The Trapped

1-2- Ain't

The vacuuming out of our air stopped. Luckily, there was still enough left to breathe.

What was going on?

"What is going on?" Craig asked. At least we were on the same wavelength.

I grabbed Craig by the shoulder. We were in the same situation and in the relatively same mental condition. Maybe he would hear me out. "Craig, just listen to me," I said. "Listen, ok? I don't know how we got here. I want to know. I need to know. It will help both of us get out of here alive. The faster we can figure that out, the faster we can leave." I was shaking, shivering, but I tried not to focus on it, and instead, became determined, resolutely, to escape.

"Nope," Craig simply said, reluctantly shaking his head, making me lose my train of thought. "That ain't gonna happen."

"What?" I asked.

"Ain't nobody ever escaped this institute in the first room," Craig said, gesturing to the expanse of this small room, without any doors or windows, and only the bright fluorescents coming from the ledges between the floors and walls. "There's nothing to work with in here," he continued.

"In the Institute, doors and walls don't exist, Mal. Everything's all locked without no need for keys. And ain't no human hands escaping through that cement."

"No one's ever gotten through. I been looking at the interviews with the survivors before I got here, you know." Craig gestured towards the area that seemed like it could be a door. "Got to wait for the door to open. That's what the airlock was. 'Pressurization and preparation', the one pretty lady called it. Ain't no other way."

"You're saying there's no way out?" He nodded. "Well that's just pessimistic!" I exclaimed. "There's always a way!" I then considered it. "But probably not through this room, actually." I wondered. "Say, the interviews... anything else we could use in them?"

"Not much. Every group is taken a month after the last, all I know."
"Anything else of use?" I asked.

"Well, I'd tell you more. Thing is, ain't no one remember a thing after the first room," added Craig.

"Shit!" I said again, this time louder. "You know what that means, right?"

"Hm?" Craig asked.

"We're either already drugged, about to be drugged, somehow hypnotized, or, at the end of all this, we're going to be smacked very, very hard."

Craig paused. "You're talking about the memory loss, eh?"

"Of course," I replied. "Something is going to cause us to lose our memories." All of them.

"That ain't good," Craig said, holding his chin, thinking.

Ain't. Every second he said ain't. God. "Please stop saying that word."

"What?" Craig asked, sneezing.

"'Ain't'. I hate that word." What an appalling conjunction!

"Conjerction?" Craig asked.

"You know what? Nevermind. It's not as important as the fact we're going to lose all recollection of the next 24 hours."

Craig went silent. "You're telling me no matter what we do today, it's going to be like it never happened?"

"Yes. But we still have to survive..." Hopefully we could, if we worked together. "We can worry about retaining our memories once the challenges started." Which they would. Any moment now, I assumed...