Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

He grabbed a length of tubing from the tray. “This is flexible, like a garden hose, but it’s metal. Coiling of some sort. I snagged it from the garage, when the mechanic wasn’t looking. Open his mouth.”

“His mouth?” Caleb asked.

“His fucking mouth!” Ernest shrieked.

Caleb tipped Nolan’s head back and pried open his mouth. Ernest fed the tube down his throat.

“Write this down: eight pm. About to attempt Level Five. Tubing has been fed into subject. The tube acts as a sort of trachea. Get ready, guys. This is it.”

Ian nodded and licked his lips. His heart pounded so fiercely his temples ached.

“Hold him tight, Caleb!” Ernest placed a funnel at the end of the tubing in Nolan’s throat. He turned back to the pot and filled a quart-sized metal measuring cup, and he then dumped the molten metal down the tube and into Nolan’s throat. He pulled the tube out as the throat and mouth filled with the liquid, the neck and throat bulging.

“Level Five!” Ernest cried, a look of triumph filling his eyes and spreading into an enormous grin. “Subject appears to be suffocating. His eyes are—”

Nolan’s movements were lightning-fast and unexpected; in the throes of his mindless, adrenaline-powered paroxysm, he broke through the last of the thick cords and bolted upright, his head whipping. Blood poured from deep gashes across his body where moments before he’d been restrained. His arms and legs pinwheeled and struck out in every direction at once, searching for help, his brain now mush, his actions primal, mouth gasping for air.

Metal, blood, and vomit flew everywhere, coating the walls and the young men. Nolan’s pupils disappeared, and he searched and pawed blindly, trying to scream through the terrible obstruction in his throat, trying to pull it out, gasping and retching, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and reaching down his throat, his body trying to vomit out the foreign objects.

Nolan was free from his restraints but his actions were primal and desperate. His bulging eyes had focused enough so that they trained on a terrified Ernest, who was now trying in a blind panic to remember where he had left the exit.

Nolan grabbed Ernest from behind, searching for help, a desperate young man tortured beyond recognition, searching for someone to save him from his living hell. So it was his fortunate luck, and Ernest’s pisspoor luck, that he was able to exact his revenge without even knowing it.

For in his final moments, Nolan—weighed down by the metal filling every major cavity in his body—gurgled and sputtered his final gasping breaths, falling forward, impaling Ernest’s tailbone, piercing major organs with what was possibly the world’s hardest and sharpest dildo.

This contorted mess of twisted body parts fell forward into the table, crashing to the floor. The metal-filled pot overturned, spilling its boiling contents on Ernest’s head. He howled, arms flailing, the liquid hardening into a layer on his head and shoulders, the skin beneath bubbling and dissolving off his bones.

He died melting like a crayon in the sun, his colon impaled by his very own test subject, who was dead as well.

Some time later, Ian pulled himself up off the floor. In a daze he extinguished the light and pulled the door closed, shutting the carnage in behind him. His mind was numb, his body trembling.

He remembered earlier walking through a series of doors and now just walked down the passageways shell-shocked, trying to recall the way they had come just a couple of hours before. It felt like he had been down there for days. He realized it would be years before the bodies would be found, if ever.

When he reached the third door, Caleb was sitting on the floor. Ian shined the flashlight beam in his glazed eyes.

“I forgot about you, man,” Ian said, sitting on the floor beside him. “When did you sneak out here?”

“Right after Nolan fell on Ernest. I got the fuck out of there. I thought you fainted or something.”

“They’re both dead. What are we going to do?”

Caleb exhaled and ran his hands through his hair. “Do? We’re royally fucked, Ian. Unless you know the combination. Look.” He shined the flashlight in the air and the beam fell on the lock, a keypad with the series of numbers 0–9.

Ian stared at it, remembering only that the combination was seven digits long.

“Oh, shit,” he squeaked, quickly getting up and entering random patterns of numbers into the keypad. “We can figure this out. I mean, how many combinations can there be?”

Caleb raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”

Ian pounded away at the keypad. He wailed on the solid oak door as well but only succeeded in smashing his knuckles and cutting the fleshy pads on his hands.

“What are we gonna do?” he cried, kicking Caleb, who stared into the darkness.

Ian searched the basement for an exit, a window, a crawlspace. All he found was hallway after hallway of solid rock.