The hallway did have an end after all. The meager flashlight illuminated something solid and flat, then a turn to the right. Thankfully, not a dead end. It wasn't exactly a way out, but at least they wouldn't be going forever in the same direction. It already felt like they were.
Another shape stood against the wall. It was tall and broad-shouldered and holding something in its hands. The object it held looked like a sort of tray.
"Should we turn back?" Hannah asked.
"Nah, fuck that," Kayson said, then he coughed. Vanessa cast him a wary look, but it was too dark to see him. "I'm fine," he said.
Vanessa faced ahead. She didn't like that shape at the end of the hall. All she could think of were Wendy's famous last words, They're just a couple of statues.
As they drew closer, the features of the shape grew more pronounced. Triangular tufts of rainbow-colored hair topped its painted face. It had red lips and a nose to match. Blue makeup shaded its eyes.
"A fucking clown?" Hannah said. "You gotta be kidding me."
But Vanessa wasn't looking at the clown. She was looking at the tray in his hands. Three bottles of water sat atop it. Until now, she had no idea how thirsty she was. She'd been too busy trying to survive.
"Look," she said.
"The water?" Hannah asked. "Do you think it's safe?"
"It looks sealed."
"I could definitely use a drink," Kayson said. "Wish it was Hennessy, though."
"Are you even old enough to drink?" Hannah asked.
"Shit, I got a throat, I can drink. Worry about yourself."
He pushed through them.
"Wait," Vanessa said.
She and Hannah followed him toward the clown with the tray. Hannah shined the light over the bottles to ensure they were truly sealed. She turned the beam to the clown's face. Its lifeless eyes stared, but it was otherwise motionless. She shined it down the right turn to show another dark stretch of hallway.
"Do you think it will lead out?" she asked.
"We don't have any other choice," Vanessa said.
"Yeah, not like we can go back the way we came," Kayson said. "Fucking fire."
Vanessa looked over her shoulder. She could smell smoke, but it could've been on her clothes from standing so near the fire moments ago. She grabbed a bottle from the tray and twisted the lid. The plastic cracked as the lid loosened.
"Definitely sealed," she said.
She wrenched the rest of the lid off and upended the bottle in her mouth. The others watched her as she glugged the cool, tasteless liquid. She sighed with satisfaction when she finished. Hannah grabbed a bottle next, followed by Kayson.
Hannah took a swig and laughed with relief.
"I was so fucking thirsty," she said.
"Salud, bitches," Kayson said and raised his bottle.
Vanessa opened his mouth to scold him for calling them bitches again, but something else occurred to her. She looked at the now empty tray.
"There were only three," she said.
"What do you mean?" Hannah asked.
Kayson ignored them and took a sip of water. He took another, more generous gulp after the first taste.
"Goddamn," he said and took a third swallow.
"Either whoever brought us here somehow knew only three of us would be left by the time we got here or …" Vanessa paused.
"Or someone's here with us," Hannah said.
Vanessa expected Hannah to say it with a whimper. Instead, it came out cold. The exhaustion of constant tension and tragedy had siphoned her emotions. Vanessa couldn't blame her in the least. She hoped this was over soon. And no one else dead. Please.
"If they're here, it doesn't make a difference," Vanessa said. "Like I said, if they just wanted us dead, they would've—"
Kayson coughed again. It sounded gritty, like his lungs were full of gravel. She cast him another wary look. She expected him to compose himself and tell her he was fine, but Hannah spun to look too, and the flashlight beam fell on the scratches on his chest.
"Oh God," Hannah said.
Her voice had regained some semblance of its earlier spirit. This time, it sounded contorted with disgust. Vanessa could hardly blame her. The sight made her stomach turn as well.
The pinkness around the red gashes had deepened and spread, creating a puffy, inflamed mountain range from his upper left pec to an inch below his right nipple. Stranger still, intermittent black growths had broken through the skin in places. They were small and rectangular. Shiny in parts, they looked almost like shards of a broken circuit board.
Kayson was looking down at the wounds too. He lifted a hand toward the black protrusions but couldn't bring himself to touch them. He looked at the women.
"This can't be good," he said. His breathing had grown deeper and more congested. He coughed again, and something stinky immediately filled the stale air. It reminded Vanessa of burnt plastic and something dead. With each hack, more of those black rectangles popped out of the already irritated flesh. He whined when the coughing fit stopped. "What the hell?" he said.
"What the hell?" Vanessa echoed, barely above a whisper.
Hannah slowly let the flashlight tilt upward. It was almost as if she didn't want to do it but she couldn't help herself. She had to see his face. Vanessa had to see it too.
Kayson's face was still Kayson's face, albeit a little paler, with dark circles under his eyes. His bottom lip trembled as orange iridescent snot trailed from his nostrils.
"Guys?" he said in a voice like a child's.
Shit, he practically is still a child, Vanessa thought.
He hacked again. This time, it came out constipated, stopping in the middle of a cough, and his lips spread open impossibly wide. With several squelches, black and jagged spines jutted from his mouth, stabbing at the air. They cracked as they bent like spider legs with too many joints. They made wet suction sounds when they stabbed into his cheeks and throat, and fresh blood trickled from these new wounds. It was hard to tell in the light, but these spines looked partly like branches and partly like bundled wires. Their texture appeared mostly rubbery but covered in parts by rough patches of bark. When his eyes flashed the same green as the code from the faces of the hooded creatures, Vanessa had seen enough.
"Time to go!" she yelled.
She grabbed Hannah by the arm and tried to pull her down where the hallway turned.
But the Kayson thing had taken Hannah's other arm. His face was collapsing in on itself, becoming a black mass of spiny lumps, but his strength had more than doubled. His hands were no longer his own. The fingers had grown exponentially and taken on the quality of the black spikes he'd expectorated.
The new hands yanked the now screaming Hannah toward his mutating body. Instinctively, Vanessa let go. She stumbled backwards and instantly regretted her decision. She took a step forward to help Hannah, but the sight of Kayson's torso stopped her dead.
His belly twisted and his chest bulged. It looked as if something massive and hungry was tunneling through him, part of it stuck in his abdomen and trying to writhe free. His malleable skin was wrapping itself around Hannah. The crunching of his bones filled the hallway, providing an infernal accompaniment to her desperate cries.
More than almost anything, Vanessa wanted to try to save her. Even as the other woman cried, "You bitch, you better not fucking leave me!" Vanessa wanted to rush over and try tearing her from the Kayson thing's deadly grasp. Especially as Hannah's pleas turned to sobs for people who weren't anywhere nearby, like her mother and father and people whose names Vanessa didn't recognize, Vanessa wanted to do something to help more than almost anything. She wanted to play the hero more than anything except, that is, to save her own skin.
"I'm sorry," she said as she turned and ran.
It was the second time that day she'd decided against helping someone.
Behind her, Hannah's screams turned to gurgles. Vanessa raised her hands to cover her ears as she ran but lowered them before she could properly shield herself. It was better to hear, better to know the cost of her self-preservation. Better to live with it, whether she lived another sixty years or another sixty seconds. The dying woman's liquid sounds of panic chased Vanessa further into the hallway's shadowy gullet.
Vanessa ran through hallways of darkness. Her maladjusted vision made it hard not to bump into walls. Keeping her hands out helped a little, but she still brushed against tight curves and stumbled against unexpected obstacles. It didn't help at all that some of the smoke from the outside fire had found its way into the building. It only added to her disorientation. The guilt clenching her chest made it all much worse.
At least Hannah had stopped screaming, Vanessa thought, then cursed her heartlessness.
In lieu of the screams, a more terrifying sound arose. A seemingly infinite number of scratching feet scrambled across pavement, punctuated by a swelling chorus of rat squeaks. Song or no song, the rats were coming, most likely to escape the growing blaze. Or their hunger had become too much.
Her legs wanted to give out and buckle beneath her. They'd gone past aching and now felt like boiled noodles. She had no choice but to slow her pace. She'd had enough water so as not to have her body completely surrender; it just couldn't go as fast anymore. Her feet felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. Her throat burned with every breath. Every heartbeat was a stiff jab at the inside of her chest. She used the wall for support and forced herself to keep moving.
At the end of her current hallway, she spotted a halo of gray light. A sound escaped her lips. Even though she had uttered it, she didn't know if it was a laugh or a sob. She stopped and took several deep breaths. Somewhere close by, the rats scampered and squeaked. She couldn't tell if they were all around her, behind her, or beside her, nor could she tell just how close they were.
Mercifully, she heard no indication the Kayson thing had given chase. She didn't think she could outrun him—or anyone at this point. Full-body fatigue had set in.
Vanessa hoped with everything she had that the light at the end indicated a way out of this dark, drab maze. She took another breath, this one much deeper than her last few, then squared her shoulders and trod toward the gloomy light. The air she swallowed tasted smoky. She'd need to get out of these hallways soon or she'd be fucked.
Maybe that was what she deserved after she'd left Hannah behind. With her father already gone and her mother one bad day away from another catatonic depression, what kind of life awaited her outside these walls? If it was something good, did she even deserve it? Perhaps it was better to simply die in this labyrinth.
She reached the gray light and stopped. Another hallway sprawled before her, and it wasn't empty.
Crumpled husks lay in lit-up, roped off exhibits. Long-dead freaks, mummified by time and neglect. They were all here: the giant and the dwarf, the conjoined twins and the reptilian, the ghost and the boy with the leopard spots. None were alive, nor had they been for decades. Just like this place, they were left behind by an increasingly virtual world. Why they remained while the rest of the staff had moved on was anyone's guess. Someone had deemed them no better than the rats, but unlike the rats, they had died here. It seemed wrong and unjust, but there was nothing just about this place. If there were, she wouldn't have been brought here against her will. If there were, the others would still be alive.
She stood at the head of the mausoleum for human oddities on wavering, unreliable legs. The scrape and scuttle of several hundred rat feet drew ever closer. The smell of bone dust eclipsed even that of the billowing smoke. She could taste its dead essence on every reluctant breath.
Exit through the freakshow, she thought. Let's do this.
She took one step forward and then another. She stopped and waited, expecting the dead freaks to rise. Though the clown with the water tray hadn't attacked them, she couldn't forget the hooded figures who'd seemed so much like unliving things at first. Several frantic heartbeats later, the husks remained unmoving and lifeless. She resumed her trek, her footsteps a hollow, steady beat under the cacophonous din of the rats.
As she passed the first corpse, the leopard boy's, she trod the opposite side of the hallway and kept her gaze fixed on the mummified remains. The eyes were long rotted out, the spotted skin gone to paper. Skeletal hands were frozen claws of rigor mortis. Only a few feet away, the bone dust stink was heady and oppressive. It made her reel, and she braced herself against the wall as she walked on.
She passed the other husks in similar fashion, casting a wide berth and never looking away. She slipped by all except the final body, the twins joined at the hip. As two bodies in one, the corpse took up more space in the hall. Going around was near impossible. She stopped several paces from it to catch her breath and reevaluate her unenviable circumstances. Up ahead, the gray lights of the exhibits terminated into more shadows. Leaving Hannah behind also meant no flashlight. There could be a way out or another turn in this dizzying maze.
I can't take this anymore.
Despite the negative self-talk, she began to walk again. When she reached the sprawling remains of the twins, she sighed and lifted one foot. She closed her eyes and stepped over. In the seconds she stood split-legged over the dead siblings, she imagined them reaching up and dragging her into a dusty embrace, using their multiple limbs to bind every part of her and steal her life.
She lifted her back leg and stepped over. Then, she took a handful more steps, opened her eyes and turned. The conjoined twins were still motionless.
Something about passing through the hall of deceased human oddities with little trouble gave her a strange, sudden clarity. The rats she heard were still outside this building, scrambling frantically and unsure where to go. The fire had spread, but it wouldn't get her. It wasn't smoky enough in here for it to be all that close.
Exit through the freakshow indeed.
She faced forward again and strode into the deep shadows. Too elated at the real possibility of freedom, she forgot to get her hands up and walked right into another wall. Her nose flared with pain, and her eyes welled with tears.
"Fuck!" she snapped. She licked blood from her upper lip and felt around for the next turn. Her hands brushed a coarse but flat surface. When she reached one edge, it bent to make a similar surface. The opposite side yielded the same result. She'd reached a dead end.
A vague urge to snap again echoed somewhere inside her, but instead, she slid to her knees in defeat. She pressed her forehead against the warm, coarse wall. It felt made of plywood and smelled like sawdust. She lifted her hands, both of which now felt unusually heavy, and gave the wall a push. It offered no give. "Come on."
She turned and sat against the wall, facing the way she'd come. The husks still lay motionless in haloes of ashen light. Even so, she could not bring herself to go back. It felt so cruel, so Sisyphean. Of course, it was neither of those things. Cruelty required direct action of another individual. Even if someone had brought her here without her consent, it was no one's fault if she couldn't now find her way out.
This harsh realization was worse somehow. She'd once thought she understood the universe's indifference and how delicate her successful navigation of its chaotic forces. After all, her father had died in a sudden accident while she was in the thick of adjusting to college life. Her mother sat in the grip of depression during Vanessa's transition from girlhood into womanhood. These were heavy things for anyone to endure, and yet she had navigated them admirably, getting into a decent school, staying out of trouble, and graduating with honors.
All of this she did in the face of personal hardship, but this whole fucked-up day was on another level. That she had run afoul of someone who'd brought her to this place for unclear reasons, watched five other people die in a matter of hours, and still couldn't find her way out after she'd been so sure she could … it was all too much and far beyond anything she ever expected to face.
Nonetheless, she needed to go on if for nothing else than her own stubbornness.
She pushed herself into a stance, never taking her eyes from the partially lit hallway with its dried-up corpses. She balled her hands into fists and dug her nails into her palms so hard she nearly expected to draw blood.
Why the hell not? She was already bleeding.
She licked another few drops of blood from her lips, took a step forward and a step back, then stopped.
Something moved in the shadows beyond, something big and amorphous.
Vanessa knew what it'd be before it shambled into the light.
The Kayson thing was now also a Hannah thing, both former captives now molded together in a twisted, welded bundle of knobby flesh and jutting, jagged limbs. The faces of Kayson and Hannah, faces with whom she'd endured more in a handful of hours than with people she'd known all her life, stared out at her from the shapeless, colorless mass, their eyes stretched into eternal expressions of pain and terror. Noses and ears misplaced or gone completely. Patches of plastic and circuitry piercing through swollen purple skin. Oozing and infected-looking. This new creation, perverted beyond humanity, lurched toward her, reaching with too many limbs, far away but not nearly far enough.
At its base, it had no feet, just a blob of flabby flesh trailing orange mucus. Red eyes twinkled in the surrounding darkness. The rats were here to evade the spreading fire. Some crawled over the mounds of flesh making up the thing at the end of the hall, but they did not scratch or bite. They acted instead out of a strange reverence for their new master. Vanessa shook her head and faced the wall, no longer wanting to see the advancing terror.
She thrust a kick at the wall and grunted on impact. The wood shook from the blow but gave no sign it might give. The vibration paled in comparison to the shock absorbed by her leg. The pain rattled from the ball of her foot to her inner hip.
Still, she took two steps back and lunged forward to kick again. Still, the wall offered no give. She'd doubled her effort, but it only resulted in doubling aftershocks and agonized frustration.
Behind her, the Kayson-Hannah thing had covered a third of the hallway. The rats milled around it, none breaking rank to charge ahead. They looked even worse in the gray lights, albino and diseased. Their yellowed teeth gnawed the air, practice chomps for Vanessa's flesh.
"Fucking damn it!" she cried and hurled herself at the wall.
Her shoulder struck wood. She felt a distant echo of pain, but it didn't give her pause. Her adrenaline was way too high. She charged again, this time throwing the whole side of her body against the barrier. The Kayson-Hannah thing reached the halfway point, sliming over the remains of the reptilian like a slug over an ancient, termite-eaten log.
The entire left side of Vanessa lit up with pain. It felt as though a near dozen small explosions were going off up and down her body. The strongest burst near her hip pocket, and she remembered the media player inside.
Exit through the freakshow.
She looked from the advancing terror to the immovable wall. She dug the media player out of her pocket and woke up the screen with a click of the home button. The cursor highlighted the song "Exit Through the Freakshow." She stared at the title on the pale screen for an eternal second.
"Worth a shot," she said through bloody teeth, and pressed play.