The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner Book 2) (5)
CHAPTER
5
Something
softened in Thomas. This kid wasn’t lying—he could just tell. The look of horror
that had taken hold of Aris was one he knew well. Thomas had felt it himself
and had seen it on too many other faces. He knew exactly what kind of terrible
memories made someone look like that. He also knew that Aris had no clue what
had happened to Teresa.
“Maybe
you should sit down,” Thomas said. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”
“What
do you mean?” Aris asked. “Who are you guys? Where’d you come from?”
Thomas
let out a slight laugh. “The Maze. The Grievers. WICKED. You name it.” So much
had happened, where could he start? Not to mention that worry over Teresa was
making his head spin, making him want to run out of the room and search for her
immediately, but he stayed.
“You’re
lying,” Aris said, his voice having dropped to a whisper, his face now a full
shade paler.
“No,
we’re not,” Newt responded. “Tommy’s right. We need to talk. Sounds like we’ve
come from similar places.”
“Who’s
that guy?”
Thomas
turned around to see that Minho had returned, a pack of Gladers standing behind
him on the other side of the doorway. Their faces were scrunched up in disgust
at the smell out there, their eyes still full of the terror of seeing what
filled the room just behind them.
“Minho,
meet Aris,” Thomas said, taking a step to the side and gesturing toward the other
boy. “Aris, meet Minho.”
Minho
stuttered out a few unintelligible words, as if he couldn’t quite decide where
to start.
“Look,”
Newt said. “Let’s take down these top beds and move them around the room. Then
we can all sit and figure out what’s bloody going on.”
Thomas
shook his head. “No. First, we need to go find Teresa. She must be in some
other room.”
“Isn’t
one,” Minho said.
“What
do you mean?”
“I
just checked this whole place out. There’s the big common area, this room, our
dorm room, and some seriously shucked doors that lead outside—where we came in
from the bus yesterday. Locked and chained from the inside. Doesn’t make
any sense, but I don’t see any other doors or exits.”
Thomas
shook his head in confusion. It felt like a million spiders had just spun
cobwebs through his brain. “But … what about last night? Where’d the food come
from? Didn’t anyone notice other rooms, a kitchen, anything?” He looked around,
hoping for an answer, but no one said a word.
“Maybe
there’s a hidden door,” Newt finally said. “Look, we can only do one thing at a
time. We need to—”
“No!”
Thomas shouted. “We’ve got all day to talk to this Aris guy. The label by the
door said Teresa should be here somewhere—we need to find her!”
Without
waiting for a response, he headed for the door back to the common area, pushing
his way past boys until he was through. The smell hit him as if a bucket of raw
sewage had been spilled over his head. The bloated and purple bodies hung like
carcasses of game set out by hunters to dry. Their lifeless eyes stared back at
him.
A
familiar, sickening tickle of revulsion filled his stomach and triggered his
gag reflex. Closing his eyes for a second, he willed his insides to settle.
When they finally did, he began his search for some sign of Teresa, concentrating
with all his might on not looking at the dead people.
But
then a horrible thought struck him. What if she …
He
ran through the room, searching the faces of the bodies. None of them was her.
Relief dissolved the fleeting moment of panic, and he focused on the room
itself.
The
walls surrounding the common area were as plain as could be; smooth plaster
painted white, no decoration of any kind. And for some reason, no windows. He walked
quickly around its entire circumference, running his left hand along the wall
as he did so. He came to the door to the boys’ dorm room, went past it, then
made it to the big entrance through which they’d come the day before. There had
been a torrential downpour at the time, which seemed impossible now,
considering the bright sun he’d seen shining behind the crazy man earlier.
The
entrance—or exit—consisted of two large steel doors, their surfaces a shiny
silver. And just like Minho said, a massive chain—with links a full inch
thick—had been threaded through the handles on the doors and pulled tight, two
big key locks snapped shut to keep it that way. Thomas reached out and pulled on
the chains to check their strength. The metal felt cool under his hands, and it
didn’t give at all.
He
expected thumps from the other side—Cranks trying to get in just as they were
at the windows in the dorm room. But the room remained silent. The only sounds
were muted and coming from the two dorms—distant shouts and screams from the
Cranks and murmurs of conversation from the Gladers.
Frustrated,
Thomas continued his trek along the walls until he made it back to the room
that was supposed to be Teresa’s. Nothing, not even a crack or seam to
indicate another exit. The large room wasn’t even a square—it was a big oval,
round and cornerless.
He
was completely perplexed. He thought back to the night before, when they’d all
sat there and eaten pizza like the starved people they’d been. Surely they’d
seen other doors, a kitchen, something. But the more he thought about it, the
more he tried to picture what things had looked like, the fuzzier it became. An
alarm went off in his head—their brains had been tinkered with before. Had it
happened again? Had their memories been altered or wiped?
And
what had happened to Teresa?
Desperate,
he thought about crawling across the floor to look for a trapdoor or
something—some clue to what had happened. But he couldn’t spend another minute
with all those rotting bodies. The only thing left was the new kid. He sighed
and turned back to the small room where they’d found him. Aris had to know
something that would help.
Just
as Newt had ordered, the top beds had been unhooked from the lower ones and
placed around the room against the walls, creating enough space for the
nineteen other Gladers and Aris to sit in a circle, everyone facing each other.
When
Minho saw Thomas, he patted an empty spot next to him. “Told ya, dude. Have a
seat and let’s talk. We waited on you. But close that shuck door as much as you
can first—smells worse than Gally’s rotting feet out there.”
Without
responding, Thomas pulled the door shut, then walked over and sat down. He
wanted to sink his head into his hands, but he didn’t. Nothing indicated for
sure that any kind of danger threatened Teresa. Something weird was going on,
but there could be a million explanations, and plenty of them included her being
okay.
Newt
was one bed to the right, sitting so far forward that just the edge of his butt
rested on the mattress. “All right, let’s get started on the bloody
storytellin’ so we can get to the real problem—finding something to eat.”
Right
on cue, Thomas felt a hunger pang, heard his stomach growl. That problem hadn’t
even occurred to him yet. Water would be fine—they had the bathrooms—but there
was no sign of food anywhere.
“Good
that,” Minho said. “Talk, Aris. Tell us everything.”
The
new boy was directly across the room from Thomas—the Gladers sitting to each
side of the stranger had scooted to the far ends of the bed. Aris shook his
head. “No way. You guys go first.”
“Yeah?”
Minho responded. “How about we all just take turns beating the living klunk out
of your shuck face? Then we’ll ask you to talk again.”
“Minho,”
Newt said sternly. “There’s no reason—”
Minho
pointed sharply at Aris. “Please, dude. For all we know this shank could be one
of the Creators. Somebody from WICKED, here to spy on us. He could’ve killed
those people out there—he’s the only one we don’t know and the doors and
windows are locked! I’m sick of him acting all snooty when we’ve got twenty
guys to his one. He should talk first.”
Thomas
groaned on the inside. One thing he knew was that the kid would never open up
if Minho terrified him.
Newt
sighed and looked over at Aris. “He’s got a point. Just tell us what you meant
about coming from the buggin’ Maze. That’s where we escaped from, and we
obviously haven’t met you.”
Aris
rubbed his eyes, then met Newt’s gaze. “Fine, listen. I was thrown into this
gigantic maze made out of huge stone walls—but before that my memory was
erased. I couldn’t remember anything about my life from before. I just knew my
name. I lived there with a bunch of girls. There must’ve been fifty of them,
and I was the only boy. We escaped a few days ago—the people who helped kept us
in a big gym for a few days, then moved me here last night—but no one explained
anything. What’s this stuff about you being in a maze, too?”
Thomas
barely heard the last few words of what Aris had said over the sounds of
surprise coming from the other Gladers. Confusion swirled in his brain. Aris
had announced what he’d been through as simply and quickly as describing a trip
to the beach. But it seemed crazy. Monumental, if true. Luckily someone voiced
exactly what Thomas was trying to sort out in his mind.
“Wait
a minute,” Newt said. “You lived in a big maze, on a farm, where walls closed
every night? Just you and a few dozen girls? Were there creatures called
Grievers? Were you the last one to arrive? And did everything go buggin’ nuts
when you did? Did you come in a coma? With a note that said you were the last
one ever?”
“Whoa,
whoa, whoa,” Aris was saying even before Newt had finished. “How do you know
all this? How …”
“It’s
the same shuck experiment,” Minho said, the earlier belligerence gone from his
voice. “Or same … whatever. But they had all girls and one boy, we had all boys
and one girl. WICKED must’ve built two of those mazes, run two different
tests!”
Thomas’s
line of thinking had already accepted that. He finally settled himself enough
to speak. He looked at Aris. “Did they call you the Trigger?”
Aris
nodded, obviously as perplexed as anyone else in the room.
“And
could you …,” Thomas began, but hesitated. He felt like every time he brought
this up, he was admitting to the world that he was crazy. “Could you speak to
one of those girls inside your mind? Ya know, like telepathically?”
Aris’s
eyes widened, staring deeply at Thomas as if he’d understood a dark secret that
only someone else who shared it could understand.
Can
you hear me?
The
phrase appeared so clearly inside Thomas’s mind that at first he thought Aris
had spoken aloud.
But
no—his lips hadn’t moved.
Can
you hear me? the
boy repeated.
Thomas
hesitated, swallowed. Yes.
They
killed her,
Aris said back to him. They killed my best friend.
0 comments:
Post a Comment