Chapter Three
Tanner had not expected to cross paths with an angel.
There was no way he was going to leave her behind in the middle of the woods.
First, it would be rude to do that to any woman.
He’d been raised with proper Southern manners, which meant he felt compelled to hold open doors, etc.
And even if he didn’t have manners, how the hell could anyone leave this woman anywhere?
He just met her and he was literally offering the clothes off his back…
and wondering if there was any future timeline where she would ask him to take more of his clothes off.
Romy was one sexy angel. That white dress was tight, and the skirt was short, and the whole outfit put way too many thoughts into his head. Hell, even her name was hot. Romy.
Nope. He needed to get the hell back to his friends and his car and the real world before he could even think about making a move. The last thing she’d want was a strange dude drooling on her in the middle of nowhere.
“We need a plan.” Talking out loud would distract him from how her red hair was falling out of her clippy thing in a way that was totally messy but looked great. “First, we need to know where we are, and then where we’re supposed to be.”
“There’s a course, right?” Romy asked. “A bunch of checkpoints we’re supposed to follow.”
“Yeah. So we should find the path.”
She looked over her shoulder doubtfully. “I suppose we could try to climb the hill?”
“The one you fell from? No way. Too steep. And slippery.”
“Okay, no hill. Can’t we just… walk in a straight line till we hit a road or something?”
He shook his head, though he was impressed. She was clearly comfortable being outdoors. “This place is set up as a gigantic escape room, and the whole perimeter is secure. Did you see the fence driving in? You can’t come in and out except through the gates. They want people to pay.”
“Well. Let’s walk the same direction those wolfmen did. They work here, so they must have been going to find more guests, or to some employee hut.”
Tanner nodded. “Sounds good. Let’s go.”
Romy led, which he liked. With his coat on, her figure was now mostly hidden, but he could still see her legs from the thigh down, and it was a nice view. Luckily, they were on a pretty level track between two steep hills and walking was easy, because damn he was distracted.
“By the way,” he asked, “if I did vote the wrong way, what would you have done?”
“Continued solo, obviously.”
“Alone in the haunted woods?”
“I choose the bear, you know?”
He couldn’t argue with that. They kept walking.
Tanner heard shrieks and laughter in the distance, and weirdly, the pounding bass of club music even further off.
It was like an amusement park, except in the middle of nowhere, and he wasn’t very amused.
He’d gotten stuck in a crowd shortly after entering, then forced through a dim and confusing area that messed with his sense of direction.
He must have wandered the wrong way when he got separated from the guys, but how could this place be so big that he and Romy were virtually alone in this part of Hellgate Hollow? He’d seen the mob of people out front.
“Why did you leave the army?” Romy asked suddenly. “Did you just finish your tour and that’s it?”
He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “I have a medical condition where my blood can clot more than it should.”
“Thrombosis,” she said.
He was surprised she knew the term. “Yeah. It turns out that if you’re on a battlefield, the army doesn’t want you to be suddenly having a pulmonary embolism, because that interferes with, you know, following orders.
So I got a medical discharge, a pat on the back from my CO, and now I’m on this anticoagulant medication that I have to take for the rest of my life. ”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like you would’ve stayed in the army if you could.”
“It was my home. Not pretending it was perfect, but there’s a structure, there’s people who understand you. And yeah, it can be dangerous. But to me, it’s a fair trade. Not that it matters now. Now I’m just a civilian like everybody else.”
“No, you’re a veteran, and that’s different.” Romy looked at him over her shoulder and her expression was surprisingly sharp in the dim light. “Plus you probably know stuff that a lot of other people don’t know, like… how to defuse a bomb, how to fight off zombies.”
He smiled. “Fighting off monsters wasn’t actually included in basic training.”
“Oh, no? That must’ve been some advanced training. Because when those weird wolf dudes were walking by earlier, you seemed to know exactly what to do.”
“Well, I suppose in some way, monsters are just like other enemies. Plan A is to not get seen. Plan B just to fight them off. But the best fight is one you don’t have to actually fight.”
He didn’t add that he did have some experience fighting monsters.
It just didn’t happen while he was serving.
Regular people weren’t ready to learn about all the bad stuff hiding in the shadows.
Romy seemed smart and sensible, and if he started talking about ghosts and ghouls, she would run away from him as fast as she could.
As he was floundering for a safe topic, she moved ahead a few steps, her attention caught. “Hey, there’s some kind of building up there. Maybe it’s got a landline.”
They approached the little structure. The spooky decor hinted that it was meant for the guests, not the staff.
They went in. Dim light flickered, in the way that special effects lighting did.
Then the door slammed shut behind them.
Tanner turned to open it, but it was locked. “We’re stuck in here,” he said, angry at himself for not securing the door before entering.
“Welcome, strangers!” a metallic voice with a bad Transylvanian accent boomed out. Velcome. “Or should it be unwelcome? If you wish to leave, you must earn the key. Or feel free to stay. I’ll be returning soon, and I do enjoy a midnight snack!”
Romy grimaced as the voice faded. “Ugh. I hate scary things.”
“Was that scary? It was like cartoon Dracula.”
“It was trying to be scary. That’s bad enough. Okay. It’s an escape room,” she said. She raised her voice. “Hey! If someone’s listening, can you send help to this location? There’s two of us here, but we’re pretty sure we’re in the wrong part of the park! Hello?”
“Who are you yelling at?” Tanner asked.
“Escape rooms always have a watcher. You know, someone who gives clues if the players get stuck. And also to make sure people aren’t misbehaving.”
“Misbehaving?”
“Like, having sex… or whatever.” Romy suddenly blushed. “Look, I worked a lot of service industry jobs while I was in school. People will have sex anywhere.”
“I believe you.” Tanner looked around before he said something really stupid. “No one’s talking back to us, so maybe there’s no handler since this area isn’t meant to be used tonight.”
“Bad luck,” said Romy. “But maybe we can solve whatever the puzzle is and that will help us, somehow. But I can barely see in here.”
The flickering light wasn’t helping at all. But Tanner saw a candle and a box of matches on a table. He lit the candle, and it added a surprising amount of brightness to the room.
“I guess they don’t want us to take the light with us,” Romy said, looking nervous.
“We’ll be fine. Let’s see if anything here can help us get to the exit.”
She began peering around. “Hold the candle up. Oh, there!” She pointed to a table with three objects. “Let’s figure this out. There’s a tooth, a claw, and a skull.”
“Very goth.” Tanner joined her at the table.
He had zero idea what they could mean. He scanned the room.
There was a top hat on a hat rack in one corner.
A big, very goofy-looking fake oil painting of Dracula on the back wall.
Another small table with one chair, set up as if for a single person to dine…
except there was no food, just an empty plate.
He wandered over to the table and sat down.
He picked up the fork. Well, he tried. It was stuck to the napkin, which was stuck to the table.
“It’s all glued down,” he reported.
“Mmmm, then it’s not relevant,” Romy said. “Escape rooms are controlled environments. They don’t want you messing with anything that’s not part of the puzzle.”
Tanner stood up, knocking into the table. The plate slid an inch. He grabbed it, easily lifting it up. “Hey, the plate’s normal.”
“Bring it here.”
He didn’t even think to question it. Romy would make a great drill sergeant.
She took the plate from him and placed it on the table with the other items. “This helps.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah. We’re assembling the parts, then we figure out how it all goes together. Explore the room and see what else is movable.”
He did, and soon found that the top hat came off the rack. Then he tried to open a door, discovered that the door was fake, and the knob came off in his hand. “Er, I broke this.”
“Or you did exactly what you’re supposed to,” Romy said with a smile. “Naturally you’d try the door to escape. But the doorknob is part of the puzzle.”
Nothing else in the room seemed to be movable, so Romy looked at all six objects, frowning. Tanner wasn’t sure how he could help.
While she pondered, he studied the Dracula portrait.
He had, unfortunately, some experience with vampires, and they were nothing like the urbane, aristocratic character.
They were predators. His whole extended family had worked to fight them—and many other nasty things in the world—for generations.
Tanner learned all about the dark truth of monsters, but his recent diagnosis meant that he’d be destined to stay on the sidelines in this eternal battle.
And what good was he there? He couldn’t even figure out a puzzle.
He was on the verge of just trying to break the door down like a human battering ram, but then Romy laughed to herself.
“I think I’ve got this. The tooth goes on the plate, because teeth are for eating things, right?
The claw goes on the door handle, because claws are like hands, they grasp things.
And the skull gets put into the top hat, because you wear a hat on your head.
” She rolled her eyes. “Ugh, escape rooms are so goofy in the end.”
They carefully placed each of the three objects to fit into each receptacle. Romy tapped her fingers nervously. “Come on, there’s got to be some signal…”
They waited.
“I must have done it wrong,” Romy said. “God, I’m such an idiot.”
“You say that a lot.”
“Say what?”
“That you’re an idiot. Or not bright.” He listed every time she’d said it so far.
She blinked at him. “Did I really call myself an idiot five times since we met?”
“Yeah. But then you just figured out a logic puzzle in thirty seconds flat, so the idiot label seems kind of bullshit, pardon my language.”
“You are a Southern gentleman, aren’t you?”
“Southern, yes. Born and bred. Not sure about the gentleman part.”
“Where were you born and bred exactly? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“I do not mind. Savannah.”
“I’ve never been there, but I’d like to go someday. I’m from Chicago. I’ve only lived here a few months.”
“You’d like Savannah,” he said. “It’s very pretty.” Like you.
Just then, they heard a click, and a spotlight shone on the fake oil painting of Dracula. Romy dashed over and started tugging at the frame, which opened like a door. She reached behind it and pulled something out of the space.
“What is it?” Tanner asked.
“It’s a key!” she said, holding it up.
It was indeed a key: the sort of old-fashioned brass key with fancy curlicues on the handle end, tied to a long ribbon.
“It better open the door we came in,” he said.
They couldn’t even find a lock on that door. Then the door Tanner thought was fake opened up inward, offering a tunnel for them to enter.
“So the key isn’t to get us out of this escape room,” Tanner muttered. “What’s it for?”
“I guess we’ll find out later.” Romy put the ribbon over her head. The key ended up resting between her breasts, and he decided he didn’t care what it opened.
“Well, that wasn’t so hard,” she said. “If all the puzzles are like this, we’ll be out in no time.”
“You did all the work. I just held the light.”
“You provided moral support.” Romy gave him a smile that was so effing cute he wanted to, hell, bring her flowers or something. She wasn’t just sexy, she was adorable too, and that was a killer combination for him.
She looked toward the dark opening. “I think I overheard someone talking about this earlier,” she said. “Survive the dark to get a light! We go through this tunnel, and then at the end, the prize is a flashlight, which helps you for the rest of the night.”
He took a breath. “I guess it’s worth it to get some kind of light. I really hate that we had to give up our phones.”
She nodded. “They know we’d all use the flashlights on them.”
Just as she was about to step in, he stopped her. “Listen up. When we get all the way in there, we’re going to pause and close our eyes.”
“Um, why? It’ll be dark.”
“Not completely. We close our eyes, and then when we open them, we’ll be better adjusted to whatever light is there.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t let go of me. No matter what. If we get separated, it will get confusing. Are you afraid of the dark?”
“A little.”
“Me too.” He squeezed her hand. “But we got this.”