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I snickered behind my hand. “Well, that was a glorious fail. You just had to do the accent.”
“I panicked!”
“His eyes are actually dead right now.” I agreed. “No life exists, I wonder if this is what humans look like before they turn in to zombies.”
“You have thirty minutes.” Dustin glared at both of us like we were petulant children. “To make it out alive, imagine…” Oh there go the cue cards onto the concrete steps, best pick this up for the next crowd, sir. “…lasting twelve years, TWELVE, but there is no escape, I tell you, there is no escape!”
He turned and walked away, head hung at a severely depressing angle.
“Imagine though”—I felt the need to add—“not just being an employee, but Max’s cousin.”
Bri let out a low whistle. “Whatever he did in a past life, it must have been bad, probably killed royalty or something.”
“Agreed. I’m thinking a king, maybe even an emperor.”
The timer above the room suddenly started sending us sprinting up the stairs, but what was beyond those doors was unlike anything I could have ever possibly prepared for.
Because every single character within the escape room—every dummy, every picture—was haunted.
Haunted. Office.
The only thing I hated more than puzzles?
Zombies.
Chapter Six
Bri
Oh shit, he hated zombies, he hated Halloween—when he told me that he refused to celebrate it I thought he’d been kidding but no… he was literally the grinch of Halloween, one time I bought candy corn and he screamed. SCREAMED because it reminded him of a childhood trauma, apparently there was a candy corn pit he got stuck, he claims he had to eat his way out—I’m sure it was a fabrication but still.
He wasn’t a fan.
He had a terrifyingly traumatic story for every October 31st.
Trapped in a candy corn pit was nothing close to the year after when he was forced to play Capitan Hook in the Halloween play and his hook got caught on the rope, sending him backward from the ship into the crowd while his pants fell down. He’d been wearing loose boxers with cats on them.
A gift from his grandma, he claims it was laundry day, I still think he had an affinity for calicos.
Ace jumped next to me, nearly knocking me careening into a cement wall. “Sorry, I thought I saw another zombie.”
“They’re everywhere, but the stage makeup has them blending in really well with the walls.”
Each wall down the giant hallway was a different color—pink, green, blue—and next to each wall was a gloriously dressed zombie walking and stumbling against said wall with the same color of paint dripping down the front of their faces, and down their chins onto the ground like blood… except when it hit the ground it turned red.
“N-neat trick.” Ace clapped twice, on the third attempt he missed his hands altogether.
I grabbed them. “Stop, you’re embarrassing yourself, not to mention me.”
“They’re not real.” He scoffed in fake bravado as we kept walking down the hall to the room at the end that said.
“Office Hell.”
I tilted my head. “Kind of makes you wonder if they based this off of Dustin’s life, right?”
Ace snorted. “His life is hell, he’s related to Max. I’m sure the office is what some would call heaven, the only place he has his own small little corner office and a sad little coffee machine with bright buttons.”
“He’s a sucker for those coffee machines.”
