Newt: A Broken Boy ↠ The Maze Runner

17

He walks into the room, his hand clasped over his sister's. Her hand is clammy in his, and he understands why. His own lip is hurting from continuously chewing it all morning.

The room is filled with children, none of them above the age of four. Some running around, screaming, some clinging to their parents, nervous to emerge into this new experience. He looks around, and notices that he is the only one there with no adult - no mother or father, not even an older sibling to help him out on his first day of nursery. He shrugs it off, remembering the love in his mother's face as she dropped him at the gate. He's always known that he's grown up for his age.

"Hello, you must be Olivia and James." A lady with a round face and warm eyes approaches him and his sister. He nods, and she smiles. "My name is Mrs Smith. Welcome to this school, I very much hope you enjoy it here."

He immediately takes a liking to her, and squeezes his sister's hand encouragingly. She gives a weak smile.

"Come, sit with the other children." She beckons at them to follow her into the next room, where a group of children are sitting on the floor, in a circle. Except soon, they aren't children.

Before his very eyes, he sees them transform. Their hair falls out. Their hands develop bloody cuticles. Their eyes are bloodshot, with crazed looks in them. His sister turns towards him, and he sees that she, as well, has changed. Slowly, he lowers his gaze to his own hands, fearing the worst. He is not wrong. His hands are covered in dirt and grime, and he can feel a long scar running down his cheek. He closes his eyes, and screams. He screams, and screams, and it seems like it will never stop.

I jolted awake from the nightmare, blinking hard. I had just witnessed my old classmates turning into monsters. Into cranks.

Sitting up, I looked down and studied my hands; the long fingers covered in scratches, the bruised knuckles. It wasn't difficult to imagine them as the hands of a crank. After all, it was going to happen all too soon.

I looked around, trying to work out what the time was. The sun was just rising behind me, so I figured it was around five in the morning.

Before shaking him awake, I took in Chuck's appearance. A mop of dark curls rested on his head, which was quite round. He had red cheeks and pink lips, which were opening and closing as he snored softly. He was using his hands as a pillow, and was curled up like a cat. If you removed all the mud, cuts and bruises, he looked like a normal nine year old.

Minho, on the other hand, looked muscular and built up either way. He had been trained by WICKED for over five years, and had developed muscles that most twelve year olds wouldn't have in their wildest dreams.

Breakfast that day was small, half a tin of canned peaches between the three of us. As I ate, I watched Minho interrogate Chuck.

"So." Minho cleared his throat. "Why were you in a burning house anyway? It's not your everyday occurrence, your residence burning down with artificial tracking fire, is it now?"

Chuck didn't quite register Minho's sarcasm, and simply laughed. "No, it really isn't." His face fell. "I was planning on camping out in there for the night, and then the fire started. Then you two came."

"And also, where did you come from? And how do you know so much about WICKED?" Minho continued with a relentless stream of questions.

"Well... well I came from WICKED, you see," Chuck began. "I was raised there, my mother worked in the facility. Not the same one that you came from," he added at Minho's confused look. "When my mother... well she died. So I ran away." He ended abruptly, and I got the hint. He didn't want to say more on the subject.

I stood up, brushing myself off. "We should probably get going," I said. "I want us to get at least five miles over the next half hour."

Minho rolled his eyes. "Who said you were the leader? And how do you expect us to walk so fast? I don't know about you, but I just woke up."

"I'm not the leader, Minho," I answered. "And to walk, I expect you to use your bloody legs. Nice and simple."

Again, Minho rolled his eyes, but this time he followed without complaint.

We walked for a few hours, covering a fair amount of land. Suddenly a clump of buildings faded through the dust and came into view, towering above us.

Minho sprang forwards, his dark eyes eager, but I grabbed hold of his shirt, pulling him back.

"You don't know what could be in there," I hissed. "For all we know, it could be infested with cranks!"

"Who cares about cranks?" Minho shook himself free of my grip. I stared at the ground, well aware that he didn't know that I wasn't immune. "Plus, there could be food up there. We need food, our stocks aren't gonna last us much longer. Probably not past today."

"Fine." I gave in, even though I still had a bad feeling about this. A really, really bad feeling.

Minho ran off is a cloud of dust, Chuck and I running after him. We slowed to a stop when he reappeared, looking back at us impatiently. He was standing in front of a grey door, almost invisible against the side of the large stone wall. I looked around for something that we could use to push it open, but Minho shook his head.

He gave the door a rough shove, and it swung open, surprisingly well oiled for an abandoned building. It only added to my growing sense of uneasiness.

"Look... Minho, maybe we shouldn't-" Minho cut me off with a finger to his lips.

The place was dusty, and covered in a nasty stench that reminded me of a dead animal. Minho walked at the front, Chuck shuffling behind him. I brought up the rear.

Sunlight poured in through a massive hole in the wall at the opposite side of the room, in a large sheet of light. Cautiously I peeked into a large wooden chest in the corner, but quickly shied away. Inside was a pile of rats, that looked as if they had been dead for a week or so, just long enough to start to rot. That explained the smell.

"Newt..." Minho's soft voice beckoned me over, presumably to see something in the next room. I obliged, but immediately wished I hadn't.

A body. A rotting, dead body. Disfigured, and seemingly burnt, but it was all there. Legs, arms, head. I could even make out the shape of the eyes, and a nose. The skin - or what was left of it - was red and flaky, and all the hair had fallen out. It was lying in a pool of dried blood, and for some reason, teeth. At closer inspection, they were sharp. Sharper than usual.
Sharp enough to draw blood at the softest touch. Only a madman would do something like that to their teeth. Only a crank. These were the teeth of a crank.

~

A/N: Hello people. Bit of a longer chapter, well long for me, cause I write titchy chapters. Anyways, votes, comments, the lot, are awesome. Baii.