Jeff Strand - Single White Psychopath Seeks Same

“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.

“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.