Instinctively, I reach for the tazer and aim it at the woman. However before I can pull the trigger, she exits through the doorway and turns the corner. The two of us sprint after her because if she gets away, then our presence will be compromised.
As we step out into the hall, I glance right and see the woman making her way up a flight of stairs. She glances back at us in horror as I aim the tazer at her. Without thinking, I squeeze my hand and watch as the woman is hit and falls in a fit of shakes halfway up the stairs.
She gasps as she falls, but by the time she has hit the floor, she has silenced. She lies on the stairs, her body lying limply. Although the woman is unconscious, her body still shakes as electricity surges through her body.
‘’Shit,’’ I mutter, the two of us approach her carefully.
She stops shaking as Aaron and I stand above her, her eyes are shut and her legs are bent awkwardly. Her mouth is slightly open and her soft breaths are audible.
‘’What do we do with her?’’ I ask.
‘’We’ll have to hide her body somewhere,’’ explains Aaron, bending down and picking the woman up.
As if she was a mere infant, he throws her over his shoulder and gets to his feet. As he does this, a small key card unclips itself from her skirt and falls to the ground. I pick up the small square piece of laminated paper and shove it in my pocket.
At that moment, a man turns the corner and appears at the top of the stairs. He wears black trousers and what seems to be a lab-coat. He wears a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and he has a pencil wedged in the hair between his ear and skull. He stares at us in what appears to be fear for a second and then turns and dashes away.
I glance at Aaron momentarily and then I bound up the stairs after him. He pants as he runs, it was obvious to me even before he began running that he would not be the fittest of people. His appearance suggests a lifetime spent behind a computer, and although that used to be me before this happened to me, I catch up with him quite quickly. My fitness has improved immensely here.
‘’Not so fast, stop where you are and say nothing or I will shoot,’’ I warn.
‘’Please Alice, don’t.’’
For a moment his response confuses me, how is it that he knows my name? Then I remember that he is among the people that have been watching me – stalking me from behind cameras my entire time here, and long before that.
‘’I’m sure you know by now that I will do it, so do yourself a favour and don’t make me,’’ I warn.
He has stopped however his back is to me, I cannot see his face.
‘’Do you understand?’’ I ask.
I see his head nod slightly.
‘’Speak,’’ I order.
‘’Yes,’’ he responses, his voice cracks with fear and I hide a smirk.
‘’Good, slowly turn around and come with me,’’ I order.
We walk back along the hall and descend the stairs. Aaron is moving towards us with a worried look on his face; however when he sees me leading the man down the stairs, his expression lightens. The woman is nowhere to be seen, he obviously took care of hiding her.
‘’What do you want with me?’’ quivers the man.
‘’We’re asking the questions around here,’’ I begin, pulling the man’s nametag from his waist, ‘’Nathan.’’
We lead him down the hall and into the room full of computers. He breathes quite loudly, he sounds frightened. And that he should be considering he is outnumbered in a room with two people that have a very good reason to want him dead.
‘’Have a seat Nathan,’’ orders Aaron.
‘’Oh no, I’m fine standing.’’
‘’That wasn’t a request,’’ says Aaron and Nathan promptly grabs a chair and takes a seat.
Aaron removes his dagger from his belt and inspects it under the light, then looks at the man quivering before him.
‘’Where are the others?’’ questions Aaron, ‘’are they close?’’
‘’The others?’’
‘’The other people that work with you. The other sickos behind this thing,’’ clarifies Aaron.
‘’Tell the truth,’’ I instruct before he begins, ‘’don’t make us hurt you, because we will.’’
The man gulps loudly, his hands are shaking slightly. We both stare angrily at him, trying to intimidate him. It obviously works; because he blurts out everything we ask him, he is obviously very afraid of death. For someone behind such a cruel game, he is quite a coward!
‘’They’re upstairs, waiting in the labs for the bodies to be collected for examination...’’
‘’Why aren’t they stopping us from taking this information?’’ Aaron asks, glancing over at the busted filing cabinet.
‘’Because nobody knows you are here, we thought you both left on the boat. We watched you both leave on the boat. We gave you a chance to live, and you came back.’’
‘’We had to stop this,’’ I say, ‘’whatever this is.’’
‘’If only you knew...’’ he says quietly, ‘’you’d understand why we are doing this.’’
‘’Doing what? Abducting children and forcing them to fight each other to the death?’’ yells Aaron, screaming at the man in the lab coat and causing him to quiver like a child, ‘’how can you justify that?!’’
‘’Shhh,’’ I warn him, we can’t give away our presence so soon, there is still much we have yet to find out.
‘’It’s for the greater good, sacrifices must be made,’’ explains Nathan with a fearful voice, ‘’the deaths of the people that die here are but just a drop of water in the ocean. You have to think of the bigger picture.’’
‘’Those people were my friends,’’ I spit in fury at the man, who sinks into his seat, ‘’so don’t you dare speak of their deaths...their murders, so casually.’’
There is silence for a few seconds; Nathan looks at me as I stare venomously at him.
‘’What greater good?’’ questions Aaron, speaking before I do anything I may regret afterwards.
‘’We were working on a cure for cancer, and you two may be part of the solution. We think we’ve done it.’’
‘’What?’’ utters Aaron in confusion, ‘’how has any of this got anything to do with curing cancer?’’
The man in the lab coat sighs.
‘’Despite your likely disagreements, I highly doubt either of your brains could even begin to comprehend the complexities behind any of this,’’ explains Nathan, ‘’so I don’t wish to delve into this.’’
‘’Try us,’’ I challenge, anger still clear in my tone.
‘’You are all very special people,’’ he begins, ‘’you all have a certain genetic defect which causes the production of an enzyme in your body called Exomantisaze-C – or Exo-C for short – which we are able to manipulate to produce a universal cure for cancer.’’
‘’Go on.’’
‘’Unfortunately, we have observed that the levels of this enzyme in humans is only found during late puberty, and even so, it is quite a miniscule amount. However, within the hours following the subject’s death, the production of this enzyme seems to magnify enormously for some reason, making it much easier to recover and observe. That’s what the bracelets were used for, to recover the enzyme. They are in fact mini-labs that are able to extract and analyse the blood values and then send the resulting data back to our labs.’’
As Nathan speaks, he speaks with such enthusiasm and passion that I know he cannot be lying. He really believes in what he is talking about. Aaron observes him silently as he speaks. I can tell he believes the man too from the expression evident across his face.
‘’It also magnifies immensely under the influence of adrenaline, which is the primary reason for the whole facade of the television show and for the murder aspect of this. Fear is essential, it helps stimulate the fight or flight mechanism tied to the basic human instinct of survival. As inhumane as it sounds, we had to ensure this process was a frightening and traumatizing as possible to achieve our goal.’’
‘’So what was the point of all the lies? Why the game?’’ I ask, ‘’why not just tell us that we had to kill each other straight out from the beginning?’’
‘’We had no choice. The game and all the discoveries you made by yourselves along the way made it more realistic and that contributed to the fear that increases the production of Exo-C.’’
‘’What about Jack, and the other mute?’’ I ask.
‘’Fear, it was all to do with fear.’’
I feel physically sick listening to the man’s words.
‘’Well why do you have to keep kidnapping children? Surely once you got the enzymes after the first time, that would have been enough?’’ I say in confusion.
He shakes his head impatiently.
‘’The enzymes cannot be replicated in the lab, we had to continue because we needed a constant supply.’’
‘’What relevance do the letters have to it?’’ asks Aaron, ‘’and the LIS.’’
‘’To distract you, to maintain fear and hence achieve optimum levels of adrenaline and therefore Exomantisaze-C production. And we believe we have done it, that’s why we gave you the opportunity to go free. But you returned...’’
‘’You sent Niamh to kill us?’’ I remind him, ‘’you didn’t let us go.’’
‘’We never sent her after you...we assumed she had gone after you however when she didn’t return to headquarters. She must have acquired a particular dislike for you over the course of the game.
What did you do to her?’’
‘’I pushed her from the boat after she tried to kill us,’’ I explain through gritted teeth as I recollect how she almost killed Aaron.
As I finish explaining this to him, a figure appears in the doorway, another man dressed in a lab coat; however this man holds a tazer in his hand – very similar to the one I used earlier. I glance at Aaron fearfully. Moments later, three more men appear and join the first standing in the doorway.
‘’I apologise for having to kill you, but unfortunately we have no choice in the matter. We have the cure for cancer after all, we can’t have people like you revealing our secrets to the world.’’
‘’You won’t get away with it,’’ I warn, ‘’people will want to know how you found a cure, you can’t keep this a secret forever.’’
‘’Ah, but we won’t need to. Curing cancer is a monumental scientific breakthrough. We can lie easily about the means; nobody will care enough to debate that with us. People will only be concerned with the end product.’’
‘’And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters,’’ says a new male voice, appearing in the doorway.
The others part to allow the man to enter the room; he is clearly their superior, perhaps even their leader. Nathan glances at him, as though waiting for instructions.
‘’Kill them.’’