The Escape Room


“Have you been to an escape room before?”

“No, have you?”

“I went with my brother and a few of his friends like three months ago. It’s pretty tight. I was the only reason we escaped.” Julie flashed a big shit-eating grin.

“So what, you’re the escape room queen now?” Kari asked.

“Fucking goddam right I am.”

“How do you know they didn’t just let you think you were solving everything? Maybe they all had a crush on you and wanted you to think you were the hero.”

“My brother had a crush on me?”

“Maybe not him, but the rest of them? Boys are pigs.”

“Dude, I’m smarter than that. Don’t be a hater, slut.”

“Yeah, well I guess we’ll see.”

“We’ll see? Does that mean we’re going?”

“Fuck it. I can’t have you gloating about your escape room skills forever. Lauding that shit over me. I’ve gotta show you how it’s done.”

“Yes!” Julie cackled and clapped her hands. “Game on, bitch!” Hanging a right, she exclaimed, “I think it’s like five minutes from here.”

"We can't do the same puzzle you already solved though."

"No shit, dumbass. This is actually a new place. Tommy tried it a couple weeks ago with Tony and Kevin, but they failed. That’s because he didn’t invite his little sister." Julie winked and stuck out her tongue.

"You're so full of it," Kari said, laughing.

"I can't wait to solve this shit in record time and go home to rub it in his face. I need you to be kicking ass though. We gotta work as a team."

"Oh, so now you need my help, do you?" Kari asked coyly.

"Fuck yeah, I do. You're the Batman to my Robin."

"I'm Batman?"

"I mean… yeah, fuck it, you're fucking Batman." Julie laughed loudly. "You're gonna hafta use your badass detective skills and I'll be your trusty sidekick. We're gonna crush this shit and escape so fucking fast we'll demand our money back."

"How much does it cost?"

"I don't know, this is my first time going to this place."

"But your brother went."

"Yeah, but the dick sucker didn't tell me what it costs. He just told me how much dick he sucked. The other place I went to was twenty bucks a person, so it'll probably be like that."

Kari frowned. "It better be worth it."

"Bitch, don't get cheap on me. It'll be worth it."

Kari rustled through her purse and pulled out a wallet, then peeked inside. "What if I'm short?"

"How short?"

Kari smiled. "Twenty dollars?"

"You lying cunt!"

"Okay, but I might be short a couple bucks."

"I got you, sister bitch."

"Cool."

"This is it!" Julie said, pulling into a small, eight-car parking lot. They were in a crowded commercial district, with the occasional fancy home crammed between office buildings. There were no signs or obvious markings to indicate this was the place, but Julie knew it was across the street from a gynecologist's office - the aptly named Dr. Kooter. Her disgusting brother had been keen on pointing that out.

There was a sidewalk that led to a stairway behind the office building they had parked beside, and through double-swinging doors was a clerk behind a desk and a waiting area with a few plush chairs. The clerk was a mousy man in his mid thirties with spectacles, short black hair, and his nose buried in a book, and he didn't even bother to look up when the girls made their entrance.

"Is this the escape room?" Julie asked cautiously, and the clerk cast his squirrely eyes upon her.

"Yes ma'am, is it just the two of you?"

"Yes sir, it's just us."

"It's twenty-five dollars each, please."

Kari gave Julie a bashful look and handed her a ten, a five, and two ones. "You still got me?"

Julie stuffed the bills in her pocket and answered, "Of course." She pulled a fifty from her own wallet and handed it to the clerk.

After holding the fifty up to the light and inspecting it, he stowed it in the register and pressed a button. "Have a seat. Our host, Mike, will be right with you."

"Must be nice to have cash to blow," Kari muttered as they sat down.

"You're such a fucking hater," Julie retorted. "Besides, we're not blowing it. This is gonna be fun."

Mike arrived very quickly from behind a door and introduced himself with a practiced grace. Rules were laid out about where and how to look for clues without damaging the property, and he collected their cell phones so they wouldn’t be able to cheat. He gave them the familiar spiel about working together and communicating to get through the challenges they were about to face, and then he led them beyond the door from which he had appeared and down a corridor.

There were rooms on either side of the hallway, but they passed them, turned a corner, and at last came to the room they would be occupying. Mike let the girls enter first, and Julie was about to ask why the room was so empty when the door shut behind them. She heard the rattling of locks and grabbed the door handle, but it didn't turn. They were trapped.

"Is this not how it works?" Kari asked, curious about Julie's sudden apprehension.

"No, this is not how it's supposed to fucking work. They're supposed to give us a scenario. There's supposed to be stuff in here." Julie waved a hand at the white, windowless walls and bare marble floor. "How can we find clues and solve puzzles in a room that's completely fucking empty?" She hammered a fist against the door.

“Dude, calm down, you’re freaking me out a little.”

“You should be freaked out a fucking lot. This is wrong.”

“Wait, quiet.” Kari had her head tilted slightly and her smoldering hazel brown eyes staring intently at nothing, the way a person looks when she's listening for a faint sound.

After a second or two of silence Julie heard it. “What is it?”

“Sounds like a snake?”

“There’s no way there’s…” Julie trailed off as she glanced up towards the ceiling. A cloud of light gray was seeping through an air duct, and as soon as she spotted it she began to smell it. “We’re being gassed.”

“What?!”

"We're being fucking gassed." Julie pointed out the ominous cloud, and the girls exchanged looks of horror before Julie asked, "You think they’re gonna use us for human trafficking?”

“You mean get us hooked on drugs and make us hookers?”

Julie nodded.

Kari smiled sardonically. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, I was thinking they were gonna torture and kill us."

Julie gulped and her blue eyes widened. "Okay, you're right. Whoring doesn't sound that bad. What kind of gas do you think it is?”

“Maybe it’s acidic. It’ll turn our insides to mush and we’ll start bleeding out our eyes and ears.”

“Fucking Jesus, Kari. What the fuck?”

Kari shrugged. “I figure if I go for something so ridiculously awful it can’t be true, then we’ll end up being pleasantly surprised.”

“Yeah, right. Nothing about this is pleasant.”

“I don’t know about that. I think I’m starting to get high.”

“Me too.”

“Could be they just wanted to hotbox us. Get us stoned before we solve their puzzle.”

Julie laughed, “Bitch, this ain’t fucking Cheech and Chong. Besides, that doesn’t smell like weed. It smells like burnt rubber.”

“I think it smells like one of your farts.” Kari wrinkled her cute little button nose.

Julie laughed again. “Goddammit, Kari, we’re being abducted and poisoned. We’re probably gonna end up on Dateline or some shit. How the fuck can you make jokes?”

“You gotta keep your sense of humor in a time of crisis.”

“I guess you’re right. This could be the last time we get to laugh.”

"You don't really think we're gonna die, do you?"

"I thought we were gonna be drugged up whores, remember? You're the one that went with the torture and death scenario."

"I wonder if they'll rape us first," Kari smiled playfully.

"Maybe they'll just rape us and let us go?" Julie never thought she'd be so hopeful to be raped.

"Maybe. Maybe they'll get a horse to fuck us while they disembowel us."

"Jesus Christ, Kari. How the fuck do you come up with this stuff?"

Kari shrugged and yawned. “Are you getting sleepy?”

The room had taken on a foggy quality, and Kari shimmered behind waves of mist. “Yeah, I think it’s the gas. They’re putting us to sleep.”

“What if we never wake up?” Kari asked, her big eyes suddenly wide and fearful.

"I guess that would be better than getting raped by a horse with my guts hanging out."

“I don’t wanna die, Julie.”

“Yeah, me neither. How about we just take a quick nap instead?”

Kari offered a half-hearted grin, “Okay, just a quick nap.” Her eyelids felt like they were filled with lead, and before she knew it she was asleep.




Julie was the first to wake and soak in their new surroundings. They were still in the same room, at least as far as she could tell, but the room was no longer empty. There was a file cabinet in the far left corner, there was a desk with some notes, some books, and a computer on it pushed up against the right wall, and in the center of the room there was a girl with her guts on the wrong side of her body.

The girl was strapped to a steel table tilted at a seventy degree angle, so she was almost completely upright. Her wrists and ankles were held by leather restraints, and there was an outcrop on the low end of the table that served as a foot rest, keeping her from sliding down or putting undue strain on her arms. It was unclear if she was alive, although Julie thought she saw the girl’s chest moving ever so slightly with the admission and expulsion of breath.

Quite a lot of blood was spattered on the girl’s clothes and pooled on the tiled floor below, and still more was dripping and trickling down. The girl, despite her disembowelment and massive blood loss, was beautiful, with a round face and big pouty lips, dirty blonde hair and fair skin. She had a full figure with generous curves, clothed in a white cotton half shirt adorned with a dead yellow emoji and a black sarong draped skirt, and her feet were bare.

After only a few seconds, Julie realized her own attire was oddly similar, as was Kari’s, the only difference being the emoji on their shirts. Julie’s was a smiley face, and Kari’s was frowning. The clothes Kari and Julie had been wearing when they entered the establishment were mysteriously gone.

“Kari,” Julie called to her friend, who was just beginning to stir. “Kari, wake the fuck up. There’s a dead chick in here.”

“Wha… huh?” Kari murmured, rubbing her eyes and slowly sitting up.

“I’m not dead,” the eviscerated girl croaked.

“Oh shit, my bad,” Julie answered.

“What the fuck?” Kari asked, horrified. “Shit really got real in here, didn’t it?”

“Pluh… please. Help me,” the blonde begged.

“Who are you?” Julie asked her.

“Sara. They cap…”

Sara was interrupted by a voice booming from a speaker somewhere in the ceiling. “Welcome to the first ever life or death escape room. Your game begins now. You will have sixty minutes to figure out how to escape, and if you should succeed, you will be free to go. This facility has been rented by a phantom, made up entirely of forged documents, so nothing will be traced back to us. Good luck.”

“Holy shit, are they serious?” Kari asked, her voice shrill.

“They gutted Sara here, so I think they’re pretty serious.”

“You think we could be dead in an hour?”

“We could be dead in sixty seconds, but I’m not planning on dying here, so wudduya say we figure this shit out?”

“Alright. Okay. We got this, right?”

“Fucking goddam right we do. I’m the escape room queen, remember?”

"Sure. Of course. So what do we do? How does this work?"

Julie tried the door handle, confirming it was locked. There was a keyhole on their side of the door, so the goal was to find the key that fit it.

"You go look at the stuff on that desk. See if that computer turns on. Be Batman. I'm gonna ask Sara some questions." Kari nodded and rushed over the desk, and Julie approached Sara. The dying blonde looked as if she was slipping in and out of consciousness, so Julie hoped she could get some answers. She lightly caressed the girl's face and gave her cheek the gentlest slap she could manage, "Sara, are you still with me?"

Dark, hazel eyes looked up at Julie, and in them she saw the terrible torment this girl was enduring. "Help," Sara pleaded.

"Hang in there, sweetie, we're gonna get you outta here. We need your help first, though. I need to ask you some questions."

Sara nodded and whispered weakly, "Okay."

“How long have you been here?”

Sara glanced at something over Julie’s shoulder, and Julie followed her gaze to the clock above the door. It was a classic clock with a minute hand, hour hand, and second hand, and Roman numerals to mark the time, and it currently announced it was 3:47. Julie made a mental note that they needed to escape by a quarter til five. “A couple hours.”

“Did you come in to try the escape room too?” Sara looked confused and her eyes lost focus for a moment. “Sara, stay with me, baby.”

“I was taken… Two guys. Never seen them before… They grabbed me outside my apartment. Said it was for some kind of game.”

“And they’re the ones that did this to you?”

Sara nodded.

“Did you see them setting things up in here?”

“No. This was all… already here. They just brought ya… you two… in like ha… half an hour ago.”

Julie realized this was not the same room where they were gassed after all. “Is there anything else you can remember that might help us get out?”

Sara’s chin quivered and she shook her head, “No,” but Julie thought she detected a hint of dishonesty in the blonde girl’s eyes.

“Julie, take a look at this.” Kari had managed to turn on the PC and she had several pieces of paper strewn across the desk.

“What do you got?” Julie asked, walking over with piqued interest.

“There’s a few diagrams of, well, guts and stuff,” Kari pointed to some fold outs that looked like they were taken from a health magazine, some showing images of internal organs and one a complete map of the female digestive system. “The PC needs a password to be unlocked, but there’s this note that probably has some clues.”

Julie picked up the note and read it.

Sara has proven to be uncooperative. All we could get out of her was some cryptic message about us knowing the hour of our demise. She knows more than she has let on, that much is certain. We have other methods at our disposal to get her to spill her guts.

“What else do you think she knows?” Kari asked in a whispering voice.

“It’s a prop,” Julie said, “Just some bullshit story they made up to set the stage for their escape room.”

“So what do we do next?”

“Check out those books. Flip through them, see if anything’s hidden inside. I’m gonna try the file cabinets.” Kari did as Julie instructed, and Julie soon found each drawer to be locked tight. She pushed the cabinets away from the wall and peeked behind them, but saw nothing of import. “You see anything?”

Kari shook her head. “Not unless they expect us to study up on interrogation techniques and the human anatomy.”

Julie mulled it over. “The hour of our demise. They wouldn’t have put that in there if it didn’t mean anything.” She looked up at the clock. It kept time well enough. The second hand ticked away the seconds and they had less than fifty-five minutes to escape this death trap if the voice over the intercom was to be believed. She hurried over to the doorway and stretched her fingers as high as she could, but the clock was just out of her reach. “Come over here and get on my shoulders.”

Julie was a stout and sturdy girl with an athletic body that was taller and meatier than Kari’s, so she was easily able to hoist her slight of build companion onto her back, and Kari snatched the clock from the wall. “There’s a key taped to the back!” Kari cried excitedly.

“Score! Now be careful when you put the clock back. We need to know how much time we have left, so don’t fuck with it.”

“Yup. Got it.” Kari hung the clock back on the wall, hopped nimbly off Julie’s shoulders and held up the key.

“It’s gotta open one of those cabinets,” Julie told her. The girls scurried across the room, eager to test the key in each lock, which as it turned out wasn’t necessary. It opened the first one they tried, and inside they found a hunting knife, a box of surgical gloves, and a small spiral notebook.

The book was titled Sara's Journal, and on the first page they found the following scrawled:

They found me! How am I going to get out of this? Everything’s at stake now. People are counting on me. All that we've worked for could come crumbling down around us. Six of them outside my door, ready to burst through any second. Someone must have sold us out. Who could be the mole, I wonder? Oscar? Roberto? Doesn't matter. I've got no time left, and one more key to hide. Swallow it.

Julie and Kari read it together, then looked at each other and looked at the knife. "No," Kari said, horrified.

"It fits. It makes sense. The diagrams of the digestive system, the books about anatomy."

"We can't."

"We have to." Julie picked up the knife and a pair of gloves, ever mindful of the clock, and walked around to face Sara. "Sweetie, I'm sorry."

"You found out, didn't you?" Sara was trembling.

"Found out what?"

"They… made me swallow a key."

Julie nodded. "It's our only way out. Either we find the key inside you, or we all die.” She pulled the rubber gloves over her hands and took hold of Sara’s bowels. “I’ll try to be gentle.” Several coils of intestines dangled between the blonde girl’s knees, totaling nearly eight feet in length, and Julie began to smooth them out, squeezing as tenderly as possible up and down the piping, feeling for something hard and metal inside.

Her efforts didn’t pan out, so she began to tug, and more slippery guts snaked their way through the gash in Sara’s tummy. The poor blonde whined and whimpered, but to her credit, she didn’t scream. Time slipped away, and Julie still found nothing. Her fingers became less benign as four o’ clock came and went, and she gave the glistening pink snakes a yank.

Sara yelped as nearly all of her small intestines and a sizable portion of her large intestine came unraveled and spilled messily out of her belly. Julie paid little mind and went right to work feeling for that damned key. Squirts of excrement spattered the table when Julie squeezed the lower portion of Sara’s colon, and still she found nothing.

The search became exponentially more frenzied, and Julie took the knife to Sara’s midriff and sliced open her upper abdomen. Digging through muscles and fat, Julie found the girl’s stomach and pulled it free. She tore it apart like a paper bag, Sara’s brown eyes opened wide in astonishment, and at last the key rattled on the floor.

“I found it!” Julie squealed, peeling the gloves off her hands and plucking up the key in excitement.

Sara gurgled on a mouthful of blood, and Kari watched it all unfold as if in a trance. “You killed her,” Kari finally said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of incredulity.

“No. The people that put her here did that. I’m trying to save the people that are still alive.” Julie stuck the key in the second file cabinet’s lock, and it turned easily enough. Within the drawer she found a loose piece of paper and a lockbox with a combination lock. The paper had the tell-tale torn loops along the left edge of a note ripped from a spiral notebook. On it the following was penned in the same handwriting as contained in the previously discovered journal:

Combination is stored on PC. Open Microsoft Word. Search for Lockbox Combo. Take what’s inside the box. 1 of you escapes. loss is part of life. it cannot be prevented. fret not. everyone dies in the end.

“Well that’s not very encouraging,” Kari noted, her large brown eyes wide and her arching eyebrows raised cutely.

Julie’s own brilliant blues narrowed and her brow furrowed. “I don’t give a fuck what that says. We’re both escaping, and we’re both winning. Losing is not gonna be part of our lives today.”

“Looks like we need to figure out the password for the computer.”

“Yup. Any ideas?”

“There must be something more to this note. So far we haven’t really learned anything from it.”

“Yeah, like why is it written like some lame ass haiku?”

“Well, it’s definitely not a haiku.”

“Whatever, bitch. This isn’t English class. You know what I mean.”

“I do?”

“Like there’s a pattern or something somewhere. It’s just too weird.”

“I get it, yeah. Wasn’t the other note like that too? The one in the journal?”

"No shit, I think you're right!" Julie pulled out the journal from the top drawer and compared the notes. "Wudduya see?"

"You're never supposed to start a sentence with a number. You know, like a digit. One should be spelled out here."

"Okay, what does that tell us? Somebody sucks at grammar?"

"Maybe, but more likely there's a reason for it. Like they did it on purpose. Look here. They didn't capitalize the first word of the last four sentences either."

"Why would they…" Julie trailed off, deep in thought for a few seconds. She was onto something, surely. Her shockingly beautiful and expressive face slowly lit up like a Christmas tree, and she nearly screeched with delight. "Kari, you fucking genius! That's it. It is intentional. It's part of the password. Look at the first letter of each sentence!"

Julie left the journal and the paper in Kari's hands, not sticking around for Kari to have her 'oh shit' moment. Instead she rushed over to the PC, the clock ever present in her mind, and typed COST1life into the password field and hit enter.

The desktop appeared, and she found Microsoft Word and opened the document saved as ‘Lockbox Combo’.

9-3-4-7-1

Each of you holds a key. One leads to life, the other leads to death. Choose wisely.

Julie felt her skirt for pockets, knowing there were none. There was nowhere else she could hold a key. Kari was watching her, and Julie was reluctant to share the disturbing message, but Kari could see the obvious concern on her friend’s gorgeous and expressive face. “What’s wrong? What’s it say?”

Julie hesitated still, “It says… each of us holds a key. One leads to life and one leads to death.”

A horrible realization dawned on Kari. “Holds a key? Where?” They both knew, but neither of them wanted to say.

Julie looked to Sara, and while she appeared more sickly than ever, the blonde’s eyes were half open and she somehow still clung to life. “Did they make us swallow keys as well? Did you see them do that?”

Sara’s only reply was a desperate, inhuman moan.

"Open the lockbox," Kari advised. "Maybe we're jumping to conclusions too soon."

"Maybe," Julie agreed. Taking a deep breath, she spun the numbers on the combination lock to match the computer screen. There was an audible click and she lifted the lid. Inside was a scalpel and another note. Her heart sank at the sight of the scalpel, but she picked up the note and read it aloud.

Two girls are trapped in a room with only two exits. One exit is guarded by a fire-breathing dragon with a taste for human flesh. The other leads to a room composed of glass prisms that reflect sunlight in such a way that anyone who enters is immediately burned alive. How do they escape?

Kari, who didn’t know about the scalpel, appeared thoughtful, welcoming the riddle. “Let me think. Give me a minute.”

Julie decided not to tell her friend about the surgical tool in the lockbox. It already had Julie shaken up enough - there was no sense in distracting Kari from solving their latest puzzle. So while all Julie could think about was what it would feel like to have her belly slit open and her insides fondled, Kari considered their riddle.

After a couple of minutes in silence, Kari posed a guess. “What if they opened the door to the dragon, got him to breathe fire through the room they’re in and melt the glass in the other room?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“Her,” Julie repeated. “The dragon’s a her. Why assume it’s a he?”

“Jesus, Julie. This is hardly the time for a lesson in feminism. Yeah, male shouldn’t be the default sex. I get it. So?”

“So I like the way you’re thinking, but it’s too complicated. Too many things could go wrong, and it doesn’t help us figure out how to get out of here. There’s gotta be a simpler answer.”

Kari thought a bit longer, then posited another solution. “Okay, what about this? One of the girls sacrifices herself in the glass room, cooking herself alive. The other girl then feeds her buddy to the dragon, giving her time to escape.”

“Better. It almost fits. But who’s the sacrifice? How do we know the dragon isn’t intelligent enough to kill the escaping girl and save the one that’s already dead for dessert? The answer to these things is usually more obvious. Like once you get it, there’s no doubt it’s the right answer.”

“Well, I’m still waiting for your guess.”

“I know, I know. Fuck! I can’t fucking think! I need to focus. Okay, let me read it again.” Julie read the note silently this time, carefully contemplating each word. When she got to sunlight, a lightbulb went off. “I got it!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, they escaped at night. Wait until night, then go through the glass room.”

“Of course!“ Kari cried. “You’re the goddam genius.”

“I dunno about that.” Julie offered her best ‘aw shucks’ smile. “I’m not totally sure how that riddle helps us.”

Kari looked at the clock. It was 3:27. “How much time do we have?”

“Like twenty minutes, maybe a little less.”

“Well we can’t wait until night time, that’s for sure.” Kari chewed her plump lower lip.

“Kari…” Julie thought it might be time to tell her friend about the scalpel. It was there because one of them needed to be cut open, and perhaps the riddle was meant to tell them which one.

“Wait!” Kari interrupted. “There’s a light switch.”

Julie held her breath, allowing herself to hope. Maybe the next clue would change everything. Maybe they were being led to incorrect assumptions, only to find the key was not so difficult to acquire after all. Kari hit the switch and the room darkened, the only remaining light emanating from a black light fixed in the center of the ceiling.

Kari went to try the door, but Julie was frozen, her heart sinking. “No. No no no no no No!”

Kari took her hand off the handle after confirming it was still locked and looked at Julie. “Okay, Shia LaBeouf. What’s wrong?”

Julie pointed to the glowing letters on the west wall.

Don’t be sad, girl. Happiness inside you is the key.

“It’s me,” Julie lamented, pointing at the yellow smiley emoji on her half shirt. “I have the key. I’m happiness. I fucking paid thirty-three dollars for you to gut me!”

“Julie…” Kari looked like she had something important to say, but she trailed off.

“Maybe I can shit it out. Maybe it’s far enough along already.” Julie scurried off to the far corner, pulled down her skirt and panties and squatted.

“You’re really gonna take a shit right there?”

“If there’s a chance you don’t have to gut me, fuck yeah I am.” Julie’s exquisitely beautiful face scrunched up and her chiseled jaw clenched as she squeezed her bowels with everything she had.

“Well make it fast, because we’re running out of time.” Kari flipped the lights back on and Julie lost any semblance of privacy, but she didn't really care.

In a strained voice, Julie replied, “Hand me a pair of those surgical gloves and that journal.” Kari obliged, taking a pair of gloves for herself as well, then she moved over to the steel table and released Sara from her binds. The blonde had died at some point while the girls were working out their latest puzzle, so she slumped limply to the floor once the leather straps were removed.

A chill went down Julie's spine as she realized Kari was getting the table ready for her. It was the sensible thing to do - if the key wasn’t in this pile of feces she was creating, they’d need to act quickly - but she still wished Kari had waited a bit longer.

Julie pulled the rubber gloves over her hands, and after pushing as much excrement through her asshole as she possibly could in the space of ninety seconds, she swiped at her crack with some crumpled up paper and got to work digging.

Terds were plucked apart with a feverish and steadily increasing desperation. She was fairly certain she would have felt a key sliding out her butt, so she didn’t really expect to find anything, but the thought of being disemboweled was too terrible to entertain.

“Julie… Julie, we’re running out of time.”

When Julie realized she was picking through the same piece of shit for the third time, she knew what had to be done. “Fuck! FUCK! Alright. Okay.” She pulled off the gloves and started towards the table. "There's a scalpel in that lockbox. Maybe you could use it? Try not to butcher me too badly, and then I can be stitched up when we make it out of here?"

"Yeah, okay. You got it. Let me strap you in first."

Julie stepped onto the outcrop at the foot of the table and stretched her arms up into the restraints, pulling her supple tummy taught. "Okay, Batman," she said, somehow finding the courage to smile. Kari secured her wrists and ankles, then removed the scalpel from the lockbox. Julie's white half shirt was pulled high on her perky young breasts, giving Kari a full view of her tender, white belly. The clock was fast approaching 3:35, and both girls took notice.

“Okay. Do it,” Julie said, biting her lip.

Kari obliged, pressing the tiny blade into her upper abdomen. It dimpled the creamy skin before it was swallowed up, bright red blood welling up in its place. Only the slightest of gasps escaped Julie’s soft lips, and Kari drew the scalpel sideways. It began in the left side of her stomach, close to an inch below her ribs, and ended up almost directly over her navel before it left her flesh.

The cut was not deep enough to penetrate the layers of fat and muscle below the skin, so Kari had to take the blade to her a second time, retracing it through the furrow. When it still wasn’t deep enough, Kari tried a third time. Finally the incision permeated the abdominal wall, and Kari was able to push her fingers through and find a sac-like internal organ, which she assumed was the stomach.

When she began to cut her way into the sac, Julie grunted and tried not to retch. Fingers and sharp metal poked and prodded in places they did not belong, and it was far more unpleasant than she imagined it would be.

“Shit, I can’t fucking see anything,” Kari complained.

“Are you sure that’s not my liver?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to read the Anatomy books. What does a liver look like?”

“I think it’s reddish?”

“Well, maybe this is your liver.”

“Don’t destroy my liver, you cunt.”

“What does a liver even do?”

“It fucking lives.”

“Is the stomach next to the liver?”

“Yes. Behind it, sort of, and to the side.”

Kari dug deeper inside Julie, and Julie made some horrible guttural sounds. “Wait, maybe this is it?”

“Oooo fuck!” Julie suddenly upchucked blood as Kari cut something new open. “Yuh. You’re fucking me… up.” The blue-eyed beauty’s teeth were clinched and more blood sprayed from between them, her lips pulled back in a snarl.

“I’m sorry, Julie, I think I might be onto something. Hang in there.”

“It burns.”

Kari explored the smaller, adjacent sac as thoroughly as possible but found nothing. She glanced back at the clock and saw she had roughly five minutes to find the key. “Julie. I’m going to need to search your intestines, and we don’t have a lot of time.”

“Of course,” Julie croaked. Kari’s gloves and forearms were bright red with gore, and more of Julie’s blood was spattered all over her shirt and face. The gaping gash in Julie’s stomach was leaking fluid like a busted transmission, and the pain was immense. “I think I’m already dying.”

“I’m going to use the knife this time,” Kari explained, already having swapped the scalpel for the larger, less precise cutting tool, and she wasted no time in plunging the blade into Julie’s tummy.

“Oooof,” Julie exhaled heavily as she was stabbed. Kari used both hands as she pulled the knife downward through Julie’s guts, carving the larger girl open. When she was finished a gaping wound that began several inches above and to the left of Julie’s center, curved down below her navel and finished slightly to the right remained.

Pink ropes had already begun to spill out, and Kari grabbed hold of them and tugged. It wasn’t as easy as one might think, but Julie felt something give inside her and a messy tangle of plumbing slopped onto her skirt between her thighs. Kari hastily began unscrambling and cajoling the pink tubing, feeling for that evasive fucking key.

Julie watched it all with wide eyes and strained groans, morbidly enraptured by this spectacular mistreatment of her innards, and it didn’t take long for Kari’s search to become increasingly brutal. As time wore on and she failed to find the key, she gave no consideration to the girl to whom these intestines belonged. She wrenched them this way and that, sometimes slicing right through the viscera instead of working out a particularly troublesome tangle.

“You’re killing me,” Julie murmured through clinched teeth.

“No, I’m trying to save you. I only have a couple minutes to find the… wait. Wait! I think I felt it. I think I’ve got it!” The excitement in Kari’s voice was unmistakeable, and she ripped and sliced and diced until a small gore-covered key rattled onto the floor.

Even though her bowels were in tatters and mostly dangling between her legs, Julie allowed herself to hope. “You did it,” she breathed. “Thank God. Let me loose and let’s get outta here.”

But Kari was already at the door, shoving the key into the lock. “I need to get the door open first,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder as she turned the key. “I…” She stopped speaking and cried out softly as ten wide blades suddenly thrust forth from within the door and ran through her midsection.

They were vertical and lined up in two rows of five, with roughly one and a quarter inches in between them. The middle blade of the lower row was less than a centimeter to the right of her oval shaped belly button. In an instant they rotated forty-five degrees, ensuring the wounds wouldn’t close, rotated back, and retracted, and the edges of the blades were serrated, so when they left Kari’s lithe flesh they took bits of her with them.

It was a roller coaster of emotions, going from the tense and traumatizing race against the clock to the relief of finding the key to the horror of having her guts shredded. Kari turned around and Julie could see the devastation and defeat on her friend's lovely face. "Oh fuck," Kari muttered, clutching her belly and sliding down, her back to the door, until her soft buttocks touched the floor.

"Did we run out of time?" Julie asked, looking at the clock. She could have sworn they had at least a minute or two left.

"It's the wrong key," Kari said miserably, and she hooked a thumb through a loop of her own entrails and pulled. "Happiness inside you. It's not addressed to you. It would have a comma…" she winced as she pulled even more of the viscera from her midriff, "after happiness. It's addressed to me. Happiness inside me. You inside me… is the key."

Julie's eyes widened and her mouth gaped as she understood. "I was supposed to pick through your guts."

Kari nodded, feeling up the several feet of small intestines she now held in her lap.

"Let me loose. I can help."

"There's no time," Kari answered. In truth, there was no time for even Kari to somehow find and extract the key from her own insides, then make an escape, and they both knew it. The clock had already moved beyond 4:45, but neither of them were ready to face that fact.

Not twenty seconds passed, with Kari pulling more and more of her bowels from her belly, before the intercom sounded their doom. “Your time is up. You have failed to escape within the allotted sixty minute window. You will now be locked in this room until you are no longer living.” They heard the dead bolts engaging inside the door as those chilling words filled the air. “Thank you for participating in the first ever life and death escape room. We hope you enjoyed the experience.”

“Best thirty-three bucks I ever spent,” Julie said with a smirk. When Kari gave her a quizzical look, she added. “What? A wise-ass bitch once told me you hafta keep your sense of humor in a time of crisis.”

Kari tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. Instead she smiled sadly and answered, “You’re right. I’m going to write a rave review on Yelp.”

“Maybe if you tell them that, they’ll let us out.”

“Oh, Julie. I wanna go home.” Two large tears rolled slowly down Kari’s smooth red cheeks.

“Me too.” Julie looked down at the mess that had been made of her belly and sighed. “The escape room queen, killed by a comma.”

“Lack of a comma,” Kari corrected her.

“You knew the whole time. You were gonna tell me… but you didn’t.”

“I saw what you did to Sara. I didn’t want you to do that to me.”

“Neither did I,” Julie agreed.

“I was hoping you were right… and I was wrong. I’m so sorry, Julie.” More tears reddened Kari’s hazel eyes.

“It doesn’t matter.” Nothing matters anymore. Julie almost said that second sentence out loud, but decided to keep it to herself.

“Oh, it hurts so bad. Why target our stomachs?”

“They’re probably perverts. Just waiting for a couple of cute girls to come in so they could gut them.”

They both bled in silence for the next several minutes, tortured by thoughts of their rapidly approaching mortality. They were at that stage in life where death was something that always happened to other people, and they didn’t really believe it could ever happen to them. At least until now.

“Julie, do you think there’s a heaven?”

Julie gave her pal a pensive look, “I fucking hope there is.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t know, Kari. I just… don’t know.” What Julie wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say, was deep down she didn’t believe. No matter how badly she wanted to.

“What if this is really it? Like this is all we get?”

“That would fucking suck,” Julie agreed.

“I’m so scared, Julie.” Kari’s lush lower lip was trembling, and her perfect, creamy skin had gone ghostly pale and waxy. She was sitting in a huge pool of blood that was growing at a grim rate.

Julie, who was actually terrified herself, didn’t know how to comfort her friend, so she tried to make light of the situation. “Yeah, no shit you’re scared. We’re fucking dying.” It was meant to be funny, but it came across as mean-spirited, and it was clear Kari didn’t appreciate the dark humor. Incidentally, it was the last thing she ever said to her friend.

“Julie… Jooo…” Kari’s big beautiful eyes bulged in her skull, and Julie watched all the terror and panic and desolation fade away, leaving a blank and lifeless stare. Kari was gone, and only a corpse remained.

Julie held on for another six endless minutes, left to endure the tortuous agony in her belly and the horror of her fading young life all by herself. Then she too faded away into oblivion.