In White Robes

Chapter 1 - Red Lights

Author's Note: This chapter is a bit long... sorry about that! But I promise you, everything down below is very, very important to understand. The rest of the chapters will not be as long, so feel free to take your time with this one. Enjoy!



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I can't breathe. I can't see. I'm drowning. I can't breathe. I'm going to die. I'm going to . . .

Lights flashed around my face. My eyes were peeling open, stunned by the influx of fluorescent facility lights that beamed down from their square, glass cases in the ceiling. I looked around. I was kneeling on the cold floor. To my left, there was a dusty table and a dirty rag atop it. It all seemed like a chore set up intentionally. To my right, legs.

Legs.

I shot back, twisting my body so that I could face the figure standing above me. My breathing was swift, uneven, afraid, for the person in the room with me was glaring down at me with a mask trimmed in silver. The mask had a mouth, a sculpted one, black in color and molded into some kind of eternal scowl. 

The rest of the figure's body was cloaked in a neat white robe, adorned by letters written in the top corner in small print: TRP. I didn't know what it meant.

"What's your problem?" the figure suddenly said, its body still and its voice firm. "Get to work, 20." 20. Hearing this, I remembered. I must have drifted off into a brief sleep before the masked man woke me back up. And that's where I was surrounded by water. That's where I felt like I was going to die.

 
Death awaited me behind my own two eyes, and then the man brought me back to my senses before it could pull me away.

But with the realization of this came the memory of where exactly I was. An all-white room, brightened by its lights, housing shelves and metal racks along the walls almost endlessly. Each one dusty, each one begging to be cleaned with the cloth that was still on the table next to me.

I remembered I was supposed to be the one to dust the shelves.

The one to stock the racks.

The one in the cage.

The last thing I remembered was about the man in the mask. We called them the Concealed, the masked figures who kept us locked away, who checked our rooms like nurses in the hospital, who prevented us from leaving by pointing rifles into our eyes. I'd been assigned to this room, the storage room, to clean it as my daily chore.

And he, the Concealed man standing in front of the door that I had just realized was there, had been assigned to me. To watch me. To prepare to detain me if I were so bold as to try and escape the room. And beyond the storage room, the doors of the facility. But I wasn't a fool. I understood that if I were to even think about escaping, they would dispose of me, dip me onto death's porch, and leave me to rot.

No one disobeyed the Concealed. No one dared defy their authority. We all went along with our new cruel lives, contained only in the cage that was this facility. Or as they liked to call it, the Sanctuary.

Again I was snapped out of my trance when the masked man yelled my name. Or rather, my number.

"20!" I flinched at his booming volume. "Get to work before I have to beat the work into you! I'm not going to stand here all day and watch you daydream. You're on the clock here."

On the clock. As if restricting me to this one building for the rest of my life wasn't enough, they had tacked on time limits for chores.

"Yes, sir!" I scrambled to say, fear in my voice. The Concealed watched impatiently as I wiped every shelf and every rack free of dust and grime. Satisfied with my work, I turned back to the masked man, holding out the cloth like an offering. It was drenched in dirt that had gone totally black.

His masked eyes scanned the object for a few moments, silence connecting the two of us in this room, and then he gave a slight nod.
"Set it down. And get off your knees." He stepped aside the door, leaving it completely open to my sight. In the far past I would have thought he was letting me go. Letting me free so that I could see my family again. But I had matured since then. "Get back to your room."

The rest of the facility was vividly all white. At times it would prove difficult to discern a pane of glass from the walls around it. And it was a blinding kind of white; too bright for my eyes. In each hall it reeked of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol, the kind of smell that would fill a hospital.

I wasn't allowed to look into the windows I could see. The Concealed behind me monitored me. Made sure I didn't look into a window and see what he didn't want me to see. I never knew what was really going on down here. But I knew I wasn't alone. Everyone else was in the same boat as me. We were all equally as stuck and blindly afraid for our safety.

When I reached my room, the man pushed me past the door harshly and stood there in the threshold for a moment. I realized he was watching me, but what expression was on his face? Past the empty eyes of the mask, I couldn't tell right from wrong. I wondered if he felt bad for me. If he pitied all of us here.

He said nothing, just stood there and stared with his hands on his weapon. And then the awkward silence between us ended when he finally shut and locked the door, settling me back into my little prison.

I sighed and rested a hand on the cold wall. It would be a while until I had another chance to leave the room again.

"Cleaning duty?" came a voice from the other side of the room. I looked over, expectant. There, on the other side of the glass barrier splitting our room in half, Avery sat curled against the wall, his antlers sticking up like daggers over his head and his face calm.

I walked slowly over to the barrier, staring at him. "Yeah. I started zoning out in there."

Avery scoffed, smiling. "I don't blame you. Who really wants to clean? We're not maids." That was true. We weren't maids, however our lives here really made us out to be slaves instead. As the Concealed were instructed to "tend" to us every now and then, we were stuck with jobs of our own. The little bit of freedom we had rested in the palm of a chore outside our rooms.

I knelt beside the glass. "Have you heard anything else?" I asked. Suddenly Avery's face softened.

"Big news. The experiments they keep talking about are close to being finished." My skin tingled as he spoke to me. We were never told explicitly what the experiments were for, but I could only assume it wasn't anything good. "Larson's pulling some of us out soon." His voice grew cold.

"Out? Like, we get to leave?" I piped up, but Avery shook his head in a negative.

"Out, as in, to be tested on," he continued, "and apparently you're next." Before my shock could envelope me fully, a noise broke the eerie quiet in our room. It blasted through my ears, and I went to cover them. Avery did the same.

The wailing noise covering the facility sounded like a siren. A warning sign that danger was near.

Outside of my door, red lights blared and blazed along the hallways. The white walls turned hot-red, the siren screamed for an eternity. When I finally mustered up enough energy to press my eyes to the small window in my door, I saw them. A squadron of them.

The Concealed, filling the hallways with haste, guns in-hand, a thundering choir of running feet. I could not see what they were after. All I could hear was the siren and Concealed footsteps. All I could see were their veiled bodies and the facility walls, now plunged into chaos.