Corridor (A MythWorks Novel)

by Robin Parrish

  “What?” he screamed. He’d heard her wrong. He must’ve. “Are you—”

  “Push down just a little. Half an inch. It might loosen the grip of the rock up top that’s hardening around your foot.”

  Closing his eyes for half a second, he pushed down a tiny fraction and immediately felt the heat burning the bottom of his foot.

  “Now yank it out!” shouted Victoria.

  He did as he was told, and stumbled backwards until he tripped. He fell down the large mound, but turned over and caught himself before sliding into the lava flow snaking around the larger mounds.

  All Troy could think about was the intense heat in his foot. There couldn’t be much of the shoe left, since most of the bottom had melted in the lava. If only he could blow it cool, or something…

  Birthday. Blow out the birthday candles.

  Just before he’d awoken inside the Corridor, it had been the night before his birthday. He was turning seventeen, and he was on his way home from the library, where he’d been researching for a book report. His dad was terrible at keeping secrets, so Troy knew about the small surprise party that would be waiting for him when he got home. It was always awkward when his dad tried to do things for him that his mom would have done if she was still alive. He hadn’t liked surprises since his mom died, and he had had even less use for parties. So he drove slowly.

  And that was when… When what? Something happened while he was driving home from the library. But what? How did he get here, to this place?

  “Get up!” shouted Victoria. “Move!”

  Troy started, suddenly aware that she’d been yelling at him for a few seconds now. He leapt to his feet and tried not to think about the scorching pain in his left foot. Had it been burned? Almost certainly. But he didn’t want to look down and see how bad, afraid he might not make it another step if he did.

  He stood and took a moment to reorient himself so that he was again facing the Exit, still a good half mile away.

  A loud plop from a dozen feet to his right made him jump. He spun. A baseball-sized sphere of red-hot magma had landed on the ground.

  Troy’s breath caught in his throat as he heard another plop. And another.

  He slowly shifted his gaze upward toward the ceiling. All he could see were the tiny red specks forming somewhere up there, like a sprinkler spraying blood.

  “Run!” screamed Victoria.

  Troy shifted into a flat-out sprint, barely paying any attention to the ground anymore. Instead, his head craned back so he wouldn’t miss any of the balls of liquid rock that were falling out of the sky.

  Lava bombs. That’s what they were. He’d read about the phenomenon for a science project two years ago. But true lava bombs usually cooled before they hit the ground; these remained liquid as they fell, and burst outward in a tiny radius when they landed, with a weird, gooey splash.

  He recoiled from a red stream, having nearly stepped into it. So he had to keep one eye on the ground, and another on the ceiling. Awesome.

  He ran as fast as his tired legs would carry him for another three hundred yards, burning through his final supply of adrenaline. The Exit was closer, two hundred feet away. One hundred and fifty. One hundred.

  Without warning, Troy screamed a sound he’d only made once before in his life: an involuntary reaction to an intense pain like nothing he’d felt before. It was the sound he’d made the day he found out his mother died. He was somehow on his hands and knees. His palms suffering from the far too hot black rock beneath them, yet he felt nothing save the scorching sensation on his back.

  “What’s wrong?” Victoria shouted.

  Something had slammed into him, and now his skin was on fire. A lava bomb had hit him just below the shoulders and was slowly rolling down his back, clinging to his shirt and torching the skin underneath. A wave of nausea and cold sweats washed over him, and Troy knew he was going to pass out.

  “Lava!” he cried. It was all he could get to come out, because he was using every last bit of his will power not to pass out from the pain.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t afford to. Not here, not now. Not this Room. It would swallow him whole.

  “Where did it hit you?” said Victoria.

  “Back!” he howled. “My back!”

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  “What do I do, what do I do?” he cried.

  “Get your shirt off!”

  He tugged at the collar of his green t-shirt, his fingers going numb. The pain in his back was so severe, his body was trying to shut down to compensate. Focusing his mind on pulling off the shirt was all but impossible, but inch by agonizing inch, he pulled it free, and immediately the ball of cooling lava fell at his feet. As he dropped the shirt on the ground, he saw a foot-sized hole had been burned through the back. It corresponded with the area where the searing pain came from.

  Troy glanced over his shoulder at the ball of lava on the ground, little more than a tennis ball-sized hunk of black goo that had already cooled and hardened quite a bit before it ever hit him. So the burns were only as bad as the surface temperature of the cooling ball, and whatever bits of warmer lava that might have spilled out from inside.

  This fact, he decided, could permit him to escape the injury with his life, assuming he could reach the Exit before he passed out.

  “If you can make it to the Purple Room,” said a terse Victoria, “you’ll be okay. You can rest there.”

  Pain.

  Pain!

  Keep going.

  Just go.

  Keep moving.

  Purple Room?

  Burning…

  Melting…

  Red…

  Purple…

  Broken wrist, burned foot, liquefying skin…

  Why?

  Fire touching his skin, burning through to his spine underneath…

  Why would someone build a place like this? What kind of sadistic person—?

  A new sensation materialized. His lower back was wet; something was running down it. He knew what it was; it shared the same color as this Room. He decided to raise his gaze back up to eye level, so he didn’t have to watch it drip to the ground.

  “Do you have any of the water left?”

  “Uh, just a little,” he moaned, barely hearing her. He staggered drunkenly on his feet, the world around him unfocused and growing darker.

  “Pour a bit on your back,” she instructed. “But not all of it. Save some for drinking.”

  “I think… I see it,” he slurred. He strained to keep his gaze on the Exit so that Victoria could see it too.

  “Yes, that’s it! Listen. You have to get yourself through that door. I don’t care if you stagger or crawl, just get there. You can rest in the next room, I promise. It’s sort of an oasis.”

  Okay then. He’d just have to do it. It was that simple.

  Seeing the Exit had the same affect on him it had every time before. Another shot of adrenaline surged through his veins, and he used it to rally one last time. He was so much weaker than last time, and it was harder to not think about how much of the skin on his back had melted off, so the adrenaline didn’t help as much as before. But anything was better than nothing.

  Troy’s eyes came briefly into focus, allowing him to properly see the door.

  The last few feet were the longest of his life. He lumbered, stumbled, and lost his balance more than once. Touching the ground was like touching the surface of an iron. But it jolted him back to reality each time, and helped get him back to his feet and push on.

  As he walked, Victoria kept talking. Encouraging him with soft-spoken words. Filling the air between them with something, anything, so that the silence didn’t crush him.

  He glanced up a couple of times, leery of the still-falling lava. But, truthfully, it wasn’t a huge concern. Not anymore. Not with his life already hanging so precariously in the balance.

  Somewhere along the way, he began to weep. He tried to hide it, to swallow it down, but he no longer ha
d control. If his frequent sniffles hadn’t made it obvious, the watery blur to his vision certainly would’ve.

  “You can do this,” said Victoria, her voice just above a whisper. Yet there was strength in it, a strength that he let himself grab hold of.

  “I’m really glad you can’t see me right now,” he said, unable to hold back a heaving, cry-filled breath. Even as the words were leaving his mouth, he felt stupid. In his head, it had sounded like a perfectly reasonable way to lighten the tension and deflect her concerns. But it turned weak, pitiful.

  “Crying can be a source of strength, too, you know,” she said softly.

  Again he inexplicably found himself trying to lighten the mood, as if convincing Victoria that he was alright would somehow make it true. “No, I meant I’m glad you can’t see me without my shirt on. It’s…not an impressive sight.”

  She let out a single chuckle. “And here I thought you were one of those ‘body builders’.”

  She was playing along, of course. But why did she say it that way, with extra emphasis on the final words? It was like earlier when she didn’t seem to know what rock climbing was, or fuchsia, or suspended animation. Who was she, really?

  He was surprised when he came upon the base of the Exit door. He knew it had taken a long time to get here, but his memories of it were abbreviated by the pain.

  “Congratulations, Runner—” the voice was saying, but he couldn’t hear it over the cacophony of anguish tearing across his back. He’d already gone far beyond the point of pain he believed himself capable of withstanding.

  “You made it,” Victoria whispered. “You did it.”

  Troy collapsed and crawled, hands and knees, the last few inches over the landing up to the door. “I wish I was dead,” he said, his voice so dry it came out as a low growl. He lifted his left arm up just over his head and waved it before the door to trigger the lock.

  When Victoria spoke again, her voice had returned to full strength, yet there was added weight and significance to what she said. “That’s just it, Troy. That’s the thing I’m allowed to tell you, now that you survived the Red Room.”

  The pain was unbearable, and unconsciousness beckoned. He was crawling over the threshold into some kind of dark space made of stone when her words sunk in. He froze, horrified by what her next words might be as the door slid shut with a thud behind him.

  “You’re here because you are dead.”

  With those words burning through him, sleep claimed its prize.

  WAKING UP DID NOT come easily. Troy felt his mind stirring to awareness, his skin rising in temperature, his heart increasing its beats per minute, long before he opened his eyes. As long as they were shut, it could just be a dream. Never mind the searing pain coming from the skin covering his spine. Just the power of suggestion, his mind making the dream real.

  “Troy?”

  His fragile fantasy turned to dust at the sound of her voice.

  Troy slowly blinked open his eyes. There wasn’t anything to adjust his vision to; this Room was much darker than any he’d been in so far. He glanced about, taking in his first details of the small Purple Room, which didn’t appear to be purple at all, while pushing with all his might against the floor to force himself to sit up.

  “Take it slow,” said Victoria. “I was right—I thought I heard your breathing change.”

  Troy was struck at the shades of fear and loneliness her voice betrayed, and he wondered how long he’d been asleep. And all that time, she was completely alone, with nothing to do but wait for him to wake up.

  “Sorry if I overslept,” he mumbled, his lips moving sluggishly. “Didn’t hear the alarm.”

  Victoria let out a quick exhale that might have been an attempt at chuckling, were the circumstances not so dire.

  “First things first,” he said, finally making it upright. He tried leaning back against the nearest wall, but the slightest touch set his back on fire again. So he leaned forward and hugged his knees instead. The pain had lessened since he’d entered the Purple Room, but he thought he could feel the raw, swollen sensation of blisters forming on his back. His mother’s death had provided an education in burn injuries, so he understood enough to know from what he could feel that his burns were likely second degree. But there was one area that had gone numb—probably where the lava bomb had first struck. Numbness meant third degree injuries. Which meant he would need skin grafts if he ever got out of here.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Almost a day, I think.”

  Twenty-four hours of sleep. Huh. He’d never slept that long before. He certainly felt less weary now than before, but his throat was achingly dry, and his injuries didn’t seem to have healed as much as he’d hoped. Still, he was alive and he was coherent, and still able to function. So the water had to be rejuvenating him.

  He found his steel cylinder a couple of feet away on the cool, cobblestone ground, which now sported a dark violet hue. He was dismayed to find it almost empty. His next swallow of the precious fluid would be his last. But if he didn’t drink it now, what was he waiting for? He might not get another chance. Besides, it wasn’t like there was any hurry to find the Exit this time.

  He picked up the cylinder and noticed that there were markings on the ground. Faint, messy etchings right in the rock, as if someone had carved it with whatever they had on hand—a sharp ink pen, or maybe even a fingernail. Names and numbers. But as he examined them, his slow-working mind caught up to the fact that more than one person’s handwriting was represented among these engravings. A lot more.

  This train of thought was cut off as he swallowed his water and took in the Room properly for the first time. An enormous spiral staircase went up higher than he could see and descended down into total darkness. The Room’s circumference was no more than twenty feet across. It probably was kind of like being inside his steel water cylinder.

  The staircase clung to the circular walls, seemingly made out of the same dark-colored rock as the Room itself, but after every ten feet or so of steps, there was a landing. And behind each landing was a metal door just like the Room Exits he was used to.

  It was a puzzle, he realized. Find the right door, and you find the way out.

  “So this Purple Room,” he began. “There’s no time limit to it?”

  “No. You can rest here as long as you want.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked, not wanting to accidentally violate another of the Corridor’s seemingly arbitrary rules.

  “My fourth Runner stayed here for almost three days.”

  He nodded, mostly to himself. Three days. A long time to sit and do nothing. Guy probably had to recover from injuries caused by a previous Room, same as Troy.

  He reached down and tugged at his tennis shoes, pulling off first the one that was still in decent condition, and then gingerly removing the half-melted one. The rubber had cooled in such a way that it was somewhat molded around his foot. Getting it off was kind of like removing a cast, but it felt good to have it gone, to let his feet breathe free.

  With a start, it all came rushing back into his head like a blast of icy wind: his delirious escape from the Red Room, and the words Victoria had left him with right before he’d passed out.

  “I’m dead?” he blurted out suddenly. “I can’t be dead. How--?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Victoria, steeling herself for an explanation she’d no doubt given several times before. “If you need to rest some more, it can wait.”

  “I need answers. What good is sleep if I’m already dead?”

  “It’s…more complicated than that,” she said.

  Troy knew that his silence would communicate his refusal to relent more than speaking, so he simply waited for her to start talking again.

  “The Purple Room is different than all the others. For the first time, you’re going to be given a choice. If you want, you can leave the Corridor. Right now. No more Rooms, no more challenges or traps or puzzles.”

  “Wh
at’s the catch?”

  Victoria paused. “What do you remember about what you were doing just before you found yourself in the White Room?”

  The Red Room. That was where his memory had started to return. But what did she care about what he was doing before he was in the Corridor? “I was on my way home. My dad was throwing a birthday party for me… Why does this matter?”

  “It’s important,” she replied. “It’s everything. Can you remember what was happening the exact moment before you woke up here?

  “I was—I, uh...” Troy strained to remember. This part seemed to be permanently glossed over with a thick haze. “I’m not sure.”

  “Think. Close your eyes and look back. What do you see?”

  “I was in my car, driving home from the library… It was getting dark out. Dusk, maybe.”

  “Keep going.”

  Troy squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could, straining to repair his broken memory.

  “I don’t know…” The neurons and mental pathways sparked inside his mind. It was still vague, but he was starting to see snatches of imagery. Split seconds of time. “There was—I think there was this—it was…violent. Something terrible. Something bad happened.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s like there was—” he came up short as the revelation washed over him. “Something hit me.”

  “What hit you?”

  “It hit the car! My car. The Beetle Dad got me last year when I turned sixteen. He had to save up for a year to afford it, but he was just determined to do it. I never really understood why it was so important to him...”

  “What hit your car, Troy?”

  He gasped as it returned to him. “Another car! It was going so fast… It hit me head-on. Or, no, it didn’t quite… I think it was about to hit me.”

  Victoria gave a sigh of satisfaction. “What you just described is the moment of your death. Or rather, the split second right before that moment. And as far as anyone knows, you died the moment that other car hit yours. But the Corridor stole you at that exact instant and brought you here, to Run. This is how it happens for everyone the Corridor chooses.”