Secrets in the Snow (On Hold) <--- As much as I hate to do that.

Part Four

Tristan and Tarin were a little slower than me and Austin and it seemed as though they hadn’t been awake before, because they didn’t remember witnessing any of what we did. They willingly followed us anyway though, just because they found it strange that they couldn’t remember anything about themselves either. I guess that was proof enough that something weird must have been going on.

            We left their room and walked out in the hallway where one of the creepy guys with lime green hair was just rounding the corner. His head shot up when he realized he wasn’t alone, as though he could simply sense our presence even though we were not making a sound. Austin was about to go after him with her needle, but it was too late, he pressed the little red flashing button on his wrist band and Austin and I both new what would come next.

            “RUN!” we yelled in unison.

            We started sprinting down the hallway and quickly turned a corner. It was only seconds later that we heard footsteps behind us… a lot of them. I began to panic as I ran. What if we had made it all this way just to get caught again?

            An alarm started to go off over our heads, blaring so loud that it literally hurt my ears. I covered them as I ran and had to squint from the bright, red flashing lights. It made it harder to get away, but I wasn’t about to give up now, especially since I had sucked to kids into this mess with me.

            “What way do we go?” Austin asked.

            I tried to look around quickly, panicking when the footsteps behind me sounded like they were getting closer.

            “There!” I yelled, pointing to a down at the end of the long hallway.

As we passed another hall on the way, I saw that there were more of these strange people coming after us from different directions.  We needed to get out of there soon, or we were going to be surrounded.

Once we got to the door I ripped it open and we all ran in, but we didn’t get very far before stopping. It was a set of winding stairs. It wasn’t overly high, but it would majorly slow us down if we had to try and run down them.

I glanced back over my shoulder. They were almost caught up.

“We’re going to have to jump,” I told my group. “Come on.”

I grabbed Austin’s hand and together we climbed up on the ledge and jumped down. Lucky for us, there was nothing hard on the ground to break our fall. We were lucky to have landed in what seemed like a laundry room of sorts.

We looked back up to see that Tristan and Tarin were hesitating. They couldn’t though, we didn’t have much time. We needed to keep moving.

“Come on!” Austin yelled up at them. “You’ll be fine!”

Tristan grabbed Tarin’s hand and they proceeded to climb up on the ledge just as Austin and I had. Then, with their eyes closed, they jumped off, landing with a thud next to us. We quickly scrambled to get up and then started running again. I noticed that the creepy “people” if you could call them people, weren’t going to jump themselves. Instead they took the time to try and run down the stairs, but it severely slowed them down, giving us time to get farther away from them.

When we got to the back of the room we noticed that there was another door with a little window. It led outside. Yes! I pointed in that direction.

“This way!”

            We opened the door to see that it was blocked in with snow, but that someone must have tunneled their way out of here already, because there was a tunnel dug out that led up a little set of stairs that brought us back up to ground level. I instructed the kids to go first. Once Austin and I were through, because I knew that our chasers weren’t far behind, I told everyone to kick at the snow until it blocked the hole. Then we ran, like hell.

            It was nighttime, I was happy to finally know something about the world around me, but that also meant that it was cold. I shivered as I ran. These thin suits were not going to be enough if we planned on being outside long.

            The area around us looked like it had been a war zone at some point in recent history. The buildings were broken, falling apart. The roads were cracked and filled with debris. Snow covered almost everything in a thin sheet of white. The worst part of the whole thing though, was that there were no other people.

            It looked like a ghost town, which was too eerie for me. I stopped when I thought we were far enough away and turned to the others.

            “Where should we go now?” I asked.

            They all looked around. There was no nice warm building to stay in, only broken down shells with ho doors or windows. I read what was engraved into the top of one of the buildings. East Middleton Bank. So, wherever we were, it must have been called East Middleton.

            “How about that bank?” Tristan asked when he noticed me staring.

            “Yeah… sure.”

            We headed for the bank, shoveling or way through snow and pushing chunks of bricks and other unidentifiable things out of our way, and were surprised at what we found once we got inside… we weren’t alone.