A/N: Another warning to the maggot haters... there is an appearance! It also has body parts... So if you are squeamish please don't read!
May, Simmons, Skye and Ward trudged their way through the woods guided by the lit arrows, only pausing once to detangle Skye from a bush that had snagged in her clothes.
"Do you think he made it?" Simmons asked, concerned, breaking the silence
"I think he will have given it the best that he could." May reassured her.
"That's a no then." Skye pointed out, realising May answered the question without actually answering it.
"I don't think we should focus on the dogs. I think we should focus on these bloody sheets we are about to walk into." Ward said, refocusing their attention to the task in hand.
The sheets were hung on what appeared to be multiple washing lines and were covered in what looked like real blood. There was a large arrow indicating that they had to make their way through them.
"It's some sort of maze" May said as she and Ward led the other two through the sheets.
After navigating around the sheets to avoid going through them they came to a clearing and face to face with a wall built in a grid of washing machines. These were covered in blood and slime and other things that they seriously didn't want to know what they were.
To the side there was a separate washing line with seven bloodied white shirts hung up on it. As a group they inspected these shirts and found a dating card attached to each one with a person's picture, a quote and vital statistics on them. They found an eighth peg that had no shirt, and the quote on the card read 'there is only one key to my heart'.
"There is only one key to my heart." Skye said, looking at Ward, wondering if he understood it better.
Suddenly all of the washing machines sprung into life and started spinning very, very fast, making everyone jump.
Skye screamed and grabbed hold of Ward's hand.
The washing machines stopped as suddenly as they had started.
But most alarmingly, the gong went to indicate the gate was moving.
Ward looked at May and together they approached the washing machines. They climbed to the top row and opened them, stretching to reach the contents. Feeling clothes they pulled them out and threw them to the ground where Simmons and Skye could search through them for the key.
The smell was horrendous.
As Ward pulled the clothes out of one washer he ended up pulling a shirt out and covering himself in maggots. Taking a deep breath he emptied the washer.
May and Ward continued to empty them one by one until they got to the floor.
"There is no key!" Skye screamed, frustrated and panicky.
"Check the tag again." May ordered, searching through the pile of clothes, maggots and body parts.
Simmons went back to the tag that said 'there is only one key to my heart' and reread it.
"Wait. It says there is only one key inside of my heart."
The four of them looked at each other before amending their search for an allusive heart.
"Gross! That's a liver!" Skye squealed as she picked up one of the body parts and promptly dropping it.
"I have it. I have the heart." yelled Ward.
"The key should be inside it." Simmons said.
Knowing that, as he found it, he would be the one who had to open it, Ward tore through the muscle and found the end of the key. Simmons pulled on it.
"We have the key!" She yelled, earning a crackle from the tannoy.
"Congratulations. You have, yet again, thwarted my test. You have a 57 metre head start. Choose wisely."
Knowing that they wasted time by not reading the card properly Ward and May looked at each other. They knew one of them should run. 57 meters was not very far. There was a good chance that they would get a better head start on the next challenge if they found all of the details before the gong.
"I guess it's my turn." Simmons was saying.
"Not necessarily. These two are looking at each other." Skye said to her.
"There is a good chance we get a better head start on the next task if we just read the clues properly, so Ward or I should run" May explained.
"You are out of time. Who is going to run against the dogs?"
"I am." May said before anyone could argue.
She would have let Ward go so he stood a chance of getting out of his still wet clothes, but she had seen Skye jump for his hand when she got scared. The only way to get her through this was for him to stay in the game, and as one of them needed to run this she would do it.
"Please follow the red arrows, the rest of you the black."