Did I say the last chapter was insane? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. Tell me what you think... is it too out there?
Chapter Seven
For a moment all I was capable of was existing. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe. I was a stone sitting there without a soul or a heart.
Then there was a loud rushing sound in my ears, and everything burst. There has to be some kind of mistake, I thought wildly. He can’t actually be talking to us, the people on this bus. But he was. “This may be the most impacting experiment yet,” Gregory went on. “The most successful. Our teams of scientists are confident that the result of this enthralling experiment may give them the answers they seek. As you know, the experiments are a study on the human mind. Now a study on your mind, in particular.”
People were talking again, and a woman actually stood and cried out, “But I signed up a year ago! How could I be chosen now?” She was shushed, but she began to blubber hysterically. “My husband is in the hospital! What—”
“Shut up,” the boy in the leather jacket hissed, faintly surprising me.
Someone jerked the woman back down to her seat, and she continued to sob. I watched her with a sort of detached shock. Somehow I couldn’t seem to accept that this was happening to me. Because even though Gregory hadn’t specified what this experiment was all about and what it would hold, I knew there had to be death and blood somewhere in it. It’s a game of chance, Mattie, isn’t it?
Game of blood, more like. Turn it off, Wrenny. Mattie’s smiling face slammed into my mind, and I cringed at my own stupidity.
“Now for the rules.” Gregory beamed at us as if this was a fair and he was some kind of clown trying to make us laugh. “There are always rules, aren’t there?”
“I want to get off this bus!” the woman with the hospitalized husband shrieked, and she jumped up. Before anyone could stop her, she had leaped over the person in the window seat beside her and began to claw at the glass. She tried to slam against it with her shoulder, and when that didn’t work, she began to pound on it with her bare fists.
“They would have replaced the glass with something sturdier to keep us from getting out,” the boy in the leather jacket said. Suddenly he sounded bored. The woman was still pounding and crying. This time no one moved to sooth or stop her.
“There is a horn on the ceiling, just above the driver’s head. Do you see it?” Gregory asked us brightly. He didn’t wait for an answer, though I was sure were already on live television, our horrified expressions huge on millions of screens.
“That horn will blow every ten minutes. All of you have been given tools for your survival, and you can find them inside the seats just in front of you.”
Everyone was already trying to tear apart the fabric of the seats, and I saw a man in a jogging outfit yank out a long, wicked-looking knife. My throat clogged. I didn’t look for my own “tool”, though Chubby Boy was.
“The first time the horn blows, you must use your tools to eliminate the other contenders. It is a sort of game, I suppose. And you have been chosen to play.” Gregory paused, staring straight into my eyes. Then he went on in the same cheerful tenor that made me want to strangle him, “When the horn blows a second time, you must stop whatever you are doing, and sit calmly. Then, once the horn blows again, you may begin again. And so on, until your vehicle reaches its destination. Ah, and there is another crucial rule: Anyone who uses their tool after the horn blows the signal to stop will suffer a grave consequence.”
The woman across the aisle from me—her son was staring up at Gregory Hawthorne with incomprehension, and I doubted he really knew what was going on—was holding her long knife in front of her, studying the shining blade with cool interest. I blinked, and then realized she had turned her head to meet my gaze.
“Better get yours,” she said flatly.
I didn’t say anything. But then a knife just like hers was stuck right under my nose.
“Here,” Chubby Boy said, his sagging face no longer sullen. Now he looked almost… excited.
In a daze, I was barely aware of taking it from him and holding it in my fist. The blood was leaving my hand from my impossibly tight grip on the wooden handle of the blade.
“But why would you even take the initiative to eliminate the other contenders?” Gregory was frowning in playful puzzlement when I glanced up at him. “Well, there’s another detail I have yet to mention. One of you—and I can’t tell you which one, obviously—but one of you has something inside of you. Something that will, ahem, endanger all of you should that person’s heart continue to beat. The heart is the trigger, you see, for the bomb.”
“A bomb?”
“What does he mean? They’re going to blow us all up?”
“He’s lying. How could there be a bomb in one of us without us realizing it?”
“It would have to be in someone’s stomach, I think,” a girl with glasses said. On the front of her sweatshirt it read, LOS ANGELOS UNIVERSITY.
“You mean someone… swallowed it? Without knowing?” gasped the businesswoman.
“Wouldn’t that hurt?” Chubby Boy asked.
The man in the jogging suit spoke up again. “Hey, I remember someone saying something about their stomach. Wasn’t it…”
And then everyone silenced again. But for an entirely different reason than before. All eyes had gone to the little girl in front, cowering beside her mother. The woman clasped her to her chest, attempting to glare every one of us down.
Mommy, my stomach hurts.
“You can’t be serious,” the mother hissed, veins in her neck bulging. “Nessa is lactose intolerant. She didn’t swallow a bomb, so stop looking at her like that!”
But it was too late. It was a study on the human mind, after all, and I could practically feel the scientists watching us with consuming fascination, see them scribbling down on their little notepads.
Gregory had stopped talking to let us take it all in, and in the quiet he spoke once more. “A timer is counting down, ladies and gentlemen. A timer you cannot see. It may go off before the bus stops, it may not. But if or when your vehicle does stop and the door opens, you may get off. After that, no rules apply. The experiment will commence with no interference from us. For now, you know all you need to.” He winked. “Good luck, contenders. And now, let the thirtieth experiment begin!”
The TV turned off with a small audible click.
Why knives? was the only thought that went through my mind at that moment. They’re so… barbaric.
Aside from myself, the woman and her son, and the boy in the leather jacket, everyone else was in a panic. The thirty or so people that were on the bus started to shriek, cry, scream, yell at each other. Chubby Boy began talking about some video game that was just like this—he may have been talking to me, but I didn’t pay any attention. My attention was up front, where the woman with the lactose intolerant daughter was using her body to shield the child, and she was unflinching as she faced the red-faced businesswoman and the man in the jogging suit.
“Stop the bus!” the hysterical woman screeched. She’d given up on the windows and was now flinging herself at the glass box around the driver’s seat. The bald man didn’t even glance back at her, and turned his blinker on, turning a corner. I wondered briefly how much he was getting paid to do this. Seeing and watching people murder each other was not something I would want to take any part in.
Murder. I couldn’t suppress a shudder at the word. And suddenly this was all real. The realization that I could die today hit me hard, and furious tears sprang to my eyes.
How did this happen? I’d never put my name in the box. Never even gone to the capital, signed up for death. How was I here? Was it a mistake? Or… had someone else put my name in?
As if it had a will of its own, my mind went back to that night in the living room. In the middle of the night, just after I had come back from Goody’s party and Phil’s arms. I saw again Mattie’s pale face, the strained expression and the fierce regret.
I’m sorry
I know. So am I.
We can’t go back, can we?
No.
My brother’s replies took on a whole new meaning. What I once took to be regret I now took as guilt. Just as Dad had been. Had the two of them worked this out together? I remembered all the times I’d wondered at Mattie’s control, how he didn’t seem sad at all by the fact that our father had abandoned us. Maybe they’d kept in contact the entire time.
But why would they want to put me here? What had I done that was so terrible, so horrible to make them hate me like this?
Dad’s frantic words echoed back to me: Wren, just listen to me a moment… I’d never seen it before on the experiments, where a parent would work with the television company to bring a “contender” into it. But now that I considered the possibility, I could almost believe it. Dad’s first thought had always been for himself, and if he’d been offered enough money, he probably would have come out of hiding to lure me onto the bus.
I roughly wiped away my tears, denying the feelings of hurt and betrayal that swept though me and crippled me. Mattie would never do this, a tiny voice whimpered. He’s changed. I noticed it, I even wondered at it. Looks like I don’t know him near as well as I’d thought. Then the world was shattered by a loud, piercing sound.
I covered my ears, my knife clattering to the floor. Chaos erupted, people diving at each other with insanity in their eyes, convinced that if they didn’t kill first, they would be killed. Screaming came at me from all around. Knives were brandished and lives were ended; the game of blood was beginning for real.
The horn had blown.
