Till The WICKED End | A Maze Runner Story (English Version)

15. Cranks

We took our things and left the building again. Before slipping under the gate that Jorge and Gally held, I took one last look at the past that WICKED had so desperately wanted me to forget.
Outside it was already night. We trudged through the deep sand back to the Berg. No one said anything, everyone was far too horrified by what we had learned.
"I suggest we spend the night here. Jorge needs to sleep too and we should use the daylight to travel and find them so we can approach them in the dark. That seems the smartest thing to do," Thomas explained after Jorge closed the loading dock.
No one said anything in reply; there were isolated nods of agreement. We settled in for the night in silence and this time I got a sleeping bag off between Gally and Brenda. Even though I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep a wink after these last few hours, I fell asleep surprisingly quickly and sank into hazy dreams that I was sure belonged to a past I might have preferred to just forget.

I was in a dark basement with a very young Thomas. A man and a woman were with us, the man carrying a rifle, the woman a bow. While the man stood guard at the foot of a staircase that seemed to lead upward, out of the cellar, the woman sat with us and gently stroked our hair. I felt like I hadn't showered in a while, my clothes and skin were dirty and my hair dull. Thomas's hair seemed to have been uncut for too long, it reached almost to his shoulders and was also dull, just as his skin and clothes were dirty. The two adults also made an unkempt impression. I could tell that the man was slightly muscular, but also thin, when he suddenly stood up, his gaze directed upward, and whispered, "There's someone there. I heard footsteps."
"Bandits?" the woman asked, and I could hear fear in her voice.
"No. They're not people, they move too loudly and imprecisely for that."
I could now make out his profile and noticed that he had the same snub nose as Thomas, and if I wasn't fooled in the twilight of the single oil lamp that stood next to the woman, he also had the same brown eyes.
"Do you think they're Cranks?"
"Let's hope they're not," the man replied, reloading his rifle.
The woman looked me straight in the eye for a moment and I saw my own likeness in her. Not the one I could see reflected in her eyes-for there I saw a little girl, with the same brown eyes as hers; but me as I looked in the present, except that my hair was twice as long and fuller than hers, my cheekbones didn't stick out quite as much, and she was perhaps ten years older than the present-Anna. Otherwise, we were almost completely alike.
The man who had walked up the stairs in the seconds I had been looking at the woman and was now coming back down looked even more worried than he had a few minutes ago.
"They are Cranks and there are many of them. I'm going to need your help, Lena."
The woman nodded, turned to Thomas and me one last time, and looked at us as if to memorize our faces carefully. Then she rose and put an arrow in her bow.
"Anna, do you still have your knife?" the man asked as he climbed the stairs again, his wife behind him.
I felt myself nod and grab my waistband where the shaft of a small knife peeked out.
"Thomas, lock the door behind us and stay with your sister. If we don't come back, you wait 24 hours, then you take your things and follow the posters on the streets. Stay in the shadows and hide when you meet other people. Don't trust anyone until you reach the doctors. And remember what they said on the radio" - he pointed to a battered radio on the floor next to our sleeping bags - "WICKED is good. You have to find them."
I felt tears welling up in my eyes, but swallowed them furiously. I had to be strong now. I had to take care of my brother, after all, I was the fighter of the two of us, the one with the knife.
"Thomas, Anna, we're going to make it. We'll be back soon," the woman whispered with one last look at us as she saw that Thomas had not won the battle against the tears as successfully as I had.
Now something popped above us. One of the Cranks must have knocked over a shelf.
"Lena, come on now. We have to stop them before they get to the door."
The woman turned away and followed the man up the stairs. Thomas jumped up, ran after them, bolted the door that I couldn't see from where I was sitting, and then quickly came back to me. We spread a blanket over us and huddled in the corner. I extinguished the lamp, then all was silent except for the rumbling above us.
"Anna?" Thomas whispered into the darkness. "I'm scared..."
"So am I, Tommy. So am I."

I was jerked back to the present by a loud curse. Only the rumble of Cranks one floor above us remained of my dream.
It took me a few moments to realize that the sounds were real, that they weren't an echo of my little trip down memory lane. Confused, I looked around. Jorge, Fry Pan, and Brenda were on their feet, making worried faces.
"They can't get through there, can they?" Francesca asked, who was sitting on Gally's other side and thus very close to me, looking anxiously toward the loading dock.
Why had they had to wake me up just now? What had happened to the man and the woman, had they come back to us? I was sure it had been our parents. Why had they told us we had to go to WICKED? Why did they think WICKED was good?
"I don't think so. But I don't know how many there are. We should get going. It's going to be light soon. Staying here and waiting to see if these things get the lid on would be tantamount to a suicide attempt."
Jorge turned away from the ramp and walked over to the cockpit. Fry Pan, who had apparently settled into the co-pilot role, followed him.