Page 28 of The Masks She Wore

?I smiled and shrugged. “Seemed an appropriate time to use it.”

?We turned the soft corner and the dark hall opened up into a small laboratory, dim fluorescent lights flickering around us, showing me exactly what we had been walking through.

?More fake blood.

?These shoes were absolutely ruined. Dammit, I kind of liked them.

?“What the fuck?” Viv whimpered as my steps slowed.

?There was a patient strapped down to a table in the middle of the room. She was screaming, cut open, her guts hanging out of her stomach while someone in a leather hocky mask and a leather apron stood above her.

?There were bodies in one corner, discarded, all of them cut open, blood dripping from the table, intestines covering the floor.

?“Rae, that looks real,” she whispered.

?I clenched my jaw, studying the scene as much as I could. She wasright. I had seen plenty of horror movies on the sliding scale of ‘clearly fake’ to ‘this was definitely a filmed murder’ andthislooked horrifically real. Even the stench. Decaying flesh, copper.

?“Just keep going,” I pushed her, even though my fear level was through the roof. This wasn’t real, it couldn’t be. Yes, I had seen movies where murderers snuck into haunted carnivals to show off because who would believe it was anactualpsychopath?

?But that was amovie. That shit didn’t happen in real life. This couldn’t be real.

?It wasn’t.

?I led her to the hall on the other side of the room, keeping my eyes on the scientist until I couldn’t anymore.

?We rushed a few steps in and slowed again, the slimy gooey floor shifting to something more easily walkable.

?“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Viv whispered.

?“We can leave as soon as we make it through, I promise, but there’s no turning back now, we have to go.”

?“So you can avoid thatcreep?” she spit at me, her voice shaking in terror. “God, you need to call the police, Rae. Just because he’s your brother, doesn’t give him the right to be an absolute dick about it.”

?“Because it’s against the rules,” I frowned, looking down at her. “Once you enter a place, the only way out is through. And…I have.” My eyes found the hall again. “That’s why I can’t go to them, because I already have. They don’t listen to me anymore, so you need to just drop it.”

?Viv looked over at that. “What? What does that mean?”

?“Doesn’t matter.” I pulled her into the next room, grateful it had come up. I didn’t want to talk about what the police were doing. God, fuck them.

?In this room, there were four people in cages. One of them was rattling the bars, one was dead, one was rocking back and forth and the last was just standing there, staring.

?Each of them were in a different state of decay, begging to be put out of their misery, begging for someone to end it.

?Skin sloughing off, falling to the cage floor, blood-soaked cages, rags barely hanging on to their decrepit bodies. The smell in this one was just as horrific. How did they do that? Make it smell as if someone had actually died? And how are none of the actors not gagging?

?One of the cage doors opened.

?We froze.

?The male stumbled out, moaning, begging for us to help.

?Viv started screaming so loudly, I had to cover my ears. She took off down the hall a second later.

?I watched after her, my irritation growing. “Fuck.” I turned back to the actor who had stopped and was now watching me. “Thanks for that,” I bit before heading after her.

?She was on edge, I understood that.Iwas on edge. I was woundso tight that I felt like I was about to explode but running usually only made things worse. You hit mirrors, you tripped and fell, you ran into actors, props, whatever. It was a dumb thing to do.

?However much restraint it took, walking was the best option unless the person following you was running too, then you had to run and be smart.

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