The Den of Souls

The Den of Souls - Chapter Seven

After the door opened, everyone hastily piled inside the next room as if the zombies would suddenly wake up and try to dig themselves out of the ground again. No one spoke as the metal door closed behind us with an affirmative locking noise, leaving us in the dark with our already dimming glowsticks. All I could hear in the dark were the heavy breaths of my haunted house companions.

"Is everyone alright?" Damien whispered to the group. No one spoke, but I could hear a rustling of clothes and presumed that the others had nodded their heads like I did.

"What do we do now?" a trembling voice asked softly. It was Anna.

I looked around us. We were now standing in what looked like a short dark hallway. If it weren't for our glowsticks, we wouldn't even have been able to see each other's silhouettes. I remembered that I had a keychain flashlight jammed in my pocket and I took it out and turned it on, nearly blinding Lily beside me. I offered her a quick, tight-lipped smile before shining my flashlight down the length of the hallway.

At the end of the hallway, there was a dimly lit room covered in a sickly dark green hue that seemed to flash off every few minutes, making my insides squeeze in fear. The zombie room hadn't looked scary when we went in and look what had happened. This room already looked like something out of a horror film, which meant that we were going to be in for a really tough time.

"Should we go?" I whispered. I didn't trust myself to speak up louder in case there was something down in the green room that could hear me and attack us or something.

"Yeah," I heard Leon answer, equally as quietly. But no one moved. We all just stood, huddled together, behind the metal door in the dark as time ticked by slowly. It was as if everyone had lost their will to go on, even Ian and Tricia.

"I want to go home," I heard Anna telling Tricia.

I do too, I thought to myself. I've wanted to go home since Lily dragged me off my couch and out my front door.

"We have to keep going," Lily said.

"Yeah, and they didn't tell us what to do if we wanted to quit, so we don't have a choice," Damien chimed in. He took a step to stand next to me.

Damien glanced down at me and I felt his fingertips brush my wrist. He leaned down and whispered so low that only I could hear him. "Are you okay?"

I nodded my head and was taken by surprise when I felt his hand close around mine. He gave my hand a light squeeze before letting go and shifting beside me to address the rest of the group.

"Anybody else have their flashlight?" he asked quietly. No one answered and I assumed they had dropped their lights some time during our horror fiasco with the fake zombies. I felt Damien's arm move beside me before a ray of light joined mine in the dark hallway. "I only have one left," Damien said. He took one more glance at me before walking down the hallway.

"Let's hurry and get this over with," he called over his shoulder.

The rest of us, begrudgingly, followed Damien down the dark corridor. When we finally got to the dim green room, Damien stopped walking abruptly, causing me to slam into his back and Ian to slam in to mine.

"Hey! What the hell?" Ian shouted.

Damien stepped to the side so we could all see what he saw and Ian immediately paled.

Green light bulbs dangled and swung eerily back and forth from the ceiling, bathing the room in a sickly green. It seemed like the room was modeled after a surgery room in a hospital with equipment thrown everywhere: a broken blood pressure machine tossed towards the back, an electrocardiogram machine broken in half, arm cuffs and stethoscopes strewn over bits of choppy metal. The walls were littered with posters and papers showing images of dissected body parts, muscles, bones, and newspaper clippings. Five long and wide cabinets ran from the ceiling to the floor around the room. There was one wooden door on the left wall with a locked metal door handle. Hanging on the door was a sign with a reversed pentagram drawn on it in red ink.

In the center of the room was a large metal table full of scalpels, syringes, varying scissors, and a small hand saw. Beside the table, laying perfectly still on a worn down and rusty hospital gurney, was a stiff, pale corpse who had had its head lopped off.

"I think I'm gonna puke," Tricia said, holding her hand up to her mouth. Anna stood motionless next to her and I could swear there were tears in her eyes.

The body on the gurney was naked, save for a thin white cloth covering it from the hips down. Where the head should have been was a pool of congealed blood that had spilled over the side of the gurney onto the tiled floor underneath.

"What should we do?" Lily asked no one in particular. She stood partially in the hallway concealed by shadows and though I couldn't see her face, I could hear the apprehension in her voice.

It was Leon who moved first. He walked from behind his brother and took a tentative step towards the corpse in the middle of the room. He stopped and waited for something to happen. There was nothing. He took another careful step; still nothing. Convinced that the body wasn't going to suddenly start moving like the zombies in the previous room, Leon crossed the remainder of the way to the body and the metal table.

"Hey, there's something here," Leon said. The rest of us made our way over to the table, mindful of the corpse and blood, and looked at the surgical tools on the metal table. Next to one of the scalpels was a piece of paper folded in half.

"Well," his brother said. "What are you waiting for? Pick it up."

"No!" Leon responded. He gave us all a once over before addressing his brother. "Evelyn picked up the notebook from the last room and zombies attacked us. If I pick that up . . ."

Leon left his sentence hanging, but we all knew what he was going to say. His green eyes had darkened and they darted around in fear of something popping out from the corners of the room. A trickle of sweat lined the sides of his face and he swiped it away with the back of his hand.

I knew that we needed to get started on finding our way out of here and that piece of paper would probably be a clue, but I also knew that I definitely would not be the one picking it up. I had opened a portal to zombieland last time, who knew what I'd open up next just by picking up a piece of paper.

"I'll pick it up," Lily offered. She had come to stand beside Leon by the table. "This is probably a clue," she said, echoing my thoughts. "It might have instructions that'll help us."

Tricia shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. She shuddered and glared right at Lily. "No, Leon is right. What if you pick it up and all Hell unleashes? We can't take that chance."

"But we have to," Lily replied. She reached her hand out for the paper, but before she could reach it, Anna's hand shot out and grabbed a hold of Lily's wrist.

"No! Didn't you hear what Trish said?! That body could get up! I don't want it to grab me!"

Anna's hand on Lily's was shaking. There was no doubt in my mind that she was remembering the zombie that had grabbed her in the graveyard.

For a brief moment, no one moved or spoke. All the excitement from before had vanished and I could bet no one wanted to be here anymore. Tricia took a step back from the table and walked over to the wall. She leaned against a cabinet and pulled a small cellphone from the pocket of her thin blue jacket.

"Damn it, there's no signal."

"Who are you trying to call?" Ian asked. He walked over to stand beside her, his arms crossed.

"Anyone. Someone to tell the refs that I want out," she replied. "I can't stand being . . ."

And that's when the siren went off.