Trials Together (Book One): The Maze Runner

Chapter 30

After a minute or so of walking, Thomas heard a shriek from ahead, followed by another, then another. Their cries faded, as if they were falling....
Murmurs made their way down the line, and finally Teresa turned to Thomas. "Looks like it ends in a slide up there, shooting downward."

"Seriously?" Rachel sighed. "These Creators need their heads looking at, maybe with bullets."

Thomas had never agreed with anything more, maybe he could pull a few of the triggers.

The number of Gladers in the chamber slowly thinned until only the four of them were left.

"Here goes nothing." Rachel took a deep breath before easing herself into the chute and letting go, disappearing instantly.

"Neither of you kick me in the head." Aris smirked before following her.

Teresa slipped down the slide with an almost cheerful shriek, and Thomas followed her before he could talk himself out of it—anything was better than the Maze.

His body shot down a steep decline, slick with an oily goo that smelled awful—like burnt plastic and overused machinery. He twisted his body until he got his feet in front of him, then tried to hold his hands out to slow himself down. It was useless—the greasy stuff covered every inch of the stone; he couldn't grip anything.

The screams of the other Gladers echoed off the tunnel walls as they slid down the oily chute. Panic gripped Thomas's heart. He couldn't fight off the image that they'd been swallowed by some gigantic beast and were sliding down its long esophagus, about to land in its stomach at any second. And as if his thoughts had materialized, the smells changed—to something more like mildew and rot. He started gagging; it took all his effort not to throw up on himself.

The tunnel began to twist, turning in a rough spiral, just enough to slow them down, and Thomas's feet smacked right into Teresa, hitting her in the head; he recoiled and a feeling of complete misery sank over him. They were still falling. Time seemed to stretch out, endless.

Around and around they went down the tube. Nausea burned in his stomach—the squishing of the goo against his body, the smell, the circling motion. He was just about to turn his head to the side to throw up when Teresa let out a sharp cry—this time there was no echo. A second later, Thomas flew out of the tunnel and landed on her.

Bodies scrambled everywhere, people on top of people, groaning and squirming in confusion as they tried to push away from each other. Thomas wiggled his arms and legs to scoot away from Teresa, then crawled a few more feet to throw up, emptying his stomach.

"That was disgusting." Rachel was doing her best to wipe the worst of the slimy filth from her face, but wasn't getting very far.

The chamber was huge, almost as big as the Glade. Pods lined the walls, containing sleeping - or deactivated Grievers - Thomas wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

Directly in front of them, a row of twenty or so darkly tinged windows stretched across the compound horizontally, one after the other. Behind each one, a person—some men, some women, all of them pale and thin—sat observing the Gladers, staring through the glass with squinted eyes. Thomas shuddered, terrified—they all looked like ghosts. Angry, starving, sinister apparitions of people who'd never been happy when alive, much less dead.

But Thomas knew they were not, of course, ghosts. They were the people who'd sent them all to the Glade. The people who'd taken their lives away from them.

The Creators.

Some Gladers shouted things at them, crude, violent threats. Thomas didn't join in, the still fresh memories from the Changing had showed him this place, and flashes of a time when he had sat at one of those desks.

Without warning a beeping began to sound, powerful, coming from everywhere but with no discernible source.

A door swung open and the beeping stopped as suddenly as it started.