The Odds - Jeff Strand Page 0,58

and Ethan felt no guilt over the fact that he really did not want it to be him.

“You’ll screw me over,” said Kenny.

The longer they spent discussing this, the more time Lisa would have to gather her keys. If Kenny wanted to be an idiot, Ethan wasn’t going to play along.

He’d just have to be scary.

“Fine,” he said. “Then get the fuck out of my way.”

Ethan moved quickly toward Kenny. The blades slashed him as he went. He’d either intimidate Kenny into backing out of the corridor, or shove him out and hope that the gashes he received weren’t fatal.

“I’m not kidding,” said Ethan. “You’d better fucking move.”

Kenny looked unsure for a moment, then began to move the other way.

Ethan didn’t slow his pace.

Kenny emerged from the bladed corridor.

Ethan kept going, hoping that Kenny wouldn’t attack him before he cleared the knives. He slashed his arm right where he’d cut it during the battle to save the old woman, then finally got out of the corridor. Kenny stepped away to give him room, possibly because Ethan now looked like a blood-covered deranged madman.

“Should’ve let me get your key,” said Ethan, walking past him into a new corridor.

Okay, he now had an advantage because he had his first key and Kenny didn’t. But he had to find an extra key, so technically they were on even ground right now.

He took a turn, and then another turn, and then realized that he could easily find himself hopelessly lost. He didn’t have breadcrumbs or spray paint, but he did have plenty of leaking blood, so he wiped some blood on the wall before each turn to make sure that he wasn’t going in circles.

“Lisa has found her second key,” The Claw Man announced. “Only one more left before she wins!”

Ethan couldn’t let this distract him. He’d never expected to come in first. He just didn’t want to lose.

In the next corridor, there was a large plaid floor mat, with no room to walk around it. Presumably it covered a pit of some sort, so Ethan wasn’t going to be dumb enough to simply stroll across it. He crouched down and pulled it up to see what it covered.

It covered scorpions. Lots and lots of scorpions.

They spilled off the bottom of the mat onto his legs.

For an instant Ethan thought that they couldn’t be real, but then he realized that they absolutely were. He tossed the mat back onto the ground and frantically brushed the scorpions off his legs.

Before too many of them could climb out of the shallow pit, he backed up a few steps, then did a running jump, clearing the pit, then tumbled forward and crashed to the ground. He quickly got up, hurried around the corner, and almost smacked into the wall. A dead end.

Without hesitation, he ran back the way he came and leapt over the scorpion pit again. It wasn’t an Olympic-level jump, but his legs had just been cut up, and the sudden jolt of pain as he left the ground made his leap less impressive than it otherwise might have been. His feet landed on the edge of the pit, and he fell backwards, scorpions crunching underneath his body as he landed.

He got right the hell up and hurried away from the pit.

It was probably worth losing some valuable seconds to make sure no venomous scorpions were crawling on his body. A few were, so he brushed them off. He could feel the scorpion guts clinging to the back of his shirt, but he didn’t think he’d been stung. He briefly considered replacing the mat so that it would slow down Lisa or Kenny, but decided that he didn’t have time for that.

He kept running through the maze, still wiping his blood on the wall at each decision point. Thus far he was covering all new territory.

At a fork, he started to go left, but then he saw Lisa run past at the end of the path to the right. She’d already found two of her keys, so he wanted to go where she’d been. He took the path to the right.

At the end of this path, the wall was covered with keys. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, in a huge array of colors.

Ethan decided to give himself one opportunity to just try to scan the wall for the blue key. If he couldn’t find it, he’d go with a more methodical approach.

He slowly walked along the corridor, trying to clear his mind and focus only