The Immunity Illness

CHAPTER 9

Minho's fist cracked against an iron beam. The reverberation mixed in with his insufferable shout.
       "No!" He punched the wall with each rising cry. "He didn't, he wasn't—no! No!"
       Thomas stood unmoving, taking longer to process what they had witnessed.
       Minho began to pace around. "Are we just gonna let everyone die now? Should I start keeping a tally? Who's next: Frypan? Aris? Everyone's dead, man! Shuck it!"
       Thomas blinked, and the grief and regret poured in. He replied stiffly,
       "He knew what he was gambling for when he fought Jorge."
       Minho cupped his hands over his eyes. "No, Gally was gonna make it. He—why didn't we go after him?"
       Thomas sucked in a breath, mumbling,
       "It was him or us."
       "Him or us? Him or us, Thomas?" Minho removed his palms, and his expression boiled. "What did you expect would happen when we got here? That Paige and Teresa would invite the five of us for lunch in their office and make small talk? We were goners from the start, bro!"
        Thomas threw his hands up, lashing out,
       "Did you see any other choices? We were armed with a stick, man! A stick! And they had a gun!"
       "Well, maybe if you hadn't dropped the gun when you got a hold of it, Gally wouldn't have his face blasted in right now!"
       Thomas faltered,
       "I...didn't expect Brenda to—"
       Minho's voice lifted three octaves. "Why did I ever allow myself to trust you again? And forgive you? You're the same idiot shuck-face that you were back in Denver! You're still getting our friends killed! Life'd be a breeze if none of us ever met you!"
       Taken aback, Thomas flinched from him. He felt his eyes well up. After a long, painful pause, Minho pinched the bridge of his nose and added more tranquilly,
       "I didn't mean that."
       "You did." Thomas knitted his brow.
       "Thomas..."
       An army-sized thunder of footfalls dissipated their spat. With an electric hum, tubular LED bulbs flickered on overhead, one by one, cloaking them in white light. Thomas hadn't been able to see just how big the tunnels were in the darkness, but now he glimpsed them in wonderment; they stretched on either side for miles.
       A blockade of roughly twenty men and women marched toward Thomas and Minho, manned by the most despicable woman alive: Chancellor Paige.                             
       He broke into a sprint in the opposite direction. It was selfish of him to desert Minho, but at this point, so freshly griefstruck, he didn't care. He pumped his legs and ran off to an unknown location. Anywhere but there. Anywhere.
       "Seize him!" Paige commanded from behind, hot-tempered and vexed.
       Thomas heard the guards raising their Launchers. He did his best to jog in a zigzag formation to avoid getting shot at. The hallway stretched endlessly. To his left, a long metal cable strung itself along the Dome Wall, presumably a power source manning its illusion. To his right, an array of doors and corridors dotted in between dreary gray building supports. There wasn't a window in sight. The slippery floor tiles squealed on his worn shoe soles.
       The guards pranced on his tail, gaining on him whenever he ran too slow. Blue streaks of Launcher energy downpoured on all sides, and his skin tingled with their electric charge. Thomas narrowly dodged a misfired lethal grenade spiraling for his head and ducked into a corridor before another blast could hit his shoulder. Although he was panting and lightheaded, he maintained his brisk speed, getting to the end of the hall with luck on his side. Blood rushed to his brain. The walls duplicated and warped in his vision. A sharp turn led to nowhere but a single door. Thomas yearningly fiddled with its brass handle, and it didn't budge.
       "Hands up, Thomas!" someone called from around the corner.
       Thomas squeezed onto the cold knob tightly. He was so wired and animated that he thought he might break it if he tried hard enough. But he did as he was told, fingers twitching, knees wobbling, head aching. Nevertheless, a downpour of electricity shot into his chest. Thomas's shriek died in his throat when the Launcher's tangle of electricity stunned his whole body. He collided with the floor.
       "We must have a talk," Paige spoke to him directly overhead, or was that from down below? Her sentence buzzed in his ears, staticky and muffled.
       Thomas felt like his nerves were on fire. Suffocating on dirt didn't sound so bad to him at the moment. His muscles convulsed vigorously. Figures with gloved hands carried him up and through the hallway. He finally made out the gruff clamor of a male, and as best he could, he eavesdropped on the chalky sound of an electronic speaker.
       "—in D Block. Contain them until they are deemed fit by the chancellor, over."
       "Wilco, Sir, over and out."
       Chancellor Paige told the two men hauling Thomas,
      "I want them under complete medical care. They should be fully treated when they return to us."
      "Yes, Chancellor."
      Thomas groaned. A grave face peered down at his own, messily shaven and white as a ghost. His hard gray eyes twinkled with determination but lacked any degree of kindness.
      "You're a puzzle piece, boy," he said in the same gruff pitch. "Stop squirming and let us see if you can fit into the puzzle."
       Although he hated WICKED to its core, Thomas was glad that he would be receiving treatment. He didn't want to be in pain anymore. That was enough reason for him to close his eyes and accept whatever horror or relief met him next.
***
       When his eyelids fluttered open, he registered Minho shaking his wrists. Thomas gulped for air.
       "You scared me to oblivion," Minho berated, filled with genuine concern. "What's going on?"
       "What do you mean?" he croaked confusedly.
       "You were jolting around like your limbs were being cut off. You tell me."
       Thomas swept back his unkempt hair, embarrassed, only to discover that it felt clean and well groomed. Minho practically glowed with health too; his facial scars and arm scratches were faded and healed up.
       "I don't remember having any dreams," he said hoarsely, twisting in his bed. He ignored his hurt feelings for Minho and tried to forget their cutthroat argument by the Gate.
       He took closer notice of the room he was in. It was a medical ward, lined with two rows of empty beds along parallel baby blue walls. IV stands and bedside tables hugged each mattress, and there was an area sectioned off for a bathroom. Thomas's eyes averted to his own body. A paper thin hospital gown clothed him, and something short of horror overcame his scrutiny when his gaze narrowed in on his IV. It transferred an azure blue liquid into his arm through a drip, and faintly, his veins took on its color. It was so peculiar that Thomas immediately knew what it was.
       Teresa had injected him with something just like it on the Cliff.
       He scrambled to unhook the drip from his vein. A drop of blood gushed from his skin, tinged a purplish shade of mulberry...not red.
       "What are you doing?" Minho interjected.
       Thomas didn't explain, instead satisfied for piecing his thoughts together aloud as they came to him.
       "This must be the Serum that made my dreams vivid, the one that Brenda mentioned. And Minho, your nightmares. They must be putting this stuff in our food and water supply, or—"
       "Take a breath! What stuff? That's just the IV meds to keep you knocked out so ya wouldn't go bat crazy on the slintheads who brought you in here."
       "No, it's not. This must be their way of controlling our emotions and actions so the Trial doesn't fall out of proportion. They got rid of the chips in our brains, right, or a piece of them? So this must do the trick itself."
       Minho didn't react. Or, more rather, he didn't have a reaction he cared to show. He went off on a tangent to share,
       "People are watching our every move through a camera in this room. The door's locked. I've tried getting it open for a while now, but it won't give. There's been no way of telling the time except for the routine nurse that comes in to feed us and change your sheets, then when the lights go out for me to sleep."
       "How long have I been asleep?" Thomas asked. "I wish someone didn't knock me unconscious every five minutes."
       "As far as I can tell, about three days. I've been eavesdropping on the nurses. You had a concussion and a fractured skull, plus a bruised spine and ribcage—I think that was my fault. They say you're recovering well, though, so at least there's that."
       "Fractured skull, huh?" Thomas muttered. Too many things scrambled in his mind. Bitterness consumed him. "They busted me up good."
       "Yeah. I can relate myself, dude. Nurses put me on stronger meds and said I'll be good as new soon. 'Course, that'd be a whole lot easier to hear if I knew how time passed in this shucking place." 
       Thomas rubbed his forehead, attempting to erase the cruel image of Gally getting shot from his memory. He trembled. His fingers rotated around his head, touching the rough cloth of a wrap dressing his wound. He let his palm drop and laid back down on the flimsy bed. He shivered again and drew up his sheets, craving for it all to stop. It was creating this dull ache that pounded at his brain. A crawling sensation flowed in and out, muddling his ability to focus. Restlessly, Thomas groaned and brought his hands up once more to massage his temples.
       "I hate this. I can't think straight."
       Minho observed him fixedly. "Your concussion is on the mend, shank."
      "This is worse. I can't think. What's hard to understand about that?" Thomas suppressed another exasperated sigh.
       "Chill out," Minho grunted.
       "You chill out!" Thomas bolted upward. "You try having your brain hurt like an insect's burrowing inside it!"
       "What? You're talking about the concussion, right?"
       "You call this a concussion? This is god awful! I'm on the verge of ripping my head to shreds!"
       Minho backed away from his bed. "Lie down before you give yourself an aneurysm," he whispered, strangely calm. "We—"
       Thomas became aware that he was gripping his sheets in his fists. He hurled back, spittle flying out,
       "Don't tell me what to do! Give me a second! I'm trying to focus! Give me one freaking second!"
       Minho stared at him in befuddlement, shaking his head. "I think you're right about that Serum stuff, and you need to chill out now. The only reason Newt crumbled so fast in Denver was because he was constantly under stress."
       "What the shuck does Newt have to do with this? And that Serum can go die in a hole, I swear! You know what?" Thomas sat up again, scanning the room furiously for a camera but coming up short. It didn't matter. They could see him, regardless of whether he could see them. "All of you" —he got onto his knees and stood up on the bed despite Minho's constant urges not to, and screamed out the last part—"can go die in a shucking hole!"
        A hand gripped his upper arm and tugged him down. Suddenly out of energy, Thomas let it and collapsed into his pillow as a weak buzz rang in his ears. Minho peered down at him with worry.
       "Thomas," he said, "there's a fat chance we're not immune to the Flare anymore."