Damien spent several minutes examining the door. If I hadn’t seen the horrible spike-trap with the giant rats inside earlier, I might have gotten irritated and just pushed my way through or asked what he thought he was doing. Now though? I was more than happy to let him poke and prod that door for as long as he wanted if it meant something like that not happening to us.

After several moments of this he took a step back, waved his hands dramatically…and then stepped forward again to open the door. “Tada!”

I gave him a flat look.

He laughed and stepped through the door.

Emilio and I followed him through a moment later.

The room beyond was dark, lit only by torchlight that spilled through the doorway and the beam of Damien’s Maglite. Great. That light revealed that the room was both empty and spacious. The walls out in the hallway weren’t exactly tight together, almost ten feet apart actually, this room was easily twice that across and deeper still. Sweeping the light over the floor as he went, Damien crossed the room until he came to another door on the far side. This one had one of those archaic iron locks affixed to the handle.

Damien cackled. “Locked door! We’re making progress.”

“By gamer logic maybe,” Emilio said as we came to a stop a few feet back from him.

That only made Damien laugh harder. I guess this whole place was sort of a sick game in its own way. Gamer logic probably made as much sense to rely on as anything else. If so, then Damien was right and this would bring us one step closer to getting out. Or maybe finding my brother.

I pushed the thought aside. I couldn’t let it distract me now. Not with so much at stake. Still, I couldn’t completely make the hope go away. Gamer logic. I needed to think like a gamer. If we were going to lean into that, then we should probably stand off to the side in case some kind of area of effect trap sprang if Damien botched something with the door.

I’d gotten more than a few of my players that way. It was weird thinking about it in real life though. I mean, it was second nature when playing Dungeons and Dragons to watch for that sort of thing. In real life? We’d been standing behind Damien making big fat targets out of ourselves without even thinking about it.

I turned to tell Emilio we should move, only to find myself alone in the room behind Damien.

I spun around, looking every which way. “Emilio?”

Something grabbed me and I was airborne, abruptly hoisted straight up as something sticky latched onto my back and shoulders. My shirt shifted and stretched across me, riding up to expose my lower torso as I rose through the air.

I shouted and thrashed about as I went, up and up and up, all the way to the ceiling, where I found Emilio. He had two strands of gooey stuff holding him, one of which had sealed over the lower half of his face, covering his mouth. No wonder I hadn’t heard him.

We hung there, held aloft by the goo, amidst a forest of upside-down giant fungi. Mushrooms, both the classic cap-shapes and those that looked kind of like clams or fans, covered the ceiling completely. They were huge. Each as big as a person. The goo that was holding us came from the fungus. These mushrooms had excreted it and used it to pull us up, like some kind of slimy fishermen. Fisher fungus?

Damien’s Maglite lit us up from below, giving me a good view of Emilio’s blind, fruitless struggle against the fungi holding him prisoner. He swung his bat around and it thwacked several mushrooms but ultimately didn’t do any good. One lucky swing brought it into contact with the goo that was holding him, and the bat stuck there.

I cursed and made to swing over to him. The bat hadn’t been able to get through the goo, but hopefully the edges of my knives would have better luck. The fall would suck. It would suck harder if Emilio suffocated to death up here. More importantly, if I cut myself free first, who would get Emilio down?

I managed to swing over and began sawing through the goo holding him with my pocket knife. The edge made short work of the goo, succeeding easily where the bat had failed, and Emilio plummeted to the ground. He hit with a hard sound that made me wince and I hoped that I hadn’t just killed him.

A moment later though he reached up and ripped the last vestiges of goo from his face, sucking in a deep breath.

Damien laughed and turned back to keep fiddling with the door.

A nightmare came at me from out of the fungus.

The giant rats had been bad enough to haunt my dreams. I hadn’t considered that the Corridor might have worse than rats and goblins to throw at us. If I had, it wouldn’t have done any good. There’s no way to prepare the mind for some things.

A centipede the size of a python, one of those reticulated monsters they display at the zoo, the kind that you can imagine unhinging their jaws and swallowing a person whole, is not something the human mind can prepare for. No videogame, no picture, no exercise could have readied me for the experience of a many-legged, segmented horror with foot-long mandibles skittering across a ceiling right toward me.

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The front half of the monster-pede lifted away from the ceiling as it came for me, like a snake preparing to strike, its many claw-like legs grasping at the air before it.

Not going to lie, I screamed like a little girl. Like a little girl being told her birthday party was canceled by a child-eating clown with a red balloon. The sound that came out of my mouth was not one that I would have ever thought a human throat could make.

Then things got worse. Because the one giant centipede coming at me wasn’t alone. It had company. Two more skittering, slithering abominations emerged from the giant mushrooms, coming right for me.

That was when a whole lot of things happened at once.

Below me, the door Damien was trying to unlock morphed into a giant set of jaws and lunged for him, massive fangs gnashing as it tried chomp right through him. Damien leapt back, screaming, and tripped. His Maglite went flying across the room and he was left to do a scramble madly backward toward where Emilio was still prone on the floor.

That was the moment that the goblins decided to attack. The little green freaks poured into the room through the door we’d come through, screaming and waving their clubs.

The first of the three giant centipedes lunged at me.

I brought the butterfly knife up and impaled it right through the head. The thing let out a hiss like a boiling lobster and I swept the curved pocket knife across the back of its head, aiming for the gap in its chitinous armor where the head and its first segment met. The blade cut right where I was aiming, but it wasn’t long enough to completely decapitate the monster. Ichor poured out of the wound and the centipede thrashed about wildly.

It fell from the ceiling, shrieking as it went. The butterfly knife was ripped out of my hand and fell to the floor with the monster. I was down one weapon and still left with the other two monsters.

I swung at the goo holding me and thankfully had more luck with it than I had the centipede. One stroke and I was free. Free to fall however many feet all the way to the floor, which had become a chaotic battlefield.

I landed on a goblin, crushing it flat, and from the sound of things, snapping its neck. It was hard to say for sure though because the ever-present silence of the Corridor had been completely consumed by the sounds of shrieking, roaring, screaming, hissing, and generally things hitting each other.

Landing on the goblin had hurt and pushing myself off of it was hard. If I stayed still though, I knew I was dead. So, I moved. That saved my life.

The wounded centipede lunged at me. Its horrifically long mandibles sank into the goblin I’d landed on top of. If it hadn’t been dead before, it sure as hell was now. I lunged forward, grabbing hold of the knife still imbedded in the monster’s head, and yanked it down. Chitin tore and stuff inside scrambled. It wasn’t enough.

There are some animals out there that don’t actually need their brains to live. Cockroaches, for example, keep on going even after you chop the heads off and only stop when they die of hunger or dehydration later. Snakes also don’t just die when their brains stop. The nerves in their bodies keep going. I’d killed and cooked enough rattlesnakes—tastes like chicken!—to know just how dangerous they still were even after they were dead.

The giant centipede apparently worked by the same rules. Worse though, than either roaches or snakes, because it had so many stupid legs! Each of those sharp legs cut into me as the body lashed up. I screamed, feeling dozens upon dozens of claws sink into my body.

I grabbed the butterfly knife still embedded in its head, then brought my hunting knife up and this time cut the head free completely. It came off in a spray of bug juice and stayed impaled on the end of the butterfly knife. The body didn’t get the memo and continued to carve me up. Death by a thousand cuts.

I staggered and crashed into a goblin. The angry midget shrieked and swung its club at me. The centipede covered me so completely that it soaked up the attack instead. Without the head to give it direction, the body thrashed at the impact. The segmented coils lashed out and the legs bit into the unfortunate goblin.

I tore free of the centipede’s body, bloody and ragged, as it coiled around its fresh prey—and barely avoided the swing of another goblin’s club. I staggered, swayed, and struck, my pocket knife stabbing into the goblin’s throat.

I had no chance to see what happened to the goblin as it fell back because without thinking, I’d brought the butterfly knife in close. The knife that still had the centipede’s head stuck to it. The head that didn’t realize it was dead.

The mandibles made a snap for me and I barely brought my face away in time. Venom, oozing from the tips, splashed out.

Emilio appeared beside me, crashing his zombie-killer into another goblin. Then another. The guy was on fire! His pure aggression was keeping the little angry freaks at bay.

Damien appeared, white coat flapping behind him like a set of wings, and stabbed another goblin with the knife I’d guessed he’d been hiding. As it came free, I got a good look at it, and wished immediately that I was armed with something like it. It was some kind of modern military stiletto. It had an actual guard, a blade nearly a footlong and double sided, coming to a neat spearpoint. A fighting knife.

Another goblin abruptly rose up into the air, trapped by a fresh line of goo from the carnivorous fungi on the ceiling. Still others were caught in the giant set of jaws that were bouncing around the room, a ball of flesh and muscle and teeth. The living maw that had started out as a door was taller than any of us and full of foot-long fangs, splattered with blood and spittle.

Goblins fled, screaming.

The maw bounced toward us, a giant ball of flesh given teeth, like something right out of Betelgeuse. It would have been comical if the thing wasn’t so horrific. Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether the giant disembodied jaws or the monstrous centipedes were worse. Either way, we scattered as it came for us.

It bounced after Damien, going right past me and Emilio. Maybe he’d pissed it off trying to unlock it?

Inspiration struck me. I leapt after the jaws and swung with the butterfly knife. The giant centipede head still attached sank its mandibles into the fleshy back end of the abomination. The jaws gnashed, and hopped around. The head slid free of the blade and remained stuck to the jaws like a tick.

I fled backward, only to find myself squaring off with several braver goblins who had rallied. They fled as the jaws came hopping and snapping after me. One tried to hit me with its club. I ducked aside and one of the giant centipedes fell from the ceiling to wrap around it.

The rest of the goblins had decided that was enough and took off.

A moment later, the jaws stopped.

Emilio rushed over and started bashing the maw with the zombie-killer, reducing the fleshy mass to so much pulp.

Silence fell, save for the centipede feasting on the unfortunate goblin.

Damien gestured with his bloody knife at the now empty space that the maw-mimic thing had been occupying. “Door’s open.”