From Inside the Maze: A Collection of Short Stories

Letter for Justice

**This story has warning attached to it. There is nothing inappropriate but there are references to suicide. Please take action accordingly**

It started with six of us. Three girls and three boys. The oldest was Valor who was seventeen. The youngest was a girl named James who was only twelve. I was somewhere in the middle, being fifteen. We were completely different in almost every way which was kind of the point. But we all had one thing in common. We were all doing it for the money.

I had applied for the position against my father's will. I was his only son and he needed me to help support my mother and sisters. But all it took was one look at our shabby house and nearly empty cupboards and one look at the amount of cash they were offering to participants and it was too good to resist.

I had been deemed the most physically and mentally fit for the experiment but to be fair I didn't have much competition. I had to pass several tests before they shipped me up to the nearby city of Eastport. My father, thankfully, was not as angry at me for disobeying as I thought he would be. He told me to back out while I still could, but I told him my decision was final. My mother was scared. She, even more than my father, begged and pleaded with me not to go. I reassured her the best I could with false promises. The next day I was on my way to Eastport and it was to late to turn back.

There I met the others. I met James and Valor as well as Indigo, Anton, and Thea. Within the first day of meeting them, I could tell they were in the exact same situation as I. We all had a poor family back home and were seeking this as an opportunity to change that.

We entered the building where the experiment was to take place. The experiment began the morning after we'd all arrived. I'd said goodbye to the others participants and was now standing in front of a closed metal door. The scientists nodded and I stepped in.

I watched the door close behind me and surveyed the room. It was quite large, larger than I'd expected it to be with a few dim lights across the ceiling. It was just a concrete room. No windows, no furniture, not even any carpet. On the left wall were two shelves with indentations in the wall just above them. The left, I knew, was how the scientists could deliver food to me three times a day. The right was for objects, other things that I would need to survive one hundred days. One hundred days of isolation in this concrete room.

The few days passed without incident. The food came and the only thing that appeared on the object shelf was a fork and spoon. I quickly learned that nothing could go back through the object shelf as the empty plate did after meals on the food shelf.

It wasn't that long into the experiment when one of my only four lights went out. I expected a spare light bulb to come through the shelf but none did. "Hey, I've gotten a dead light bulb in here!" I called out into the empty room. "Room Three. Josephus. Needs a spare light bulb." I suddenly realized that I was perhaps becoming crazy and quickly stopped yelling into my room expecting an answer.

Then, as I expected, something new appeared on the object shelf. It was a knife and a rather sharp on at that. I was concerned until for the evening meal there was a beautiful steak waiting for me on the food shelf. I gobbled it up faster than anything I'd ever eaten in my life. But that was the last nice meal I had.

After about the first thirty days things changed and they changed faster. Another of my lights went out and the ones I had left that worked seemed to become dimmer. The amount of food on the plates coming through became smaller and smaller until one day there was just no food at all. I was terrified that the scientists were going to starve me to death until the next morning there was the normal small portion of food I had come to expect. But, I ate only half of it and set the rest aside for fear that they would cut off my food supply for good.