The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  But it wasn’t James we were matched with the next day; it was Joe.

  “Now, as many of you know, I’m a nerdy botanist, so what am I doing here? Am I going to teach you how to avoid Venus fly traps that the opposition might plant as defenses? Am I going to teach you how to scavenge for berries and cook lizard berry pie out in the wilderness? Am I going to teach you to avoid poison ivy? No, but I am going to poison you. All of you.”

  We had all been chuckling at his speech, but that died away instantly.

  “Wait…” I said, “Joe, you’re just messing around, right?”

  “Oh, no. I am very serious. Check this.” He opened the lid of an iron cauldron, and foul smelling smoke erupted from it. Once it reached us, we were all covering our noses. Joe wrinkled his but did not seem to be as affected by the stench as we were. Alice was actually gagging, though she was trying to stifle it. With one thickly gloved hand, he reached into the steaming pot and pulled out a wet, slimy, brown root. The tendrils that flowed from the main body of it were still moving, looking like tiny, slithering worms. Alice gagged harder, and I had to suppress the urge to do the same.

  “This…” Joe said, “…is the Tenebris Excitatio root. That is Latin, and loosely translated, it means ‘dark awakening.’ So what does this do? Well, kiddies, when you chop off one of its tendrils…” Joe held the root to the table and hacked off one of the slithering pieces, which took two hard hacks with the an axe before it dislodged. Once it was on the table, it stayed still, “And grind it into powder…” Joe was grinding it into powder, “And blow it in someone’s face, they are almost instantaneously plunged into darkness. Your eyes and your ears stop working. You lose all sensation in your body, and yet you can still walk and you can still think. You are an active mind stuck in an active body, but you have no control over any of it. Now, in a small dosage, this will last about six minutes. In a higher dosage, it could last six hours. It’s been known to drive grown men completely out of their minds in three minutes. This is used in the Old Spirit camp to get repentances from their citizens, confessions out of their criminals, and as it would pertain to us, to get secrets out of their captives. You cannot learn to fight it off until you have experienced it. So, today, I am going to administer a small dosage to each of you, and you are going to try to control your bodies, but more importantly, you are going to try not to talk. The Old Spirits tell their victims that if they start making sounds like they are trying to talk, they will administer the antidote, because the victim is probably trying to repent, or confess, or tell the secret. If you all start calling out, I will administer the antidote, and as it works through you, you will tell your secret, if that is what you were trying to do. But regardless, if you come out, you are disqualified from these proceedings. Alright! Is everyone ready to party?”

  We were all silent, and two guys in the back said that they were out and left.

  I grasped Alice’s hand as Joe walked down the line, blowing the ground-up root into the faces of everyone in the room. I watched as it easily traveled up their nasal cavities, leaving not a single particle behind. Immediately, the men and women went down, and when Joe came to me, I nodded, and before I could even shut my eyes, everything was black, and I could not hear anything. My body was moving; I was panicking. I was running into walls, into tables, into other people, but I could not feel the pain. My mind was racing, urging me to count the seconds. Joe had said that it would last six minutes. Six minutes, but it seemed like ten had already passed. I fell over something, reminding myself to keep my mouth shut. I knew if I opened it, I would confess everything to him. I would confess my secret, the one that was beginning to take shape in my mind. But Joe said we had to try to control it. We had to learn how to fight it. Only then would we have mastered it, and it could not have an effect on us. Even if we mastered it once, there was no way that any person could take being inflicted with this multiple times.

  I had to relax. I had to try to lay down. I had to find solace in my own mind. What could I think about? What brought me peace? Well, Alice did, but when I thought of her, I panicked, because I knew that she was panicking. What else? My parents, but they were gone. Playing football? All my friends on the team were dead. All my coaches were dead. The whole Earth was gone.

  I was a thinker to a certain extent, but I had always had a pessimistic streak. I accused Alice of being the pessimistic one, but as I tried to find some positive thought in my mind, I couldn’t. Everything was tainted by my negative thoughts. But my body was lying down. It was not moving. Somehow, I knew that I had collapsed. The world was dark, and I was trapped inside of my blind, deaf, unfeeling body, like a corpse. It was like I had died and would remain stuck, stuck in my head, stuck in my body, buried alive… I was still panicking, but somehow, I was calming down. A memory was taking over me. I remembered when I had been a little younger, and my parents had taken me snowboarding for my birthday. My mom had kicked ass at it, and my dad, because he was six foot five, had been falling the whole time, nearly breaking the board under his weight. My mom and I had been cracking up all day, sometimes just lying on the side of the slope, watching him fall and get frustrated. My best friend at the time had come with us, and after we were done snowboarding for the day, we had all eaten these terrible cheeseburgers from the restaurant attached to the ski place. The entire time, it seemed, we had talked about how epically my dad sucked at snowboarding. He had never lived it down.

  I was laughing. As I came out the darkness, I was laughing hysterically. Alice was over top of me, looking panicked, thinking, no doubt, that I was one of the men who had gone completely nuts in under two minutes.

  “I’m fine.” I told her through my hysterical laughter, “I just remembered that time when we went snowboarding… and my dad… my dad…”

  I laughed even harder, but she did not crack a smile. She was still scarred from what she had just experienced. I sat up and hugged her, forcing myself to kill my laughter.

  “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

  “No. I just laid on the floor and moaned. That was terrible! How can you be laughing?!”

  “Because that’s the trick.” I told her, “You have to find something in your mind that makes you less afraid. Something funny. Something that makes you happy. It’s the only way to stay sane.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to try that next time. Quinn…” She said softly, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. That was…” She stopped, sniffled, and wiped at her eyes, trying so hard not to cry. “Yesterday was a cakewalk compared to this, and yesterday, I thought nothing could be worse. So what is tomorrow going to be like? I think I should just give up.”

  “Allie, don’t say that! You’ve made it this far. Come on, you have to see it through to the end. We’ve got two weeks of this. We can do this. This is what you wanted. Don’t give up now.”

  “I just don’t think I can do that ever again. I felt like I was dead. I had convinced myself that I was dead.”

  “But now you know the next time that you won’t die. That you’re just drugged up, and you’ll come out of it. Come on, babe. You’re strong. You’re a Viking. You can do this.”

  She looked at me, and after a second, she smiled.

  “Okay.”

  “Alright, guys…” Joe said excitedly, “We’ve only got four drops so far, and I like to have at least ten by the end of a session. So, who’s ready for the Belladonna-Ipecac treatment?!”

  “Joe, you are so obnoxious.” Alice told him, “I’m going to tell Rachel on you.”

  “Say that again, and I will eat all of this belladonna. At least then I would die quickly.” He kneeled down beside us, and his tone was serious. “You guys are doing great. Allie, you stayed laying down the whole time, and that means that you were fighting it better than anyone else. Quinn, you came out laughing, which means you’re learning to beat it. You’ve got this. Now, take this Belladonna and hang on to your hats.”