by Lucas Flint
This gave both of us a lot of time to think. I wish it didn’t, because I didn’t want to think about our odds now. Stuck down in this seemingly endless maze, full of monsters that liked to eat human flesh, with a crazed ex-superhero who nearly killed us and would probably try to kill us again sometime soon, missing one of our own already, no communication to the outside world … it all contributed to feeling like a rat in a cage.
“I don’t get it,” said Triplet aloud, speaking for the first time in several minutes.
Snapped out of my thoughts, I looked at Triplet and said, “Don’t get what?”
“This maze,” said Triplet, gesturing at the tunnel in which we walked. “It’s huge. It must have taken years to build. Yet when I researched the Longworth Family Mansion before coming here, I didn’t find any mention of a maze built underneath it.”
I frowned. “It is weird, but aren’t the Longworths really rich? Rich people usually waste their money on stuff like this.”
“The Longworths are wealthy, true, but their wealth has diminished greatly over the last several decades,” said Triplet. “Phaser was especially bad about wasting their wealth in his first life. It’s estimated that Phaser spent more than half of the family fortune on getting equipment for his various crimes.”
“His brother didn’t try to stop him?” I said in disbelief as we turned a corner. “If my brother tried to waste our resources like that—”
“Phaser is the older of the two, so the wealth was passed on to him when Longworth Senior died,” said Triplet. “Samuel didn’t get any say in how the money was spent until Phaser died and what was left of the fortune was passed on to him. That was still a ridiculous sum of money, but it surely couldn’t have been enough to build something like this, not without completely bankrupting Longworth and rendering him homeless.”
“Do you think someone else built this place, then?” I said, glancing at the ceiling. “But who? And why?”
“I can’t say,” said Triplet. “Ever since I got here, I’ve had a bad feeling about it. In my time, I’ve learned to trust my gut whenever it warns me about something. And this place has set off all kinds of alarms in my body ever since I first stepped foot in here, and it wasn’t because of the cyborgs, either.”
I gulped. “You don’t think it’s haunted, do you?”
“Nope,” said Triplet, shaking his head. “It’s more than that. I feel like we’ve walked into something a lot bigger than either of us realize. And I don’t like it.”
“Same here,” I said. “I just want to get out of here and go home. This sucks.”
“Only way to do that is if we keep going forward,” Triplet replied. “And—hey, do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I said.
“Water flowing somewhere,” said Triplet. He came to a stop and held up a finger. “Listen.”
I stopped and listened. I immediately heard what Triplet did: Water flowing somewhere nearby. It sounded almost like a river and it also sounded very close. In fact, it sounded so close that I wondered how I had missed it. I guess I had just been so caught up in our conversation that the sound hadn’t even registered in my ears.
“Is that a river?” I said, looking at Triplet in confusion. “Down here?”
“Maybe,” said Triplet. He drew his gun from his overcoat and held it before him. “Don’t let your guard down. River or no, I have a feeling we’re going to run into yet another dangerous situation. Maybe another cyborg beast.”
I nodded and prepared my electricity, my hands glowing with red light as electricity flowed through my body. The two of us continued to advance, but much more slowly now, keeping our eyes and ears open for any potential traps or ambushes. We did not run into anything out of the ordinary, however, until we emerged out of the tunnel and into a much larger chamber than I expected to see.
The chamber into which we had emerged was huge. Shaped like a dome, the ceiling soared over us, with bright lights on the walls allowing us to see the source of the flowing water.
It wasn’t merely a river, but an outright waterfall. Gallons and gallons of water poured down the waterfall endlessly, splashing into a pool below, which eventually turned into an artificial river of some sort. The river snaked across the bottom of the chamber into three separate branches that went down other tunnels, tunnels too dark and long for me to follow. There were no people or animals here from what I could see, although I did see what looked like an observation tower near the top of the waterfall. The chamber was also quite cold in comparison to the rest of the maze and the floor, walls, and ceiling were damp with water.
“Whoa,” I said, staring up at the waterfall with my mouth hanging open. “Is that an actual waterfall? Down here?”
“Looks like it,” said Triplet. “This was definitely not mentioned in any of the articles I read about this place.”
I followed the movement of the river, looking up and down it as I tried to figure out where the water went and what it was all for. “This place must be much bigger than I thought. But why would Longworth need a waterfall, of all things?”
“Perhaps it’s hydroelectric,” said Triplet. “Could be providing his mansion with power.”
“What kind of mansion needs a hydroelectric dam to power it?” I said, looking at Triplet in bewilderment. “It’s a big mansion, I will admit, but even big mansions don’t require this kind of power to stay active.”
“Then it is probably powering something else,” said Triplet. His eyes narrowed. “Something even bigger than the mansion, perhaps the maze itself.”
It boggled my mind to think that Longworth had apparently had a gigantic underground hydroelectric dam—complete with waterfall—to power the maze. It made me think that Triplet was right and this place hadn’t actually been built by Longworth, but that did not answer the question of who had built it and why. It just made the mystery that much more puzzling and, in a way, frightening, although I could not explain what was so scary about all of this.
I looked over the platform we stood on. I estimated we were about a hundred feet above the ground, while the waterfall was probably twice that. We were far enough away from the waterfall that we didn’t have to worry about getting sprayed with water, but close enough that the platform was damp and our clothes were becoming damp as well. A set of half-rusted stairs led off the side down to the lower level and a long metal bridge spanned the river not too far away from us.
“Let’s head down,” said Triplet, turning to face the stairs. “Looks like the tunnel continues on the other side of this chamber. Hopefully, it goes up, rather than down.”
Before Triplet could take a step forward, I grabbed his arm and said, “Wait a sec.”
Triplet looked over his shoulder at me with a questioning gaze. “What?”
“I don’t like this situation,” I said. “It feels too easy. I feel like Longworth or Phaser set a trap for us and they’re just waiting for us to walk into it.”
Triplet frowned and looked out over the chamber. “Possibly, but I don’t see anything.”
“Let me fly out real quick and check it out first,” I suggested. “I’m stronger and faster than you, so if it turns out to be a trap, I’m more likely to survive it. Once I determine that it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”
I could tell Triplet didn’t like the idea of having to wait, but he finally nodded and said, “All right. But be quick. I don’t want us separated for very long.”
I nodded and flew into the air over his head. I crossed the length of the chamber easily and then did a circuit around the ceiling. This brought me close to the observation tower at the top of the waterfall, but as I passed by it, I did not see anything within. No lights, no movement, no sign that this tower had been used at all recently. And by ‘recently’ I meant that in the last decade. It was eerie.
Still, it was better than being full of enemies just waiting to take us down. I then landed on the bridge, testing its stability to make sure it wasn’t going to collapse undernea
th my feet abruptly. It creaked slightly under my weight but otherwise held.
I looked up at Triplet and waved at him, shouting, “It’s safe to come down now!”
I saw Triplet nod. He was about to make his way down when he froze suddenly and began pointing at the river frantically. I could see his mouth moving, but the roar of the waterfall combined with the distance made it impossible to hear what he was saying.
That was when a gigantic tentacle burst out of the water, wrapped around my waist, and lifted me off the bridge with crushing strength.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The massive tentacle wrapped around my chest, doing its best to squeeze the life out of me. I gasped for air as the tentacle tightened its grip on me, doing everything in its power to crush me to death. Putrid slime rubbed off the tentacle onto my costume, filling my nostrils with something that smelled like sewer water and dead fish.
Although taken by surprise, I nonetheless activated my super strength and, with a shrug of my shoulders, broke free of the tentacle. The tentacle immediately went back into the water, but then another tentacle shot up into the air toward me like a cobra. I flew backward out of its range, however, and looked down at the water to see just what the heck was trying to kill me.
I expected to see a giant squid rising out of the ocean, but instead I saw what looked like a gigantic metal shell breaking the surface of the flowing water. A massive turtle head poked out of the water, its dull eyes glaring up at me with what looked like frustration and annoyance. Where a turtle’s legs normally would have been instead were four identical tentacles, each one covered in suckers that looked very uncomfortable to the touch.
“Holy cow,” I said. “Is that supposed to be some kind of combination between a turtle and a squid?”
The monstrosity of science did not, of course, respond. Instead, it lashed out at me with its tentacles again, which I easily dodged. The turtle-squid creature let out a deep growl, seemingly out of frustration at the fact that I was smart enough to stay outside of its reach.
“Okay, you’re freaky,” I said as I observed the monster carefully, “but not very smart. Being in the water would be a huge advantage … if I couldn’t shoot lightning bolts.”
I fired a red lightning bolt into the water, expecting to fry the turtle-squid or at least hurt it so much that it decided to run away.
Abruptly, the turtle-squid pulled its tentacles and head back into its metallic shell and disappeared beneath the water. When my lightning bolt struck the water, it created a small explosion that sent water flying into the air and caused red electricity to run up and down the length of the river in a light show that would have made a rock band jealous.
When the lightning ceased running along the water, the river returned to normal, but I didn’t see the turtle-squid anywhere.
I cracked a grin. “Didn’t expect me to take the easy route, now did you?”
But my grin fell off my face like a dropped bucket when the turtle-squid’s metallic shell reemerged from the water, completely unharmed by the electricity. In fact, it looked better than ever, as if my attack hadn’t happened at all.
“What the heck?” I said. I lowered myself closer to it, unsure if the monster was dead or not. “How did it survive that? Its shell can’t be that tough, can—”
A tentacle suddenly shot out of the shell and wrapped around me. Before I could react, the tentacle pulled me directly into the water and under the surface.
I barely had time to catch a breath before I hit the surface of the water and disappeared underneath. In contrast to the surface, the water was incredibly dark. I could barely see anything, but that didn’t matter when I was struggling to find air to breathe.
But then the tentacle slammed me down against the floor of the river and I gasped. I quickly closed my mouth, but that brief gasp had already caused me to lose a good deal of my air. The tentacle continued to bash me against the floor again and again, clearly trying to smash me to death. And it was starting to work because I had run out of air and found my lungs filling with the disgusting river water, at least when I wasn’t being smashed against the floor over and over again.
My survival instincts kicked in. I activated my super speed, flight, and super strength all at once and immediately shot upward. The tentacle, to my surprise, held on tight, making me think for a moment that even my powers wouldn’t save me, but then I suddenly broke through and went flying up through the water faster than a speeding bullet.
In the next instant, I broke through the surface of the water and into the air. The tentacle tried to hold me down, but I broke its grip with another shrug, but then another tentacle came out of nowhere and wrapped around me. It tightened around me considerably, which I normally would have been able to break, but I was so exhausted from escaping the last tentacle that I had no strength left to break free of this one.
All of a sudden, gunshots rang throughout the chamber and the tentacle let me go. Gasping for air, I looked down at the bridge and saw Triplet standing on the bridge. But he wasn’t alone. His Thirds stood on either side of him, shooting their guns at the turtle-squid’s tentacles, making surprisingly good hits despite how small they were in comparison to the tentacles.
Despite their size, they must have annoyed the turtle-squid, because its tentacles rushed down toward them. Just one tentacle was big enough to crush all three of them into paste and they weren’t fast enough to dodge, so I activated my super speed and shot down through the air toward them, racing with the tentacle to see who would reach Triplet first.
As it turned out, I was the faster of the two. I slammed into one of Triplet’s Thirds, knocking it into Triplet and then his other Third, the three becoming one again, allowing me to pick up Triplet and shoot up into the air toward the ceiling. I felt the tentacle try to catch me, but I soon flew outside its reach and stopped near the ceiling. I turned around to see the turtle-squid’s tentacles retract back into its shell and the turtle-squid itself disappear beneath the water, no doubt preparing itself for another attack from me.
“Trip, what were you doing?” I said, looking at Triplet, who I held in my arms with no problem.
“Saving your life,” Triplet replied. “What does it look like I was doing?”
“Getting yourself killed,” I said in annoyance. “That thing is way too big and powerful for you to take on. Heck, even I’m having trouble with it and I’m much stronger than you.”
“I’ve faced far worse than that and survived,” Triplet said. “But thanks for saving me anyway, although it doesn’t solve how we’re going to beat this thing.”
I looked down at the rushing river below. The turtle-squid was nowhere to be seen, but I knew it was just waiting for the right time to strike.
“Maybe I should just fly us over to the other side of the chamber,” I said, nodding at the exit on the other side. “The turtle-squid’s tentacles have a limited reach.”
“What makes you think that thing will even let us leave?” said Triplet. “I could easily see it crawl out of the river to come after us. I’m not sure what purpose Longworth built this thing for, but I imagine it must be some kind of guard dog.”
“But it’s a turtle-squid.”
“Figure of speech.” Triplet sighed. “In any case, I’d feel safer if that thing was dead, so we’re going to have to come up with a way to kill it.”
“Electricity doesn’t work,” I said. “It just retreats into its metal shell, which as far as I can tell doesn’t conduct electricity. I guess I could try lifting it out of the water and throwing it away, but I’m not sure that would work, either.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Triplet. “The only reason your electricity doesn’t work is because it retreats into its shell, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“What if we could distract it long enough for you to electrocute it?” said Triplet. “Would that work?”
“I guess so,” I said slowly, “but it seems kind of risky.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Triplet. “I’ll distract it. You just focus on killing it once you see an opportunity.”
I still didn’t like the idea, but Triplet was right that this thing needed to die. I had a feeling that the only reason it hadn’t left the river yet was because it didn’t have a need to. If we tried to leave, that would definitely give it reason to come after us. Better to deal with it now than later.
Lowering to the floor, I put Triplet down and then shot up into the air. As soon as I passed over the river, the turtle-squid emerged again and all four of its tentacles came flying at me. I managed to avoid getting hit by them, but then I heard gunshots and realized that Triplet was already attempting to distract them.
And it was working. The combined gunshots from him and his Thirds were causing the tentacles of the turtle-squid to go away from me and focus on him. Most of Triplet’s shots missed, but it apparently didn’t matter, because enough hit to make the turtle-squid consider him the bigger threat, apparently.
That worked for me. I flew up into the air and aimed at the water. One good shot and—
“Bolt!” Triplet shouted. “Help!”
I whirled around just in time to see Triplet—running away from the tentacles by himself now, with his Thirds nowhere to be seen—crossing the bridge spanning the river. He was running and gunning, occasionally shooting his gun over his shoulder at the three chasing tentacles.
Wait. Three chasing tentacles? Where was the fourth?
That was when I noticed the fourth tentacle come falling down toward Triplet. Triplet saw it coming, too, and jumped forward. He managed to jump out of its reach, but he still landed on the bridge.
In the next instant, the tentacle crashed and through the bridge, breaking the bridge cleanly in two and sending Triplet falling into the raging river below with a terrified look on his face.
