked from behind us.

"Who is Snatch?"

"The little pink imp lady," Kane said, as if that explained it.

"And it's spelled with a Y."

"As in… S-N-Y-T-C-H?"

"S-N-A-Y-T-C-H," Gen replied.

"Snaytch." It still sounded like 'snatch' to me. It also brought up a whole new line of questions to pepper our new friends with.

"Is Sna—is she an imp?" Kane blinked.

"There are more?" Gen glanced back, equally perplexed.

"That's what I'm asking," I said.

"Our guy is Plaxx," Tre offered.

"Huh," Kane mumbled, smoothing his gray hair into a combover.

"So… Okay, we knew there were other Runs, but Snaytch made it seem like she hosted them all." Tre's jaw hinged open.

"There are other runs than these?" Kane's confusion cleared into immediate recognition.

"Long days and pleasant nights?" Tre gasped.

"I've never met another of the Ka-tet in the wild." Isabel leaned close, between Gen and me, and whispered: "What the fuck is happening right now?"

"Geeks," Gen answered. We reached the end of the corridor and headed right, into more rusted walls, another concrete floor, and work lights spaced too far apart to do much good. A long walk led to a quick right, then a hard left. The only thing that changed was the source-less heat, which continued to swell the deeper we went, until my shirt stuck to my back. The fog on the map lifted enough to be of actual use.

Of course, we trusted the layout exactly as much as anything else Maltheris had given us (which was not at all). We were in a hall that would move us east to another T-junction, and there were two alcoves on the south side wall. Our options were: push ahead and decide there, or explore the two dead-end alcoves first. The walk had eaten another thirty-three minutes of our overall time.

"Supplies could be in one of those," Tre said, pointing to the alcoves. He'd climbed onto Liam's shoulder, leaning over, as everyone gathered round to see the iPhone-sized LifeLine screen. Gen helped Kane onto her shoulder, fussing over his injured foot. Isabel stood to my right, tapping a black-painted fingernail against her bare thigh.

"How do you know that?"

"I… I mean, I don't." Tre shuffled his feet, head down. Kane cleared his throat.

"Plausibel. Unless they are hidden on purpose, finding treasure in a labyrinth is the whole point, no?" Isabel either accepted that or didn't want to start shit; she was tough to read. Regardless, she didn't protest the idea any further.

"Anyone else have thoughts?" I asked, aiming to include everyone in the decision.

"Timer's ticking."

"We could check both," Liam said.

"You know, like, split into groups—" Tre cut him off with a fart sound and a solid thumbs down.

"People gotta stop suggesting we split up."

"Strength in numbers. That's the way of it." Gen stepped back, peering down the dark tunnel.

"We should check both to be safe." The irony of wasting time debating how much time might be wasted was not something I had a ton of patience for. Still, we had to hash this out now.

"What if they're both traps or some other distraction?" It came out wrong. I was so relieved to have found another girl living through a similar experience that I could have cried right in the hallway, if not for the whole lingering threat of death thing.

"Sorry, I didn't mean you—" Gen cut me off, waving the thought away with her hand.

"I know what ya meant."

"According to the map, we're not that far from the first alcove," Tre started.

"Maybe we can check in, and then if we find nothing, we'll be on our way."

"And the other? We are going to pass it anyway, so…" Kane said, trailing off. Distance aside, both alcoves appeared identical on the map as small turns off the main path, which led to an obvious dead end.

"Let's check the first one since it's right here, and we can figure out if it's worth slowing down again when we get to the second alcove. That work for everybody?" A round of affirmative grunts and nods was good enough for me. We started walking again. The first alcove was a short break in the corridor wall, and we turned in. A few more feet and we reached a dead end. A door waited on my right.

"Oh, good, another door," Isabel said flatly. Vibration rattled the ground, and gears turned somewhere below us as the door lowered into the floor. Inside, the small room was filled with trash and lit by another single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling on a black wire. There were piles of garbage bags, old, broken toys, and discarded furniture.

There had been an undernote of sourness in the air since we'd first entered BK's maze, and now, we'd found the source—curdled dairy, rotting raw meat, liquified produce, weeks-old fish, dirty diapers. I gagged, clamping a hand over my mouth. Liam retched from the back of the group, and Tre recoiled, waving his hand in front of his face. Gen pinched her nose closed.

"Absolutely mingin'." Kane appeared entirely unbothered, hopping off Gen's shoulder. He cursed as his wounded foot touched ground. Tre followed suit, climbing off Liam's back. They walked only a few feet into the room before the trash prevented them from going further.

"You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?" Tre asked, turning to Kane. Kane nodded.

"Garbage room in A New Hope." A grin swept across Tre's face.

"My man!" They high-fived. Liam's voice came from behind me.

"Does that mean there's a monster in there?"

"Too tiny for a dianoga," Kane stated.

"Now we're really wasting time," Isabel said, entering the room. She sidestepped Tre and Kane to walk into the trash pile and started digging around.

"I don't think it wise to root in garbage with an open wound, love," Gen warned her husband. Kane's big ears sagged with disappointment. Tre patted him on the back.

"She's right, man. It's for the best." I waited for Kane to exit back into the alcove before I stepped into the thigh-high trash pile. Like Isabel, I started hunting around for… I wasn't sure what. I guessed the supply cache would look like a crate or a box of some kind, as a treasure chest was far too off-brand for the Grindhouse. The longer I dug through bags of rotten food, the more I began to worry the supplies would be scattered randomly amongst all this crap. Liam, Gen, and Kane hung back in the alcove.

Kane was up on Liam's shoulder. Gen faced the open hallway to watch our backs for unexpected visitors; at least, that was my assumption.

"You find anything yet?" Liam asked from the doorway. Isabel flicked black goop off her fingers and gave Liam the same look she'd given the goop.

"If we find anything, you'll be the first to know." Damn. She's such a bad bitch— A thought struck me harder than the time in fourth grade when Danielle Tenor landed on top of me playing soccer and broke two of my ribs. I gasped louder than I had on that field.

"My belt!" I'd left it back in the first room, after I spit it out of my mouth, forgotten on the floor in the rush to escape." FUCK!" The group stared at me. My eyes went hot, then wet. All over a belt... In a death maze. And Maltheris knew exactly what it was worth to me, which is why it existed in the Grindhouse at all. Tre fought back a smile.

"The Bad Bitch one?"

"I'm so sorry I was careless and—" I stopped when Tre climbed on top of one of the trash bags and puffed out his chest. He was wearing the belt across his body like a bandolier. How had I not noticed it was missing? Given the way we'd fled from the Skevington's Gyves room, I gave myself a pass.

"You grabbed it?!"

"Duh, I bought it for you. I wasn't going to leave it behind in a death dungeon." Tre pulled the belt over his head, then tossed it over. Quickly feeding it through my belt loops, I vowed never to take it off again.

"You're the best, Tre!"

"I know." Gen pushed past Liam into the room.

"We need to move on."

"Agree," Tre said.

"I don't think there's even anything here I can craft with." Isabel and Tre were clearly over digging through trash, so it didn't take much convincing to get them to agree to move on. I was grateful Gen had been the one to call it, that someone else took charge, and I was happy to follow instead of leading. Plus, I'd already expressed my concerns over wasting too much time and didn't want to be the one constantly pushing us forward on top of that.

Our search through literal garbage had been a bust even though I'd gotten my belt back. We funneled back to the main passage with three hours and change left on the clock, and more injuries than supplies between the six of us. If the second alcove turned out to be another waste of time, we were pretty fucked.