The Program [COMPLETED]

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aiden coughed, his eyes blurring with tears. The gas dripped into the chamber at a slow rate, taunting Aiden with the prospect of certain death. He would die, and he would die slowly. General Xylem had made sure of that. Hatred burned through his body like fire. The poison of the gas was trickling into his body little by little, and the pain was like nothing Aiden had ever felt before. It gripped every part of him and clung to him like a infant to its mother. Outside the walls of the chamber, Agent Toryn was nowhere to be seen. He'd vanished out of thin air, and Aiden feared that the agent had gone to meet his friends on the main floor of the building. Aiden couldn't even warn them. They were doomed.

"Jayda," Aiden managed. She had leaned against the side of the chamber, the furthest she could get away from the gas. She looked at him with hazy eyes, grimacing. She seemed to be in even more pain than he was. 

"There has to be a way out," she gasped. "Some sort of vent, to flush the chamber."

Aiden looked around. Their metal prison was large enough to fit five people at most, which could buy him and Jayda the few precious moments of life they needed to survive. The murky gray gas hung in the dwindling air around them, making it more and more difficult to see across the chamber. He thought he saw a series of vents on the opposite side. Formulating a plan in his mind, Aiden plunged into the cloud of gas before Jayda could say otherwise.

"The hell are you doing?" Jayda exclaimed in a hoarse voice.

"I've got my knives. I'm going to try and pry the vents open so I can climb out and shut off the gas valve and override the circuitry for the chamber," Aiden explained in a hurry. "Watch my back, will you?"

"Too dangerous," Jayda coughed.

"No," Aiden replied firmly. "You're more vulnerable to the gas than I am, for some reason. It's safer for you to stay over there. The effects are getting to you faster than they're getting to me." Aiden justified his argument as he worked away on the vents. So far, prying the ventilation grates apart with his knife wasn't working too well.

"What makes you more immune than me? Did the Medical Bay give you some extra strength medication, or something?" Jayda argued.

Aiden pondered the thought for a second. He fought to remember anything he might have taken in the past that Jayda and the others had not been subjected to. The memory of a searing headache popped into his brain, along with the answer. 

"Zariah gave me headache medicine," he remembered. "It was months ago, and I could be totally wrong, but she said that they were pills from her own Unit. They also said that they had other plans for Zariah. Maybe she's partially immune to the gas?" 

"Well, good for her," Jayda retorted. "She's not in here with us, is she?" She was met with an intense coughing fit following her sentence.

"No," Aiden replied quickly. "But I just might be able to pull this off."

He looked down after a few seconds to find, to his dismay, that he hadn't even made a dent in prying apart the grates. Another idea crossed his mind. He ran his fingertips along the sides of the vent, and sure enough, he felt industrial-like screws digging into his skin. He removed the knife from in between the vent cracks before redirecting his attention to the screws and using his knife to untwist them from their locations. He'd already removed two screws from their placements in the wall and was already working on a third. He looked back at Jayda, who was now pressed up into the corner of the chamber, breathing heavily. Her eyes were shut tight and the gas hovered by her chest, passing in and out of her nostrils in puffs of thick, gray fog. Aiden was beginning to tire. If Zariah's headache meds really were the cause of his immunity, even they had their limitations. He removed the last two screws from the vents before throwing the panel aside. Sure enough, he saw freedom on the other end. The vent opened up into a broad tunnel that Aiden hoped would lead to a grate on the other end, beyond the chamber walls.