“She’s trying to distract you,” Hannah said. “Hurry up and shoot her.”
“Madam,” Robin said, his voice haughty, “I do not ‘hurry up’ and do anything.” Then he let the Frisbee fall from his hand, picked an arrow from his quiver, and flicked the Zippo to life.
Screw this. Dee dropped the messenger bag to the floor and shoved both hands inside, arming as many devices as she could. Then she grabbed the bag by the handle and spun around, swinging it like a hammer throw, and launched it at Robin’s head.
The heavy bag landed at Robin’s feet beside the discarded Frisbee, and for a moment, Dee thought she was screwed and the entire contents of the bag was faulty. But before she could even register the fear, the bag detonated.
The hand holding the Zippo went flying in one direction, Robin’s arm and head went flying in another, and the force of the explosion rocked the support beams of the scaffolding. Hannah staggered as the wooden structure swayed from side to side, grabbing one of the beams for support. Before she could get a firm hold, the edifice buckled, and the platform on which she stood tilted downward toward the hot tub.
Hannah lost her balance, arms flailing as she desperately tried to grab hold of anything to prevent her fall. But it was too late. With a heavy splash, the chef plummeted into the boiling water, where bits of Robin bobbed like veggies in a broth.
There was a hiss, followed by a sickening gurgled scream as Hannah frantically splashed around in 212-degree water. Her cries were so horrifying that Dee’s stomach clenched involuntarily, and if she’d eaten anything in the last twelve hours, she probably would have puked it up on her pilfered leather flip-flops.
An arm emerged from the water, clinging desperately to the side of the hot tub. The skin was bubbling, blistered, and red. Hannah’s fingers had swollen up, now looking more like raw, overstuffed sausages than human digits, and as they gripped the edge of the glossy acrylic shell, Hannah was able to raise her head out of the water.
At least Dee thought it was her head. The chef’s hat was gone, as well as the dark brown wig she’d worn. Most of Hannah’s actual blond hair had been boiled away from her scalp, leaving small, frizzled clumps protruding from her scalded skin. Her eyes were wide despite heavy swelling around her brow bone, and her skin was beginning to peel away, exposing puffy pink fatty tissue beneath.
Dee’s instinct was to run to the hot tub and try to save Hannah, even though she was a psychopathic serial killer who would just as soon drag Dee down with her as escape a horrifying death. But the point was moot. Hannah’s strength gave way, and she slipped back into the boiling depths. There was a momentary splash as some water sloshed over the side, and then Hannah was gone.
DEE WAITED A FEW moments before she approached the hot tub, half-afraid that Hannah might rise up from the steaming depths, skin and gore hanging loosely from her body like rotting clothes on a corpse, and attack. But as the smell of boiling flesh wafted across the warehouse toward her, she realized that Hannah Ball, like Robin’s Hood and Barbaric Barista, was not to be feared any longer.
Three down, four to go. Dee was second-guessing her tactic of having used all the explosive Frisbees. Now she was left without a weapon. Robin’s bow and his quiver of arrows had been obliterated in the explosion, Hannah hadn’t brought any knives with her that Dee could see, and the only things left in the room were the hot tub and Robin’s Zippo lighter.
With a shrug of resignation, Dee picked up the lighter, cringing as she slipped it from the severed hand that still gripped it, and dropped it into the bodice of her dress. Then she skirted the edge of the hot tub—stepping over chunks of Robin’s Hood—and continued into the maze.
After her long, twisty journey from the Ultimate Frisbee field, Dee was surprised to take barely a handful of turns before the smell of burning candle wax filled her nostrils.
She paused, inhaling deeply. The smell was pleasant, significantly more so than the smoldering man bun or boiling human flesh that had nauseated her in the last twenty minutes, and it reminded her of going to church with her dad every Sunday and lighting a candle in memory of the mother she’d never known.
Gucci, Cecil, Molly, and DIYnona were left. Gucci had been known to use candles to set his extravagant scenes, like the one he’d designed for his murder of Blair, and the idea of getting back at her friend’s killer caused a dark smile to curl the edges of Dee’s mouth. It would be justice served.
Dee paused; her smile vanished. How many Painiacs had died by her hand? Sure, they were deranged serial killers and the world was better off without them, but did that absolve Dee of their deaths? Because that was the whole pretext of Alcatraz 2.0—justice served. Had Dee, in some way, become a Painiac?
The idea made her breath catch in her chest. No! She wasn’t like them, would never be like them. She was fighting for survival. It was different.
She took a deep breath and pushed the doubt from her mind. Doubt caused hesitation, and hesitation might get her killed. Right now she had to focus on Gucci. She set her jaw, steeling herself against what he might have in store for her, and peeked around the edge of the maze wall.
The room was long and narrow, more like a double hallway than the large Astroturf field, and instead of garish rococo furnishings and lush upholstery, it looked like the art classroom at Dee’s high school. White laminate tables lined one wall, each arranged with a different set of items: skeins of yarn, magazine clippings with vats of glue, mason jars, a wood-turning lathe, and, on the nearest table, a massive jar full of brightly colored beads. Seated at the far end of the room on a wheeled office chair was DIYnona.
The handicrafter was dressed simply in jeans and a T-shirt. Her wiry gray hair was swept up into a jaunty ponytail, and she wore a leathery apron to protect her clothing from the variety of art supplies she used in her do-it-yourself crafts. At first glance, Ynona could easily have been mistaken for a middle-aged employee at the local big-box craft supply store, complete with sunny eyes, crinkled up at the corners, which suggested a bright, cheerful smile beneath. But you never saw DIYnona’s smile, cheerful or otherwise. She wore a tankless portable respirator—the kind painters used when they spray-gunned interiors—which covered her nose and mouth.
The rest of The Postman’s lineup appeared to be on the young and fit side—even the portly Gassy Al had cut an imposing figure with his height—so Dee was struck by how frail Ynona looked in contrast. Her hands were delicate, the skin almost tissue-thin, exposing the deep blue veins beneath. Her body was slight and bony, and as she rolled her chair forward she was half-afraid that Ynona would keel over from the sheer weight of the respirator.
But she also knew better than to underestimate this Painiac. Mara had warned her of knitting-needle impalements, stained-glass embalming, human book bindings, and death by pottery wheel. Ynona loved her DIY crafts, and she would get incensed when her victims made fun of them. Well, at least Dee knew how to throw Ynona off her game.
“Oh, hello, my dear,” Ynona said, her voice muffled by the mask. “What a lovely surprise.”
As if she’d had no idea Dee was coming and just happened to have half of a Michaels store inventory set up in the middle of a warehouse maze on Murder Island. Lady, please.
Ynona tilted her head to the side. “I take it you’ve disposed of my rivals? Good. That means more fun for us!”
Rivals? She must be referring to the other Painiacs. So if Ynona knew that she wasn’t Dee’s first encounter, and that Dee had “disposed” of the others, why was she sitting there cheerfully waiting for Dee’s arrival?
“I’ve prepared such an exciting assortment of activities for us today,” Ynona continued. “Beadwork, knitting, wood turning, decoupage, candle making.” She paused, sweeping her arm toward the line of tables. “Won’t you choose one you like?”
Dee examined the assembled craft supplies. Yarn for knitting, jars of beads, the lathe, glue, and magazines for the decoupage, and the mason jars must be for the candles. She sniffed. The smel
l of candle wax was stronger than ever, but where was it coming from?
Dee didn’t look up—she didn’t want to clue Ynona in to what she was thinking—but that was the only logical place the wax could be: suspended above her in some kind of giant superheated vat. She shuddered at the thought of being encased in it: embalmed alive. It made Hannah’s hot tub seem like a fun dip in the pool.
“Beadwork, knitting, wood turning, decoupage, or candle making,” Ynona repeated, the cheerfulness ebbing from her tone. “Which one?”
Right. She wanted Dee to pick a craft. Dee noticed that Ynona remained at the far end of the long, thin room, as if the crafty killer wanted to stay far away from a potential molten wax bath. How was it triggered? Remote control? Maybe, but then Ynona would have to time it perfectly.
“Come forward,” Ynona prodded. “Choose one.”
She wanted Dee to move farther into the room….
Trip wire. That had to be it. As soon as Dee crossed to a craft table, swoosh. Human candle.
“Hmmm,” Dee said, pretending to think. “I don’t know how to knit, but I’ve always wanted to learn.” She held her chin in her hand as if contemplating her options, then let her eyes drop to the floor. About five steps in front of her, Dee could just make out a thin black cord stretched knee-high across the room. “Do you think you could show me?”
Ynona sighed, sounding very much like Darth Vader through her respirator. “Of course, dearie. Just take a seat first….”
“Or maybe decoupage?” Dee suggested. If I could just get her to come over here. “Is that like scrapbooking?”
“No!” Ynona snapped. “It is not like scrapbooking.” She muttered something under her breath that sounded very much like “stupid kids” before she regained her poise. “Decoupage,” she said calmly, “is an ancient decorative practice dating back to Eastern Siberian tomb art in the Middle Ages.”
Dee rolled her eyes. Normally, she would have stopped herself, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings. But pissing Ynona off was her number-one goal. If she could get the handicrafter to lose her focus, maybe she could lure Ynona into her own trap.
“Sounds lame,” Dee said. “In fact, all of these sound lame. What kind of person wastes their life with meaningless crafts?”
“Why, you snooty little brat.” Ynona stood up, hands balled into fists at her side, and moved forward.
Even angry, she wouldn’t be so stupid as to trip the wire herself. And though Dee thought she might be strong enough to take the old lady if it came down to a fight, the odds were good that they might trigger the wire together and both get the ultimate wax job.
Then Dee’s eyes landed on the jar of beads.
“Come here!” Ynona commanded as she approached.
Dee acted as if she was going to comply. “Fine!” she said with a heavy sigh. She took a couple of steps, expertly slipping out of her flip-flops in the process; then, just as she was about to hit the trip wire, she leaped in the air, grunting as her lame ankle pushed off the concrete. Dee cleared the trip wire and landed chest first on the nearest table, and, with a sweep of her arm, she knocked the jar of beads onto the floor.
A thousand round bits of plastic scattered across the concrete. Ynona, unable to stop her forward momentum in time, brought her foot down on top of them and immediately lost her balance, arms flailing as she tried to right herself. She looked like a giraffe on roller skates as she careened across the concrete, sliding on the round beads.
Dee jumped from table to table, heading away from the trip wire. She turned in time to see Ynona hit the floor, knocking the respirator askew.
She must have felt the wire as she landed on top of it and desperately tried to crawl away from the target zone. Dangling directly above her, an enormous oil-drum Bunsen-burner contraption began to tip on its side.
On the bead-covered concrete floor, Ynona couldn’t get any traction. She flung the respirator aside, exposing an ugly, snarling face. But Dee only saw the real DIYnona for an instant before the woman was swamped in a downpour of liquid wax.
Ynona tried to scream, but the viscous fluid flowed into her mouth, choking her. She contorted in pain, but the motions were dreamlike, choreographed. The wax began to harden immediately, and Dee watched in fixated horror as Ynona’s movements slowed, her limbs locked into their death throes. She looked like the plaster molds of the Pompeii victims Dee had seen in a museum once: humanlike, but not.
Dee could only contemplate Ynona’s embalming for an instant before she faced her own life-or-death situation. The enormous cauldron that had drenched Ynona in molten wax had swung down like a pendulum, but the weight of its contents must have been too much for the metal arms that suspended it from the ceiling. As the cauldron reached the highest point of its swing, it ripped away from one tether, and as gravity began to reverse the motion, the remaining beam gave way.
The hot metal cauldron careened through the air, directly at Dee. She dove off the table and barely avoided getting crushed.
Dee slammed into the floor. Her left arm broke her fall, and she immediately felt something snap.
She cried out in pain, rolling onto her side and cradling the injured arm against her stomach as the cauldron smashed into the table where Dee had been standing moments before. She heard a sickening crack of wood as the cauldron demolished a portion of the maze wall, but the pain in her arm was all-consuming. Her vision blurred as white-hot bolts of agony rocketed from her elbow to her wrist, and Dee’s brain only barely recognized that a huge portion of the wall teetered above her. The entire section had buckled from the force of the impact, and the cauldron itself lay on the table, slowly rolling toward her.
Her broken body was slow to respond as she tried to claw her way toward the doorway. And just as Dee had given up any idea of escape and was bracing for impact, she felt an arm around her waist. Someone lifted her off the floor and half dragged, half flung her through the doorway to safety as Ynona’s section of the maze imploded.
THE BACK OF DEE’S head slammed onto the concrete floor, adding a new mind-numbing pain to her growing collection. She took a deep breath, eyes closed, and her chest felt heavy, as if someone or something was on top of her.
Dee blinked open her eyes. Dust and debris fluttered down around her, but she distinctly recognized a head of shaggy blond hair hovering over her.
“You all right?” Nyles asked.
Dee smiled. “Auntie Em?”
“Unlike Ethan’s action films,” Nyles said, pushing himself back onto his knees, “I actually recognize that reference.” He put a hand behind Dee’s neck and eased her into a sitting position. “Slowly,” he said. “You took quite a spill.”
It was a spill, all right.
Dee winced as she sat up, her left arm pulsating with pain. “Ynona was tougher than she looked.”
Nyles pursed his lips. “This is my fault. I should have gotten here earlier.”
“Everything taken care of?” she asked.
He nodded, glancing at the camera directly over their heads. “You don’t have to worry about Griselda anymore,” he said slowly.
Dee nodded, understanding him perfectly. Their subterfuge hadn’t been easy—the cameras were always on, and Dee had had to trust that Nyles had understood what she wanted him to do.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, then immediately felt like an asshole. Now they were both caught in Slycer’s maze. She should be apologizing to Nyles for putting his life in danger again, instead of being selfishly grateful that she didn’t have to face the rest of the Painiacs alone.
Nyles laughed. “I’m glad I’m here too. Shall we have a look at that arm of yours?”
Tenderly, Nyles ran his palm up and down the skin of her left forearm, pausing near the wrist. “A fracture, I believe. It’s already beginning to swell.” He whipped off his jacket, then pulled his long-sleeve shirt over his head.
Nyles’s skin was pale, indicating a mere passing acquaintance with the sun, but his muscles were
defined, his body lean. He might not have had Ethan’s bulk, but now Dee understood why Nyles was stronger than she’d assumed based on his gaunt frame.
He grabbed a piece of wood from the shattered wall, gently placed it under her arm, then bound it to her with his shirt, tying it off at her shoulder to create a makeshift sling.
“It won’t stop the pain,” Nyles said, his eyes full of concern, “but it will immobilize the break somewhat. Until we can get you to a doctor.”
Or until I’m dead.
Nyles pulled his jacket back on and helped Dee to her feet. “Shall we?”
Dee nodded. “Let’s see what’s next.”
Dee and Nyles didn’t need to go very far before they stumbled upon the next trial. After they rounded the very first corner, the wall slid closed behind them, locking them into a wide-open room. It ran parallel to the narrow corridor that now served as the final resting place of DIYnona, but while it was just as long, this space looked significantly wider, though that might have been an optical illusion. The wall through which they’d entered was mirrored like a dance rehearsal room.
Illusion or not, it was wide enough to hold an elevated stage that ran about two-thirds the length of the room plus a haphazard assortment of metal scaffolding and stacked wooden crates, set up as bleacher-style seating opposite the mirrors.
Dee had spent enough time with her stepsister to recognize a fashion runway when she saw one, even if it was embedded in some kind of industrial-waste storeroom.
“Actors to their places!” a voice called from the distance.
Dee’s heart rate accelerated as Cecil B. DeViolent stepped out from behind the stacked crates.
He wore a simple black blazer over a white collared shirt, fastened at the throat with a shiny black button. Cecil still had the dark shades, but he’d ditched the facial hair and sandy brown wig from his Die Hard reenactment and replaced it with floppy blond hair that almost reached his chin. The look was familiar, but also generic, and Dee had no idea what film scene he was going to re-create.
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