The Loop

by Ben Oliver

  Again I am running back to my cell, the panic is still driving me onward, not allowing me to break down or give up.

  I make it to my room, drop the tourniquet to the floor, and open the hatch. I look inside, expecting to see Wren coming toward me in a blind rage. Instead she sits on the bed, her face so pale it’s almost silver. She is completely still, other than those blinking eyes.

  As I aim the tranquilizer gun through the hatch, ignoring the lockdown warnings, Wren turns to face me, smile still wide and crazy. I fire the dart and hit her in the shoulder. It takes about five seconds for the tranquilizer to take effect before she slumps to the floor.

  I drop the tranquilizer gun, open the door, and step inside. I place the tourniquet over the remaining portion of her arm and press the button. Nothing happens. Even the medical equipment has been affected by whatever has taken out the electronics. I grip the small handle, which resembles an old-fashioned tap, and twist it over and over again; the loop of material that makes up the tourniquet begins to tighten around the pink flesh, pushing the bloody meat of the stump against the snapped bone inside until the severed arteries are squeezed shut and the blood stops pouring out.

  The dead weight of Wren feels impossibly heavy as I pull her from the floor and lay her on the bed before stepping back and wiping the sweat from my forehead.

  I stare at her lying there, lifeless. For all I know, she might be dead; there is no rising and falling of her chest, or pulse to be felt in her neck or wrist, but there wouldn’t have been yesterday either: At the age of eighteen, all Alts have their heart and lungs replaced with more efficient apparatus (tested on former inmates of prisons in Region 7 and Region 44 many years ago).

  I kneel beside the bed and press my ear against her chest; from within I hear the constant hum of the APM where her heart once was. The sound sends a chill down my spine. I know the benefits of the APM—they’re advertised frequently enough across the city by personalized Barker Projections, I hear them yelling out to Alts in the wealthy parts of town—but I’ve always wondered: If your heart doesn’t beat faster when you’re scared or nervous or excited, does that mean you’re a little less human?

  I lean forward and lift her left eyelid. Her pupil dilates as light hits her eye—she’s still alive. I hold open her eyelid with my trigger hand before easing out her Lens with my free hand.

  Using the blacked-out screen as a mirror, I place Wren’s Lens over my eye. There is no heads-up menu, no text, no way to shut off the trigger. The Lens must have gone out with the rest of the power.

  “Shit,” I mutter, my hand already feeling weak and hot against the metal. “Shit!” I say again, screaming it this time.

  I take the Lens out, place it on the edge of my sink, and make my way back into the corridor, closing the cell door behind me. I can no longer hold back the emotion brought on by the sheer chaos of the last few hours. I sink to my knees and scream a string of gravelly profanities before getting to my feet and throwing a punch at the wall.

  I stop myself just before my knuckles connect. It would be stupid to break this hand when the other one is keeping me alive, gripping the trigger.

  Don’t be an idiot, I tell myself. Think. You have to be smart now.

  I breathe slowly, calming myself.

  Wren is still going to die, I think, laying out the facts. The tourniquet will give her some time, but without proper medical attention, she won’t last a day.

  I know that I have to get on the Dark Train; I have to get out of here and find someone who can help. I turn to move back toward the station, but I hesitate.

  Kina will be in her cell, panicking, worried, wondering what’s going on, just like I was.

  I walk to her cell and slide the hatch open.

  For a few seconds, she just stares at me from her bed, her brown eyes wide, her mouth half-open.

  “Luka?”

  She speaks my name like I’m a ghost.

  “Kina, something’s happened.”

  “I can see that,” she says, swinging her legs over the edge of her bed and getting to her feet. “Do you want to elaborate?”

  “Something’s … happened,” I repeat, and I realize just how tormented I am.

  “Okay,” Kina says, getting closer to the door. “Take a few breaths.”

  I do as she instructs, but the air feels somehow thin and ineffective, as though it’s not reaching my lungs at all.

  “Slowly,” she says, and demonstrates slow, exaggerated breathing. In through the nose and out through the mouth. I copy her actions and gradually my head stops spinning, and I no longer feel like I’m going to collapse.

  “Now,” Kina tries again, “what’s going on?”

  “The power is out, I don’t know how or why, but something is wrong, people are going crazy. Wren, she killed … she killed them.”

  “Wait, what?” Kina says. “Wren killed someone?”

  “I think she’s killed half the inmates of the Loop. I think she … I …” My words fade away.

  Kina’s eyes scan mine, maybe looking for signs that I’m mistaken or that I’m the one who’s gone crazy. “What do you mean, killed half the inmates?”

  “She lost her mind, started executing the 2 a.m. club. We all ran to our rooms. I locked myself back in my cell, but she came to my door, tried to arm my heart trigger, tried to kill me. The hatch came down, her arm …” I realize that I’m rambling as I mime the hatch chopping Wren’s arm off. Kina’s eyes widen when she sees the trigger in my other hand, “Oh, yeah, this is armed; if I let go, I’ll die.” I feel myself hyperventilating again. “I got out, Wren’s bleeding to death in my cell, I got a tourniquet on her, but I have to get help. I’ll come back, Kina. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  I’m about to shut the hatch when Kina yells, “Wait!”

  I turn back.

  “You’re going to have to slow down. I didn’t understand any of that. What is the 2 a.m. club?”

  “There’s no time to explain,” I tell her. “All you need to know is: Something bad has happened, something big.”

  “Luka, what if this is the war? What if it happened?”

  “I don’t have time to think about that right now,” I say. “I have to get help.”

  “What if you get killed out there?” Kina continues. “Who’s going to come and let the rest of us out? We’ll die of thirst by Tuesday. Someone needs to stay behind to unlock the doors, just in case.”

  I nod; she’s right. I step forward, spin the lock on her door, and haul it open.

  Kina steps out into the corridor and stares up at me.

  “Thanks,” she says. Then her eyes drift over to Fulton’s body, his limbs splayed unnaturally, his mouth open, skin gray.

  “Look at me,” I tell her, and her worried eyes turn slowly to meet mine. “Just wait here, okay? Don’t move, don’t look in the open cells, and don’t unlock any of the doors.”

  “Okay,” Kina says, and now I can hear fear in her voice.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say, marveling inwardly at how quickly our roles have switched. “Kina, if I’m not back by morning, try to find Pod and Igby—they’ll be in a cell together. If they’re dead, try to find Pander—she wears hearing aids and glasses. If not her, then Malachai. They’ll explain what happened here and help you escape.”

  “Right,” Kina says, her voice still electric with terror. “Right, okay. Just come back, all right? Just come back.”

  Once again, I turn to go, and Kina calls out, “Wait!”

  I turn back and feel her hand in mine. For a second, I get a sense of vertigo as her fingers wrap around the trigger that I’ve been clutching so tightly that my hand is throbbing. Instinctively, I pull away. Kina looks into my eyes and takes my hand in hers; slowly she takes the device, replacing my fingers with hers around the switch that would end my life if released.

  “Just come back,” she tells me once more.

  I nod and hold her eyes for a second longer. And then I run. Again, I
stare forward—I’m still not ready to look into the open cells and see who lies inside.

  I cross the threshold of the disarmed doorway and hold my breath until I’m standing on the platform.

  There is no way into or out of the Loop other than the Dark Train. I walk to the screen where guards make a request for the train, but it’s blank. The emergency power has gone out. I’m too late.

  I stand on the dimly lit platform and stare into the blackness of the hexagon-shaped subway that leads to the city.

  Now my only way out is through those tunnels.

  * * *

  I step down onto the rails. There is only one direction I can go—the line terminates at the Loop.

  I take a breath and step into the darkness.

  Immediately, fear grips me. The Dark Train is unmanned, and for the last few miles between the city and the Loop, it runs through tunnels. The fact that I’m walking through these tunnels coupled with the fact that the train travels in almost-perfect silence makes me incredibly aware that I could be pulverized at any second.

  The trains aren’t running, I reassure myself. The power is out.

  I push the fear down and run the fingertips of my left hand against the tunnel wall to keep me on the correct path. My fingers run along crumbling concrete, wet slime, and wires that snake in and out of the wall. I try to picture the path that I’m walking down, try to imagine the half dozen rails that—when working—would be thrumming with the magnetic power to hover a ten-car train. I try to imagine the white walls, stained by the strange moss and algae growing on them. I try to imagine my own feet landing over and over on the concrete floor, but in this kind of darkness it isn’t easy.

  It’s hard to tell how much time has passed. One foot in front of the other, over and over, on and on into the darkness.

  As I walk through the damp underground passageway, I begin to sing, in nervous and tremulous tones, the last song that I heard Pander singing before the end of our last exercise hour. I don’t know all the words, so I resort to vowel sounds and tuneless mumbling through the chorus.

  I stop. Pander, did she make it to a cell after she dropped her glasses? Did Wren kill her? Was her cell door open?

  This thought leads me to the horrible geometry of trying to remember which cells were open, which of my friends are alive, and which are dead.

  I start singing again, louder this time, trying to keep the thoughts from infiltrating my brain once more, trying to focus on my badly out-of-tune voice.

  The Dark Train travels at 200 miles per hour almost constantly and only makes one stop—at the courthouse—before reaching the Facility after about fifteen minutes. This means the Facility is around fifty miles away. If there are no other stations along this line apart from the courthouse and the Facility, then Wren is as good as dead.

  The disheartening calculations cause me to pick up the pace until I’m jogging along the tracks, singing my mumbled song even louder, but the singing comes to an abrupt stop when I feel something brush past my leg. Something big, something warm and alive.

  Ignore it, I tell myself. Just a rat; it’ll leave you alone if you leave it alone.

  But as I move onward, I feel a second and a third creature slalom around my ankles. The sheer size of them makes me shudder.

  When we were kids, before I was taken to the Loop, my sister, Molly, and I used to stand at the entrance to the subway tunnels of the city, goading each other to run as far in as we dared. We’d tell each other stories about the rats, stories that had been passed down through generations and around the playgrounds of the Regulars’ schools, embellished and inflated until they became urban legends—the tunnel rats that had made their way here from the Red Zones, mutated rats crawling through sewage pipes and the old underground train lines. We’d say the rats could drag fully grown men into the darkness and strip their flesh to the bone.

  Ignore them, ignore them, ignore them, I repeat over and over in my head, losing my place in Pander’s song before starting again.

  But now there are more of them. I can hear their feet scuttling against the hard ground, their hairless tails whipping the rails, their nattering calls echoing off the cold concrete walls. More and more come scurrying in from the darkness until there is a wave of rats surrounding me and every time my feet touch the ground there’s another tunnel rat squirming out of the way.

  Ignore them, ignore them, ignore—

  “Shit!” I scream as I feel razor-sharp teeth digging into the material at the calf of my jumpsuit.

  This act of bravery from one of the rats seems to ignite something in the rest, and I feel a second bite, this one harder and right on the bone of my ankle, and then another high up on my left knee. I can feel blood trickling down my leg.

  My blood acts like a drug to the creatures, and the air is filled with the fervent screeches of desperate vermin. They jump up, sharp claws scrabbling at me, teeth biting and ripping through the material of my clothes, and more blood begins to spill out as more and more teeth and claws tear at me. One climbs as high as my shoulder and sinks its teeth in so deep that they hit the muscle below the skin.

  I scream in agony, swiping in the darkness, kicking out at the relentless swarm of squirming animals as panicked thoughts rush through my head, too fast to register.

  I drive forward, walking with stiff arms and legs, weighed down by the creatures covering my body, rapidly losing hope that I’ll get out of this tunnel at all, and I’m glad that I opened Kina’s cell before I left, that she’ll have the chance to get out of the Loop alive. I hope that she’s smarter than me; I hope that she’ll search the staff room and find that gun and take it with her. Why didn’t I think of the gun? Why did I assume that it would be easy to get out of here?

  The weight of the clambering rats is getting too much for me now. I feel myself flagging, weakening as the blood seeps out from countless wounds. The pain of the onslaught is taking its toll, and I can’t go much farther. And when I die here, I will have failed Wren; she will die as well because I was too stupid to bring a weapon, too weak to make it to safety.

  The thought of Wren, how frail she was when I laid her down on my bed, how close to death she was, pulls me forward for one more step, two more, three, but it’s hopeless, the rats are piling onto my body, their instincts telling them to bring me down to the ground so they can eat. I close my eyes and fight against the rats.

  If Kina had left the trigger in my hand, I would let it go right now. I would let my heart explode.

  This thought offers no comfort as I wait to die.

  I’m almost ready to give up when I open my eyes and see a light.

  Up ahead, in the distance, a small patch of brightness in the black of the tunnel.

  It’s too far. Surely it’s too far for me to make it?

  But what else is there?

  I swipe at the rats with my remaining strength and free myself of some of the weight. They pile on again almost immediately, squeaking and biting and scratching. I shuffle forward, the muscles in my legs straining and burning.

  The light grows bigger and brighter; it’s barely a glow, but compared to the gloom of the tunnel, it looks heavenly. I can smell the fresh air of the outdoors, and I know that the light is coming from the glow of the moon.

  I can see a platform up ahead, the raised concrete of a station, and something tells me that when I get there, I’ll be okay. I’m ten feet away, eight, six.

  And then I fall.

  No sooner have I hit the ground than the swarm of rats doubles in size. There must be dozens of them, the size of small dogs.

  Their teeth pull at my flesh, ripping it away as they shriek with delight. They cover me from head to toe, fighting one another, killing one another as they vie for space. They teem and roil, they cover my face until I can’t breathe, and I know that it ends here.

  No.

  No, not when I’m so close. I won’t die on the ground like this. I want to see the moon one last time, I want to see the stars as a free
man just one more time.

  I grab one of the rats off my face and throw it with all my might against the wall of the subway. I dig the fingernails of my hands into the cold ground and drag myself and the frantic rats an inch closer to the platform, and an inch more, and an inch more.

  Something strange begins to happen: The rats who were biting at my ears and the back of my neck begin to scramble away, and as I heave myself ever closer to the platform, the rats at my shoulders and the top of my back run away from me, back into the darkness of the tunnel.

  They’re afraid of the light, I think, and strain every muscle in my body as I pull myself forward.

  A few more yards, a few more agonizing, exhausting yards, and I’m lying in the light of the moon, free from the suffocating weight, feeling like I’ve crawled across broken glass, my white Loop suit now shades of red and black, torn to shreds like the skin beneath it.

  I lie on my back, staring at the stars, breathing in the night air. I don’t let myself think, don’t let myself acknowledge that—for the second time in less than two hours—I came within touching distance of death.

  I push myself to my feet and stumble to the platform edge before hauling myself onto the cold concrete. The wounds across my body scream out in renewed pain as I make it to the platform and look around.

  Despite the condition I’m in, despite everything that’s happened, I can’t help but feel awe as I see the half-moon hanging large in the sky, illuminating the rooftops of the small village beneath it and the Ferris wheels of the sky-farms beyond. I smile up at the stars and laugh weakly.

  This feeling of wonder is short-lived, however, as my eyes move to the horizon and the enormous residential buildings beyond the farmland: the Verticals reaching up and up into the sky above the crowded mass of homeless shacks surrounding them, the big blue rain collectors on the roofs and the jumble of homemade pipes connecting the water to each apartment looking like some monstrous sea creature wrapping itself around the concrete. The Verticals are lit by fire; the city is burning, great plumes of thick, dark smoke rising up into the black sky.