The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner Book 2) (9)
CHAPTER
9
When
he woke up, his head felt like several chunks of ice had been hammered through
his ears and into his brain. Wincing, he reached up to rub his eyes and was hit
by a wave of nausea that sent the room tilting around him. Then he remembered
the terrible things Teresa had said, then the short dream, and misery engulfed
him. Who had those people been? Was it real? What had they meant when they’d
said those awful things about his brain?
“Glad
to see you still know how to take a nap.”
Thomas
peeked through a squint and saw Newt standing next to his bed, staring down at
him.
“How
long’s it been?” Thomas asked, forcing thoughts of Teresa and the
dream—memory?—into a dark corner of his mind to agonize over later.
Newt
looked at his watch. “Couple hours. When people noticed you lie down, it
actually kind of relaxed everyone. Not much we can do but sit and wait for
something new to happen. There’s no way out of this place.”
Thomas
tried not to groan as he scooted himself into a sitting position, his back
against the wall at the head of his bed. “Do we even have any food?”
“No.
But I’m pretty sure these people wouldn’t go through all this trouble to bring
us here, trick us or whatever they’ve done, just to let us buggin’ starve to
death. Something will happen. Reminds me of when they sent the first group of
us to the Glade. The initial group of me and Alby and Minho and some others. The
original Gladers.” He said that last part with a not-so-subtle burst of sarcasm.
Thomas
was intrigued, surprised he’d never before dug into what that had been like.
“How does this remind you of that?”
Newt’s
gaze was focused on the brick wall outside the closest window. “We all woke up
in the middle of the day, lying on the ground around the doors to the Box. It
was closed. Our memories had been wiped, just like yours when you came. You’d
be surprised at how quickly we pulled ourselves together and quit panicking.
There were about thirty of us. Obviously, we had no bloody clue what had
happened, how we’d gotten there, what we were supposed to do. And we were
terrified, disoriented. But since we were all in the same crappy situation, we
organized ourselves and figured out the place. Had the full farm running within
days, everybody with their own job.”
Thomas
was relieved that the pain in his skull had diminished. And he was intrigued to
hear about the start of the Glade—the scattered pieces of the puzzle brought
back by the Changing weren’t nearly enough to form solid memories. “Did the
Creators have everything in place already? Crops, animals, all that?”
Newt
nodded, still staring at the bricked-up window. “Yeah, but it took a ton of
work to get it going nice and smooth. A lot of trial and error before we
accomplished anything.”
“So
… how does this remind you of that?” Thomas asked again.
Finally,
Newt looked at him. “I guess back then we all just had a sense that there was
obviously a purpose to us having been sent there. If someone had wanted
to kill us, why wouldn’t they have just killed us? Why would they send us to a
huge place with a house and a barn and animals? And because we had no other
choice, we accepted it and started working and exploring.”
“But
we’re already done exploring here,” Thomas countered. “No animals, no food, no
Maze.”
“Yeah,
but come on. It’s the same concept. We’re obviously here for a buggin’ purpose.
We’ll figure it out eventually.”
“If
we don’t starve first.”
Newt
pointed at the bathroom. “We’ve got plenty of water, so it’ll be at least a few
days before we drop dead. Something will happen.”
Deep
down Thomas believed it, too, and was only arguing to solidify it in his own
mind. “But what about all those dead people we saw? Maybe they rescued us for
real, got killed, and now we’re screwed. Maybe we were supposed to do
something, but now it’s all been messed up and we’ve been left here to die.”
Newt
burst out laughing. “You’re one depressing piece of klunk, slinthead. Nah, with
all those corpses magically disappearing and the brick walls, I’d say this is
something more like the Maze. Weird and impossible to explain. The latest and
greatest mystery. Maybe our next test, who knows. Whatever’s going on, we’ll
have a chance, just like we did in the bloody Maze. I guarantee it.”
“Yeah,”
Thomas murmured, wondering if he should share what he’d dreamed about. Deciding
to save it for later, he said, “Hope you’re right. As long as no Grievers
suddenly show up, we’ll be good.”
Newt
was already shaking his head by the time Thomas finished. “Please, man. Careful
what you buggin’ wish for. Maybe they’ll send something worse.”
The
image of Teresa popped into Thomas’s mind just then, and he lost all desire to
talk. “Who’s the cheerful one now?” he forced himself to say.
“You
got me,” Newt replied, then stood up. “Guess I’ll go bug somebody else till the
excitement begins, which better be bloody soon. I’m hungry.”
“Careful
what you wish for.”
“Good
that.”
Newt
walked away, and Thomas scooted down to lie on his back, staring at the bottom
of the bunk above him. He closed his eyes after a while, but when he saw Teresa’s
face in the darkness of his thoughts, he opened them right up again. If he was
going to get through this, he’d have to try to forget about her for now.
Hunger.
It’s
like an animal trapped inside you , Thomas thought. After three full days
of not eating, it felt like a vicious, gnawing, dull-clawed animal was trying
to burrow its way out of his stomach. He felt it every second of every minute
of every hour. He drank water as often as possible from the sinks in the bathroom,
but it did nothing to drive the beast away. If anything, it felt like he was making
the thing stronger so it could inflict more misery within.
The
others felt it, too, even if most of them kept their complaints to themselves.
Thomas watched as they walked around, heads hung low, jaws slack, as if every
step burned a thousand calories. People licked their lips a lot. They grabbed
at their stomachs, pushed on them, as if trying to calm that gnawing beast.
Unless they were going to the bathroom to use it or to get a drink, the Gladers
didn’t move at all. Like Thomas, they just lay there on the bunk beds, limp.
Skin pale, eyes sunken.
Thomas
felt all this like a festering disease, and seeing the others only made it
worse, a stark reminder that this wasn’t something he could just ignore. That
it was real, and death waited just around the corner.
Listless
sleep. Bathroom. Water. Trudge back to bed. Listless sleep—without any more of
the memorydreams he’d experienced. It became a horrendous cycle, broken up only
by thoughts of Teresa, her harsh words to him the only thing that lightened the
prospect of death, even if only a little. She’d been the only thing he could
grasp for hope after the Maze and Chuck’s death. And now she was gone, there
was no food, and three long days had passed.
Hunger.
Misery.
He’d
quit bothering to look at his watch—it only made time drag and reminded his
body how long it’d been since he’d eaten—but he thought it was roughly
midafternoon of the third day when a humming sound abruptly began from the
common area.
He
stared at the door leading out there, knew he should get up and go check it
out. But his mind had already been slipping into another one of those hazy
half-naps, the world around him foggy.
Maybe
he’d imagined it. But then he heard it again.
He
told himself to get up.
He
fell asleep instead.
“Thomas.”
It
was Minho’s voice. Weak, but stronger than it had been the last time he’d heard
it.
“Thomas.
Dude, wake up.”
Thomas
opened his eyes, amazed he’d survived another nap without dying. Things were
blurry for a second, and at first he didn’t believe that what he thought was
just a few inches from his face was real. But then its image sharpened, and the
red roundness of it, with flecks of green scattered across its shiny surface,
made him feel like he was looking on heaven itself.
An
apple.
“Where’d
you …” He didn’t bother to finish, those two words alone sapping his strength.
“Just
eat it,” Minho said, followed by a wet crunch.
Thomas
glanced up to see his friend munching on his own apple. Then, drawing the last
remnants of energy from somewhere deep inside himself, he pushed himself up
onto an elbow and grabbed the fruit lying on the bed. He lifted it to his mouth
and took a small bite. The burst of flavor and juice was a glorious thing.
Moaning,
he attacked the rest of it and had eaten down to its stumpy core before Minho
had even finished his—despite the head start.
“Slim
yourself nice and calm,” Minho said. “Eat like that and you’ll just throw it
right back up. Here’s another one—try slowing down this time.”
He
handed a second apple to Thomas, who took it without saying thank you and
chomped a big bite. As he chewed, resolving to swallow before stuffing another
chunk in his mouth, he realized he could actually feel the first traces of
energy trickling through his body.
“This
is so good,” he mumbled. “This is so shuckin’ good.”
“You
still sound like an idiot when you use Glader words,” Minho responded before
taking another bite of his apple.
Thomas
ignored him. “Where’d these come from?”
Minho
hesitated in the middle of chewing, then resumed. “Found them out in the common
room. Along with … something else. Shanks who found it all claim they’d just looked
a few minutes earlier and nothing had been there, but whatever, I don’t care.”
Thomas
swung his legs off the bed and sat up. “What else did they find?”
Minho
took a bite, then nodded toward the door. “Go look for yourself.”
Thomas
rolled his eyes and slowly stood up. The miserable weakness was still there,
like most of his insides had been sucked right out and all he had left were a
few bones and tendons to hold himself erect. But he steadied, feeling even
after a few seconds that he was already better than the last time he’d made the
long, lifeless trek to the bathroom.
Once
he thought he had his balance, he walked over to the door and entered the
common area. Only three days before, the room had been filled with dead
bodies—now it was crowded with Gladers picking things off a big pile of food
that had seemingly been dumped there without any order. Fruit, vegetables, small
packages.
But
he’d barely registered this when an even more bizarre sight on the far side of
the room caught his attention. He reached out to steady himself on the wall
behind him.
A
large wooden desk had been placed opposite the door to the other dorm room.
Behind
the desk, a thin man in a white suit sat in a chair, his feet propped up and
crossed at the ankles. The man was reading a book.
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