The Immunity Illness

CHAPTER 25, Thomas

The moon twinkled above. Thomas watched it pass under multiple clouds, poking through the clumps of fog with its scintillating honey glow. It entranced him for a while as he lay in a pool of his sweat, becoming more disconnected from the material world. His thoughts scared him. They didn't make much sense. The word 'monster' replayed in his mind like a ticking metronome until it wasn't a word at all, but the guttural pronunciation of a foreign language.
Monster, monster. Monster, Tommy. You're a buggin' monster.
Thomas blinked, and the moon's shape altered. It bent on its crescent mouth, a jaw folding inward, a crocodile snapping its canines together. His heart leapt yards in his chest and he blinked again and again, commanding the distortion to fade.
"Aris," he called in a panicked tone. Frypan had left them on account of having to take a leak. "Aris, please talk to me."
Aris climbed down from his altar on the rocks and scooted next to him. "What's up?" he yielded. "What do you wanna talk about?"
"Anything." Thomas clutched his blanket in his fists, tilting to face him.
"Okay. If you had to guess, what do you think Isaac and Iris are doing now?"
He answered tightly,
"Planning to blow up the place like our Right Arm actor buddies did so Paige can cram in one last gag."
"You don't believe these rebels are legit?"
Thomas hacked out a dry laugh. "I'll believe that Santa Claus is coming to rescue us in his sleigh before I give the rebels a second thought."
Aris frowned, and the contortion of his lips in the shadowy gloom produced an eerie effect. "I believe in them." He shrugged. "Maybe they're more advanced than WICKED gives them credit for. Maybe Paige is afraid."
Thomas scoffed, arguing,
"Afraid? The woman's indestructible."
"Think about it," Aris attempted to persuade, gesturing with his hands. "If these guys are big time, of course she'd do everything to prevent us from learning about them. Their name holds power. So, what does Paige do instead? She uses you for building the Denver Trial. She plants false hope in your head and then stomps it to pieces. Rebels are failures and fakes. No one can take down WICKED. That's what she's drilled into your brain, and you're tired enough to eat it up without question."
Thomas yanked off his blanket and dragged himself away from him, crawling on shaky limbs. Fiercely, he refuted,
"WICKED is a god. We're nothing under it, do you understand?" He swiveled to jab a finger at Aris. "No one, and I mean no one is going to stop it. Look at what it's done to us. I just wanna stay alive, man. We can't destroy these people."
Aris leaned forward, and the sheer power in his response bested Thomas's doubt. "But the twins can destroy them. Rebels can, Thomas. It doesn't always matter if they're good or bad. All you have to do is make sure you stand on the right side of the allegiance line."
"Since when did you change sides?" Thomas spat.
Dots of moonlight reflected in Aris's resentful eyes. Slowly, wrathfully, he spoke in turn,
"Since the minute Nash tricked me into surrendering my free will through an implant. Since he and Teresa forced me to watch Rachel die twenty-six more times."
       Twenty-six. He'd kept count. They held each other's gaze in a tense stand-off, and once again Thomas grasped that he knew nothing about Aris. "Who's Nash?" he questioned in a single breath.
Aris absently touched the back of his head. Thomas thought he saw a tremor course through his body.
"He's the bad man. The Psych. When Teresa wasn't ordering me around through the abstraction database, he was."
A series of footsteps squished loudly in the wet tallgrass. Both of them grew hushed. Aris stood up to investigate, but the mysterious figure declared first,
"It's me, Minho." Aris retreated onto the rocks. "Where's Frypan?" Minho continued.
Thomas grunted wryly. "After eating all our food, where do you think?"
Minho began to ascend the rockbed. "I swear, he's spent over half of his life taking a klunk. I oughta—"
Aris stumbled briefly. His eyes bugged out of his skull, trained like glue on something in the field.
"What are those?" he hissed to them.
Thomas rotated, surveying the grassy landscape sheathed in darkness. Three faraway pairs of yellow orbs bobbed up and down in the thicket. Gradually, they drew nearer, radiating brighter. Bristly clumps of fur came into view that attached to their bulbous, tubular bodies. The yellow orbs illuminated things unnatural about the creatures—things branded by WICKED.
No one moved. The shock was too stifling.
The spindly animals wobbled toward the rockbed, silent save for the mechanical rumbling of their legs. No, not legs, spikes. Thin, pointed spikes, four to a body, drilling into the ground in order to move. All the while, the yellow bulbs never blinked.
Thomas instinctually rose to his feet. He found his balance only due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins, and somehow, he tore his focus from the creatures to gape at Minho.
A pathetic squeak, then a deep, long whine. The creatures had no mouths to cry from, but that was no obstacle. A chilling howl. Thomas finally located his voice.
"Run," he ordered, edging on hysterics. He whipped around to tug at Aris, discovering him to be in another motionless trance. "Snap out of it, dude! Run!"
Aris looked on frozenly, showing no signs of intelligence. Thomas's mind went into a frenzy trying to pinpoint what had caused the activity this time. Was it something he'd said? Was it—
Frypan. His heart dropped into his stomach.
"Frypan went to one of the twins," he stuttered to Minho. "There's no other explanation."
Minho's nostrils flared, and his face scrunched up. "He couldn't stay away, could he? He couldn't do the one thing Paige made crystal clear not to do?"
The sluggish creatures in the field drilled at a more efficient pace, albeit less gracefully than Grievers or the bulb giants from the Scorch. Their atmospheric howls sent goosebumps racing down Thomas's arms, and he realized in a state of repulsion that they sounded like foxes.
These things had killed Group B.
Swaying from the fever, Thomas climbed down from the rocks to meet Minho. They exchanged wordless, dire conclusions about the situation. The yellow-eyed creatures broke out of the tallgrass, and once they reached the sandy border of the incline, Thomas took a defensive step back, although they weren't after him. Paige, Nash, Teresa—or all of them—wanted Aris.
The next wave of the attack hit. The three creatures creaked and jittered as distinctive objects protruded from the front faces of their blubber. In the black of the night, the attachments reminded him of beaks, spired and metallic.
"What do we do?" Thomas pleaded with Minho. He didn't expect a solution, but hearing anything close to one would subdue the sickened sensation of dread in his chest.
"He's toast," Minho replied, hanging his head.
In a swarm, beetle blades flooded out of the Box Gate. The whirs, clicks and buzzes of their metal links blended with the fox howls, creating a deafening noise so loud that the Immunes of the camp would have to take notice of it. The nimble robots scurried around Aris in a dizzying circle of movement. The spike-foxes joined them in the ring, and they collectively yipped pneumatic squeals, behaving like rabid dogs readying to lunge for the kill. Each iron beak grinded across the rocks to properly encase Aris into their devilish snare.
A devastated shriek ruptured from the camp. It carried on throughout the landscape, so intense and distressed that Thomas had the inclination to cover his ears. The rotating cluster of creatures tackled Aris flat onto his back. Thomas lurched to go after him, but Minho squeezed onto his arm, thundering,
"If you get any closer to those things, they'll tear you to shreds!"
Thomas combed a clammy, feverish hand through his hair. Poor Aris. Poor, poor Aris. The spike-foxes raised their beaks in a synchronized, horridly beautiful swoop. Then the pincers rained down. More shrieks resumed in the camp. Thomas braced for the destruction and shut his lids.
       No scream. The whirs ceased. The squeals, the laughs, the howls, clicks, and buzzes—all done away with.
He opened his eyes in time to observe the satisfied spike-foxes zipping into the field. The beetle blades spread out across the rockbed. Their red-lights flickered, winked out, and ninety percent of them quit moving.
A broken kid lay abandoned on the pebbles. Minho got to him first, announcing puzzledly,
"There's hardly a scratch on him. He's still awake too. I think he's coming out of it, Thomas. Get over here!"
Stupefied, Thomas hobbled to his side and crouched by Aris's head. His pupils switched from Thomas to Minho. Words wrestled to breach his esophagus.
"W-Wi...," he mouthed.
Minho dipped lower to hear him out.
"WICKED is good," Aris stated in monotone.
Thomas wrenched himself away from him and dug his nails into his palms so strongly that he felt the skin dent. Every screech emanating from the camp contained the roar of a jet engine. He analyzed the tents beyond the Hill and became aware of the pandemonium's cause. The final straw. The greatest atrocity.
Yellow orbs were everywhere.
Minho swore a chain of bitter phrases and jerked Aris upright. He still had that empty stare, yet he didn't object to being manhandled. Perhaps that was a good sign. Thomas didn't know anymore. They watched the army of creatures raid the settlement spike by spike, and more screeches surfaced from it.
"We have to find Frypan," Minho barked, rattling Aris on his shoulder. "Shuck, what did those things do to him?"
"WICKED is good," Aris mumbled.
Thomas took his other arm and helped Minho tow him off the rocks toward the Hill. They rounded the weed-infested slant with surprising ease; Aris jogged compliantly alongside them.
Then a bridge of lightning rippled across the atmosphere.
It charged the night air, mushrooming as a massive silver-white dagger. Electric particles crackled through an infinitesimal skynet, exposing gigantic black openings overhead which housed nozzle devices, presumably for spraying water. The crackling developed into a steady vibration. The Horizon started to shake. An earthquake absorbed its plains—not from below, but above. Thomas witnessed the phenomenon open-mouthed. The urge to run conquered every other reaction, and he did. He smacked Minho, grabbed Aris and threw them forward in a bolt.
Lightning, ferocious thunder, yellow eyes.
The Dome was in its collapse process.

~Hope you're enjoying the story! Thanks for reading! At this time, any constructive feedback/voting would be great. I appreciate hearing everyone's thoughts :)

~If you're wondering about the next 50 chapters, they're currently in their final stages of edits and will begin getting published soon. Expect 2-3 chapters uploaded in clusters, unlike the first massive 25-chapter dump (italicization doesn't transfer from Google Docs to Wattpad for some reason, and that equals a long and painful process of me adding them all in manually). I learned my lesson on that and nearly went insane—pun intended.

With that said, stay happy and healthy! Kisses, -LH