The Venus Trap - COMPLETED (The 1st Installment of The Derek Welsh Trilogy)

Chapter 21

Tuesday 10th

Rita walked a little behind the others so that she could study her surroundings thoroughly. She and the other girls were guided by Oggy, who was walking in front of them, into a doorway where there was an elevator door. Oggy's sharp cologne filled the air, alongside his slick back hair, his neatly trimmed goatee and his glittery long silver coat.

They all had to hand in the black cards that were given to them previously to a man standing in front of the elevator. He was wearing a dark suit and looking almost like a ghost with his almost white hair that was cut close to the head, white blonde eyebrow and extremely pale skin. An albino, Rita thought.

He took the cards and punched the key panel then he let them all inside the elevator. Rita felt that the elevator started to zoom down slowly. It must be a sub-basement or something, Rita guessed. She had no idea that a place such as this one could actually exist. She had quite vast knowledge about the CSZ area in Erabiya, but she couldn't say the same about the Northern part. She has always been a 'Centraler' as Derek sometimes called her, having spent most of her life in CSZ.

Rita's parents had died of cancer when she was only three years old. They both had worked as Alliance's researchers before they died. So afterwards, their baby girl was taken into one of Alliance's orphanages because most of the orphanages in CSZ were used to take care of the children of Alliance employees after their deaths.

The death toll was still very high at that time. Rita was a little girl, growing up without parents and braving the new world. And now, here she was, a grown woman, walking into something so complicated that she couldn't even comprehend. She just hoped that the tracking device which securely attached inside her body was strong enough to transmit signals to Derek and Chester up there, wherever they were.

After they were out from the SUV and had their blindfolds taken off as soon as they had reached the inside of the building, Rita was welcomed by a large and grand structure of a white mansion. The garden was large and beautiful, with neatly trimmed green bushes, red and yellow flowers and a variety of plants under many bio-domes.

There were cars parked in a hidden pathway behind a well-structured building that might serve as a large garage or perhaps a pantry that was connected to the main building. The very expensive kinds. Not those affordable city cars which The Alliance had launched about twenty-five years ago, like the one Derek had been driving.

From Shockwave, Rita rode in one of the SUVs that Oggy had pointed out to her with two other girls inside, but Rita had seen that there was more than one car stood by. Oggy had made them put on blindfolds before entering the car and even after Rita felt that the car was only several meters away leaving Shockwave, Rita heard a man's voice from the passenger's seat in the front, warning them not to take their blindfolds off until there was further instruction.

Rita couldn't see him behind the dark glass separator. She didn't even know that he was already in the car when they all entered. She prayed that Derek wasn't that far behind and hoped that nothing went wrong.

Back in the mansion, when the elevator door finally opened, and they were all arrived in a long hallway. Rita glanced left and right. The walls were painted off-white and gleaming clean. There were no windows at all. Rita could feel a faint pressure in her surroundings. A familiar feeling that you felt when you know something thick and heavy were above you. Polished and expensive marble built the floor under her feet.

The sounds of her heels, along with the other girls' heels were click-clacking on top of it, a little too loud over this quiet hallway. They were all dressed ready for a party. A special party that was. Rita could only wonder, but she knew that they were all here as some kind of offering. Judging from the duration of the drive that she had taken from Shockwave, her best ability to project a sense of direction while having her eyes blindfolded, and the deduction she got when she saw the grand mansion, she was pretty sure that she was in the NSZ now.