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Escape, the voice tells me. Run away.
“Close your eyes, this will only take a second.” I willingly close my eyes because I don’t know what else to do. Maybe he will help me escape.
Before I have time to react; I feel something jab into my arm and everything goes silent.
* * *
My ears are ringing with a deafening sound. What just happened to me? I slowly open my eyes and see Albert leaning over me. I am lying on the cold, hard ground. “Get off-” I look at the empty syringe in Albert’s hand. “What did you do to me?” I stand up and back away from him cautiously.
“It helps with the regeneration of memories. You freaked out and forgot everything. You didn’t know who Jasper was or who I was. This helps you remember.” He tells me.
I feel like he is expecting a thank you, but I can’t bring myself to do it because he made me like this. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be having these episodes. But whatever happened, I don’t want to think about it, so I change the subject. “Do you just carry those things around in your pocket all the time?
“Well, I wouldn’t want to lose you,” I don’t understand if he means mentally or physically, but I guess by ‘lose’, he means whatever happened between me seeing the elevator and me now, lying on the floor.
“Let’s go get Jasper and his friend,” I say. The quicker we go and save them, the quicker we can get out of here and I might be able to feel sane again. I don’t remember anything after saying that we are going to take the elevator, and maybe I don’t want to. It scares me; how quickly I can be triggered into forgetting everything. The scariest part is, this could have happened so many times before, and no one would even know. They would just assume I am acting as myself, and I wouldn’t even remember if anything happened.
“Let’s take the stairs,” Albert opens a door and begins to stride up the stairs. Wise decision, I tell him internally. He must surely know about my hatred for elevators.
After many flights of stairs, Albert stops and opens a door. We walk out into another hallway, everything drenched in white as if it had never seen a speck of dust in its life. There were people here though, lots of them. Walking places, talking in huddles, and generally looking important. All of them are wearing the same black suit attire and frowning expressions on their faces as the people I saw before.
As Albert begins to walk among them, the people stop and greet him, saying a simple ‘hello’ and a ‘how are you?’ He walks up to a door and just before he opens it, a lady throws it open and greets us with a smile bigger than my entire face.
“Hello, darling people.” She shouts over the ringing that continues to pound in my ears. “Come in!” She gestures inside the door. Albert follows without hesitation, and I follow behind him.
Inside is a room full of computers and overwhelming flashing lights. I begin to feel nauseous, but quickly snap out of it when I remember what happened last time. Right now, I just need to keep my cover. Head low and no more mistakes. We can’t afford to have me triggered and freak out again. One side of the room is completely glass. I assume that the glass is one-sided, and the people can’t see us.
I follow Albert to the glass and focus on the six people on the other side. The closer I get, the more in focus the people become and suddenly I am hypnotised by them until my face bumps into the window. I KNOW those people behind there.
I KNOW the blonde girl with the short skirt; the tall boy with the dirty blue shirt; the bleached haired boy with the cross necklace; the boy in the leather jacket. Aubrey. Mason. Crusoe. Hayden. My gang. My family.
The family I was supposed to protect from the thing that they are trapped in right now.
I look past them and find Jasper, a pencil tucked carelessly behind his ear. Next to him is a tall boy with an afro and denim jacket who I assume is Tyler. I follow Jasper’s gaze, which lands squarely on Hayden. Hayden’s eyes glare back with the same intensity, and I am filled with dread. Hayden is mad. I can tell easily from the way that his eyebrows are scrunched, and he is placing his hand on the back pocket of his jeans, as if prepared to pull out his gun.
I don’t understand how I know all this, but by seeing the gang here, all this new information comes to me like I’ve known it my whole life.
“So, this is your test Cuffs?” I ask, biting back the rage that is creeping rapidly up my spine.
“Oh yes, I wanted to do an experiment to see how a group of people, mixed groups of Civilised and Ransacked, would react with each other when they get put in a room and forced to face each other’s fears.” The lady explains, tapping some buttons on a large blue screen next to her. “And, as you can tell,” she gestures to Crusoe, who is pulling Hayden away from Jasper by his shoulders, “It is going splendidly.” She claps her hands together as if it is the most exciting thing in the world.
“And you find pleasure in watching this?” I ask.
“Absolutely!” She replies as if it is the most normal thing in the world. I don’t know what is happening behind the glass, but I can see the fear on my friends’ faces, and I hate the lady next to me for it. “This is revolutionary,” she smiles kindly like she knows my thoughts. “Alright, next fear.” She clicks a few more buttons and I see a girl pop up into the room. She is sitting on a chair, and her face is blurred out, but the long brown hair pulled into a long braid down her back is unmistakable. I recognise her instantly. The girl is me.
Chapter 17 - Jasper Cunningham
The end of the world begins the moment I see her: The girl in the chair that I know I need to kill. I look around me and see the shocked faces of everyone besides me. The face is blurred, but the small figure and the long brown hair is enough to make everyone aware of who it is.
I look towards Hayden and notice that his hands are clenched in tight fists. He has his eyes solely focused on the girl in the chair, processing everything that is going on, his breathing growing eerily shallow.
I knew we’d get to this point eventually. After suffering through Mason’s fear of tight spaces and Crusoe’s fear of his mother, we went through Aubrey’s fear of criticism, by having walls of mirrors surrounding us while people mocked our every move. Then we had Tyler’s fear of clocks.
When I first heard the chime of the clocks ringing and saw him freeze up, I almost wanted to laugh. It would be just like Tyler to fear something as simple as a clock. But then I realised that maybe that’s why he is so impulsive, why he takes risks without thinking of the consequences. Because he is scared of running out of time. That thought didn’t make me want to laugh anymore.
When we finished those two, I knew it was me coming next. It was out of me or Hayden, and the moment I saw Emerson’s face, I knew that I was in trouble.
The gang takes a moment to look at Emerson, then looks between me and Hayden curiously. Hayden is too caught up on the girl in the chair to even notice their looks. “I have had to do this before.” I explain hurriedly, hoping to subdue some of his anger by my explanation. “Not The Cuffs exactly. But my father occasionally puts me in these training programs to help strengthen me mentally.”
