• Trial Two: The Scorch •
||𝐃𝐀𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐄𝐃|| Blake is cracking like the stone walls she had escaped from. Each lie, betrayal, challenge, and death pushes her into a deeper hole of emptiness. Blake and the Gladers thought they escaped from the madnes...
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12. Toby's words grappled an iron grip of a feeling in her stomach, causing a scatter of bad butterflies. Suffocating her with a horrible, horrible feeling. His head was replaced by a metal ball...it seemed too unreal to be true.
"What're you talking about?" Minho asked.
Thomas let out a groan. "Didn't you hear it rolling away right after he stopped screaming? I know it―"
"It's right here!" someone shouted. Blake heard a scrape of heavy metal again, then some grunting with an effort she guessed was Newt. "I heard it roll over here. And it's all wet and sticky―feels like blood."
"What the klunk," Minho half-whispered.
"How big is it?" The other Gladers joined in with a chaos of questions.
"Everybody slim it!" Newt yelled, waiting for everyone else to quiet. "I don't know." Blake listened as Newt tried to get a better feel for the thing. "Bigger than a buggin' head for sure. It's perfectly round―a perfect sphere."
A small sound left Blake's mouth as her sense of feeling distorted. One was already dead. She knew it wasn't the end to the death toll either. Her body retreated backward, growing closer to Minho. "We need to run," Thomas said. "We need to go. Now."
"Maybe we should go back." Blake didn't recognize the voice. "Whatever that ball thing is, it sliced off Frankie's head, just like the old shank warned us."
"No way," Minho responded angrily. "No way. Thomas is right. No more dinkin' around. Spread out a couple of feet from each other, then run. Hunch down, and if something comes near your head, hit the living crap out of it."
No one argued. Blake had let go of Minho's hand and had started to run a few feet behind him. She focused on the beats of her racing heart, on her shallow breaths. Her feet pounded against the concrete as she repeated the words 'run, run, run' in her head, it soon became like a ring in her ear. A whisper of a siren inside her brain.
As she ran it felt as if she was taken into a strange dream, clinging to the debilitating fear of death—of her friends' deaths. Kisses of death now filling the air. A reaper was overlooking them now, watching their moves play out along a chessboard, waiting before it decided to knock a piece off.
The ball of death had stolen one more person. It happened behind her but closer this time. The anguished screams drowned everything out. It drowned the thumping of feet, drowned the cries within her head.
No-one stopped. Humanity frowned upon that terrible action.
Her heart raced with blood and cold steel adrenaline. A shock wave of poison had also engulfed her senses, lighting and settling a pit of black fire inside her. Sizzled the scars of fear and pain, imprinted her with it just like Wicked had with the tattoos.
