Into the Maze

Chapter 10

(I have a bunch of really good ideas running around in my head, so I'm writing another flashback! This takes place about nine months after the last flashback in chapter 8. Enjoy!)
Raze rubbed her sleeve on the window, attempting to clear the thick fog that had gathered on it. She knew that even if she managed to clear the window, it would still be pitch black outside, but she needed to entertain her mind. She had been on this train for a week now, and it didn't seem like they were stopping any time very soon.
She thought over the past nine months of her life. She thought about living in the sewers, packed in with people dying from burns and heatstroke. She thought about the people that found them and put them on this train.
Nym, who was curled on the seat across from her, whimpered in her sleep. The nightmares had come back.
"Nym." Her sister shot up, eyes wide. "You were dreaming again," said Raze.
Nym rubbed her fists in her eyes and crossed the aisle to sit next to her sister. "They were worse tonight."
"I can't sleep either."
Something clanked in the depths of the train, which had been scavenged from the wreckage of NYC and forced to run by some of the more mechanically-minded survivors.
"I think we're stopping soon." Nym peered out the dark window. "I heard people talking earlier."
Raze had stopped thinking of life getting any better, but her heart jumped with hope anyways. "Where are we stopping?"
"They said something about a 'Scorch' but I've never heard of a place called the Scorch."
"Me either." Raze leaned her head on her sister's shoulder.
"I don't care. They said we will be safe there." Nym looked out the window again.
"What did you dream about tonight?" Raze knew it was risky to ask but she was curious.
"The sewers," Nym said quietly. "And the floods. But I was alone."
Something else creaked in the dark interior of the train, and Raze shuddered.
Suddenly, all the lights flickered once, and went out. A scream from a few rows up convinced Raze that she and Nym weren't the only people awake.
Chaos. Babies crying, children screaming, parents scuffling around as they pulled the children to themselves, hushing them.
"Everyone stay calm!" The reassuring voice of Raze's father filled the darkness of the train. "I'm going to see what happened."
At that moment, the train stopped moving. Stillness, accompanied by distant clinks and an occasional scream.
"I'm going to go see what happened," her father repeated. There was a sound of the door sliding open, then her father's voice once again commanded, "lock the door behind me, Milla."
The door slid shut, and there was a click of the lock as Raze's mother locked it. Raze let out a small shriek as a hand pressed her shoulder, but Remi's voice said, "it's okay, Sweetheart. It's me."
Her older sister slipped between Nym and Raze, and they both snuggled up to her. Orion's faint shape beside them in the darkness made her feel safe.
Then, a bang in the silence made Raze scream. Her scream joined to the raucous noise of the terrified people around her. "Orion, what is that!?" Remi jumped to her feet.
"Someone's trying to break in!" He shouted.
Then Remi had grabbed Nym and Raze by he arms, she was pushing them toward the back of the train. That was when the door burst open.
A soft whizzing sound in the darkness beside her distracted Raze. Someone finally got an electric lantern lit, and Raze made the mistake of looking back.
People in gas masks had entered the compartment, the masks making them look nonhuman. They wore green body suits which made it impossible to decide if they were men or women. Maybe there was some of both, she wasn't sure. She clung to her sister's arm and stumbled as quickly as she could toward the back of the car.
Orion, who had been right behind her, tripped on a fallen body and crumpled to the ground. She screamed and Remi whirled around, kneeling to help her brother get up.
A sharp pain in her neck caused Raze to stumble and cry out in pain. The room went blurry. Somewhere, far in the distance, Nym screamed, a distant sound, echoing in her head.
Then the room went black.
Screaming. Far away, as if on a different planet. But still it persisted, getting louder. Getting closer.
She tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids felt as if weights had been placed on them. The screaming was so close, she had to know why...
With all the force she could, she opened her eyes.
The screaming stopped.
She was laying flat on her back, staring up at a hole in the roof of the train. The night sky shone through the jagged hole, stars glinting in black.
Suddenly, a scream split through the darkness. Immediately alert, Raze jumped to her feet and searched the darkness, eyes wide, terrified.
Another scream sounded, and she found the source of the noise. Only yards away was a man, sprawled on his back, blood pouring from his nose, mouth, and eyes as he clawed frantically at his own head. Through the blood, Raze recognized him. She had seen him holding his small daughter just earlier that day on the train as the small girl giggled and laughed. What could have happened that caused him to turn so suddenly savage that he was attempting to rip his own brain out?
She suddenly remembered the pain in her neck, and her hand instinctively reached up to touch the wound. As if she had been stung, all that was left was a scab, and some swelling.
The man on the floor looked up at her, eyes a bright, piercing blue in the red blood. "My head!" He screamed, as if she should know what to do. "They're living in my head! It hurts! Kill me! Kill me!"
He reached out with a weak, mangled hand and grabbed at her small legs. "Help me!" She shrieked, scrambling away from the man. "Somebody help me!"
She tripped over something lumpy and soft, and found, when she landed next to it, that it was a body. It too had blood-stains around the mouth and eyes, and seemed to have died mid-scream.
She screamed as loudly as she could. "HELP ME!"
An arm reached out of nowhere to grab her and, the next thing she knew, her father was dragging her out a window of the wrecked train car. Tears of terror and shock were streaming down her face, and all she wanted was for her father to hold her and tell her she was going to be okay.
He kneeled in front of her and felt her forehead. "How did you survive?" He asked incredulously.
"Daddy, that man! He was bleeding, he said his head hurt, Daddy! We have to help him!" She seized her father's big hand and tried to pull him back toward the train wreck.
"No, Raze!" His voice was sharp, but it grew gentler as he said, "there's no way to help him."
Raze was to find out later that as soon as the intruders in gas masks and green suits had left, after shooting darts at the passengers (that's what had put her into unconsciousness) and disabling the train of movement, the people who had been shot were separated from the others, but it was not until they had started showing symptoms that they were locked in the unused train cars, separated from the survivors, to die a lonely and painful death. Raze had also been separated when they had found out that she had been shot in the neck, but had been unconscious for a day. By then, almost everyone who had been shot on the attack had died. But not quite.
Raze's mother began to sob when her youngest daughter arrived safely at the makeshift tent her family had set up when they found out the train was unusable.
Though torn, tattered, and dirty, her family was together. All of them. "We're still deciding what to do next," her father reported. "But for now we're stuck here."
"Where is here?" Asked Remi, who had apparently been told as little as Raze had.
"The Scorch."
Nym and Raze locked eyes, and the conversation of their last night on the train flooded back into Raze's memory.
"What is the Scorch?" Orion was standing, leaning against the tent pole.
"It's a desert. Must've been a really badly burnt area. No sign of life."
"What about the men in green?"
"They came in Bergs."
Orion sighed deeply, every idea he had gone. "Why don't we walk out of the desert?"
"We don't have that much food."
"We have to do something!" Orion's voice raised a notch. "Do you just want to sit here and wait to die!?"
"Someone might see the wreck and come looking for survivors! Going into the desert would kill us now!"
"Like we aren't already dying! Look around, Dad!"
"Orion!" Raze's mother rose to her feet. "Please."
Orion turned and flopped down at the back of the tent.
"Orion's been acting funny." Nym burrowed under the blankets in the small mat she shared with Raze, later that night. "He's mean. And... he acts strange. He paces, and he has headaches a lot."
My head! Raze shot up, the screams of the bleeding man echoing through her mind. "Nym."
"What?"
"That... disease they shot us with. It's not contagious is it?"
"I don't know. Daddy won't tell us much."
Raze was silent. The horrible thought of something eating through her brother's mind almost made her sick.
"Why didn't I die?"
"Mommy said you were 'immune'."
"What does that mean?"
"I guess that you don't die when you get shot."
In the quiet before the dawn, Raze found Orion outside. He was kneeling by the tent, hands folded, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. "Orion."
He jumped. "What!?" When he saw it was Raze, his gaze softened and he held out his arms. She walked into them and leaned her head on his shoulder. "Orion, do you feel okay?"
"I know what you're talking about, Raze. Nym told you, didn't she?"
"Yeah."
"You heard the infected talking, didn't you?"
"Yeah. Orion, do you have-"
"Yes, Raze. I wouldn't tell you, but... Raze you need to know."
"When did you find out?"
"A few days ago. I was having a headache and I heard an infected screaming about their head. I knew then, and I want you to know now."
"Why?"
"So that you know... anything I do from now on... I'm doing it for you, and Nym, and our whole family. Understand?"
"Yes, Rion. What are you going-"
"Never mind, Raze. Go back to sleep."
She did as he told her, and she rested hard. She rested all the way through that misty morning when he left the camp, wandering away into the desert. She rested through the search parties screaming his name, and her mother's hysterical sobbing. And when she woke up, he was gone without a trace. He was gone for good.
The family went into the intense sorrow that fell upon someone when a person they love has been lost. Raze's mother and Remi did what they knew how to do: clean. They scoured the camp from top to bottom, washing away the dust and sand that would return within minutes.
Raze's father threw himself into his work, thinking of it as his way of remembering his only son. He planned day and night, desperately trying to find a way out of the desert. Away from the memories.
Nym and Raze lived in grieved silence, helping their mother when necessary, living in fear of the wrecked train cars and the terrorizing creatures within.
But the disease had passed. There were no other infected, only the stench of their rotting bodies filling the camp. Everyone spoke of the small girl who was immune, but other than that, there were no other signs of the virus.
Not until one day, as Nym and Raze scoured the tent for the fifteenth time that week. Nym's hand, usually so fast with a dust cloth, had slowed since Orion's disappearance. She move it to a rhythm across the shelf, humming softly, and Raze recognized the song:
"Deep in the forest, where irises grow
Deep in the darkness, where animals go
There night will come and will pull you away..."
Nym's sweet voice died away into silence.
"They're in my head," she whispered.
Raze didn't remember screaming, she didn't remember Remi scooping her away from Nym, who had fallen to the ground, moaning. She didn't remember Nym being hauled away, or the big man in the vest saying that it was indeed the disease and it was contagious.
She remembered only Nym's screams: "don't leave me alone!! Don't leave me please!!"
She remembered it all later, when the dust had cleared, when she woke up in the shady interior of the tent.
Remi was sitting near her, pulling out stitches in a small shirt which she could remember as Nym's. "What are you doing!?" Raze tried to snatch the shirt from her sister.
"Raze, stop! We need the material!" There we're tears in Remi's eyes.
Her mother, however, was past the point of tears. She was sitting outside, pleading in a quiet voice with her husband. "Please, Jed, please. She doesn't want to be alone, and she's almost gone. I don't care if I get it, what's the use of living?"
"Our daughters, Milla! And... your baby."
It was the first Raze had heard of a new baby, but she wasn't excited. She felt no emotion but pity for her soon-to-be baby sibling. "Mommy, let me go." She spoke without thinking. "She doesn't want to be alone, and I'm amoun, anyways."
"Immune," corrected her father. "Milla?"
"Yes, Jed, please."
Minutes later, the door was closing behind Raze as her eyes peered into the darkness, trying to find her sister. She found her when she felt a hand slip around her own.
"Come here." Nym's voice was oddly high, somewhat insane.
She allowed her older sister to lead her to a corner. There she was asked to sit, which she did, and she felt Nym lie down beside her and lay her head in Raze's lap.
"I'm not afraid, Raze." Nym was speaking again. "I want to go see Orion. I'll tell him you said hello."
"Okay." Tears streamed down Raze's face as she realized: this was only the shell of her sister. Nym, and all her fire and passion, was gone already.
"Tell Mommy and Daddy that I miss them... and our sister too. What was her name?"
"Remi."
"Yeah, her. Raze?"
"Yes?"
"Don't leave me please."
"I won't. Ever." Raze cradled her sister's sandy-blond head gingerly.
"Raze?"
"What?"
"They're talking to me. The voices in my head are talking to me. Make them go away."
How? Raze groped around in her brain for anything to take her sister's mind off the disease and the voices. Then it came to her.
"Deep in the forest, where Irises grow
Deep in the darkness, where animals go,
There night will come and will pull you away
Then I will beg and I'll plead you to stay
But you will fly away on the wings of the night
And I will give up, so tired of the fight
Deep in the forest, where the Irises grow
Deep in the darkness, where animals go
Here I will lay you, put you to rest
For here is the place that I knew you the best."
Raze's tears flowed freely onto her sister's mangled face, because she knew: even the shell of her sister was gone now.
All that was left was a cold, mangled, tortured body, and a sister who held it and wouldn't let go.