Run With Me ➵ Newt [2]

FIVE | cranks

▬We ran for what felt like hours, our feet kicking up sand. Wind tore through our clothes and howled all around us, tossing up sand and dust everywhere. It was stiflingly hot outside even though it was nighttime - then I remembered about the Sun flares, about how they destroyed our world with its heat and left it in chaos. I couldn't remember much about the outside world as I was taken away to WICKED compounds at a very early age, but I did remember how unbearably hot the air was, and how my parents rarely took me outside.

My parents.

Suddenly, I fell into a flashback: I remembered my dad's straight blond hair in contrast to my mom's wavy dark brown's. I remembered the two of them bearing hazel eyes, my mom's a little darker than my dad's. I remembered the dimples in my mom's cheeks when she smiled, how my dad used to tease her about it. I remembered.

"Rose, come on!"

I blinked and glanced up - Newt was staring at me in concern, worry lines crossing his face. "What's wrong? Why are you slowin' down?"

"S-Sorry," I mumbled, shaking my head. "I... I was thinking about my parents."

Newt's face softened immediately. He slowed down himself and grabbed my hand. "We'll talk about this later, alright?" He said gently. "For now, we need to run."

I nodded, and we poured on speed to catch up with the others.

"Where are we even going?"

"Slow down!"

"Stay together!"

Teresa, who was ahead of the group, stumbled into the glass roof of a building that had sunk into the desert ground. She leaned against it, breathing heavily, and the rest of us caught up with her, sliding around on the slippery sand. She peered into one section of the sunken roof, where the glass was broken as the gales howled around us, throwing sand into our eyes and messing up our hair.

"Come on!" She said, and stepped into the broken window and out of sight.

"Teresa, wait!" Thomas called out, but she had disappeared.

"Get down here!" Her voice echoed from below.

Thomas went in first, then the rest of us followed. I crawled through the hole and slid down a sandy slope, landing beside the others, who were dusting their clothes, and glanced around me warily. The building was completely shrouded in darkness so I couldn't make out much, but from what I could tell, it was abandoned a long time ago. Every tiny sound I made echoed through the eerie silence.

Minho turned on his flashlight that he'd stolen from WICKED and shone it around. "Where the hell are we?" He muttered.

"We gotta go," Thomas said breathlessly. 

He started to shuffle further into the building when Teresa said loudly, "Thomas, stop!"

He froze and turned around to look at her.

"Tell me what's going on," she said firmly.

Thomas shuffled closer to her, his face cast in shadow from Minho's flashlight. "It's WICKED," he said. "It's WICKED. They lied to us, we never escaped. Aris and I found these bodies. There were too many to count."

"Dead bodies?" Minho questionned.

"No, but they weren't alive either."

"Gee, that definitely clears things up," I said.

"They-They were strung up," Thomas said. "W-With tubes coming out of 'em. They were being... They were being drained. Look, I don't know what WICKED wants, but I know it's not something good. We need to get away from them as far as possible."