Testing Grounds (On Dangerous Grounds Book 1)

by G. Allen Wilbanks

  Not only was the violet door not the end of the barriers they faced, but neither was the next rainbow cycle. Or the next. The group continued their task of moving door after door for what felt like another half hour. The stack of doors growing behind them already filled the back hallway, and now it almost crossed the entire room behind them. The excavated exit hallway stretched to almost forty feet with no sign of ending anytime soon.

  The stack of doors behind them approached the exit hallway and it would soon block the opening, effectively sealing them in. The entrance hall lined up precisely with the exit, so they could keep going, continuing to stack the doors behind them. Leon suspected there was no coincidence to that fortunate orientation. Two, maybe three more doors, Leon estimated, and they would be enclosed in the newly formed tunnel.

  Shoo called another halt to address the situation that they were about to create for themselves.

  The discussion was brief. Once everyone understood the circumstances, they all agreed the best choice was to forge ahead. To escape this hallway, they must continue to remove the doors in front of them, and those doors needed to go somewhere. Annie expressed the concern that when they closed the hallway at both ends, they might shut off their source of air in the confined space. Even that did little to deter the group. Options were limited: go forward or go back. Going back appealed to none of them. Besides, this hallway demonstrated the same generic illumination they had found in the others, and if light could get in from no apparent source, then they could hope the same rules applied to oxygen. Or they could pray they reached the end of this interminable series of doors before the air ran out.

  Sofia and Annie moved the next two doors, a green one and a blue one. Colored barricades now sealed the hallway at both ends. Leon did not like the eerie feeling of being trapped in such a narrow passage, but he forced himself to stay calm by reminding himself the doors moved in both directions. They could always get back to the previous room if they needed to temporarily reverse course. Hiss took down the next violet door and the rest of the group hugged the walls as the lavender pieces skittered past their feet to the opposite end of the tunnel. Shoo repeated the process with the red door that appeared behind it.

  Everyone did their part and helped as they moved through another color cycle and returned to yet another violet door. Hiss, as it was again his turn, collapsed the violet barrier and hurried to place the centerpiece at the other end of the hallway. In his rush, he failed to notice what the removal of the lavender door revealed.

  The others did not.

  A white door with a gold-colored metal handle on the left side stood before them. Holding his breath, as though afraid any sudden movement or sound might frighten the inanimate object away, Leon tentatively reached for the handle. It turned without resistance and the door swung outward as Hiss returned and rejoined the group. The alien squeezed forward, automatically taking the lead. The others made room for him to pass.

  Hiss peered through the opening, cocking his head to one side to focus two glittering compound eyes on the newly revealed scene.

  “Ah,” he said. “Very good.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Hiss stepped through the doorway and the others crept cautiously past the threshold behind him. Another dining hall, complete with massive table, chairs, platters of food and pitchers of drink greeted the travelers. Each chair stood beside a place setting of clean white dishes, crystal goblets, and polished silverware. The room appeared identical to the last dining hall they visited, and Leon would have believed they had circled back to the original room except for three distinct features.

  First, all the food and drink on the table had been replenished. Not a hint of the mess they left behind during the first meal remained in evidence. Every tray, plate, and goblet gleamed, pristine and untouched. Second, to Leon’s great relief, Michael’s body was not in the room. His eyes traveled unbidden to the floor where the corpse would have been if this was indeed the same location. He did not see any bloodstains or lingering remains of carnage; only empty floor met his gaze.

  Third, and most disturbing, a double row of gleaming, metal swords hung point down from the ceiling. Two parallel lines of five blades dangled from clear filaments the width of a single thread, each precariously suspended above one of the ten chairs arranged around the table. The nature of the trap in this room seemed terribly apparent to the members of the group as they peered up at the precisely arranged weapons, and this straightforward threat greatly worried Leon. If he had learned anything from this hellscape, it was to never take the obvious for granted.

  Since the table in front of them held a wide assortment of new food, Leon no longer needed to worry about depleting the gathered supplies in his backpack. He opened his pack and removed one of the three blue fruits remaining inside. With a glance toward the others and a brief warning to stay back, he shuffled toward the table and lobbed the oblong fruit onto the chair closest to him.

  The fruit had no sooner touched the seat of the chair when the sword above flashed down. It fell faster than gravity alone should have been able to accomplish. The point speared through the fruit, continuing through the wooden chair, and piercing several inches into the stone floor beneath. The blade rang, a high keening tone that echoed through the room for several seconds before fading away. Other than the speed of the attack, the sword had behaved more or less exactly as Leon had expected. That continued to worry him. He felt as if he was still missing something.

  Leon felt a tug on his backpack and turned to find Annie reaching a hand inside to recover another item to throw.

  “So, we don’t sit in the chairs?” she asked with a wink.

  “Apparently not,” Leon agreed.

  Annie pulled out another fruit and lobbed it at the next chair in the same row. Her toss was a little off and the projectile struck the back of the chair before bouncing away onto the floor. The sword overhead fell. Rather than drop straight through the chair as the previous blade had done, this one angled its decent to pursue the errant fruit, driving through its pitted heart and pinning it to the floor.

  “That’s not proper,” said Malcolm, stating the obvious.

  Leon silently agreed with the assessment. He reached again into his pack. This time he retrieved one of the pieces of hard cheese. He threw it toward the third chair with enough force to send it careening as far across the room as possible. The cheese struck the intended chair and bounced along under its own forward momentum, causing it to strike a glancing blow on the fifth chair before falling to the floor and tumbling erratically.

  Two swords fell, the third in line and the fifth, streaking the length of the room to bury their points into the hard, stone floor, but only after each had passed directly through the hapless block of cheese.

  “We don’t touch the chairs,” Annie amended.

  For the next few minutes, Annie and Leon threw various pieces of food from his bag at the chairs surrounding the table. The remaining six swords were all deployed in turn. One miscalculation on Leon’s part caused a large heel of bread to carom off a chair, ricochet upward and land on top of the central dining table. This led to a rather messy display as the last remaining sword bisected its intended target before continuing through a pile of cooked yellow vegetables, a metal tray, and the table itself. Only the broad metal crossguard striking the sturdy wood of the table prevented the blade from reaching the floor as all its companions had done before it.

  “Is it safe?” asked Sofia when the clatter of disrupted trays and food had died down.

  Leon shrugged, uncertain. He threw a few more items at the assembled chairs, then lofted a piece a cheese over the table toward the far wall for good measure. Other than the thrown food, nothing else in the room moved.

  “I guess we tripped all of the traps,” Leon mused. “I don’t recommend sitting down on those chairs, though. They’re probably safe now, but why risk it? Hiss? Do you think the food is safe to eat?”

  “The food, always before, safe to ea
t. The danger, from surrounding traps, comes.”

  No one in the group was particularly hungry; it had not been that long since their last meal. However, as they could not be certain when the next opportunity to eat or drink might come along, they each helped themselves to at least a few bites and sips of water. Leon also restocked his backpack with several easily portable items. The repast did not last long. The exit door appeared soon after the final sword deployed, so there was no delay waiting for a way out, and no one suggested sleep or rest this time as the group was eager to keep going.

  The humans finished eating first. While Shoo and Hiss consumed a few last bites of something brown and wriggling, and Leon packed items into his bag, Malcolm wandered over to one of the swords standing upright in the stone floor.

  “I don’t think you should mess with those,” Sofia warned him.

  “I’ll bet you don’t,” Malcolm jeered.

  He tapped a finger on the bottom of the pommel and flinched back. Nothing happened. Emboldened by the lack of reaction, he placed a hand around the grip. After another pause to gauge the sword’s reaction to being touched, he grasped the hilt with his other hand and pulled. The blade remained firmly embedded in the floor, refusing to budge under Malcolm’s attempts to work it free. Giving up on one weapon, Malcolm moved to another. Then a third.

  All ten swords remained stuck fast. Even the last blade trapped in the table did not move so much as an inch when Malcolm tried to pull it loose.

  “Tough break,” muttered Leon with no real sympathy for the other man’s plight.

  Malcolm glared at him and spat on the floor, dismissively.

  “Are we ready to go?” asked Sofia. “Hiss? Shoo? Do you need a few more minutes?”

  When both aliens advised they were finished dining and ready to move on, Sofia grasped the handle of the exit and attempted to pull it open. The latch did not disengage, and the door remained closed.

  “Um, there’s a problem,” she commented, rattling the handle uselessly up and down.

  Hiss stepped forward, gave the door a cursory look and reached into a pocket of his vest. “No problem, there is,” he assured the others. He removed his ring of keys and, a moment later, cleared the obstruction.

  The next hallway they found matched all the other intermediate passageways they had thus far used, but this one did not terminate in a single door as the others had. This hall split into two distinct directions, forked at a forty-five-degree angle to the left and right. The left passage stretched more than twice the width of the path to the right. The right passage, however, towered several feet taller than its companion to the left. Each of the hallways extended several dozen paces in a straight line before veering out of sight back toward some central point between them. Leon guessed the two paths probably rejoined each other in another room or else merged into a single hallway somewhere further along.

  “Let me guess,” suggested Annie. “One path is safe and the other one kills us. We have to pick which one to take.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Leon, pointing upward.

  “The answer, that simple, is not,” agreed Hiss.

  Above each of the two hallways was a sign. Leon saw no discernable writing on either of them, but each had been marked with roughly drawn, black figures on a white background.

  The image over the right tunnel depicted two people; from the shape of the outlines, the figures represented members of the Many. One of the figures was much larger than the other. Leon guessed the size discrepancy represented one male and one female. The female image stood upright beside the male, but the male figure appeared to be crawling along the ground, head lowered with his body braced on his knees and larger hands.

  The picture mounted above the left tunnel consisted of four silhouettes, all mostly equal in size and drawn to appear more obviously human than the images on the right. The four humans stood in a row abreast of one another with their images linked into a single chain, their arms bent and firmly entwined at the elbows.

  “Right and wrong path, there is not,” suggested Hiss. “But Many path, and human path, there is.”

  Sofia looked down one tunnel, then the other. “Is it that simple? You and Shoo go to the right and we go to the left? Why don’t I believe it’s going to be that easy?”

  “Because you’re smart enough to know better,” Leon told her. “Nothing we’ve come up against has been completely straightforward. There’s always some kind of twist, or at least a puzzle to figure out. And by puzzle, I don’t mean boys to the left and girls to the right. I think there’s more to this challenge than we’ve figured out.”

  Hiss gestured his agreement with Leon’s assessment. “The picture, the clue, is. Not only who, goes, but also how, goes. The Many, to the right, go. Shoo, walks. Hiss, crawls.”

  “Is that it?” asked Leon. “Do you think that’s everything? I mean, what if we missed a clue somewhere?”

  Hiss glanced at the hallways around them, then pointed out the bare walls to the others. “There, what more to miss, is? There, only one clue, is. There, only one conclusion, is. I, correct, am. I think.”

  “Okay. I see your point, and I agree I can’t find anything else that might hint at how to proceed from here. I still don’t like it, but I guess I haven’t really liked any of this so far. Well, good luck.”

  “Luck, to you, also,” Hiss replied.

  Hiss turned to Shoo and gestured a quick query, asking her if she was ready to proceed. Shoo pointed into the tunnel indicating that Hiss should lead the way. The large male alien glanced up at the sign above the passageway, then looked back to Shoo while touching his small hands to his chin.

  “We, together only, go,” he explained. “We, separated, disaster create.”

  Shoo did not like Hiss’ response to her direction. The frantic movements of her small hands and the periodic clicking of her mandibles displayed her displeasure clearly to the entire group. Despite her misgivings, she conceded that Hiss’ caution was justified, and she turned to face the tunnel, ready to enter alongside her companion. Hiss lowered himself to his hands and knees beside her and indicated his own readiness to move forward.

  “Go,” Shoo directed.

  Leon, Sofia, Annie, and Malcolm watched intently as the pair moved forward. Leon’s hands clenched into nervous fists and he caught himself holding his breath. He forced himself to breathe and to relax his hands, but it did nothing to ease his internal tension.

  Shoo and Hiss inched forward, pausing frequently to check their surroundings. Shoo took one cautious step at a time, careful to move slowly enough for Hiss to remain even with her as he crawled along. Their advancement was painfully slow, but Leon knew as difficult as it was to watch such minute progress, it must be doubly hard for Shoo and Hiss to remain calm and not try to rush through this challenge.

  While Hiss kept his attention on maintaining pace with Shoo, the female alien for her part anxiously watched the walls and ceiling for any unforeseen traps. They covered ground steadily, methodically. Each passing moment found them closer to their goal at the end of the passage, and still no unpleasant surprises leapt up to bar their way. At last, the pair reached the bend at the end of the hallway. They turned to peer down the next stretch of the tunnel and Shoo seemed to visibly relax at what she found waiting for them.

  “We, the end, have reached?” Leon heard her ask Hiss.

  “The end,” he agreed.

  Peering towards whatever they had found at the bend in the hall, Hiss rose to his feet. The larger alien turned to face the humans standing in the main corridor. He waved a large hand in acknowledgement.

  A flicker of light momentarily blinded Leon. The flash lit the entire hallway for only fraction of a second before it blinked out of existence, but its effects soon became all too horrifically obvious. Hiss’s head drooped forward as if he were nodding toward Leon, or perhaps had looked down in surprise at something at his feet. His raised arm also dropped, toppling at an odd angle. Leon watc
hed in numb disbelief as Hiss fell to his knees and his head continued to roll downward, separating from the rest of his body. The chitinous skull tumbled like a damaged ball through the hallway in the direction of the waiting humans. The alien’s heavy, armored torso crashed to the floor a moment later.

  A muffled scream erupted behind Leon, but he could not tear his gaze away from the scene in front of him long enough to determine who it had come from. As the humans all stood, stunned motionless at the sudden death of the creature that had been their unwilling guide through this nightmare landscape, Shoo bolted. The lone surviving alien did not wish to stick around long enough to find out if she was going to be the next one decapitated. She dropped to the ground and scrabbled away as quickly as she could manage, disappearing from sight around the far corner of the passage.

  Before Leon could break his paralysis, the corridor in front of him narrowed and closed. In the time it took him to blink twice, he was staring at a solid surface. The sign above the passage had also disappeared, blending seamlessly into the new wall.

  The passage to the left, designed for the humans to walk through, remained open, although after what had happened to Hiss, it was decidedly less inviting to Leon and his companions.

  “What do we do?” asked Sofia.

  Annie turned to face her. The glaze of shock at Hiss’ sudden end still shone in her eyes, but a flare of determination was there as well. “Exactly what we were going to do before that happened. We still have to go through our path. There isn’t another option. Is there?”

  “No,” Sofia agreed, reluctantly. “No other option.”

  Annie pointed at the sign. “We walk in together, all four of us side by side, and we link arms like the sign says, the entire time.”