Subject 9012

Chapter Two

Chapter 2

                I pressed my back against the door, sliding into a sitting position. Breathing heavily, I close my eyes, giving myself a moment to gather my thoughts. Did the Pre-Test Zone really just explode? And if it did, how am I still alive? Isn’t this technically part of the Pre-Test Zone?

               I twist my body around and pull at the handle. It doesn’t budge. Standing up, I decide to try again-no luck. Frowning, I lean back, pulling with all my might, but the door still doesn’t open. By rattling the door, I can tell that it’s locked. I slide back down the wall again, letting out a sigh. This can’t be happening…

                First things first; I need to see how bad my leg is…and if there’s any other injuries I’ve sustained. Really, I think I’m the only person-or rather, test subject-that has managed to hurt themself before the test even begins.

                Rolling up the leg of my camouflage cargo pants, I can see the damage done to my leg. It’s actually not all that bad…ish. There’s already a huge purple-black bruise forming, and there are lots of little and big cuts and scrapes. Running a hand gently over the muscle, I can feel that I pulled it, maybe even sprained it. I have no idea why my leg isn’t broken; honestly, the bone should be split into lots of tiny pieces…

                Now that I think about it, how did I even manage to walk to the door, carrying two fifty pound-or-more bags (at least for most of the way) while laden down with another twenty to fifty pounds of weapons and an apparently broken leg, all in twenty seconds? I probably had to walk for around two hundred yards to get to this hallway…

                That’s about 10 yards a second; dragging along a hundred pounds with a bad leg. As far as I’m concerned, that shouldn’t be humanly possible.

                I push those thoughts to the back of my mind, peering across the room. Since I couldn’t go back, there was only one direction to travel in-forward.

                I stand up yet again, taking a deep, shaky breath. I’ll have to figure this out later…until then, I should start walking.

                The noise of my heavy, slightly lopsided footsteps echoes through the immaculate hallway as I walk. The bag scrapes the ground as I drag it, emitting a low rumbling sound. The steel is strong, and the tiles are uniform and in pristine condition. It’s an endless space of steel and lines, creating identical silver square after silver square after silver square…

                Then I noticed that the tiles had begun to get darker. In fact, looking ahead at the end of the hallway (which was barely visible), the squares there were almost black. At the beginning of the hallway, the squares were a pristine white.

                Shivering, I decided there was nothing left to do except to continue walking. Only now, as I walked deeper into the land of the black squares, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was falling down a hole, to never see the light again…

*                                                                                *                                                                                 *

                The end of a hallway has never been such a scary place.

                Not only were the tiles black, but the more I walked, the more the lights dimmed. They went out slowly and gradually, so by the time I reached the almost-black squares, I was plunged into almost-total darkness. I could barely see the huge doorway, even though it was right in front of me.