Collision

Chapter Twenty One

~ Chapter Twenty One ~

Joel's P.O.V.

I had to find them. I had to find them soon. I had to know that Ellie wasn't hurt and the only way I could know for sure was if I saw it with my own eyes. Not many people could be trusted, but I hoped Michonne wouldn't hurt her. I was damn sure the boy wouldn't.

"We need to find higher ground, make our way up these walls somehow," Rick announced, looking at the map we had obtained earlier.

"In the many months of occurrence, that has been tried numerous times, but has never succeeded. Those who even bothered to climb up the walls either fell to their death, unconscious, or fell and paralyzed more than half of their body. Are you sure you are willing to risk your physical being to get to the top of this labyrinth?"

The more he spoke, the more the blood pumped faster through my veins. I couldn't take it. He thought of this as something like a game. As if he were an actual game master. As if we were his avatars.

"Shut your damned mouth!" I yelled, not being able to contain my anger. I looked up and around me, searching for wherever the voice could be planted.

"Oh, the emotions have heightened already. This is going to be great! The audience will love you!"

"What, now we're on a damn show?" Daryl added, flailing his arms and looking around as I was doing. 

"Let's save our breaths," Rick suggested, sighing and putting his hand to his forehead in frustration. We agreed and walked through the next pathway, searching for more of the image shifting glass, the things he called 'holographic screens'. 

"Hold up, hold up," Daryl stopped, he looked at a fading wall to his right. Rick and I stopped jogging and walked to the wall. It was changing. For a few moments it would be a normal wall, like the other gray ones in the maze, but in the next few moments it would look like glass, showing an empty room inside. The pattern kept occurring, a wall and a room, a wall and a room.

"Would this be one of those holographics?" I asked, not familiar with the technology.

"Well, well. Your eye is good. You have found one out of the many invisible rooms in the labyrinth. To open one, press your hand on the bottom right corner of the glass. It will scan every body in sight and only let in the ones that are not bitten and infected."

"I don't believe this crap," I stated. It could just be a glass with a hundred walkers inside, waiting for the door to be opened. Waiting to feed.

"You don't have to. It is your choice, as avatars, to choose your fate. Although, I do have to inform you on the acid disinfectant sprays that go off once the clock hits midnight and all is dark."

"It won't hurt us to try," Rick spoke, walking up to the wall.

I ran to stop him, standing between him and the glass screen. "This could be a trap, games are set up that way. And anyways, what son of a bitch like him wants people to live?"

"We have to try. I can't risk getting poisoned or maybe even killed by anything that happens when the daylight is gone," He firmly stated. With that, I stepped aside, watching as he placed his palm on the bottom right corner of the glass.

Ellie's P.O.V.

We were nearing the box, whatever it was. So far, we hadn't found a single person yet which was good, but saddening. What if all the other people died? What if they were too weak to handle the obstacles ahead? Would that mean the obstacles were far too great for us to overcome? No, Michonne, Carl and I could probably kill people and walkers if we had to. The three of us have all done it before. 

 "We need to find more of those corners so we could get more resources, we're running low on water and we only have enough food to last maybe a couple of days. On top of that, our flashlight battery is running low and we only have one battery left. Let's see if we can find at least something," Michonne stated. She'd been taking care of the map since she could read it better than Carl and I could.

"But how about those holographs? We could take a risk and just wipe out the walkers in them so that we could see if there's a bunch of resources in there," Carl suggested, but Michonne slowly shook her head.

"If we do that, we won't know how many walkers are in there and there might be many. There might also be nothing at the end of the hall so we shouldn't bother," She explained further.

In a hurry, we quickened our walking pace to a jog and found every available resource area near us. After finding six water bottles in the next corner, we decided to take a break.

"Ellie, can you hold this for a second?" Michonne asked, handing me her bag and the map. She started rolling her shoulders back, her muscles being tense. While they relieved pain in their aching bodies, I decided to take a closer look at the map.

There was a box in the middle, right above the horizontal line. After about two days of being in the maze, we only managed to cover one-tenth of the entire thing. As I observed all the lines and details, my mind linked as if solving a puzzle.

"Michonne?" I started. She stopped stretching and turned to me. "How come we've never noticed that this map is symmetrical?"

"What do you mean?" She asked, walking over to me and staring at the paper in my hands. Carl did the same.

"Look, on the left side, it looks exactly the same as the right side except mirrored. There are two small circles and both the sides fit to form the box in the middle," I showed her what I meant and she furrowed her eyebrows, looking at the ground.

"Didn't you say there's a line exactly in the middle that splits us from the other side?" Carl asked, getting the hang of what I was implying.

The three of us looked at each other, wide eyed and with a glint of hope. The maze was two sided, both being exactly the same as the other. 

"That means... That means Rick, Daryl and Joel must be on the other side, since the door they entered wasn't too far from the door we went through. We could just take a shortcut and make our way to the other side," Michonne stated, while Carl and I grinned with confidence.

And with that small observation, we were one step closer to finding the rest of them.