TRAIN [FIRST DRAFT]

Chapter 14: Mind Games

 Aimee could hear her faint heartbeat, and her breath echoing through the room. Nothing was happening. She sat down, cross-legged and almost disappointed, and then she sighted something, a blurred object. She narrowed her eyes for a clearer view and saw a door. She beamed with potent hopes that it was a way out, but relaxed again. She recognised the door as her bedroom door. She rose from the floor and went up to it. Her hand reached out in front of her, until she held the cold spherical handle in her five fingers. Through the door, she saw a mirror image of herself, and then a mirror image of Gavin, hugging her from behind as she cried.

A memory?

She saw no point in this. A scary thought came to her mind: that maybe Buckley was controlling this mechanism and all of the others, that somehow he focused on a sweet memory that she had of Gavin to change her mind about Stefan. She was hoping that that thought of hers was wrong, but why else would that be what she saw during this segment of her training? It was a nice moment, but pointless now.

There Gavin was, telling her how she is so beautiful. Aimee did not know how she was supposed to feel, what a proper reaction would be, but she could not help feeling enraged. Her blood boiled as if she was positioned over a fire, being cooked on a spit. As her hand constricted the door handle, she knew that it would be best if she returned to that great and empty room, and closed her door. The door shut with an unintentionally loud bang, and she rested on it, exhaling uneasily. She then took a good look at the steel room and noticed something on the walls that was not there before: cameras.

"What is this?" she whispered.

They each spun with a robotic hum and a blinking red light, targeting Aimee. And then she realised that they were not cameras at all.

They were wall-mounted machine guns!

That memory of Gavin was a distraction, so that she could be caught off-guard. A gun on her far right opened fire. It was distant. She had time to get up and evade the bullets, it was easy, but who knew for how long. She had to run – she did – faster than she had ever run. And her panicking inner voice asked her what Valerie would do in such a situation. She remembered her words.

"Stay calm, focus hard," she repeated it as a mantra, short of breath. "That's not gonna stop machine guns!"

Aimee glanced behind her, at the hot metal guns that had fired. They were getting faster, every bullet making a beeline for her. She looked ahead. She was running towards the gun that she figured would be the last to fire. It was last in the row of the wall-mounted holders of hell. Aimee had to think quickly. Eventually, she would run out of steam and surely die. She could not die, not then, not before Domino Doomsday had even begun. Her life was precious, frustrating and unkind and falling apart, but precious. After all, the fate of her country rested on it.

She reached the gun and climbed onto it. She came up with a plan, and although it was not her best plan, at the moment it was all she had.

I'll destroy the other guns with this one, at least until it becomes automatic, too, and then I'll have to dodge its bullets until it runs out... Well, running from one gun is easier than running from all of them.

She grabbed the gun firmly and fired. Some of her bullets ricocheted off the walls, but she got the hang of it. She was doing well, blasted a minimum of twenty other buggers, until the gun just before hers shot at her. It was too quick for her to shoot back. She slid off of her gun, and they shut down, thinking she was dead, as she fell onto the ground. Her gun was a hot, melted mess, a clump of metal. It had been fired at, not her, so why did she feel an unbearable pain? She would know if she'd been shot. She raised her shirt and observed her bandaging – it was red, her blood was spreading. Her wound had reopened.