Rachel was never going to believe this. Not in a million years. There was simply no amount of swearing that could ever convince Andrea’s best friend that there existed a place like the City of the Blind hidden deep inside a colossal Temple of the Blind that itself existed right beneath the very streets of Briar Hills. Rachel was also not going to believe that Gilbert House, those eerie, but otherwise boring walls practically in Andrea’s own backyard, was actually an entire building that was somehow invisible and acted as a portal between their world and an endless, black forest populated with shambling, undead corpses. She was never going to believe there was any such thing as a hound or a Sentinel Queen or whatever that thing was that attacked everybody in Gilbert House. She was not even going to believe that always-modest Andrea took her clothes off in front of a guy.
Even Andrea wasn’t sure she believed all of it. It was so much to take in. Even the things she’d seen with her own eyes seemed far too spectacular to possibly be real. As she gazed around her now at the walls of gray stone that stretched on and on into the relentless darkness before them, she could not help but marvel over all the things she’d discovered since that envelope first appeared on her window screen.
She couldn’t stop wondering what she was doing here. What business did a girl like her have in a place like this? She was only eighteen, still just a kid. Had she really followed these two complete strangers into this terrifying underground labyrinth just because a mysterious voice in the forest told her to do it?
What business did any of them have down here, for that matter? From what Wayne and Olivia told her, they had never met each other or the three people they were trying to catch up with before tonight. They were all three of them strangers, yet here they were, alone in the darkness, far too deep within the earth for their screams to be heard by anyone, forced to trust in one another like family.
They were naked, even! They were walking around down here completely nude, their most private parts on display before the eyes of people they’d known for mere hours! Why? It was insane. She couldn’t stop thinking about how utterly crazy this all was. She never would have believed herself capable of doing such a thing. Yet here she was.
And now that she was here, what was it she was supposed to do? The Sentinel Queen told her that she had no idea how the envelope found its way onto her window screen, or whose voice was in her head outside Gilbert House, instructing her to come here. She was an unexpected player in this game. Clearly someone intended for her to be here, but who? What was her role in it all? It was all so confusing.
What did she even have to give? She wasn’t special. She was quirky, but otherwise just a perfectly normal teenage girl. She was not psychic like Olivia or Albert or Brandy. Certainly not like Beverly had been. She was not courageous like Wayne. She would not have been capable of walking through that horrible tunnel all alone and scared to death. She certainly would not have been able to take on all those zombies. She probably wouldn’t even have been able to handle just one shuffling corpse without screaming herself into cardiac arrest. Neither did she have Olivia’s courage. Even with the Sentinel Queen’s gentle words in her head, assuring her that she would be okay, promising that someone was coming to find her, she would have been driven completely insane with terror after just an hour inside that dark restroom, much less after two long days. It did not make sense that she, just a gentle virgin in a harsh and emotionless world, would be chosen to come down here into this ancient, underground world, to strip off her modesty and walk naked through a nightmare labyrinth that, to her, had begun to feel a little like the valley of the shadow of death in that prayer her grandmother once taught her, the one that always made her shiver.
It was all so overwhelming. All of this was overwhelming. This whole place, the very reality of it all.
And even as she thought about all these things, her eyes kept drifting to Wayne. He was walking in front of her, his naked back and buttocks caked with stinking mud in the light of her flashlight. Until tonight, she had never seen a guy naked before. And until now, she had been too embarrassed to give him more than a fleeting glance. But she found that she was beginning to grow bolder as the night went on and now she found herself really looking at him, studying him, memorizing him.
He was a little soft around the middle, but he was still muscular. He had big arms and legs and broad shoulders. He also had a fairly attractive butt, she noticed. Maybe not the cutest she’d ever seen, but not bad…
It felt odd looking at him like this. It was sort of naughty. It gave her a nervous lump deep in her belly. And she was surprised to discover that she liked the way that naughty sensation made her feel. It made her body tingle a little. Even with the stench of the mud chamber still wafting from her body, she couldn’t help but feel a little sexy as she watched him walk, his strong thighs flexing rhythmically with his ever-urgent stride.
Was this what the sex room had done to her? Was this her punishment for ignoring Wayne’s warning and peeking at those insane statues? Was she now doomed to feel these urges all the time? Would she slowly lose herself to increasingly insatiable desires until there was nothing left of the girl she used to be? Or was this all perfectly natural? Maybe it was just her body’s way of telling her that she’d grown comfortable with hers and Wayne’s nudity. Perhaps this was nothing more than who she was and who she’d always been. She just needed the right circumstances to reveal it to herself.
Either way, it felt sort of good. And she found herself forgetting the Sentinel Queen and her unknown purpose as she studied Wayne’s masculine shape, enamored with these fascinating new feelings.
No, Rachel was definitely never going to believe this.