Mutations

November 24, 2014

November 24, 2014

I woke up in a grey room, with no windows only a door at the other end of the room. I have a different bandage on my arm, I'm not even wearing the same clothes I was wearing when he knocked me out. I'm wearing a black zip up jacket with no hood, but it has a collar. The trim is orange. I'm wearing black pants almost the material of jeans but it's not the same. No shoes only socks. I sit up on the table I'm laying on and wipe my eyes. There is a pair on tennis shoes on the floor neatly placed next to the table. The door opens and a woman wearing a white lab coat appears.

"James Baker?" She says, I nod and put the shoes on. Then she stands aside and let's me leave the room.

"Where are we going?" I ask following her down the hallway.

"To see the others," she means the other thirty-five people chosen to compete to be in this experiment. She stops walking and opens a door then stands aside again. I walk through the door, everyone in the room turns to see who's coming in. They are divided into boys and girls. All the girl's chairs are full and there is one left in the guy's. I take the last seat and a older man with grey hair and a wrinkly face walks on stage. Like the woman in the hallway he is wearing a white lab coat.

"We are going to start the trials immediately, you all will be escorted to your rooms, you all will have one roommate. You will change into the running uniform supplied then you will be escorted to the pacer room," he says, I hear a couple groans from the crowd.

"Is this going to be like the fitness testing we had to do in grade school?" I hear someone ask from the first or second row of guys.

"Exactly like that with our twist on it, now go," he says and walks off the stage. Everyone gets up and moves towards the door. We stop in front of the door, the same woman who lead me here is standing there. She starts walking down the hallway and takes a left turn, then she stops.

"These rooms will be where you will be living until we have narrowed you down to the sixteen. There are two names outside each door, find your room, change and be back out here in three minutes," I walk down the hallway and the first eight rooms are girls, I look at three doors and find my name on the third door. The name next to mine is Ryan Davis. A man with brown shaggy hair walks up next to me. He's at least six inches taller than me.

"You Ryan?" I ask him. He nods and pushes the door open, I follow him through the door. It closes behind me. It's almost like a hotel room but everything is double except the bathroom. There are two twin size beds, two closets two night stands and two dressers. There are clothes laid out on the beds. I walk over to the second bed and hold up the shorts to me, they only go halfway down my thigh. They give us compression shorts too. And a white tank top. I unzip my jacket and get changed, so does Ryan. We walk out of the room and people have started to walk down the hallway. Everyone's wearing the same shorts, tank top and shoes. We walk down the hallways taking turns until we come to a set of double doors.

The woman pushes them open and we all walk in. The room has a high ceiling with windows at the very top. There are lines painted on the floor and numbers going from one to thirty-six in front on the them. They line up like lanes. "Go and stand on your number," the woman says. I walk over and stand on the thirty-six, Ryan is standing on the fifteen. A girl about the same height as me stands on the thirty-five. She turns to me and smiles at me.

"My names Chris," she says and hold out her hand.

"James," I say and shake her hand. She looks at my arm with all the bandages on it. "Heroic action," she nods.

"These are the rules," the man from the stage says, "You will have to cross the white line on the other side of your lane before you hear a beep. There will also be a yellow line moving across the floor at the pace you have to run to beat the beep. If you do not make it across the line in time your lane will turn red from the blue color it is now and you will stop running. If you score below sixty laps you will be not able to participate in the experiment and you will leave. A mans voice will be counting the laps and a woman's voice will be counting the number of remaining runners." He pressed a button on the table he was siting at, with the woman, and a man's voice started speaking.