Loop

by Ben Oliver

  Malachai sighs. ‘I guess we gather the team.’ One by one we open the cells of Wren’s chosen few, the ones who were lucky enough to be put into Group B: Pod; Igby; Pander; Akimi; Reena; Juno; Alistair; Emery; Adam; Fulton; and, finally, Woods.

  They all want an explanation, and we tell them to wait until everyone is free of their cell.

  The group gathers, and I look over to Kina’s cell. I want to go over there and let her out, or at least explain what’s happening, but Wren begins to talk.

  ‘Early this morning, at about five a.m., the power went out across the whole city. At first, everything was fine. There was a little bit of panic – people thought it might have been The Missing, maybe they had been planning some sort of attack all along – but by six a.m. everyone was enjoying the blackout. They carried candles in the streets and laughed about the first power cut in most people’s lifetime. Then we started hearing screams near the centre of town, then more at the financial district, and later we heard gunfire. Me and my family locked ourselves in our cellar. We were there for hours. My dad went out to find out what was going on and he didn’t come back. Sometime later the ground shook and I heard the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. We thought a bomb had dropped, we thought it was the end, I held my brothers and we said goodbye to each other, but the sound stopped. I’m the next oldest in my family so, after some more time had passed, I went upstairs to get food and water for the boys and outside the kitchen window I saw that a plane had fallen out of the sky, everyone who had been on board was . . . their eyes, they were staring—’ She breaks off and stifles her tears. She takes a deep breath and composes herself. ‘I came here as soon as I could, I couldn’t leave you to die. The trains are running on emergency power but they’ll be offline soon.’

  ‘So, we’re under attack?’ Reena asks, pushing a strand of curly red hair behind her ear.

  ‘We think so,’ Malachai says, turning to look at her.

  ‘Well, we need to go,’ Fulton says, his eyes meeting first Adam’s then Woods’, ‘right? I mean, you can’t leave us here to rot.’

  ‘We need to talk about it,’ Wren says. ‘We need to—’

  ‘What is there to talk about?’ Fulton says, his voice growing in volume. ‘If there’s a war out there then we’ll be the last thing on their minds. The government doesn’t care about us, they’ll either delete us or forget about us, you know that.’

  ‘Or they might pardon us,’ Woods points out, his wide frame still slumped and dejected from the death of Winchester. ‘If we sign up for the front line, they might pardon us.’

  ‘And you want to wait for that option?’ Adam asks, taking an aggressive step closer to Woods.

  Woods turns towards his enraged friend, looking up into his face. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be legitimately free than a fugitive?’

  ‘We might never get that chance! I want to be free, no matter the cost!’

  ‘I think you know what you have to do,’ Fulton says, glaring at Wren.

  Wren appears not to hear this at first, her eyes distant and unseeing, but then she takes a deep breath and looks at Fulton. ‘Yes, yes, of course, you’re right,’ she mutters.

  ‘You’re going to let us out?’ Woods asks.

  ‘I think I have to, don’t I? I think that’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘It is,’ Pander says decisively.

  ‘Right, yes, it is,’ Wren replies, her voice far away and dreamy.

  ‘Think about this, Wren,’ Malachai says, touching her cheek. ‘Think carefully.’

  ‘I have, I’ve thought about it. I have to do the right thing. The trains will stop running soon and you’ll be trapped here. I’ll let you guys out first, then I’ll set the rest of them free.’

  Malachai nods and steps aside.

  My heart rate increases suddenly as Wren moves towards the detonator threshold. She’s going to free us, she’s going to let us go. I think, first, of my sister, Molly, then my father. I have to get to them, that’s the first thing I have to do. I have to make sure they’re OK.

  Wren moves forward, but she appears to be unstable on her feet, stumbling as though she’s been drinking or taking Crawl.

  I follow her, we all do, eagerly staring at the panel beside the doorway that, soon, Wren will press a finger against and disarm the infrared barrier that would kill us instantly if we tried to cross it.

  But then I stop, my head turning towards Kina’s cell. Can I really escape now and leave her to deal with those Wren deemed too dangerous for the 2 a.m. club?

  ‘Fuck,’ I whisper, and take a step back from the group. I know I can’t go without Kina. I either have to get Wren to let her out or I have to wait and take my chances with the second group.

  Tyco will be in the second group, I think.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I hear Pander say impatiently, and I turn back to Wren.

  She’s standing stock-still at the doorway, her back to the group. She is so still that she seems frozen in time. I step closer, feeling that now too familiar sense of dread seeping into my skin.

  ‘Wren,’ Malachai says, and for the first time I hear fear in even his voce, ‘everything alright?’

  Things happen quickly. Wren spins to face the group, her eyes blinking rapidly, her mouth contorted into a grotesque smile. The entire group takes a stumbling step back, Malachai’s arm stretches out across them, defensively. Wren reaches for the trigger on her belt and aims it into the crowd. I hear the four beeps inside someone’s chest as the trigger links up with one of our heart implants. I close my eyes and pray it’s not me.

  ‘No,’ I hear Fulton whisper, ‘no way.’

  And then he falls silent as he crumples to the floor.

  There is a moment of complete stillness. And then screaming and panic and shoving as we all sprint for the safety of our cells. Woods sidesteps into Fulton’s old cell. In front of me Igby wrenches at Pod’s massive arm, dragging him into a free cell and slamming the door shut. I see Malachai slide on his back into another cell, and Emery grunt as she pulls a heavy door shut, screaming at Alistair to ‘go, go, go!’ at the same time. Her voice cut off the moment the door shuts flush with the frame. All of this happens in the space of three seconds, and all the while I’m being pushed and pulled by the panicking crowd.

  I run towards my own cell – there are two empty ones before it but I’m not thinking clearly. Alistair runs beside me and then his bleached blond hair moves ahead as he beats me for pace. I hear four beeps and I can’t tell if it’s him or me. He goes limp; a ragdoll dropped from height, his legs flipping up, curving his spine as his expressionless face scrapes along the floor.

  I grab the frame of my cell, spinning myself around and into the tiny room. I pull at the door, my breaths coming out in panicked cries.

  I see Pander sprint past me, her glasses falling to the concrete floor, and she stops, turns around and bends down to pick them up. I want to scream at her to run, but my cell door closes, the locks snapping shut. I really hope she makes it to the next room.

  The silence engulfs me, surrounds me, swaddles me like a blanket.

  I collapse to the floor. This isn’t real, this can’t be real, this isn’t happening.

  Alistair and Fulton are dead. Wren killed them. Why did she do that?

  I can’t face this, I can’t accept this. My mind blocks out everything, drags me down into a world of nothingness: I feel nothing; see nothing; hear nothing; I’m aware of nothing. I sit on the hard floor and I am no one, I am nowhere, and it’s a kind of bliss.

  Alistair and Fulton are dead. Wren killed them. Why did she do that?

  The question is far from here, inside of a locked room in a locked house in a ghost town.

  I might lose my mind if I don’t get a grip, I’m aware of that. I slap myself in the face, hard, and then I do it again. The pain brings me back to the present.

  ‘Alistair and Fulton are dead,’ I say aloud. ‘Wren killed them. Why?’

  I contemplate the question.

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nbsp; ‘She went crazy, she lost her mind. Wren killed Alistair and Fulton. There’s a war in the city, the power is out, we’re under attack.’

  I’m mumbling the words, trying to put them together like assorted jigsaw pieces from a dozen different puzzles. None of it makes sense, none of it fits together.

  I stand up and walk to the sink and twist the cold tap. Nothing happens.

  ‘Fuck,’ I hiss.

  My heart thumps in my chest, as though it’s taking running leaps against my ribcage. I look at my reflection in the blacked-out screen on the wall of my cell. I barely recognize myself: my skin is ashen; my eyes bulging; my mouth fixed in a grimace that doesn’t belong to me. I’m in shock, I know that, but there’s nothing to be done.

  I walk to the screen and touch the black surface. I wish it worked, wish Happy would talk to me again, keep me company, bring me my food, tell me the time. I don’t want to be in this alone. I pick a book from on top of the pile, read the first line, and then throw it at my locked door. No way of opening it from the inside.

  I am stuck in here again. It seems I can’t stop getting stuck in here. Am I destined to return over and over, until I die?

  I freeze as the hatch on my cell door slides open slowly, the metallic scrape squealing into the silence of the room.

  I turn to face the door. Wren’s wide, bright eyes stare back at me, her eyelids fluttering open then shut, open then shut, over and over. Hummingbird’s wings.

  ‘Wren, it’s me,’ I say, my voice sounding like an echo of an echo. ‘It’s Luka.’

  She says nothing, just stares at me, teeth bared in that awful smile.

  She lifts her hand up and points something at me. In my dazed state it takes half a second to recognize the little green light on the end of the trigger. For a moment I don’t move. For one little moment I accept that Wren is going to kill me. I think of my dad, my sister, of Kina, and I dart out of the way before she can arm the device and link it with the wire in my heart.

  ‘Wren!’ I yell, pressing myself against the wall. ‘Please, Wren, put that down.’

  She doesn’t reply, her expression doesn’t change, she just aims the trigger at me.

  ‘Put the trigger down, Wren, what are you doing?’

  I see her arm snake through the hatch, and the trigger comes around to face me.

  I dive to the other side as she tracks my movements. Without thinking I roll under my bed and watch as Wren thrashes around trying to arm the device so she can detonate the explosive that’s surgically attached to my heart.

  And then I realize that there’s a sound in my cell; the sound of Happy’s voice:

  ‘Infiltration. Lockdown in five seconds . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .’

  ‘Wren!’ I scream. ‘Get your arm out of the hatch!’

  ‘. . . one . . . lockdown.’.

  The hatch slams shut, and Wren’s arm, severed at the shoulder, falls to the floor of my cell. As it does so the green light of the trigger turns red, and I hear four beeps from deep inside my chest.

  The trigger is armed.

  I’m frozen for a second by the sight of the blood seeping slowly from the lifeless limb, but then I scramble over and carefully pry the trigger from Wren’s hand, making sure I keep my finger pressed down firmly on the switch.

  ‘What the hell, what the hell, what the fuck,’ I say through shallow breaths as I hyperventilate. ‘The Lens,’ I mutter, ‘I need the Lens to disarm the damned thing.’

  Disarm! my brain screams wildly, and I almost laugh at the sight of the pale arm on the floor.

  There’s no time to assess the situation, no time to work out what to do next, as the sound of my cell door creaking open infiltrates the silence.

  I turn to face Wren, who stands in the doorway, still blinking, still smiling, apparently unaware of the life-threatening injury that she has inflicted upon herself. She steps forward, her remaining hand reaching out and grabbing me by the throat.

  We both fall to the hard floor of my cell. A sickening crack fills the room as my head thumps off the concrete, and I see white spots in my vision. Wren’s face is centimetres from mine; she smiles down at me and crushes my throat with all her strength.

  I try to speak her name, try to beg her to stop. Blood drips on to my face from the wound at her shoulder, and the pain and the panic are unbearable.

  The pressure is building behind my eyes and my vision is growing grey at the corners. I feel my grip on the trigger weaken.

  I have to do something and I have to do it now. With my free arm, I punch and chop at the hand that’s choking the life out of me, but Wren’s smile doesn’t even waver. I reach out and grab for a weapon; something hard and heavy that I can hit her with to stop her from killing me. My fingers wrap around something that feels hard enough and I swing it with all of my remaining strengthinto her temple.

  It barely affects her, but her grip loosens for a fraction of a second, enough for me to roll out from underneath her and fill my lungs with air.

  Without thinking, I turn and swing my weapon again. As it hits her above her cheek, I see that it’s the hardcover book: The Fellowship of the Ring.

  The blow drops her to the floor, and I scramble to the cell door, swinging it shut as this deranged version of Wren throws herself towards me. I lift the handle and spin the wheel. The door is locked, and Wren is inside.

  I rest my free hand on my knee, and the other grips the dead man’s switch tightly. I try to fight off the need to vomit as I cough and breathe and spit blood on to the floor.

  After a few seconds the events of the last week explode inside my brain and I let out a scream of anger, frustration, confusion and fear.

  I run my free hand through my sweat-soaked hair and tell myself to breathe, tell myself to be calm. I take a look at the trigger, but it’s just a solid tube of metal with a single button depressed beneath my thumb, two lights on the end, and as far as I can see, there are no instructions or hints as to how to turn it off.

  Wren is going to die, I think, unable to shake the mental image of her severed arm falling from the hatch and landing on my cell floor with a wet smacking sound.

  I slide the hatch open.

  ‘Wren, you need to make a tourniquet or you’re going to lose too much blood,’ I say, my voice coming out in a weak croak.

  She doesn’t appear to hear me; she’s pacing the cell from wall to wall like a wild animal, still with that horrible smile on her face, still blinking over and over again.

  ‘Wren,’ I say, trying to yell.

  For a second her eyes dart up to mine and she runs at the door, diving for the hatch as though she believes that she can squeeze through the tiny gap and get to me, finish me off.

  I slam the hatch shut before she can reach it. I stand in the corridor, feeling helpless.

  Whatever happened to Harvey happened to her, I think, but, once again, the puzzle pieces don’t connect – the Group As all lost their minds after the Delay, but Wren was nowhere near the Facility.

  I have to get to her before she dies from blood loss, but how do you help someone who tries to kill you every time you get close?

  I step back and lean against the other side of the corridor. It’s then that I notice that some cell doors are open. It appears to be a random pattern – one cell shut, the next open; four cells shut, three open . . .

  I feel even more adrenaline enter my system, accompanied by complete terror. Mine wasn’t the first cell that Wren came to.

  I stare at the open doors, and I know what I’ll find inside. I hold the trigger up to my face and I try to absorb that inside all those rooms lie the lifeless bodies of my fellow inmates. Wren was successful in pairing the trigger with the devices in their hearts, and she killed them. She moved from cell to cell, stopping, when the mood took her, to execute the helpless inmate inside, and then she opened their door to check that her work was complete.

  To confirm this I will have to go to each cell and witness the carnage first hand, but as
I stare at the glaring dead eyes of Fulton, and the unnatural position of Alistair’s body sprawled on the corridor floor, I know that I can’t do that now, because if what I’m imagining is true then it will make wanting to save Wren’s life very difficult.

  I look to the right of my cell and I see that the adjacent door is still shut and locked. I feel a burst of elation in my chest as I know that my neighbour is still alive.

  ‘Kina,’ I whisper, and I allow myself a second to smile.

  I take a breath. Think.

  I have to save Wren. She won’t last much longer if she keeps losing blood.

  I have to get help, I have to get out of the Loop and get help. I run towards the entrance of the Loop, keeping my eyes firmly ahead, unwilling to glance into the open cells. I run straight at the exit until something in my mind screams at me to stop. I see the big letters written in yellow:

  INMATES! CROSSING THIS POINT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION WILL CAUSE IMPLANTS TO DETONATE

  My heart jumps in my chest when I see how close I came to crossing the threshold. I scold myself for being so stupid. I walk to the panel on the wall. At first I’m sure that there’s no way for me to deactivate the barrier, as I know that my fingerprints won’t work on the scanner. The only person who will be able to deactivate it is Wren, and she’s not going to voluntarily press her fingertips to this—

  But she doesn’t have to volunteer.

  I run back to my locked cell as fast as I can.

  Without overthinking my plan, I open the door, grab Wren’s severed arm from the floor and throw it behind me into the corridor. As I’m still holding the trigger, I have to do everything one-handed. Wren doesn’t react as quickly as she should, probably because a lot of her blood is now on the floor and soaking into the mattress of my bed, but she lunges at me, the fingernails of her hand scraping the skin on my face as I dive back into the corridor and spin the lock.

  I pick up the arm and run back to the entrance of the Loop, the place where the Dark Train delivered me on my first day, and push Wren’s lifeless thumb against the pad. The display reads:

  DISARM? YES NO