Zombiestuck- Not Okay

Chapter 29

I had two choices. I could keep fighting to stay alive, and continue the physical and emotional pain of watching Aradia's misery. Or I could give up.

I had made my choice. I closed my eyes and leaned back on the tree. Then I felt the rest of my life slowly fade away with my last breath.

My eyes snapped open. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, although once I did I didn't completely understand. Wait... Aren't I... Dead? I looked around to find myself inside a glass box a circular room. I instantly recognized it as the place from my vision a while ago. Everyone was unconsciously floating in their own boxes in a circle, with three empty ones in the middle. Except for me. I was slumped against the glass wall on the bottom of the box.

What? I stood up and looked at a sign on the wall. The strange dream-like quality of the room that it had the last time I was here was gone. I reviewed the list of colors of the lights on the wall. White = alive, green = infected, red = dead. I looked above me at the light overhead. It filled the box with a red glow. I was dead. But... I didn't feel very dead.

I actually felt perfectly fine. All the pain from the past day was gone. I lightly touched my shoulder and gasped. The bite wasn't there. It was completely fine, there wasn't even a scar. I stepped back and looked at my reflection in the glass. There wasn't a single scratch on me. Looking around, I realized that everyone else was fine too. They all looked like nothing had ever happened.

Suddenly I remembered the lights and quickly looked over at Aradia in her box a couple down from mine. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw that her light was still white.

Keeping my eyes on Aradia's light, I felt around the edges of the box to try to find a way out. I felt a crack in the glass and squinted to just make out that it was the edge of a door. I squeezed my fingers into the crack and pushed it open. Well that was easy.

I cautiously stepped out of the box into the room. What's going on? It couldn't be a dream, it felt too real. But I had never seen this place before apart from that weird vision. How could I have gotten here?

You don't know how you got to the place you were in before either, I reminded myself, Maybe that was the place that wasn't real. Now I was really confused. It had to have been real! But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Everyone was in some kind of coma, and I had just woken up from it. That would explain why the lights over everybody matched up with what I remembered.

But it couldn't have been a dream, because then how would the lights be able to tell what was going on inside of it? And if we were all dreaming, the others were definitely having the same dream. Unless... I looked over at all the wires, machines, and computer monitors in the corner.

It was a simulation. Everything made so much sense now. I didn't know how we had gotten here, but this whole room was running a simulation of some kind of zombie apocalypse. It must have been a pretty good simulation if we could all feel the pain of whatever happened to us inside it.

If this was a simulation, I had to find a way to end it. I ran over to Aradia's box and used all my strength to pry open the door, but it wouldn't budge. "Aradia!" I shouted, banging on the glass, "Wake up!"

She stayed unmistakably asleep. Either the glass was soundproof or she just couldn't wake up. It seemed like she wouldn't until the simulation was over.

I didn't know if it was possible to end the simulation, but I knew that I had to. I searched the room frantically for anything that could provide a clue as to how I would be able to do that. Finally, I ran over to the computers. Maybe there was some program I could cancel, or at least start hacking into, to make it easier for them to get out.

But there were a ton of programs running on those computers, and they were all protected by some impenetrable coding in languages I had never even seen. It would take sweeps for me to figure them out.

All I could do was wait for them to get out. I didn't know how they would, though, or even if they would. There had to be some kind of end goal for them to reach that would wake them up, but I couldn't help them anymore. On their end of things my time was up. I was a zombie.

Oh no. I ran back over to Aradia's box and stared at the light above her head. I knew she would be able to kill me, she was strong enough. But I had to watch and make sure. I stood there going over a scene in my mind where she escaped the forest and got back to the hotel safe and sound. It made perfect sense. She would be able to do it. She had to. I believed in her.

But a couple seconds later, the white light filling the box faded, and in its place shone a bright green.

No.