I awaken to the sound of rushing water, and screams.
I try to turn my head, but find that I am unable.
“What the- What’s going on? Who’s there?” I murmur groggily, my head pounding with total disorientation.
“HELP!” A woman screams just above me. I start in surprise, and try to look at her.
“PLEASE!” comes another voice, this time from below.
All around me, I realise, there is a great and growing chorus of voices. Of prayers. Screams. Anger.
And fear.
I try to move for the third time, it’s difficult to describe... something’s holding me in place… I blink rapidly as water pours across my face from above and splashes into my eyes. I become aware of the fact that I am being held on my side, in a laying-down position. I blink and grunt and force away the water, opening my eyes, craning my neck and squinting to get a look at my surroundings.
…Well, a part of me wishes that I didn’t. What I see is a scene so surreal that I will never, ever forget it, as much as I will try. Forever will it haunt my nightmares, until the day of my death.
Allow me to do my best to explain to you what I can see. For you to immerse yourself in this environment, for you to become trapped here with me, and with these others.
I find myself staring up into an enormous cylinder, from the inside. Five or so metres in diameter. Like a tunnel. I am being held in the inner walls of this cylinder, and I am one of many.
The only part of me that is visible is my head. The rest of my body is hidden beyond the mysterious wall of the cylinder. It’s the same story for everyone else here. For the dozens upon dozens of screaming, panicked heads. We are stacked in rows, and our heads form rings that ascend, and descend in both directions. I try to turn to my left, and to my right, and I have some limited success. There are, I think, about seven other people on my layer. All I can see are their heads. Their faces are streaked with coloured paint. Three of these seven remain asleep, as I was myself just moments ago, but the rest are all awake, and terrified. Screaming.
Water rushes down from above, and this ‘above’ carries way up into shifting shadows, interspersed with artificial, grainy light. There are eight ‘heads’ on each layer of the cylinder, and they go up and up and up towards these shadows… It makes no sense, what I am seeing, and yet, I do not know how else to describe it.
The primary sounds of the environment are three.
The chorus of the screams.
The rushing, pouring, torrential splashing of the water,
And an unknown mix of mechanisms and generators unseen. A whirr, a hum, a grinding…
My heart pounds in my chest. I try to raise my arms, but I cannot. I try to struggle, to move my body from left to right, but I am held tight. I have never been particularly claustrophobic, but I can feel the panic settling in now. I am stuck here, spluttering in the streams that fall from above.
There is a woman on my row, to my left. She has orange paint streaked across her face, and she awakens, now. She looks at me bleary-eyed, groaning, and is then shocked brutally into the moment as the cylinder suddenly shakes.
Terror ripples up through the ranks.
I squirm, and am able to shoot a quick look below me.
There are four rows of people below us. Four rows, each with eight heads.
And then…
…Below the final row, there is water.
Gushing, frothing, foamy water, and the unseen threat of submerged gears and pistons.
The cylinder grinds… And to my horror, it starts to move.
…It starts to lower its inhabitants down, down towards the water below.
There is nothing I can do but watch in shock and anguish as the lowermost row of eight heads… Eight living, breathing PEOPLE, is steadily lowered into the gushing, frothing water below us.
“NO!” screams a young woman. “STOP, STOP! WE’RE GOING TO DROWN!”
“GET ME OUT! I WON’T GO LIKE THIS!” cries out an old man.
One man about my own age says nothing. He only stares in frozen shock as the side of his head sinks below the water.
“S-STOP!” I cry out myself, finding my voice. “THESE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE!”
Everyone is awake, now. Everyone is aware.
The motion of the great cylinder continues. I squirm, and am powerless to do a thing but watch as the man my age takes a slow, deep breath, and closes his eyes.
He, and the seven others on his row are submerged beneath the water. Their screams and shouts are lost to the bubbles and froth and the churning waters.
A great shudder runs through the metal and mechanisms of the cylinder as it judders to a halt, and we are locked in place once again.
I do not know what to do. I don’t know how to escape.
All I can think of in this moment are the faces of the people below me. The faces of the people who are at this moment, living out their last moments beneath the churn.
I stare desperately all around me.
There must be a way out. How did I get here? There MUST be a way OUT!
“Hey!” I shout to the woman next to me with the orange paint, her face frozen in fear. “Hey!” her eyes flicker to mine. “What can you see? How are we going to get out of this?”
But I don’t know what I’m saying, really. She’s just as clueless as myself. I cry out in frustration as I try to move, as I try to draw my head through the metal of the cylinder, but there’s something keeping me locked in place. I cannot move any further out, and I cannot retreat further in.
If I could get out.. Maybe I could climb to safety?
…Climb to safety using the heads of my fellow men and women as stepping stones.
The thought is a grim one.
I cry out in alarm as the cylinder shakes again. A shiver is sent rippling through the metal, and the sound of the grinding grows louder as it did before. The cylinder, again, has begun to move.
Down we go. Lowering towards the ravenous water beneath.
“F*CK!” Screams a woman from the lowermost level. “F*CK, NO! NO, I DI-” but her words become lost as her mouth fills with water. She splutters and chokes as the cylinder lowers her, and all the other people on her level, into the darkness of the frothing water below.
Someone beside me laughs. It is a mad sound, the cry of the lunatic.
The cylinder judders to a halt, allowing itself a moment to digest its latest waterlogged meal.
…There are now only two rows beneath me. Two more rows, and then it is I who will be at the mercy of the water.
I’ve never particularly ‘liked’ water. I know how to swim, sure, but not in the ocean. Not in pools without adequate lighting. Not in lakes. Nowhere where I can’t see the bottom.
I shoot a desperate glance below.
Who knows how deep this thing goes? Who knows how many countless layers upon layers of souls have been lost to this monstrosity?
“HELP!” I scream. “LET ME OUT! YOU HAVE TO LET ME OUT! NOW! PLEASE! PLEASE!”
But I am answered by nothing more than the rush of water from above, cascading down, and with the echoes of my own distress reflected back at me from all the people around me.
My mind races as I desperately try to formulate a plan. I try again to move my head in and out through the cylinder walls, but it is locked firmly in place. It feels like there is something around my neck that is preventing me from adjusting myself. I try to bring up my hands to fiddle with it, but they are stuck by my sides. I am held in what feels like a tight container.
Like a coffin. A headless coffin.
I shout out in frustration and kick my legs, but there is no space for them to kick, not really. I move my hands around the limited space afforded to them, looking for a catch, a switch, a button or a panel, or anything… But there is nothing. Only uniform, rough metal.
The cylinder grinds, and we are juddered and rocked as we are lowered. I listen to the sounds of the shouts and the prayers get lost to the churning tides below as another layer of people is submerged slowly beneath the water.
There must be something I can do. Something. ANYTHING.
Despite being so close to death it still doesn’t feel real. I’m the main character of my story, goddamnit, what kind of a story ends with such confusion in so disturbing a place, with no warning?
I have to go on living. I HAVE to, because it’s quite simply all I’ve ever known.
I squint and splutter as another torrent of water falls across my face. I crane my neck away from the flow and peer up towards the top of the cylinder.
…I cannot see it, however. The ‘top’. I do not see where the rows of heads ‘begin’. They just keep going. Up, and up, and up. It could be endless, for all I know. The curious lights and shifting shadows up above could be one hundred metres way, or it could be a kilometre. It is impossible to tell the distance.
It’s like being in a factory, I decide. A factory for drowning.
Sh*t.
The woman beside me is babbling something about her daughter. I think she’s talking to me, but I don’t know, really. It’s not of a pressing importance.
The man beneath me calls up to me. I am one of the few not screaming, perhaps that’s why.
“My friend! Buddy!”
I try to look down at him.
“You are thinking, right? What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know”, I shout back at him. “There must be a way out. There has to be!”
“I hope you think of a plan”, he says to me. “I think that my time might be up. I tried my best for a good life”.
The unseen mechanisms whirr. The cylinder groans and creaks, and we sink towards oblivion.
“NO!” I shout out, “NO!”
But the ring of people beneath me are lost to the water. They disappear into the dark churn. In the corner of my eye, I see the man beneath me close his eyes as he is swallowed beneath the surface.
The cylinder shudders to a halt. The froth of the water is close now. Right by my ear. The sound of the cascading and the splashing and rushing is torrential.
…My row will be next.
Myself, this woman shouting about her daughter, and the other six in this ring are all about to be drowned in this terrible place.
Cold terror ripples up my spine. I start doing my best to breathe in and out, as deeply as possible. Expanding my lungs. Preparing to hold my breath for as long as necessary. Maybe if I can hold on tight I’ll get carried around and back into the air. Maybe someone will come to save me. Maybe, maybe… maybe maybe maybe…
…The mechanisms whirr.
The invisible generator starts to hum…
…And something happens that has not yet happened before.
A light starts to flicker and flash from up above.
It flickers through the spectrum of visible light. From red, through orange and yellow, through green and blue and down through purple.
“CONGRATULATIONS”, blares a robotic, inhuman voice with discordant cadence. “LOWERMOST ROW. YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED TO PLAY IN THE DROWNED MAN GAMES. YOU WILL NOW BE WITHDRAWN”.
…There is a moment of awful silence as, for a moment, all the voices in the cylinder are hushed, listening to this message.
And then, instead of being forced down into the water, I hear a little ‘clicking’ sound from by my neck, and I met with a sudden rush of force as I am carried away.
One second I am staring roughly to the side, my head angled slightly up towards the ‘sky’ as water splashes against my face… and the next I am being drawn away and my vision is replaced by darkness. I am hauled through the cylinder walls in the pitch black, the box that I am trapped in acting as some kind of transportation cart. My head of course remains free, and unable to see I can only feel, and what I feel is the rush of cold air against my skin. I grit my teeth as I am carried through the darkness at monstrous speed, eyes clenched tight shut.
I am not a religious man. I’m culturally Hindu but I don’t know if I’ve ever really believed in a creator… Though that being said, I mutter to him now.
“Let me survive this, Almighty. Please, I beg. I’ll be a better man, I promise. I swear it, I swear it”.
…The speed of the cart begins to slow.
It’s subtle at first, but we really do begin to decelerate, and the level of light starts to gradually increase.
My heart pounds as the cart starts trundling, then rolling gently to a final bump, where it comes to a quiet, unnerving stop.
I take a second to just breathe.
In, and out.
In, and out.
There is enough light in here for me to see some of my surroundings.
I find myself in a dark room, with black walls and a ceiling covered in black pipes. Water drips from up above. There is a large, cracked screen against one of the walls, and all around me are other people. Seven others, by my count, all in the same predicament to myself. Trapped in their boxes, which I can now see are on rails. I recognise the woman in the box beside me. It’s the same woman who was beside me in the cylinder- the one shouting about her daughter, face marked with orange paint- though as with myself and the others, only her head is currently free.
The people in here with me… All these people… This is my entire ‘ring’, I realise. Everyone who was on the same level of the cylinder as myself are now all together, down here in the dark.
Most of us are quiet, shocked into silence, but one of the men is bellowing and shouting in rage.
We are kept here like this for a minute more, and then a series of clicks echo around the room, and the metal panels that form the barrier between our heads and the rest of our bodies fall unceremoniously to the floor with a clatter, and a little splash.
My head is now free. I can turn my neck fully from left to right.
I groan with this ease in the tension, and find that the uppermost panel of my ‘box’ is now loose. I kick it until it rattles, then shift to press a palm against it. I grunt, and with a little bit of force it cracks out of place, and I am able to slide it to the floor, and make my escape.
…Well, my escape from the box, at least.
My joints ache and burn as I twitch and stretch and clamber my way awkwardly out from its claustrophobic confines, hopping unsteadily down to the floor beneath. My feet splash in a thin layer of water across the black-tiled floor.
I put a hand up to my head. It still pounds.
The rails of each of the carts extends into their own dark tunnel, and each of these tunnels are quickly sealed away by metal panels that clunk out from the wall to block the way.
The room has only a single metal door, painted carelessly with a few streaks of red paint.
“Hey, hey! Can you help me out here, please?” comes the voice of a man still trapped in his box.
He’s speaking in English, and I think he might be the only Westerner in the room.
“Hey, yeah, of course”, I say as I move to help him.
He has glasses, which have miraculously managed to remain on his face throughout our ordeal, and his face is streaked with green paint down one side. It must be a strong brand, as it hasn’t fully washed off in the streams of water we were subject to in the cylinder.
I gather my senses and look around. I think that everyone has these streaks of paint. All in different colours. I suppose I must have some too. I help the Westerner out of his box and down to the ground with a grunt as the people around me do likewise.
He has something around his neck. Something metal. Some kind of a collar…
I bring my hands up to my neck. Yes, I realise to my dismay. I have one too. It’s thick, and attached firmly, comprised of various, and worrying mechanisms and gears.
“LET ME OUT!” he shouts. “LET ME THE F*CK OUT!”
…The screen flickers into life with a flourish of sparks.
We all turn to face it, us eight, down here in the damp and the dingy darkness. The man with the red-streaked face pauses his assault, his chest rising and falling.
A picture of a beast-like man made of stone appears on the screen. The screen is cracked and littered with dead pixels, but the image is still quite clear enough. The being’s eyebrows are carved downwards and cover his eyes, sunken back into his animalistic, stony head.
“HELLO”, comes a deep and unsettling voice from the screen. A voice that sends my blood racing. “Congratulations. You have been selected to take part in the DROWNED MAN GAMES. You will play for your escape. I will now explain the rules-”
“What the f*ck is this, man?” shouts the guy with the red paint to the screen. “This is SICK! LET US GO!”
“Be QUIET!” urges a woman nearby, with blue across one side of her face. “This is going to be important!”
“You will notice that you are all wearing collars***”.
Yes... Yes I suppose we are. I bring my hands up to touch it now. I guess they are what kept us locked in place, back in the cylinder.
“If you break any of the rules of the Drowned Man Games, your collars will activate. You will be cut from the game by way of drowning. Once a rule has been broken, the activation of the collars is irreversible”.
I feel myself paling, and my hands drop from the collar, suddenly anxious that they might trigger some terrible feature or mechanism by mistake.
Activation of the collars…? DROWNING…? This is fucked… This is all so, fucked. This guy on the screen can’t be telling the truth, can he? …Death-collars?
The tension in the room tightens instantly and significantly.
“The first rule is as follows”, the stone man on the screen continues.
“You are forbidden from using your own names. Your birth names. If you say any birth name out loud your collar will activate, and your game will be over”.
I swallow.
“The second rule is as follows. You will find looped around your necks and beneath your collars a coloured key. This key matches the colour to which you have been assigned. If you try to remove this key, or if you try to take the key of another from around their neck, your collar will activate, and your game will be over”.
The hands of everyone in the room go up to their necks, and yes, sure enough, I feel a key.
A collar… a key… My head is all over the place. What other apparatus have they loaded us with? I check myself for other equipment. My feet for ankle bracelets, my hand for rings… But there doesn’t appear to be anything further.
My own key is a faded white-grey in colour. I notice that the man with the red paint has drawn from beneath the scarf he is wearing a red key, and the Westerner with green has revealed a green key.
Does that mean I have a ‘designated colour’ as well? White, or grey, maybe?
“The third rule is as follows. You will find in your collars a small slot for the insertion of a card. Each room of the game contains eight cards. Each card can be used only once per collar. If you try to enter the next room without first inserting the previous room’s card, then your collar will activate, and your game will be over”.
This rule is the most complex. I try to get my head around it.
Cards? What is he talking about? So we have to slot a card into our collars to allow us to- to what? Pass through to the next room? How many rooms are we talking here?
I do not have time to properly process his words. He moves onto the fourth and final rule.
“The fourth rule is as follows. To escape, and to win the game, you must pass through the final door. The Rainbow door. You will require keys to unlock this door. All seven colours of the rainbow will be needed to open the door”
‘Seven’ colours? I glance around. But what about mine? There’s no white or grey in the rainbow, is there?
“Good luck. I am your Asura, and it is my pleasure to welcome you here. I hope you enjoy the games”.
And with this, the screen shuts off, and goes dead dark.
We stand there in silence, us terrified eight, until our gazes turn slowly to each other.
A girl with yellow streaks down the left side of her face, one who can’t be much older than eighteen, crumples down to the ground and begins to cry.
…No-one moves to comfort her.
The woman with the blue across her face speaks first. “Rule number one”, she says. “The guy said no names”.
“The guy?” comes the voice of the Westerner streaked with green.
“The guy”, she replies, doing her best to stay calm.
“The guy made of rock. The ‘Asura’, he called himself. He said no birth names. So what are we going to call each other?”
“Why the f*ck does that matter exactly?” The guy with the scarf and the red paint replies angrily, throwing out his arms. “The only thing we need to do is work out how to ESCAPE. And how to get these DAMNED THINGS OFF!” he reaches up to struggle with his collar, and the two people closest to him cringe and back away.
“F*ck, idiot!” says a girl streaked with purple. “STOP! What if you set it off?”
“It’s not gonna set off!” he retorts. “The voice on the screen was bluffing”.
“Well, say your name then”, says a man also streaked with purple, albeit a different shade.
“What?”
“Say your name. Say it out loud, and we’ll see for certain if it’s a bluff”.
The red man hesitates, glaring at the man in purple. He opens his mouth, and for a second I think he’s going to do it… then he swears and mutters to himself under his breath instead. “Fine. So what ARE we going to call ourselves?”
“What about our colours?” I say, speaking to the group for the first time. Everyone turns to look at me. “Seems obvious to me”. I point to the man with the red down the side of his face. “You’ll be Red”. I point to the woman in blue. “You’ll be Blue”.
“What about us?” the girl with purple paint asks, gesturing to herself and the man with similarly coloured streaks. “We’re too similar”.
“The screen-guy said colours of the rainbow; didn’t he? Your shades of purple are different. So you’re Violet, and you”, I point to the man. “Are Indigo”.
There is a general murmur of assent.
“Makes sense”, Blue shrugs, wringing some of the water from her shirt. “So what’s the first move here? Did everyone get a good grasp of the rules?”
“Why the **** are you still talking about the ‘rules?’” Red responds, stepping close to the woman, jabbing a finger in her face. “You know we’re not actually ‘playing’ this game, or whatever it is, right? We’re getting the f*ck out of here”.
“I’m with him”, says the girl with the cherry-purple paint down the side of her face. Violet. The colour matches quite closely the shade of the streaks that she has dyed into her hair, though I don’t know if this was a deliberate choice on the game-maker’s part, or just a coincidence.
The game-maker… Who could have orchestrated something like this..?
Violet looks to be about Yellow’s age. Maybe a bit older. I doubt she’s even in her twenties, or if so, just barely. “If we play the game then we’re accepting what’s happening. We’re basically just rolling over and asking for abuse”. She crosses her arms.
“So what do you suggest we do?” Blue asks, putting out her hands. “What’s your escape plan?”
“How are you so damned calm…” Red mutters, shaking his breath. “You an expert in getting kidnapped, huh? Drugged and kidnapped? And ABUSED, TORTURED!” He reaches up and grabs his collar, giving it a dangerous rattle. I suck some air in through my teeth in morbid expectation, but nothing happens. “And what the hell is this? Collared like fucking dogs? I won’t stand for it!”
He points at some of the quieter members of the group. “Hey Lanky. Indigo, whatever fucking colour you are. How about you stop just standing around and make yourself useful, ey? Start trying to break those barriers that came down and blocked the rails. Maybe we can climb back up through them. You too, Green”. He turns to the Westerner. “You even speak Hindi?”
Green nods and opens his mouth to respond but Red switches to English before he can do so. “Break those damned doors already. Comprende?” He turns to me. “Grey. Search the room. See what you can find”.
Grey… I guess that’s my colour then. Not one of the rainbow’s colours, though.
Blue interrupts the man’s stream of orders. “I don’t recall deciding on making you the leader. If we’re going to survive this then the first thing to ensure is that we all have a grasp on the rules of the-”
“FUCK the rules. I don’t give a damn”. He gestures to Yellow with a jerk of his thumb. “Get that girl to shut her damned crying the hell up already. You can mull the rules over all you like as you do that”.
Blue glowers at him but chooses not to argue in this instance. She instead does as he suggests, and goes to try and comfort Yellow.
Red points at Violet and beckons her over to the metal door, the only door in the room. “You; get over here and help me work out how to open this. And you, Orange lady. Help Grey. Get searching. I want this place raided and shuttered up by the special police by the end of the day”.
End of the day. We don’t even know what time it is.
But we get to work.
We move about in a daze. Well, some of us do. Red seems like he’s about to explode at any given second. Blue remains eerily calm. And there’s an undercurrent of quietly bubbling panic flowing around the group. It seems almost too dangerous to believe that any of this is real. Far safer to pretend we’re in some kind of bizarre dream. Any moment now we’ll wake up safe and soundly in our beds.
…Any moment now.
As I search the room I find myself next to the woman from the very beginning, with the orange streaks of paint across her face. She does not appear to be engaging very well with what’s happening. She stares right through her surroundings, at nothing.
“Hey”, I say to her. “Are you alright?”
Her eyes flicker over to mine, unblinking. “No”, she says. “No, not really”.
“You were next to me in the cylinder”, I tell her. “You were talking about your daughter”.
The woman pales.
“She’s only a kid…” she whispers. “The last thing I remember. The last thing I remember before waking up in that nightmarish place… We were walking home. She’d run on ahead. She was standing on the opposite side of the road to me, and she turned around to call for me to hurry up… and that’s it. That’s all I have. Next thing I know I am next to you. Water pouring into my face”.
She lurches suddenly forwards and grips my shoulders, I start in alarm.
“What if they took her too?” she chokes out, her voice thick with anguish. “What if she’s down here too? What if she’s already been DROWNED”.
“No- no, they wouldn’t-” I reply, but I don’t know if that’s true, of course. I have no idea what the people in charge of this hellshow are capable of. “Just- just stay calm, alright?” I do my best to channel a diplomatic aura. To sound reassuring. “We have no proof she’s down here. How old is she? You said she was a kid?”
“She’s eleven”, she replies, releasing me and wiping her eyes.
“Right. Well I didn’t see a single kid in the cylinder, not one. I saw dozens of faces, and none of them belonged to children”. I gesture to Yellow, and to Violet. “Those girls are the youngest I’ve seen so far, and I doubt they’re younger than eighteen. You’ll have to ask them”.
She nods, not quite convinced, but hopefully taking my logic onboard. “Yes… Yes, perhaps. Surely, they wouldn’t… No-one could do this to a child…”
“Guys?” comes a voice from the other side of the room. It’s Blue’s. She successfully put a stop to Yellow’s sobbing and stands beside a cluster of shadowy pipes in the room’s corner. “I’ve found something”.
Orange and I exchange a look, and we head on over.
Red and Violet have been unsuccessful in opening the door, and Red gives the metal a strong kick with his foot, grumbling before he joins the rest of us. Blue crouches down beside a small, squat grey locker, though its little door is battered and is cracked open a slither.
Once we’re all able to see she reaches down and tugs the door open, revealing inside a set of red cards, each with a little chip in the lower-left corner.
“This is what we were told about”, she said. “In the explanation of the rules-”
Red swears and tries to cut her off, but she raises her voice above his. “You might not LIKE it but if we’re going to SURVIVE this then we need to think rationally”.
“Don’t talk to me about survival”, mutters Violet under her breath. “About rationality”. I glance to her, but I don’t think she intended anyone to hear her.
Blue continues. “If you don’t want to bother caring about the rules then DON’T, that’s your prerogative. But I know what’s best for me. I’m not going to talk about this again, do what you will”.
Red huffs, but holds his tongue.
“These are the cards that the Asura was talking about onscreen. There’s the KEYS-” she jingles the little blue key on the cord beneath her collar, “and there’s the CARDS”. She reaches into the locker and grabs a couple. “The implication is that every card will only work for each collar ONCE”.
She looks at me, and I feel the weight of her gaze. I open my mouth to talk, but then realise that she isn’t actually looking at me, as such. She’s looking at my collar. Searching it with her eyes. She reaches up to her own collar, her fingers touching and tracing the metal until she finds what she is looking for… a thin, dark, card-sized groove…
…And she slides one of the cards right into it.
The collar beeps, and chimes, and every single one of us takes an immediate, hasty step back.
Well, all of us except for Indigo. He smiles to himself. “Yes. Here, pass me that card”.
Blue does so, and we watch as he fiddles about with his collar until he finds the slot, then inserts the same card that Blue used.
…There is no noise this time. He reaches out his hand to Blue and she gives him a new one. He tries this one, and his collar responds with the beep and the chime.
“Quite simple really”, he says, his mouth twitching into a smile.
“How many are there?” Red and Violet both ask at more or less the same time.
“Hey, please, could I have one?” Yellow asks in a desperate voice, reaching out her hand.
“Well! I need one as well!” Red butts in, shoving his hand down towards Blue.
“Wait please, leave one for me!” Orange says, jostling with the others for a position.
“Hey!” Blue shouts, pushing them all back. “Calm the hell down! There are eight cards, okay? There’s one for each of us, just slow down!”
She hands out the cards one by one, and we each slide it into the slot on our collars, listening for that beep and mechanical chime.
I am the last, and once my collar has been activated, the metal door with the red paint across it starts to whirr. We all turn to watch as unseen gears grind and roll, and the door slides its gradual way out of sight and into the wall, revealing a passageway down and into the dark. For a second or two, nobody moves. Then Red breaks the silence.
“Okay. I guess we don’t have much of a choice for now, then…” he turns to Green, and to Indigo. “Did either of you manage to dislodge those panels in the wall?”
He is met with shaking heads. He turns to Orange and I. “What about you two? Find anything helpful? Any… I don’t know… any pipes that could be dislodged?”
Orange shakes her head.
“No”, I reply. “I’m sorry”.
He swears to himself and rubs his forehead. “Then I guess we really are just pawns, for now. Shit”.
…He doesn’t step forwards, though. It is Blue who make the first move, striding her way through the door and down the corridor. Red hurries along after her, and then one by one we all follow.
What are we all doing here? I wonder as we walk. My heart pounding. Why us? What do we eight all have in common? Anything? And what the hell is happening back there in the cylinder? Are all those other people still frozen there? Or are they being drowned row by row? Factory-style. Production-line murder…
The corridor eventually opens up into a room much smaller than the last. There are eight desks, primary-school style, and eight accompanying chairs. Each desk has an old, bulky computer attached, and each of the monitors has been splashed with a lick of paint.
The only other feature in the room is another door like the one we just passed through. Metal, and streaked with red.
“The hell is this?” Violet asks, brushing her soaked-through hair behind her ears. “Surprise test time?”
No-one laughs.
Blue considers for a moment, and then sits herself down at the desk with the computer marked with blue.
Green does likewise, and then we all do the same.
I sit down at the computer splashed with grey. Or white. I’m not sure. It looks white, to me.
There is a keyboard, and a page with a couple of lines of text:
YOU HAVE FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. YOU MAY RECORD YOUR THOUGHTS HERE. AFTER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES IS UP THEY WILL BE SENT OUT.
“You guys seeing this?” Violet asks the room. “Sent out? What does sent out mean?”
A sudden flash of red catches our attention, up above the metal door. We turn to look at it, and an LED is revealed, hidden formerly in the shadow. It shows a time. A time that is already ticking steadily down.
45:00
44:59
44:58
44:57
“Looks like we have about forty minutes then”, Blue says coolly, stretching her back, before placing her fingers onto the keys. She begins to tap.
“Forty minutes to WHAT?” asks Orange, shooting me a desperate glance, but I have just as much knowledge as she does.
Blue does not respond, and before long the sound of clicking keys fills the room.
I take a moment to consider. This doesn’t seem to be any kind of test… And there’s no real way of knowing what’s going to happen until the forty minutes are up. I also don’t want to waste such an opportunity..
…I look around me.
“Should we use our names?” Yellow asks to the room, to a general murmur of dissent.
“It’s not a risk that I would take”, Indigo replies quietly. “But you should do what you think is best”.
Yellow whimpers before returning to her keyboard.
Many of my fellow ‘players’ are spewing words at random. Writing out a big list of the events of their experience. I glance to my neighbour’s screen. Some of them are writing to the best of their memories what they can recall from the moments before they were taken.
Orange is writing a letter to her daughter. Telling her how much she loves her. How she promises that no matter what happens, everything is going to be okay.
I run my hands through my hair, and take a deep breath.
I choose a different tactic.
I do not know what is happening. I do not know where these writings are going to be sent, if indeed they are going to be sent anywhere at all. But I decide on doing my best to relive the experience, from start to present. Fortifying what has happened in my memory, and doing my best to get across the terror, in the hopes that someone out there will find it, and someone out there will read it.
Maybe someone is reading this right now.
…But the timer is about to expire. Ten seconds left.
I don’t know what is coming next. And I am scared.
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Updated 15 Episodes
Comments
Raquelle
goshhhhhh😖😖😱😱😱😱😱😱
2022-04-30
1