It had been a year since my friends had been sent up into the mazes. And those twelve months had been pure torture and that was only speaking for myself. There was so no way that I could ever fathom how the 'subjects' were feeling.
I still couldn't bear watching them in there. They reminded me of lab rats, cruelly treated and thrown into harsh conditions. It had been rough in the beginning for the male's maze, a lot of fighting. George had been stung by a Griever, the first one ever in the boy's Glade; Alby killed him with a spear when he started to change. There had been the few unlucky ones, getting stuck in the maze overnight. They never made it until morning. The Grievers had gotten them.
There was something about the gruesomeness of it all that no matter how hard someone tried to remove the images from their mind, they stayed. Mocking, like a bloodstained shirt that is drowning in bleach, but the redness is permanent.
I had been livid as I watched what Alby had done. It had taken a sort of courage that not many people had: self-determination and survival. It had taken my all not to jump out of my chair in the labs and strangle Janson who had been strolling around the room, recapping what had happened while we were asleep. There was no sanity left in Janson. I had realised that a long time ago.
Newt had become a runner along with Minho, Ben and a few others. They ran the maze every day, mapping it for a way out. But a few months ago, Newt had tried to commit suicide, something that I had been forced to watch. One day, when he was out for his run, he had climbed halfway up the fucking maze wall and tried to jump off. His foot got caught in the ivy though and was found hanging there with a bloody ankle. Alby had brought him back to the Glade right before the doors closed. If my spirit hadn't been broken already, it sure was now. I wanted to jump out of my seat, run to the weapons lock-up room and shoot Janson and Paige.
I couldn't believe how emotionally detached the creators were. They seemed to not even care that the teenagers they had sent into the fucking mazes were mentally and some even physically broken.
I had no idea what I would have done if Newt had offed himself. Suicide was not a joke and the emotions that Newt must have been feeling to even want to attempt such a thing shattered my whole being. No one deserved to feel that way, no one ever should.
I had no clue how I had been able to maintain my composure while in front of everyone. I had just sat there, staring at the screen, frozen with every single bad feeling as Alby carried Newt's unconscious body back to the Glade. But once we were back in the confided bedroom space for the night, I had cried uncontrollably. Only stopping when unconsciousness took over for the night.
Perhaps on the first day that I had arrived here at WICKED's headquarters, was the day that I knew life was not going to be wild and crazy like so many of the movies that I had watched and books that I had read over my years illustrated. The sun flares had probably killed off most of the actors and actresses that had been in the movies and the authors that had written the books, anyway.
So the girl always got the guy? Right. Of course, unless they are torn apart for the sake of fucking science, a load of bullshit if one asked me, and the Earth is in shambles. The girl never gets the guy when he is trapped inside a God-forsaken maze of death and destruction. And especially if he killed himself before they could be reunited again. It sounds dramatic, doesn't it? Well, that is half right. It is tragic, but it is one-hundred and ten percent the truth.
Those bloody mazes that they were put in were booby-trapped with murderous half-metal, half-monster creatures that only have one job and that it to kill anyone that it can get its hand on- or whatever the hell is in the place of the creatures arms on.
But don't worry, they only take one person per night because of logic, am I right? After all, there is no way that any one of them would survive if a monstrous creature came and killed everyone in sight. The trials would not go as planned.
The first month that the boys had been in the maze was the worst of it, though. I could remember that like the back of my hand.
I glowered at the man in the centre stage that was situated in the middle of the two lines of computers. The man infuriated me, and I had to hold my tongue to keep myself from screaming out in frustration as he spoke.
"Well done, excellent," Janson nodded, "they have learned not go into the maze at night and seem to be beginning to work together more and more. We are getting great information."
His nasally voice had always bugged me, enough for me to receive a burning sensation in the back of my mind. I scoffed loudly at his pathetic attempts to engage us in this false conception of reality. Was the world that screwed up that we had to put the future generation in situations that most of them will be killed in? Where was the humanity? The future generation should be protected, educated, and prepared for the world that generations before us have ruined. We could be the key to everything, but not in the way that WICKED believed.
"Now, we are going to be sending up the first new arrival to the mazes today. Please watch closely when they get up there. Record everything and anything you can; I will be checking over your notes and your thoughts about it. Every single bit of emotion and information is vital in our search for the cure," Janson shot me a stern look to which I just rolled my eyes. If he thought that he could try to scare me into working, he had another thing coming.
"Nick seems to be taking charge, with Alby by his side." Thomas leant over towards me. They had received animals and supplies for the past couple weeks and had started to have some order: Winston had begun working with the animals, Zart had taken the fields, Minho and Newt ran the maze daily, Gally started the building, Frypan worked the kitchen, and so on. It was going that way smoothly. They all did their part.
"You speak of them like they are specimens in a pig farm, and you are choosing which one you would like to slaughter next," I growled back. I knew that Thomas was just trying to do his job. He seemed to be believing more and more that WICKED was doing the right thing, and I was trying my hardest to keep his whole brain from turning to mush under the social pressure.
Thomas did not have a chance to reply. Our computer screens started to blink wildly, and we turned back to them. All of the boy's hands shot up to their ears, protecting them from the awful alarm. It was a customised sound for a new person entering the Glade.
Since I had been ordered to watch over the boy's maze with Thomas and Teresa, I automatically searched for Newt the second my eyes hit the screen. He was in his usual spots: by his tree, with Minho in the maze, or helping out in the field in his free time. This time I couldn't find him. My computer screens froze on the Glade so that when I tried to switch cameras to our in the maze, it wouldn't let me.
I felt the urge to swear at the scene and slam my fists down on the table, suddenly anxious over Newt and Minho's well-being. If we couldn't see them, we would not be able to know what happened to them if anything did.
About a half an hour later the box open. There was another few, hour-long feeling, minutes before anyone reacted. The boy in the box, which I had never bothered to learn the name of, even if he and I had spoken a few times while he was here at WICKED, shrunk as far back in the box as possible while shielding his eyes from the blazing sun. The group of boys raised their spears and knives and Nick started to walk towards the box with Alby and Gally flanking him. The boy in the box threw his arms up in surrender, and Nick held up his hands and spoke something over his shoulder to the waiting group. Eventually, all objects were lowered.
Alby helped the boy out of the box as Newt and Minho came running out of the maze. I could see them yelling at across the maze. Their expressions wild with confusion.
Here is the problem with leadership. It gets to that person's head, and he or she can sometimes be very sporadic in his or her ideas. Take Nick, for example, he had become the leader to the Glade without a doubt, and him being the leader caused him to think that it was a good idea to try to get the Gladers out. So he had jumped down the box shaft. He didn't survive it. WICKED was far too ahead in their planning for that to be such an easy way out. Nick didn't even get ten feet down before he was cut cleanly in half. And one better believe it when I say that they made us watch it. We hadn't even been in the room when it happened. Coincidently, out for our lunch break. Janson, being the massive, gaping asshole that he is, played it back for us. Not once, not twice, but three times! He made us watch the ghastly video of Nick being chopped in half three fucking times. These were the times that I thought about opening up all of the doors to the building and allowing cranks to come in and infect everyone inside, mainly Janson. Man, that would be so satisfying.
And it gets better. As a sick, morbid joke, WICKED put a glass box with half of Nick's body encased in it in the deadheads, or as some might know it, the forested area in the corner of the maze. They ever added a warning that was engraved in black letters; 'there was no escaping through the box hole'. Because seeing their friend cut in half was not enough to deter them from jumping down there.
Conceited pricks.
That had happened three months after the first arrival. The boys were anxious to get out. Who could blame them? Rash decisions weren't exactly thought over at times like these.
It wasn't until the boys were in the maze for a year and a half that I started to feel the isolation from the people I worked with. It got hard for me when Thomas and Teresa seemed to be drifting away. Not that they had been much of friends to me over the past months. They were more like slaves now, brainwashed into thinking WICKED was good. I could tell though, by the way, they looked at me with a sort of depressed, uncomfortable look, like they knew I was next in the line for slaughter.
It could have been perceived as people were becoming afraid that I might spring on them in any second and snap their neck because honestly, I would have loved to do that to quite a few people in the labs, but I knew that there was no way that it was about that. Like come on, look at me. A five foot four inches fifteen-year-old girl is not exactly the most frightening thing ever.
So really, there was only one other possibility to why I was being segregated, and that was that I was going to be taken up into the maze. It was my time to shine! Ha! Yeah, right.
The frustrating thing about being sent up there was not the fact that I was going to have to resort back to primitive times of land foraging, but the fact that my memory was going to be wiped. I was going to be able to remember anything. I wasn't going to be able to remember Newt.
I would be sent up into the girl's maze with no knowledge of who I was and I would never get to see Newt ever again. Thanks for ruining my life, WICKED.
I had thought about making a break for it. Running as fast as I could to the first exit I found and meet my demise outside instead of up in an artificial land mass that was still in the building. I wouldn't have gotten far, though before the guards would have stopped me.
It wasn't much of a surprise to me when a few weeks later, I was woken up by a large needle being stabbed in my arm. And when I say large, I mean bigger than any needle should ever be. It resembled more of a pencil in size than a needle or at least that was what it felt like.
I opened my eyes to darkness. The people had put a blindfold over my eyes, and for what? I knew my way around the building. I knew every single place they were going to take me. I tried to reach up with my hands to rip the cover off my eyes, but I could only move my hands a few inches before there was a clang of metal against metal and the leather straps around my wrists tightened. I could feel the pressure of a belt-like strap around my waist, holding my arms down.
"Get this fucking blindfold off of me!" I let out a scream, and someone slammed their hand over my mouth. I let out a fierce growl and bit at the person's hand. They yelped out in pain when I got a large chunk of their palm between my teeth. The hand retracted but then came swinging towards me and connecting with my cheek. "You asinine, little brat," a male voice hissed, undoubtfully the man with the iron swing.
I opened my mouth to retort something back, but my open mouth was shoved full of a sort of cloth. I was going to suffocate before I could even get to the maze. Good, I almost preferred that. Put me out of my misery.
The sedative that they had given me was kicking in. I became weak, and then I was limp. This was the part when I expected my mind to go numb as well, putting me into a deep, unsoothing sleep, but it never came.
They pulled the fabric out of my mouth, and then there was manhandling. Several hands were on my body, slipping under me to pick me up and move me over to what I suspected was one of the gurney's that I had seen so many times before. They dropped me onto the rollable bed in a way that was nowhere near careful. I tried to swear at them and tell the workers that they were shitty at their job, but my mouth wouldn't move.
A strap was put on my stomach and cinched up so tight that it was becoming hard to breath. They did the same with my legs to keep me secure in the gurney. And then to my surprise, they placed around strap around my neck. This one wasn't as snug but still enough to let me know there was no escaping.
I heard the movement of bed springs, and I knew that it was my bunkmates watching. The workers left the room quickly and the door shut with its all too familiar click which indicated the locking mechanism was on.
"We're sorry," Thomas whispered. I could sense him getting up from his bed, and his soft footfalls indicated that he was coming close. I heard the sound of Thomas pulling something out of his bedside drawer. "Here, take this," he said and slid the object was weighed next to nothing into the pocket of my pants and got back onto his bed. The weight made me question if it was anything at all. Maybe a metaphoric object, like his hope or something else cheesy like that.
"You'll never be alone," Teresa said. It was probably good that I was unable to speak or else a snarky comment would have come out of my mouth. "Behind the computer, we will do anything to keep you and Newt alive. We promised. I know you won't remember, but we will be there. You'll never be alone," her voice was soft, and for the first time in a long time, I could tell that she was sincere.
The nurses came back into the room and began wheeling me out of the room. It was nice knowing, you guys, I wanted to say, but the damned drug did not allow it.
The lights outside the room were their strong white incandescent selves, and even though the blindfold, they threatened a headache.
I was brought into a room with the same blaring white lights. And I imagined it was the one that I had been in before. There was a huge metal contraption, with many tubes and wires hanging off of it in the centre of the room if my memory served me correctly, and I was soon going to be hooked up to the machine.
"Now, this will only take a second. We wouldn't want you remembering anything after the chip is inserted, now would we?" A woman laughed like she had said something hilarious. "I think it will be best to give her another dose of sedative, just to make sure she is under," the lady said to who I was guessing was her assistant. I couldn't be sure to how many people were in the room, but there were at least three sets of footsteps.
I tried to snarl when I felt the needle enter my arm once again, but to be avail. That was the last thing that happened before I felt my consciousness slipping. The blackness of a coma-like state was calling my name, pulling me away from the light that was trying so hard to reach my eyes through the blindfold.
Say goodbye to everyone and everything that I know and say hello to a new life as a 'subject' that will be studied in a confined pen.
It was bliss when the blackness finally took over. The stress and anxiety faded away, even if it was only for the short period of time.