by Carver Pike
A sharp steel spike shot through his stomach, another through his right knee, and a third through his neck. Then more blades until the man looked like a bloody pincushion.
He couldn’t even fall to the floor as the long blades held him up.
“The fuck?” I yelled. “Isabelle!”
I was just about to step into the bathroom when the door slammed on my foot in its attempt to auto lock.
I screamed as the bones in my foot shattered.
The door, which had looked to be wooden, was metal.
My foot was destroyed and was wedged in the door, only the tough leather sole keeping it open.
My knees gave out and I fell into the doorframe, smacking my head against it.
Then came the sound of gears turning and doors clanking. Through blurred vision I saw the walls open and the furniture sink inside. The TV and bed both disappeared into the wall.
“Shit!” I cried. “No!”
I realized I sounded like the men on TV. I’d become one of the channels. And I was stuck in the doorframe, the heavy door keeping me in place. I pushed on it, trying to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Isabelle, please!” I cried out. “You don’t need to do this!”
I knew it was too late. I’d let her get away.
“Please, Isabelle!” I tried once more. “Don’t do this to me.”
A spout came out of the ceiling over where the bed had once been.
“Oh fuck! No! No! Fuck!”
I was going to die. I knew it. I’d watched two others go and now I’d be on a video too, with Diablo Snuff at the bottom right corner.
“Let me the fuck out of here!” I tried again.
I lost it. I guess adrenaline took over because in my fit of rage, I finally started to push the door open.
Then the spout came to life and acid rained down from the ceiling. The scent singed my nose hairs and the sizzling as it hit the floor was like knives through my skull. A drop hit my shoe and fried it. I kicked it off just before it ate its way through my foot.
I shoved my way through the bathroom door and fell onto the floor, clutching my shattered foot. The pain was unbearable. But I was alive. I’ll never forget the sound of the acid sizzling outside the bathroom door.
The urge to call out for help was almost overwhelming but I realized no one who could hear me would be coming to my aid. And they might not know that I’d survived. I was supposed to die out there in that empty room, my body disintegrated by the acid rain.
I forced myself up onto my one good, bare foot, and grabbed the bathroom counter for support.
What the fuck am I going to do? How can I get out of here? And where the fuck did Isabelle go?
I looked all around the bathroom and saw nothing. There was no trapdoor in the floor, there was no drawstring for an attic escape, so where the hell had she gone? The shower. That’s where she’d been. I’d seen her go in there. I’d seen her in the steam as she’d started to wash herself.
She was in the shower.
I hopped as slowly as possible, trying not to shake my foot too much. Each jerk sent lightning through my body. It hurt so badly.
I opened the stall door and looked into the shower to see that it was empty. Damn. Hope was almost lost when I noticed that halfway down the wall there was a white piece of fabric.
I reached out and touched it. It was a piece of a towel stuck in the wall. I looked over at the plastic pouch sitting on the counter, the one she must’ve carried into the bathroom earlier, and saw that one of the towels had been removed. She’d wrapped a fucking towel around her waist and ditched me.
The bitch left me there to die. I knew she had. I’d known it from the beginning, but still, seeing this shred of evidence infuriated me. I wanted revenge. Against Isabelle. Against whoever she worked for. Against whatever the fuck Diablo Snuff was.
I felt along the wall, searching for some sort of secret door. Through the shower window I saw the deathly rain pour over the room I’d been in only minutes before, sizzling as it struck the floor.
My hand pressed on the tile wall with my attention on the glass window. I wasn’t paying attention when my hand touched a loose tile, it sunk in, and the wall swung open with the sucking sound of a seal being pulled open. I fell through the door with my arms flailing, and stepped hard on my broken foot.
I smacked into a dark, dirty, and damp wall and would’ve fallen over if not for the lantern holder attached to the wall. I grabbed it and hung as I howled in pain silently, screaming with my mouth closed to stifle the sound. The shower door closed behind me.
The pain was searing. I looked down to see my shoe at an awkward angle. It was completely destroyed.
I steadied myself against the wall and waited for my eyes to adjust. I was inside the walls of the Love Bug push button. The hall was dark except for the faint glow of lantern lights hung every thirty feet or so along the black, metal, and rusty walls.
It didn’t seem like I was on the other side of hotel rooms but more like I was walking down a corridor that led to a boiler room or steel factory. Strange sounds filled the air, things you’d expect to hear in a nightmare.
Water dripped somewhere in the distance.
Gears shifted.
Locks slammed shut.
Then screams. Agonizing screams.
Muffled voices that sounded like people begging.
Males, females, and a mixture of two yelled for help.
This was hell. Or what you’d imagine hell to be like. Behind me, the hall seemed to go on forever and in front of me was just the same. Doors were on both sides of the hallway, iron ones that looked just like that which I’d come through.
I was tempted to yell her name. I wanted to find her, to force her to explain, to choke the shit out of her. I’d never laid a hand on a woman but if ever one deserved some physical abuse, it’s the one who fucked me into a trance and then left me to be disintegrated in a shower of acid rain.
The hallway seemed endless and with my foot a heap of broken bone and cartilage, I dreaded trying to navigate it. I had to hop forward one quiet step at a time and drag my bad foot behind me.
As I carefully crept forward I thought of how I’d met Isabelle earlier that evening. She’d been so beautiful sitting behind me, warning me not to go with the prostitutes. Oh, how I wished I’d just gone with the hookers. Chances are, they would’ve just gone with me up to a regular hotel room, not dragged me out to the middle of nowhere to be slaughtered for the camera.
The camera.
Who was on the other end of that thing? Who was watching these repulsive acts? Who was getting off on this?
Diablo Snuff.
The logo at the bottom of the screen kept coming back to me. What the fuck was Diablo Snuff?
Another scream sounded off right behind me and I turned painfully on my heel and nearly ran right into the woman who came charging through the iron door. This one completely naked, blonde, just as gorgeous as Isabelle.
Her hair was wet, her tits red and pocked with bite marks, her pussy unshaven and dripping with shower water.
Another Isabelle.
“You!” I growled.
“Que?” she said. “What…who…”
I grabbed her throat and slammed her up against the wall.
“Who’s in there?” I asked.
She tried to shake her head but my hold on her was too tight.
“Let’s go see!” I said.
“No.”
I grabbed the wheel-like handle on the door and pulled it open. I grabbed the blonde by her hair and held onto her like a crutch as I hopped forward and yanked her into the shower with me, making sure to keep her body halfway out the iron door in case it decided to slam shut. Wouldn’t be my foot this time.
The room was identical to mine. And as I stood in the shower, staring through the glass partition, I watched as three gigantic wolf-like creatures chewed up the man on the other side.
One animal ripped at his face while another
yanked flesh from his stomach, entrails strewn all over the place.
The third creature stared at me.
“Sick him!” I heard the bitch behind me yell.
The creature’s face twisted into a look of pure hatred and evil. Its snout pulled back to reveal giant teeth.
The dog ran, leapt through the air, and crashed through the glass of the shower stall just as I smashed the bitch’s head into the door and tossed her out into the hallway. I slammed the door shut just as the demon dog rammed into it on the other side.
Her body hit the floor with a sickening thud. I looked down to see her nose was broken, blood collecting in a pool near her head.
“Fucking cunt,” I said.
I was never a fan of the word but it suited her properly. The fucking cunt got the man on the other side killed and tried to do the same with me. And she’d just come through the door only seconds before, meaning she must’ve stayed in the shower long enough to watch the man get attacked.
She’d gotten off on it. Probably fingered herself to the scene.
I reached down the best I could and slapped her leg, checking to see if she were awake. She wasn’t. She was out cold.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath.
I didn’t want to leave her there. What if she woke up and charged at me from behind or ran to tell someone I’d survived? Well, she’d been heading right at me when she came out of the door so at least I knew I was going in the right direction. What I was going to do when I reached wherever she’d been headed was a complete mystery.
I had no weapon.
The only thing I had was the element of surprise and I wasn’t even sure about that. I knew the rooms were being recorded but were they being watched live as well? If so, I was fucked. Someone would have seen me escape.
I heard yelling from a couple of doors down.
“Hello!” came the muffled voice.
A door opened and I squatted down quickly, hoping to not be seen. I was lucky. A man ran out, naked and wet, his dick swinging as he cackled and ran away from me and towards the end of the hallway.
Men do this too? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
I hobbled over to the door he’d exited and yanked it open. Through the shower window I saw her pulling on her pants. She had long, wavy red hair and pale skin. She wrapped a bra around herself, fastened it, and turned it to cup it over her big, beautiful tits.
She was pretty enough to be one of the evil seductresses. What if I was being tricked again and she was one of the bad ones?
She yelled something but it wasn’t English and didn’t sound Spanish. Then she followed it with, “Help me! Javier! Please!”
Javier was the man’s name. Just like Isabelle. She wasn’t one of the evil ones. The look on her face was pure panic. She was freaking out.
The room was empty. No furniture. Whatever was planned would be happening in a matter of seconds.
I banged an open palm against the shower window. She turned and saw me, confusion on her face.
“Javier?” she asked.
“No!” I yelled. “Come on!”
She approached slowly, cautiously, just as the mirrored ceiling above her opened up.
“Hurry!” I yelled.
She turned to look up at the ceiling, clearly having no idea the real danger she was in. How would she? She hadn’t seen the videos. She only knew she was in a strange, empty room and her lover had disappeared.
Then it happened.
I heard the hissing sound before I saw them. Snakes. They fell down, right where she’d been standing only seconds before, crashing to the ground, a heap of pissed off killers.
They were different colored serpents but all sure to be as deadly as the next.
She screamed and backed into the window, staring at the evil gift she’d just been given.
I didn’t bother with the other door in the bathroom as I knew it would be sealed shut. My mangled foot was a reminder of that. I looked around for something I could use to break the window. Nothing.
The bathroom was empty.
Just a sink and a bar of soap.
I looked up at the shower head and quickly went to work, yanking and pulling until it was loose enough for me to unscrew it.
Outside the window one of the snakes snapped at her. She slid out of the way. She banged on the window with her closed fist, keeping her back to me, watching the snakes start to dance around her.
These weren’t ordinary snakes. They’d done this before. They sensed a victim in their presence without the need to be provoked. They’d been triggered just by dropping through the ceiling.
Another snapped and this one sunk its teeth into her knee. She howled in pain, yanked it loose, and threw it. It snapped at her face as she tossed it in the air. It missed and fell back into the crowd of angry serpents.
“Watch out!” I yelled.
She couldn’t move out of the way as the only way for her to go was directly into the pit of beasts.
I held the shower nozzle over my head and slammed it into the window. It cracked but didn’t shatter. I didn’t have the same kind of power that an angry demon dog had. I pulled back and hit it again and again. With the last hit, it shattered and the girl fell back through the window and into me, knocking me into the wall behind me.
My head slammed into the tile and she stepped on my broken foot. I cried out and grabbed her waist to prevent my fall.
The snakes were coming.
“In here,” I yelled as I pushed through the secret wall.
She followed behind me and crashed to the floor in the corridor. She tried to get up to a crawling position but her eyes were struggling to remain open. Her mouth was open and her tongue lolled out.
The snake bite.
“Come on,” I said. “Stay with me. What’s your name?”
“Vivian,” she replied, just barely getting the word out.
“Okay, listen, Vivian. We’re gonna get out of here. The two of us. You and me. We’re gonna get out of here, okay? But you have to keep your eyes open and you have to stand up long enough to get out of this building. It’s not safe where we are. And I can’t carry you.”
Her head hung down. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even have the energy to crawl let alone walk.
Grief overwhelmed me. I’d barged through the door and shattered the glass to help her and I’d been too late. She’d gotten bitten by the snake anyway. If my foot hadn’t been fucked up I would’ve reacted quicker.
Her eyes closed.
“Vivian,” I said again as I snapped my finger right next to her ear.
She collapsed to the floor and lay there, a heap of flesh, no longer responding to my requests or commands.
“She’s dead,” thundered an unseen voice. “The venom in her veins has already eaten its way through her body.”
It was loud, like it was coming from a megaphone or something. But the voice was strange and disturbing. It was deep and then it was soft. It was that of an old man, then a young man, and then a small child.
“You sick fucks!” I yelled.
Being quiet was no longer important. They, whoever they were, knew I’d survived.
I expected a response. Maybe a warning. A threat. I don’t know, something.
I got nothing. I checked Vivian once more but she was gone. Dead.
Anger shot through me and adrenaline filled my veins, helping me stand back up and limp down the corridor. I needed to reach the end. Saving people was no longer my priority. I wanted to find the owner of that psychotic voice and rip out his fucking vocal chords.
I reached the end of the hall and found nothing. I’d been expecting to enter some sort of…I don’t know…control room? An office? I don’t know. I found none of that. Only a cement wall.
I backed up and just stared at it. Couldn’t be. I hopped back to the wall and felt around, thinking maybe I’d push open a new secret door but I only felt solid concrete. It wouldn’t budge.
I turned around an
d looked down the hall. Nothing but dim corridor lay before me.
What the fuck? This is so insane. I have to be in a nightmare.
I remembered waking up that morning and having breakfast with my buddies in the hotel.
I remembered lounging by the pool for a couple of hours sipping mojitos.