In considerably less time than it had taken Albert, Brandy and Nicole, Wayne made his way from the City of the Blind’s north gate to the second pool of water. Behind him, Olivia and Andrea struggled to keep up with his brisk pace. He was eager to catch up (if that was even possible) and share what he had learned from the Sentinel Queen and the old man. Together, perhaps they could sort the truth from all the lies and determine what it was they needed to do.
He did not even hesitate at the water’s edge. As Albert had done, he simply hopped into the water, assuming it would be easier to jump in all at once and get it over with.
Just like Albert, he was wrong.
Instantly, all the breath was sucked from his lungs. It actually seemed to him that his heart stopped beating, and perhaps it had skipped a beat or two. Water this cold was like a bolt of electricity, with all the gentleness of a baseball bat to the gut.
Olivia did not wait for his reaction. She jumped in after him, her feet entering the water even as Wayne was struggling up to the surface. She came up with a breathless gasp. “Oh my God!” she cried.
“Is it cold?” Andrea asked.
“Course not,” Wayne remarked, his lips quivering with the violence of his shivers as he turned and swam away from her. “Perfectly tepid.”
Andrea hesitated. Again she stood alone on the edge of a psychological cliff, pushing herself to jump, though every fiber of her being begged her to turn back. Desperately, she wished she’d rushed in as Olivia did, without waiting to see how it would affect Wayne. She did not want to go forward, did not want to torture herself anymore, but there was nowhere else to go. She was sure she could not survive the journey home by herself. If the emotion rooms didn’t kill her, the hounds likely would.
Wishing a little that she’d just stayed home, Andrea gripped her flashlight and jumped in. The cold was unbelievable. She could not help but wonder how deep the water must be to be so cold. At some point far below in the permanent darkness, was it completely frozen?
The swim to the other side of the chamber took less than a minute, but it felt much longer, as would any form of torture. Soon, the three of them climbed shivering and dripping onto dry stone. Earlier that night, Albert, Brandy and Nicole paused here to warm up by sharing body heat, but Wayne pushed on, warming himself by exertion instead, almost dragging his weary companions along.
“We’re going to get sick,” moaned Andrea.
“Not if we don’t let ourselves get sick,” Wayne replied.
“I don’t think we have much control over it,” she retorted. In the biting cold and her growing weariness, she was beginning to feel considerably less perky.
“I know,” he told her. “But being cold doesn’t make us sick. It just weakens the immune system. It makes us more susceptible.”
“Really?” Andrea asked.
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I think I remember one of my high school teachers telling us that,” Olivia recalled.
The cold made Wayne’s arm and leg hurt. The cut he’d sustained from the spikes in the fear room did not bother him by comparison, nor did his feet, really, but the zombie bite and the injury he’d sustained from the hound were killing him. He did not think he could get much more miserable than this.
For a while they walked, the shivering and the chattering slowly fading, their bodies gradually regaining their former semi-warmth. They crossed the room with the forty-two sentinels and entered the passage beyond without pausing to examine any of them.
As he approached the intersection ahead, he spied the yellow line that ran along the far wall to the right. He reached out and dragged his fingers across it, smearing it.
“What is it?” Olivia asked.
“Sidewalk chalk,” Wayne replied. He remembered the Sentinel Queen telling them that the others had left a trail for him to follow and realized that this was what she meant. “Follow the yellow chalk line,” he said, grinning a little. “We’re going to see the wizard.”
“Guys…” Andrea had turned and was looking back the way they’d come, her flashlight piercing the darkness that pushed in at their backs.
Wayne turned and added his beam to hers. There was nothing there. “What is it?”
Andrea shook her head. “I thought I saw something…”
“I don’t see anything,” said Olivia.
“I guess…” Andrea shook her head again. For a moment she would have sworn that there was something there, some dark form, short and hunched, darker than the rest of the darkness, but there was nothing there. “I guess not,” she said at last.
“Come on,” Wayne said. “Let’s hurry. We’ve got their trail now.”
Andrea lingered for a moment, still not ready to dismiss what she had seen, and then she turned and followed Wayne into the labyrinth, their flashlights chasing the yellow line that would lead them to the others.
Behind them, in the thickening darkness at their backs, the Keeper watched with interest.