Children's Games: A Story of Modern Consequence

Chapter 55

~Matthew~

Matthew could now remember why his visions of long corridors riddled with vents and coffins were so significant. It related to parts of his childhood.

In the summer, his parents would lock the house up as soon as the heat started rolling in. There was nothing to do, so he would escape to play games with the other kids in the neighbourhood. It would drive his mother insane, but his father would laugh at his wife's antics towards a young boy wanting to roam free.

There would be about twenty of them, all crowded into a circle to pick a seeker, then they would all scatter to hide. The seeker would tag the first person that he found, then they would start a team to find the rest of them. It might take all day, through the scorching temperatures so hot that the school day had been cancelled, but they would all inevitably be found.

Except for Matthew. He was the master of 'hide and seek', and he had never told anyone his secret. And he had forgotten his own secret until, so far away from that place, Matthew ran beside Dominik. They both exerted themselves pushing a huge crate on wheels that was full to the brim with the 'Models'. He was painfully aware that so much destruction was just a step in front of him, and he cringed each time the commander stopped them so that he could place a Model into an exposed air vent. But he would continue each time, pushing the heavy crate full of disease, scared of what he had to do sooner or later.

He couldn't help but realise how confident his child self used to be, always so daring. Now, there wasn't a day that passed without thinking of dying, without thinking of everything that made him feel like he didn't belong here. At first it was because he had evaluated his own qualifications and skills and decided how inadequate he was, and now it was because the thick scars that licked up his spine from his months of torture as a prisoner of war now made him feel victimised and weak. He couldn't explain the shame he felt.

Dominik had taken him to a strange neighbourhood that was decorated with glow in the dark ink that painted the walls of the houses. The artwork were depictions of a battlefield where naked soldiers struck each other with their bare hands. Gods peered down from their seats in the clouds, wearing uniforms and medals, looking amused. Matthew didn't have time to deconstruct what it meant before they appeared behind a house where a door was built into the edge of the cliff face.

They entered into the hallway that looked much like the ones in the council building. Each way stretched on and on, and gradually curved away as it stretched around the entire perimeter of the city. Dominik kept a hand on the back of Matthew's neck as he instructed him to disable the cameras while explaining the new environment. It only took Matthew a few moments, then they were off again to push their huge cart filled along. The lights along the ceilings flickered from neglect and the dome cameras elicited no light as they ran past.

There were a few hundred of these corridors that looped around the whole of Fimiston, all connected by a steep stairway every few hundred metres. As they jogged, every now and then a special large machine attached to the vents came up in a gap in the wall, built into the thick cool rock underneath. They would stop and Dominik would activate the timer on a Model and attach it inside the machine, then they would continue.

The machines were special conditioning systems to cool the rich apartments close to where they were in the hallways. Once the timer set off, the bacteria would be released and would be free to spread and grow directly in people's houses.

They were on the 250th floor and had positioned a total of fifty models. Dominik explained that these hallways were unknown to the general people and were only used by the soldiers on duty so that they could get to places quickly and avoid the overpopulated streets during times of emergency. The network of corridors didn't connect to any important buildings and weren't heavily guarded as no one was supposed to know that they existed, and its doors were always locked.