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♪ Currently playing ♪: Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.

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Bionic horns are a relatively inexpensive procedure here in the Scorch, though prone to infection. All it takes is cutting a bit of skin near the temples and implanting a pair of cheap chips with retractable prongs, around which a shell of outer skin will eventually regrow, scarified to lend the horns an even gnalier visage.

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At the moment, I’m watching a scabber with what looks to be an exceptionally shoddy job – one side shiny with puss, definitely infected – who thinks they’re getting the jump on me.

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They’re not.

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Skulking low to the ground, their grip high on their machete’s hilt, they’ve been tracing a pair of watermarked footprints to one of two only access points left that lead to the haunted tunnels underground. What they’re too stupid to realize is I painted on these footprints myself, and the junk strategically placed around the access point conceals a secret ramp with a very hair-trigger spring trap.

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They won’t realize until it’s too late. Until they’re lowering themselves into the platform, sliding open the cover, and stepping one foot down the sloped slab of pavement. Until their ankle gently tickles a cord to release an avalanche of trash behind them, plugging up the exit and sealing them in indefinitely.

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There are no lights down there, except for one spot where a high grate with several slats allows in some natural sunlight during the daytime. The rest of it is one big labyrinth. Proper labyrinth for a proper minotaur.  

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When the park was still functioning, these tunnels were employees-only, housing various offices and security hubs, break rooms and changing rooms where mascot actors on their breaks would sit around shuffling cards or grabbing a shower. When I first came here I spent weeks exploring its depths (with light, of course, compliments of a seemingly endless supply of glow-in-the dark toy swords). Even though it was the only place that scared me in the entire park, I explored it until it scared me no longer, until I had memorized every inch of its innards. Now I know these corridors like the back of my hand. I even have a number of saferooms where I keep food caches now, hidden so well that nobody who isn’t already looking for them won’t find them.

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The only other access point is a deep chamber where I dump my growing collection of trespassers. At this point it stinks something fierce, even with a series of tarps over it.

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You get used to the stench of the dead, same as you do the living.

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One day, perhaps not too far off, I’ll add this scabber to the pile but not until they’ve run themselves ragged through the darkness for several days first. When they’re too weak to even lift that machete, I’ll pop down and pay them a visit. I’ve left them a single glow sword with a battery that’s nearly depleted. (One shouldn’t lose their sense of humor, even in the middle of the apocalypse.)

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I’m not even looking when I hear the spring trap bolt and hear the subsequent ruckus: a faint scream smothered by an explosion. Cascade of debris.

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If you’re wondering what haunts the haunted tunnels, it’s me.

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I’m the minotaur.

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Two down.

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