Single White Psychopath Seeks Same

Chapter 21

I PUT THE van into reverse again. Even though I had the accelerator against the floor, it seemed to be struggling to hit five miles per hour. I wondered what my chances were of taking all four of our pursuers out via vehicular homicide.

Something slammed against the side of the van, followed by Daniel’s charming voice shouting “You idiot!”

There was a huge explosion that rocked the van.

I kept the accelerator down, and by some miracle the van kept moving.

I heard something land in the back. Something rolled along the floor.

“Move your head!” Charlotte ordered.

I did so. She flung the grenade out where the front windshield had been. It struck the gate, and for a heart-stopping instant I thought it was going to bounce back at us, but it dropped straight down to the ground and exploded.

No damage to the gates.

I swerved the van to the left, steering it back toward the garage. I couldn’t run anybody over going this slowly, and the gates were a hopeless cause.

In what remained of the rear-view mirror, I saw another grenade fly into the back of the van.

Then a second one.

A third one sailed in as Roger grabbed for the first. Charlotte scooped up the second and threw it past my head again. It landed on the ground and exploded, sending a huge blast of snow into the air.

The van was picking up speed. Not much, but a little.

Roger threw his first grenade out the window. Charlotte began to frantically look around the rear of the van. “Where’d the other one go?”

“By your foot!”

Charlotte grabbed it and threw it again. But she was so frazzled that the throw went wild, hitting the top of the windshield, bouncing off the dashboard, and into my lap.

I’d played Hot Potato many times as a kid, but never a version with such high stakes. I grabbed the grenade and whipped it out the window. It exploded in mid-air, barely clearing the front of the van.

Then the machine gun fire started again.

I ducked down and blindly drove the van, hoping I wouldn’t go off the mostly-cleared path and get us stuck. I was amazed that the van was still functioning, even at this fairly pitiful level. Another grenade exploded, but this one hadn’t made it inside.

The machine gun fire didn’t stop, so I couldn’t tell if we were leaving them behind or they were running after the van. I sort of hoped they were running after us. Slipping on a patch of ice while firing a machine gun could cause one heck of a nasty accident.

After an endless minute, the van reached the garage. I attempted to turn into it, but instead crashed against the side of the doorway. While Roger and Charlotte climbed over the seats toward me, I grabbed the machete and scrambled through the front window and onto the smashed hood.

More machine gun bullets hit the van as the three of us hurried through the garage. I opened the door and we rushed back into the hallway. As I pulled it shut, the door began to twitch with the impact of machine gun fire.

“Any great ideas?” I asked.

“Run between the bullets,” Roger suggested.

“How can you be a smart-ass at a time like this?” Charlotte demanded.

“We could die at any second,” Roger explained. “I’d like my final words to be something clever.”

We swerved down another corridor just as they began firing again. It was readily evident that this had been one of my typical bad decisions, because the corridor had a door at the end but no other options.

“Piss,” Roger remarked.

I unlocked the door, flung it open, and we rushed through, finding ourselves in a small, dimly lit room. A small room with a bearskin rug on the floor, and nothing else. No windows, no doors, no portable teleportation devices, nothing.

“Piss, piss,” Roger added.

“Okay…problem…” I mumbled, shutting the door. Maybe we could smother them with the rug.

“I hope you’ve got your clever comments ready,” said Charlotte.

Why was there a bearskin rug in an otherwise empty room anyway? I slid it aside, half-expecting it to try and bite my foot off. There was a trapdoor underneath.

Bullets began to tear through the door. The three of us dove to the floor. I unlatched the chain on the trapdoor and lifted it. It was too dark to see anything but a slide leading down.

“Looks good to me,” said Roger.

Then I remembered what Daniel had said about his latest project, the underground one that wasn’t completely functional but would be amazing.

“You know what, I don’t think we want to go down there.”

More bullets tore through the door.

“Okay, yeah, we do.”

Roger jumped down into the trapdoor and vanished from sight. Charlotte followed. Just as the door broke apart from a violent kick on the other side, I went after them.

I slid down for about ten seconds, and then kicked somebody in the back as I landed. It was pitch black down here, as well as hot and humid, almost like I was back in Florida.

“Everyone still alive?” I asked.

“Not dead here,” said Roger.

“Here either,” said Charlotte.

I got to my feet. I couldn’t see a thing except for a faint light from the trapdoor above, but if any of the others slid down here, they were going to run into the machete.

The trapdoor closed, cutting off all the light.

“Okay,” I said, “our situation does not seem to have taken much of an upward turn.”

“Why is it so hot down here?” asked Charlotte. “What is this place?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I have a strong feeling that it’s not going to be fun.”

“What’s that noise?” asked Charlotte.

“Okay, I don’t need questions like that,” said Roger. “When you ask something like ‘what’s that noise?’ it really makes me nervous, and I’m plenty nervous already, and I’d just rather you-”

“Shhh! Listen!”

We all shut up and listened. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, but there was some sort of noise coming from the darkness ahead of us. Something too soft to make out accurately. Almost like a buzzing.

“We can’t stand around here,” Roger said. “If there’s a way out, we’ve got to find it as soon as possible. How long do you think the other prisoners can defend themselves with that one gun?”

We spent a few minutes trying to find a light source. There was a wall right behind where the slide had dropped us off, but sliding our hands along it turned up no light switch.

“Forget it,” I finally said. “We’ll just have to do it in the dark.”

Slowly, cautiously, we began to walk forward. I had my arms out on front of me, and assume the others did, too. The floor was smooth, possibly cement. The sound got a bit louder as we moved forward, but was still impossible to identify.

Then I slipped on a wet patch and pitched forward, smacking into something at waist-level. It felt like one of the carts in the operating room. A second later there was a huge crash-glass breaking against the floor. I tried to move away and smacked into something similar. It also toppled over in an explosion of shattering glass.

There was a long silence.

“Smooth move,” said Roger.

I could feel a large shard of glass pressed up against one of my bare feet. Now it was officially time to move very, very slowly, unless I wanted to leave large strips of my feet behind. I carefully slid my right foot forward, pushing away the glass in front of it. I did the same with my left.

The noise was much louder now, and this time I could identify it.

Rattling. And hissing.

I very much wanted to take off running across the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, but the presence of the broken glass made that a poor decision.

“Are those fucking snakes? ” asked Charlotte.

“Everyone stay calm,” I warned.

The hissing continued, and now I could hear slithering coming from at least four places around me.

“What is the problem with these people?” Roger demanded, his voice panicked. “Who keeps rattlesnakes in their basement in Alaska? Where the hell did they get them? When do they feed them? I’m having a really hard time with all of this!”

“Be quiet!” snapped Charlotte. “Just don’t make them mad!”

I moved my toe forward, past something sharp and into something soft and wet. The open mouth of a dead snake. Unable to control myself, I rapidly stepped back, crushing a small, scaly mass that had come up behind me, and then I lurched forward again.

I bit down on my knuckles to keep from shrieking. Of course, with my knuckles muffling my shriek, I could hear the rattling and hissing and slithering perfectly well.

Then Charlotte shrieked for me.

“What? What happened?” asked Roger.

“It went over my foot! The snake went over my foot!”

There were loud pounding sounds that were apparently Charlotte beating the ground around her feet with the spiked club.

“Everybody calm down!” I said, pulling my hand out of my mouth. “If we don’t get bit we’ll be fine! Just keep moving forward!”

There was definite writhing behind me, and I was starting to think there were well more than four active snakes on the floor. I slid my foot forward, hooking my toe underneath the dead snake whose mouth I’d explored and flipping the creature out of the way. Not toward Charlotte.

The snake behind me brushed across the back of my foot. I hadn’t killed it when I stepped on it, and it seemed to be freaking out, twisting back and forth wildly. Hopefully it would slice itself to death on the glass, or at least not dig its fangs into my heel.

I kept moving forward. There was a sudden stinging pain in my toe. I screamed.

“What? What?” demanded Roger.

“I got bit! One of the snakes bit me! I got me right-okay, no, that was a piece of glass.”

“Listen to me, both of you,” said Roger. “No more screaming. None!”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not barefoot.”

“I mean it!”

We continued walking. The glass on the floor thinned out quickly, but I still couldn’t see anything in front of me. After a few more steps I stopped worrying about the snakes, though I figured I’d have plenty of other things to worry about before too long.

“Ow!” said Roger.

“What happened?”

“I bumped into the wall.”

“Smooth move.”

“Shut up.”

I touched the wall as well. Now we had to figure out if we were in a completely sealed-off room, in which case we were totally screwed, or there was a way out, in which case we were only close to totally screwed.

“Hey, everyone, guess what I found?” asked Roger. “Let there be light!”

Nothing happened.

“I’m going to be really annoyed if you just released some wild animals into the room,” I said.

But then there was a low hum, and some fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling lit up with a dim glow. A second later, they switched to full power, completely lighting the room.

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.