I heard a sound.
"Hey" Somebody carefully kicked my combat boot. "Sutton."
Another kick. "Masie"
Whoever this was knew how to kick. Why didn't he kick a soccer ball or something. I'd bet he'd be goals at it.
"Why won't you wake up?", the annoying person said.
"Why won't you stop kicking me?", I blurted out.
My eyes shot open and Ty Roville leaned back until I had his entire, rough jawed footballer face perfectly in frame. Chummy soft brown eyes and blond hair and all. I knew Ty from school but it was not like we ever talked much. About four words in six years. My brother Aron once had him over with some other athletes for a study session, when they all were about to repeat a grade because they put more energy into swimming laps or throwing rounded objects, than they invested into calculus or English Lit. But he hadn't come over afterwards.
Ty and Aron weren't exactly on the same wavelength. So he'd greeted me before (the only one from the jocks. Points for trying.) but never had I been even closer to him than a quick shoulder brush in the hallways. We surely weren't on kicking shoe basis with each other.
He cocked a half smile at me but something in his usually so arrogant eyes was off. And then it came back to me.
I sat up with so much force that I slammed back into the wall - pulled back by white cuffs around my arms and wrists.
"Where.." I grabbed the smooth wall. We were inside a spacey white square. No doors, no windows. But the air seemed fresh and I inhaled, urgently needing oxygen. Where was the light coming from?
"You alright?" Ty's hand reached out until he remembered his own cuffs "They dropped you on the floor pretty hard."
I flinched away from his hand although he technically could get nowhere near me and he pulled back.
"Where are we?", I demanded, like he had all the answers. But who knew what he knew. In the strange dim white half light that shone inside this jail box, Ty gave me a faint half smile.
"Won't you guess?"
"Do I look like I'm in the mood to play I see something that you don't?"
"No, but won't you guess?"
"Want me to punch you to your senses?"
Typical jock. He really wanted to play games, even now.
He chuckled humorlessly. "That will be kinda hard. You know, contamination and all. Unless you try to kick me to death." He nudged my shoe with his to prove his point. His was not a bad idea - at least I would like to kick him back.
"Sorry", he said to me, examining my face. "I never realized we were on terms this bad."
"We're not", I said. "It's just..." Just that he was a jock. I realized. And I kind of had put them all into the Aron-Kain category. I hadn't tried to be unfair.
I sighed. "Yeah you're right. Sorry. Where are we?"
"Contamination Box 268b, is where we are, from what I've gathered.", Ty sighed. At my blank face, he did another one of his false grins. "Yeah, their Ioptine dosis didn't really work for me. They gave me another fill but I still wouldn't really fall asleep like they wanted me too. So you know, the bastards actually tried to knock me out" His cuffed finger pointed upwards and I realized the right side of his face was swollen. "But I still saw things. Like the number outside our box. And that they brought us to the port. This is a container box, darling."
"Okay, let me rephrase this. Why are we here?"
He raised his eyebrows at me, light brown eyes glemaing with a weak attempt of mockery; But his body was tense. His breath shallow. He was just as wild as I felt.
I stared at him and wondered how, in such a short time span, this had happened. I was sitting in some sort of government dicatet cage with a friend of the guy who made up rumors about me I'm sixth grade and got everyone to hate and avoid me.
"You mean...", I said slowly. It made my skull creak to think about this. ".. We're swimming?"
"On a ship, alright" He shook his head. "That's not how I imagined my first cruise."
"I doubt this will be a cruise, so don't save your tears for the postcard. I doubt we will get to send one. So, feel free to weep. We're in deep crap." I groaned and looked around in the empty nothing. "The test.", I said, grabbing my pounding temple. "My vial.. it went..." Black, I wanted to say, but then hesitated. How much should I tell him?
Sure, this guy sat - quite literally - in the same boat as me - or the same disturbing, smooth white contamination box. But how much should I tell? Tyler Roville was not exactly the trustworthy sort of guy who walked puppies around the block and went shopping for elderly neighbors, but the type known for stupid backyard parties where someone always ended up thrashing the neighborhood and getting the police to drop by. Not to mention that he was rumored to have had something with a seventh grade art teacher, Ms. Brady, who mysteriously left school a while after the rumors started. Sure, who was I to judge on rumors. But I didn't trust him. Far from it. My natural mistrust was one instinct I would never willingly let go. Better careful than rueful was my go-to approach.
But he already gathered what I wanted to say. "My vial went black as well.", he said, in a matter of fact fashion.
"So what does it mean?"
"No. Efing. Clue."
"Are we... I mean are we Acid positive or crap?"
"Or crap. I don't know much about this ACID stuff - nobody does. But the vial would go bright red if we were positive. That's why it's called a code red." He looked at me like I lived under a rock. The truth was, I never wanted to know about the whole 'ACID crap', as Ty so fittingly named it.
He groaned when I started touching the wall behind me up and down, as far as my cuffed hands would allow me.
"Oh no. Don't do that!", he said. "That's what I've been doing for the past two hours or so. There's nothing there and at best you'll get a nice electro shock." He thumped his head back against the wall.
"Two hours. That's how long we are here?", I inquired. "And if they know when to shock you, does that mean we're being watched?" There were no visible cameras but I didn't trust anything in this place.
"No. I've counted three hours. Nothing happened since then. They're most likely watching us, since we're lab rats now. And while you were so peacefully slumbering I think they locked this box from the outside."
"Wow. I'm glad they're checking up on us. Making sure we don't panic... And scratch each other's eyes out.", I said dryly.
He raised his eyebrows. "It's the government. The same guys who think it's okay for us not to know anything about the ACID pandemic." Fair point.
Then a humming sound made us both sit straight. "What was that?", I asked like he had eyes outside this box.
"We're moving", he said and he was right. The box moved and and it felt like we were floating; the floor was slightly swinging around like somebody or something was heaving us through the air.
We both grabbed the floor for balance.
"Whoa", Ty said. We stared at each other.
"Did this happen before? While I was knocked out?"
His answer was all I didn't want to hear. He shook his head. "No. This is new."
Suddenly, lines of light flared up above us.
The whole box vibrated and I flinched, as the thing seemed to lock to a new ground. Under our feet, a bolt went through the white. Then it seemed like we were floating again, this time inside something much heavier, much bigger.
He said what I was thinking.
"Motherfuckers." He stared at me, square jaw tight, honey brown eyes wide. "We're on a plane."
•
Wherever the plane flew, it flew fast, and it flew for a long time. At a certain point the light inside our comfortable little contamination box dimmed, as if they were giving us the hint that it was okay to sleep now. Like I would. My eyes were open to the point of tearing, just like Ty's.
Then and again, we passed the time playing rock, paper, scissors. After about eight counted hours, I lost my determination to stay fully alert at all times. Nothing was changing inside our jail. Another couple of hours later my eyes slowly dropped close and then I suddenly woke with a jolt.
Something was different. The air was cold. It was biting and wet inside the cubicle. The lights where completely off - I now realized they came from the inside of the walls - and one wall to our left was completely gone, revealing an eery grey background. Ty was gone.
Where he had sat across from me, his cuffs hung lose and the only trace left of him where a few crumbs of mud fom his boots on the floor.
I gasped, panic rising inside of me, until I realized that maybe I had hallucinated him ever being here. Who knew what they pumped into me. But just as I thought this, and realized that my cuffs hung loose as well, Ty's muscular blond head peeked around the corner and into the cube.
He looked relieved. "I almost thought they gave you too much of the sleep stuff. You simply wouldn't wake up."
I wasn't speaking what I was thinking - where the hell where we - I instantly jerked up, stretched, and left the cube on light feet, jumping down the sixth wall that now served as a ramp and turned around in complete astonishment.
"Holy crap", I said, staring at the huge green forest opening we were standing on. Only it wasn't a forest.
Thick, lush jungle surrounded us. We were standing in a field of Heath. The smell of herbs and sweet woods and honey and something bitter was very strong in the air. At the far back, was the grey thing I first noticed. A sort of industry hall. A grey slab of stone in the scenery.
Somewhere in the back ran a river. The sound of it was so mind numbingly loud, the rush of the stream was splashing up fountains of water against rock.
But most of all, the sky above us was of an eery, stomach turning yellow.
"Holy Crap sounds about right." Ty dropped a pile of sticks between us. "I've run a around the shore of the river but the stream is insane." He pointed to the building at the back. "There are rocks in the water but crossing with that amount of water is out of the question. If we wanna get there we'll have to dare into the jungle."
That didn't sound too great. "I'm not sure we should make a campfire", I said, kicking the pile of sticks closer together, to keep the outer sticks from rolling away.
"It's cold now", Ty retorted. "It will be colder at night."
"Do you have any idea how late it is?"
"We got here early morning. I've counted seven hours since then. It should be about two or three PM." He shrugged. "I could be wrong. I mean, the sky is yellow."
And no sun was to be seen but there was a bleak glow around us. The grass and the Heath were at ankle height but got a lot deeper towards the jungle. To the right, there was swampy ground underlying the green. If we wanted to break into the jungle we would have to stick to the left side, where the grounds got drier and dark gum trees where higher and the pale blue peak of a mountain rested at the very back. But Ty insisted we should also check out to right side. We got here with a ship and a plane, he reminded me. Wetter could mean near an ocean.
I didn't speak out the obvious. And what then? Standing in front of an ocean would get us nowhere. It wasn't like we could just swim past it - unless there was a harbour with means of transportation, like Ty speculated.
The problem was that whoever placed us here obviously wanted us to find a way to the gray fabric hall at the other side of the river. But Ty said we definitely shouldn't do what 'they' wanted from us.
"Don't let them play cat and mouse with us.", he said over his shoulder, checking inside the cube as if it hadn't been empty for hours. No food would miraculously drop there while we didn't look. "If they are the cat, let's play the wolf."
I had to admit I liked his attitude. Not to be damsel in distress or anything, but being here with a guy like type did make me feel a lot more at ease than I might have been otherwise; His back was broadened with the weight of muscle mass. Years of football, devouring protein bars and triple the portion of those around him gave him a build like a bear. I was strong myself. Taller and broader than most girls. I wasn't the typical pretty girl, but a bit more intimidating than that. I could lift things; Dad was barely at home, Aron always hung out with his friends. There was no way Mom in her pumps or little Kenzie would stash a whole palette of Joghurt canisters on the too shelf of our pantry or carry in the sacks of fresh flour Mom ordered. I would be one of the last girls in a room to scream.
I prayed that a combination of those factors would mean we would have a slightly higher chance if surviving, should something come out of the jungle. That was the fear, the silent, unspoken truth that hung between us. So far it was just Ty and me and the Heath and the jungle. But... for how long?
I had no doubt that I could climb one if these high trees in the back. Even more than strength, my advantages were agility and quickness. But Ty was more heavy footed. He could probably hold his own with one wild animal or two but the question that really nagged me was wether I would be ready to leave him behind if I had to. I don't know the guy. And I didn't want to die for someone I didn't know. But I also didn't want to run. We had to work out some plans.
"This is crazy", I mumbled, stomping through the scented grass. A breeze whipped my dark hair into my face. I swatted it away and a movement to the right caught my eye. A bee flew by and disappeared into the jungle. I shook my head and sat down at the edge of the cubes ramp, watching Ty kneeling over the campfire with two stones, trying to make it an actual fire.
The sky above us eemed to be endless but the area in which we could move without danger was very restricted. I watched along the line of the jungle, scared of movement.
That's when I heard a high pitched scream.