Part Three: The Hundred and One Seers
I've got maybe a split second here to tell you want you need to know, so listen up.
My friend Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger and I were chest-deep in Super Maggots, giant fly larvae that were currently asleep but would wake up the second Dr. Steiger, a seriously sick Corpse mad scientist, hit the button on his remote control. When that happened, these mutant monsters of his would immediately start chowing down on a breakfast of teenage boys.
We'd be dead in seconds, and bones seconds after that.
Oh, and I'm Will Ritter: Undertaker.
There. You're caught up.
Now, you'd be surprised how much can happen in a split second, the time it takes for a dead finger to press a button. That's especially true when Yours Truly's got a button of his own to press, and panicked desperation enough to press it fast.
But was it fast enough?
The florescent bulbs lighting this long narrow pit filled with Super Maggots immediately winked out.
Nailed it! I thought.
Then I was airborne.
Something had grabbed me and thrown me straight up, with such force that my feet actually cleared the sea of maggots. For a second, I hurtled through empty darkness, flailing my arms and yelling in surprise and terror. A second later, something cold and metal and cylindrical slammed against my shoulder. Instinctively, I wrapped my arms around it, still clutching my pocketknife in one hand, though the dog whistle — the Super Maggot activating and deactivating dog whistle that Helene gave me before we split up — tumbled from my lips and disappeared in the blackness below me.
Somewhere, a voice yelled, “No!”
It was Steiger. I could tell from the thick, syrupy sound of his rotting chords.
“Undertaker!” he cried into the darkness. “You and that accursed EMP generator of yours have vexed me for the last time!”
I remembering thinking: Accursed? Vexed?
Who talks like that?
Then a door opened and closed, leaving behind a silence that told me Steiger had left us alone.
Us.
“Dave!” I called.
“I'm okay!” he called back from somewhere directly below me.
I swung my feet up and around the pipe. Because that's what it was: a pipe that ran the length of the narrow room, big and thick enough to easily support my weight. I didn’t know what flowed through it, through from what I'd seen so far of “Dr. Steiger's House of Horrors,” maybe ignorance was bliss.
“Dave,” I said again, blinking into the inky blackness.
“Yeah?”
“Did you ... fling me?”
There was a guilty pause. “Yeah.”
“Can I ask ... what for?”
“'Cause I didn't want you to get eaten!”
With an effort, I managed to scramble up and straddle the pipe, which lent me enough support to free my arms and use my pocketknife's flashlight. Shining it around the long narrow room showed me nothing I didn't already know. There were two doors, one on each end, both closed, and both set too high up on the walls to reach. The pipe ran the whole length of the room, coming close enough to each door — but, from the look of things, not close enough.
