Don't Read After Dark: Keep the lights on while reading these! (A McCray Horror Collection) by Carolyn McCray

enough for the entire dungeon to hear. “Has anyone ever escaped?”
    The dungeon answered with a unanimous “no.”
    Evie felt slightly uncomfortable discussing the topic with all the men focusing on her, but this was too important to give up on. She needed to get out of here, like now.
    “You’re trying to tell me that no one has ever gotten past that second door?”
    Papa shook his head. “Not in my short time.”
    “Oh,” Door said. “People have gotten out…”
    Evie waited for him to finish, but Andrew was the one to speak next, in his excited, just-past-teen voice. “Yeah, yeah. Like Lumbar Jack and Boy Toy. They made it out!”
    “Then their fucking heads came rolling back in…” the rapist made the action of throwing a bowling ball.
    Evie never would have believed it before. But after that free-for-all, with Clyde splayed open like a pig and Esau crumpled in the corner, Evie would believe just about anything could occur in this dungeon.
    “But there’s got to be a way,” she insisted. Not because she believed it, but because she had to believe it.
    “Oh,” Door said. ”Remember the Corsica brothers?”
    Andrew bobbed his head up and down. “They had that whole tag team wrestling angle going for them!”
    Back pointed up to the trap door above his head. “If it wasn’t for their fucking double twist backwards flip, we never would have figured out there were swinging blades inside those trap doors.”
    “Ugh,” Andrew said. “Then Igor missed a few body parts up there.”
    Door pinched his nose. “It stunk for weeks.”
    “But—” Evie tried to interrupt the excuses not to try. However, Back overrode her.
    “And don’t even think about trying to take Igor down.”
    “He’s strapped with enough C-4 to blow us all into our next reincarnation,” Andrew added, quite unnecessarily.
    Door agreed. “He’s got a dead man’s switch in his shoe.”
    Back chimed in, “If the guy comes off his feet, it is ‘boom.’”
    Evie frowned. Since Igor was still alive, clearly he had never gone “boom.”
    “And how would you know that?” Evie asked, trying to find some chink in the dungeon’s impenetrable defenses.
    Andrew shrugged. “It was before my time.”
    “And mine,” Door stated.
    All the men looked to Back, who was busy cleaning his own wounds. “What?” he asked, but then settled in to tell the story. “A few weeks after ‘my-shit-doesn’t-stink’ got here, Darion got the bright idea to cover his lock with some stale oatmeal before the mechanism clicked closed.”
    The rapist drifted off as he dabbed around his calf.
    “And?” Evie promoted.
    “It worked. Then he jumped Igor the next time he came in to feed us. Then found, ‘wow-that-is-a-lot-of-explosives.’ Darion followed the wiring down to the shoe, and the rest is history.”
    Evie looked down to Darion. So he had been brave and wanting to get out of here at one point. Darion smiled and pointed to a small nick on his neck.
    “You missed one.”
    Evie carefully cleaned it.
    “Oh!” Andrew announced, with cupcake crumbles flying. “Remember the S&M Master?”
    Door snorted. “Yeah, he thought he had all the moves. Thought that he could ‘take’ the pain from the collar and ‘use’ it. Whatever .”
    “So,” Andrew continued. “Mr. Superior mimics Darion’s move, down to the stale oatmeal, but ties Igor’s foot to the bottom of a bar, keeping it flat while he went to figure out the combo to the outer door. Which he got through.”
    ‘Then, though, it was fucking BBQ central,” Back finished.
    “His collar fried,” Door said. “But fried not only his neck, but his brain, man.”
    Andrew pantomimed the action as he spoke. “He was flopping around, seizing for ten minutes before he died.”
    “Yeah,” Back said with a chuckle. “That was a fucking great day, no doubt.”
    “Then what?” Evie asked.
    “Then fucking what? What?”
    Evie was kind of over Back’s undiluted aggression. “What happened