It’s different here. Calm, almost. You take a deep breath and feel false relief wash over you like soap bubbles in a steaming bath. Part of your mind is still scrambling to stay alert, to process what’s going on. Extra oxygen? Nitrous oxide? Chloroform? But you feel yourself relax anyway.

The ground is fake stone that clinks with every step you take. There are chalk drawings on the ground — hopscotch squares and hearts and rainbows and everything else a child would draw. Mr. Aspen takes particular care to smudge the doodles with his steel-toed boots.

Up ahead of you is a little girl in a baby pink dress with pigtails who’s clinging to the hand of her mother. She skips from one drawing to another, hopping through the squares and dancing around the doodles. Her mother’s squeezing her hand and guiding her through the rows of shops.

And oh, so many shops there are. Children’s clothes stores bursting with pink and glitter. Formal wear stores. Pajama stores. Bridal gown stores. Scarf stores. And the jewelry shops that shine blindingly at you in their gold and silver and sparkly gemstone. It’s enough to make anyone dizzy.

You’re not the only one disoriented. Jack’s not walking straight anymore and Mr. Roots’s eyes wander everywhere. Only Mr. Aspen seems immune. He marches on as if the world is a blank hallway, heading straight for the elevators.

“Whoa,” Jack whispers, pointing. “Look at that.”

You follow his finger for a moment, then freeze, your eyes stuck in front of you. The little girl has stopped skipping and instead turned around to face you.

She doesn’t have a void for a face.

But she doesn’t have a face either.

Her skin isn’t skin, but rather smooth, cold plastic. Her pigtails aren’t human hair, but rather fine polyester strands. Only her clothes are really clothes.

Around you, you hear the squeaking of plastic on plastic. Of joints unbending. Of feet marching towards you. You look around, but you already know what you’ll see.

The dozens of mannequins are marching towards you. Their faces are blank, but you don’t like what their intent could be.

“Run,” Jack whispers.

“Run,” you echo.

The four of you take off running. Three pairs of sneakers squeaking along the stone floor. One pair of boots pounding the chalk drawings into dust. All of you leave behind footprints in pink, blue, and yellow: the markings of the chalk that you had stepped on.

You curse, scraping your feet on the ground to get rid of the footprints. With those, wherever you go, the mannequins will find you.

“Forget it,” Mr. Aspen yells. “They’ll catch us anyway. We need to get to the elevators.”

You spring to keep up with him, gasping. There’s a stitch in your side that threatens to split you apart. The fog in your brain isn’t helping either.

You don’t dare look back, but the footsteps behind you sound like they’re only a dozen paces away. A handful of heartbeats before they reach you. You put on another burst of speed, leaning into the sprint, until you feel something give way.

There was a puddle. A slick, soapy puddle just in your way. Your foot slides out from under you, and you go sprawling onto your knees. You turn around, and get a good look at your chasers.

The mannequins close in around you, not more than three paces away. They reach out their arms, caging you.

Jack stops and yells your name, running back towards you. Mr. Roots and Mr. Aspen follow, but the mannequins have already cut them off. They’ve surrounded you.

Mr. Aspen reaches into his coat pocket and flicks open a pocket knife, slashing at the mannequins. They don’t notice a thing.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Jack drops to his knees and slides between them just before they close the gaps between their legs.

“What on earth are you doing Jack?” Mr. Aspen yells.

Jack ignores him and grabs you instead, scanning the ring of mannequins. They’re still pressing closer. In a few sweet breaths you’ll be crushed in their plastic embrace.

You scream. You scream the loudest scream you’ve ever screamed, an ear-piercing scream that sings above the heads of the mannequins, through the walls, and soars into the air. You scream a scream of defiance, because you’re not going to die this way. Not today. Not playing this game.

It doesn’t matter. You can feel the hard, plastic bodies of the mannequins against you now. There’s no stopping them.

Jack whispers your name. “It was nice knowing you.”

The mannequins have grabbed both your arms and legs, pinning you into place. You ignore their touch and stare Jack in the eyes.

“Don’t say that.”

There’s no stopping them. But that doesn’t mean you won’t try.

You know how joints work. You’ve designed plastic joints before. Seen how they twist and twirl and most importantly, snap. So you know how you need to twist your arms and cross your legs so that their joints snap, too. So that they’re flipped on their backs with dislocated shoulders and broken wrists.

Soon you’re surrounded by a little graveyard of plastic bodies and blank faces.

But they keep coming.

Mr. Aspen slips through the gap between the mannequins and grabs you and Jack, dragging both of you away. You keep sprinting. They’re right on your heels, but with the adrenaline surging through you, you manage to gain some distance.

Soon, you round the corner and you see the elevators. All ten of them. Nine of turquoise, one of silver.

Mr. Roots pounds the up button.

Nothing happens. It doesn’t light up. There’s no hiss of an elevator rushing towards you. Nothing.

Mr. Aspen pulls a screwdriver from his lab coat and uses it to pry the doors apart.

He looks down. Then he looks up.

The cable of the elevator has been cut.

There’s nothing to climb up, or climb down. It’s a straight, blank, uncaring shaft of reinforced concrete that descends into darkness.

You turn around. All of you curse. The mannequins have you surrounded, and the only way out is to plunge to your death.

You inch away from the edge of the elevator shaft, searching for a gap between the mannequin’s bodies. Praying for some way out. There has to be a way out. There always is.

You’re squeezed between Jack and Mr. Aspen, all four of your hearts in your throats. You hear the wheezing of their breaths, the rustle of their clothes as they too swivel their heads, trying to find that one in a thousand change that will let them escape. Let them stay alive.

With each second the mannequins press in closer. Their goal isn’t to squeeze you to death, but to force you over the edge.

Your eyes travel between your three companions. Who’ll be the first to drop? Jack, who looks slimmer than his weight? Mr. Roots, who may be a featherweight, but has a will and iron grip above the rest? Mr. Aspen, who’s stout enough to avoid being blown over? Or you?

You try to force the thought out of your mind and focus on the task at hand.

“If we aim for the same one at the same time,” you say, “I think we can escape.”

Mr. Aspen nods. “We’ll go for the one with the green dress.”

Jack gives you a thumbs up. Mr. Roots crouches like a cat ready to pounce. “Three,” he whispers.

“Two.”

“One.”

You exhale and lunge, dropping beneath the mannequin’s hemline to push against its shins. It slides backward, then slowly, hair by hair splitting hair, begins tipping over.

The other mannequins begin crowding behind it to support it, but it’s a lost cause. With the weight of the four of you on top of it, the mannequin begins sinking, trapping the others beneath it. You scramble over it. The force of your weight splits its chest open, revealing not machinery, but an anatomically correct plastic heart. You almost don’t give it a second glance, all too eager to get away from the robots, but at the last minute, you scoop it up, slip it in your pocket, and and sprint away from the heap of tangled plastic limbs, back the way you came.

The ground is littered with broken glass from when the mannequins broke free from their displays. Clothes racks are pushed out of the way, shirts and socks are thrown onto the floor, and hangers glint at every corner, their wires oddly shiny. The place is eerily quiet, without a soul in sight.

Thankfully, the mannequins behind you are slow to follow, and you make it back to the escalators without another encounter. You jump on the glass stairs, waiting for them to whisk you away from this horror scene, but with your weight on them, they grind to a halt. Instead of the whirr of machinery, you hear the sound of a distance stampede, as if a herd of animals was panicking all at once. All four of your heads swivel behind you, and you see…

Trolls?