This chapter was added in after the original story - Enjoy and VOTE, COMMENT!
I open my eyes and look up at the gnarly face above me, "Is she gone?" I whisper, afraid that if I tilted my head up to check Emily would still be there and figure out our ruse.
Jasper turns his gore covered face towards where Emily ran off, then back to me to say, "Yep, she's long gone."
I let out a short laugh and reach a hand up for him to help me back to my feet. The fake guts smell disgusting, and I have no idea how Jasper managed to get the filth all over his face without gagging. That's true dedication to his craft right there. They smell like mold and melted plastic. I'm sure with how old the control room looked the guts were well past their best-by date.
"Let's get this shit off me," I say, trying my best to not get more of the red gunk on my skin. A ton of the mess has already stained my skin. Jasper goes around to my back and detaches the gut bag, allowing me to peel it from my body and drop it in front of me. As I do Chase appears from the other side of the mound with the hatch I crawled out of. "You get it?" I ask.
He lifts a hand above his head, in it is my phone, "Got every second." He shouts over to us. I grin, he recorded the entire event, video proof we got the last laugh.
"Excellent," I say kicking dirt over the pile of guts on the ground.
My stomach is totally stained with the red dye, but there is nothing here except the wilderness, so I can't really clean it off. I decide to button what I can of my shirt back up so we can head home and show Emily the video. Three of the five buttons on my shirt are broken, leaving only one at the top and one in the middle intact. I button them up and tuck the bottom into my pants. I sure hope the video is worth ruining my top.
Jasper takes the old jacket off and peels the fake scars off his face. While he's cleaning up Chase asks, "Shall we go back?" He moves alongside me and wraps an arm over my shoulder.
"I think we should," I say.
As a group, we head in the same direction Emily ran off. I kind of hope she fell entirely for it and is back home crying or some shit so we can show her the video. It would be a bit of a buzz-kill if we find her just ahead realizing how dumb she was for running.
I look back at the discarded props and the hatch. This place sure is an odd location for a haunted house. I wonder what happened to it and why it went inactive without anyone knowing about it. The cave is only a mile or two from the edge of the town, but the way it was built up this place felt like an expensive high-end hotspot. A bigger question is that if it was shut down, why did the owners leave all the props and computers down there? I'm sure that stuff would have fetched a good amount of money back in the day.
There are no signs of it ever being used as an attraction on the surface—like a well-groomed hiking trail or old decorations. But that may be because, by the looks of it, because the place was shut down decades ago. If it wasn't for Ronny and Lisa finding the old tunnel and Emily's dad, the place may have remained hidden for years to come. The cave is genuinely terrifying and I wonder how it must have been when it was opened. I also wonder why it closed. Maybe that slide was the knife that killed it. I could see terrified people getting seriously hurt on that.
The walk back to town takes about fifteen minutes through the forest. Jasper can't stop talking about the look on Emily's face, the fact that she ran off with that terror in her eyes, or that he's going to relish every moment of her horrific defeat for years to come. What we did was pretty cruel though, and I don't think he sees that. I'm not sure if there are years to come after what we did. She did kind of deserve it, though.
