Winning Vote:
Option 3 – Try to ambush whomever's coming.

As the scraping sound draws closer, you look around for anything to us as an improvised weapon, but nothing useful is to be found. The rod that the curtain hangs from is heavily bolted to the wall. The curtain itself hangs from the rod with iron rings too thick to break. Even the body, if you could even bring yourself to use it as a club, looks solidly bound by the two chains.

A thought occurs to you and it draws your gaze down to your hands which you unknowingly clenched into fists. Seeing those twin arrays of whitened knuckles, it occurs to you that there are two weapons left at your disposal: treachery and a willingness to kick people in the balls. With this realization, you hastily grab your shoe from the doorway and pull it back on, lacing it extra tight.

You step behind the door to gain that extra few seconds of surprise, and you wait. The intensity of the sound grows more intense and complex as it nears. In addition to the hcheh hcheh of something heavy being pulled along a gritty floor, a pair of repeated thwap thwap noises has just now become noticeable. It almost sounds like the footfalls of—

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” is briefly heard before

*whump!*

and the door flies open faster than you can track. There is barely a moment to for you to recognize how screwed you are before your mind drifts in unconsciousness.

Winning Vote:
Option 2 – Follow the peppermints.

Moving slowly forward on your hands and knees, you grope blindly in the dark for each peppermint. Greedily, you stuff the first dozen into your mouth and the rest into your pockets. A low rumble signals that your stomach demands more snackrifices, but there's only so much space in your mouth with those pesky teeth taking up all that room—unless...

Oh, no. There's nothing there. No wrapper, no peppermint, just a stickiness to the floor and a foul odor coming from up ahead. You tilt your head up towards the smell and see a thin slice of hope: a thin, sliver of light glows out from underneath a door.

Standing up carefully lest the ceilings are short here as well, you begin to move through the darkness, getting closer and closer to the smell. Thankful to just have a goal, you run as fast as you can without slipping and falling, which only grows more difficult as the door draws closer. As your criminally under-exercised lungs breath deep, the unknown acrid smell burns fiercely into your nostrils like a soup of copper and salt.

You stop at the door, panting fiercely. Leaning against the door for a moment of respite, you find that the door is on swinging hinges and is both unable and unwilling to support your weight. Tumbling into what is probably only a softly lit room, your eyes are blinded by the contrast from the passageway. A sharp edge catches your pant leg and tearing off your left shoe as you fall into the room. You cry out in shock, launching precious peppermints onto the glistening red floor.

It isn't until your eyes have adjusted to the new light that you can see the source of the floor's sheen. Winding its way slowly across the ground is a small red rivulet. Tracing the liquid back, it flows silently down a naked pair of bruised and battered female legs. Only the bottom half of the woman's body can be seen; a curtain hides the rest.

“Hey.” you whisper carefully, not knowing if who did this is still around. “Are you okay?”

The curtain is heavy and has a sheen of its own, though not from the blood. The fabric is a dark blue with a diamond pattern and has been plasticized to prevent staining. You grab it by the edge and pull it away, ready to be declared a hero.

Behind the curtain is nothing but a brick wall with the text “For Fun” written sloppily in blood. Warily looking down, your eyes are drawn to an oddly shaped white stump sitting amidst an avoid of red and brown. It only takes you a moment to realize that the stump is what's left of the woman's spine and that a pair of chains are the only things holding the legs upright.

“My god...” you whisper, being quiet not out of fear but of horror.

You vomit profusely across the torso-less body, dropping to your knees and turning your head away in disgust. Your eyes don't close quite fast enough, however, and, through the door propped open by your orphaned shoe, you catch a glimpse of a pair of female eyes gleaming at you over the edge of a trashcan. Glazed over, the eyes only have a semblance of life because of the light shining past the door. The woman's hair frames her face, locked permanently into a tight embrace by streaks of fresh blood. Some of this blood had been collected and used to write “For the Rats” across the trashcan.

You're snapped back to attention by a scraping sound coming from something heavy being drug down the passageway that you just came down. There appears to be only the one exit from the room, so you're left with very few options of what to do.