The Many went to the clothing area first. Each selected a loose-fitting vest designed with four arm holes to accommodate their unique anatomy. The vests were brightly colored and featured several pockets of various shapes and sizes stitched into the front and back. The multiple pockets gave them an appearance like something between a backpack and a sportsman’s equipment jacket.
Michael, after slinging his weapons into his sash, followed the Many to the clothing selection. The first item he selected was a brown leather jacket that he slipped on over his t-shirt. Next, he kicked a bare foot through a few piles on the floor before sitting down to sift through the items. He pulled a pair of thick white socks from the mound and pulled them over his feet. He crawled to another pile then began to rummage through a disorderly heap of shoes. Annie, without a word, sat down next to Michael and helped him sort through the footwear.
Leon moved to the next row of shelves to examine what it had to offer. He found a perplexing assortment of kitchen utensils, plates, bowls, cups, and other items one might find in a home cupboard or pantry. He picked up a fork from one of a dozen stacks of cutlery. It appeared to be silver, although just by looking, Leon had no real idea what it was made of or what it might be worth. It could be lead for all he knew. Besides, he wasn’t about to fill his backpack with silverware just because he might be able to pawn it for a few bucks back home. First, he had to get home, then he could bemoan whatever profit opportunities he may have missed while stuck in this bizarre world of limbo. He replaced the fork in its stack.
Browsing to his right, he ran his hand along a collection of glass stemware, stacks of porcelain plates and bowls, and finally a tower of metal cook pots. The pots made him wonder how long they might be trapped here. Would they need cooking utensils to prepare meals? Leon debated slipping one of the pots into his pack but dismissed the idea. The metal item was bulky and heavy, and he did not want to carry it around without good reason. He hoped if they needed to prepare food at some point, Hiss would warn them before they left this room; that way several people could share the burden of lugging any necessary equipment.
“Perfect fit!” exclaimed Annie. Leon turned to see her holding up her right foot for Michael to admire. She had ditched the heavy, black shoes she arrived in and was now showing off a simple pair of white athletic sneakers. Michael nodded dutifully before resuming his own search for something to wear.
Leon returned to his explorations. The kitchen items gave way to bookshelves. Dozens of shelves, twenty feet wide and stretching from floor to ceiling, were crammed full with hardbound books. The tomes appeared to be bound in leather or vinyl, or some type of glossy animal hide, and they varied in color from bright yellows and reds to more muted browns and greys. Each spine had a legend printed on it, but to Leon’s frustration, none of the books at eye level were in English. He could not even be certain that the titles were written in any language that originated on Earth.
A thick book bound in a forest green material caught his eye. The title on the spine was embossed in gold with something that looked vaguely like hieroglyphs. He slipped it out from between its companions and opened it. As he leafed through the volume, he was disappointed to find more of the strange lettering covering page after page. Before giving up and returning the book to its shelf, he stumbled across an illustration laid out across two full pages.
The drawing appeared to be a cross section of an unfamiliar machine. At one end there was an obvious power source that Leon identified as a sophisticated electrical generator, and at the other was an opening through which an unknown projectile could be dispelled. The plans might be for a weapon, but if they were, this weapon was unlike anything Leon had seen before. Where was the trigger mechanism? How was it operated?
And how big was this thing? Leon did not see any scale reference on the page, so he could not be certain if the designers expected the item to be carried by hand, or if it belonged mounted on the side of a building. Shaking his head in confusion, he replaced the book back where he found it.
Glancing up, his hand still on the top of the green book’s backing, he caught a glimpse of something he recognized. It was another book, grey and blue, and covered with a waxy, laminated cardboard sleeve. The legend written across it was in English. The spine read, “Human Anatomy.” Leon knew the book immediately. How could he not? He had seen it sitting on his desk every day for an entire semester during his first year at college.
The textbook was too high for Leon to reach without climbing, and he wasn’t about to risk falling and dragging a thousand pounds of books and shelving down on his head. It didn’t matter. He did not need to pick it up to confirm what he was seeing.
He took a step back to better view the colorful collection. Knowledge shared in a hundred different languages – maybe from a hundred different worlds for all Leon could guess – sat right in front of him. The secrets contained in the books gathered here was an intellectual fortune that far outstripped the paltry silverware nearby. He was staring at a library that exceeded any collection he had ever heard about on Earth. The discoveries represented by these tomes had the potential to propel humankind forward technologically by decades. Maybe centuries.
But, again, he was confronted with the same problem. As beneficial as it might be to gather as many of the books as he could carry and bring them back to Earth, first he had to live long enough to get home. Perhaps lugging a hundred pounds of books in his pack might not be the most conducive act to insure his survival. They certainly did him no good if he was dead. Besides, how could he know that the books he collected would be of any real use later? He might be lucky enough to accidentally pick up a guide to curing cancer, but he was just as likely to bring home a tutorial on how to properly floss for creatures with multiple rows of teeth.
It didn’t seem worth the effort or the risk. In fact, maybe he should lighten the load he already had. Reluctantly, Leon slipped his backpack off his shoulder and unzipped the main pouch. He removed the three school textbooks he had placed inside his pack that morning. It would cost him several hundred dollars to replace them, but maybe leaving them behind was the smarter move. With a sigh of determination, he placed his books into the shelving unit one at a time, slipping each one into the gap between the top of the books already there and the bottom of the next shelf. Maybe some future creature, trapped and transported here by the mysterious Apex, could benefit from the information he added to the collection. He consoled himself with the idea his actions might do some small amount of good for someone else.
With the books gone, the backpack hung limp in his hand. The only items remaining were a paper notebook, pens, a couple energy drinks and two granola bars.
And his cell phone!
Leon snatched the phone out of his pack and touched the home button, opening the display screen. The phone turned on immediately, showing several rows of cartoon icons designed to indicate the available apps he had downloaded onto the device. Everything seemed to be working, but a glance at the upper left corner informed him no wireless service was currently available. Not really a surprise, but the discovery was still disappointing.
The time display on his phone read 10:38 AM. Leon parked his car at the university lot at about 8:15, so assuming the clock in his phone continued to function properly, the trip here had taken two hours in total. Maybe not useful information given the circumstances, but nice to know. Leon tapped the phone to put it into sleep mode and replaced it in his pack.
He zipped closed the now mostly empty backpack and slung it over his shoulder.
An exclamation from behind him made Leon jump. He spun, his adrenaline spiking in anticipation of needing to fight or flee, but he discovered only Malcolm making a scene. Apparently, he had stumbled across something unpleasant.
“Mary and Joseph!” the big man roared. “What sort of bloody, nasty shite is this?”
Malcolm had one hand clapped over his mouth and nose while holding up a small black cube in the palm of the other. The cube res
ted on a sheet of opaque material that had probably recently served as a wrapping when Malcolm found it. As Leon took a step forward, trying to get a better look at the item, a noxious smell struck him with the force of a physical blow.
Everyone in the room recoiled as the odor of something long dead and rotting filled the air. Leon’s eyes started to water and his nose began to run as if he had been dosed with tear gas. He was tempted to pant through his mouth to minimize having to smell the fetid stench permeating the room, but the thought of breathing those fumes directly into his lungs completely unfiltered did not appeal much either. Instead, he grabbed the hem of his t-shirt and held it over his face in an attempt to find some relief from the nasal assault.
Malcolm hurriedly rewrapped the substance and dropped it onto the floor. He took several steps backward and waved his hands in front of his face, trying uselessly to dissipate the smell. To Leon’s surprise, Hiss scuttled toward Malcolm and scooped up the wrapped cube.
Hiss peeled off the packaging again, causing a vocal complaint from most of the other occupants in the room. He held it up and examined it closely, touching one finger of a small hand to the black, tarry substance before sealing the wrapper once more tightly around it. He held it up toward Malcolm.
“You, where did this, find?” he asked.
Malcolm pointed to a cabinet braced against the wall behind Hiss. “Left door, bottom shelf.”
Hiss pulled the indicated door open and located several more similar objects wrapped in neat, white, square packages. He gathered them all up and placed them into two of the larger pockets of his green vest.
“Are they important?” asked Malcolm, a disgusted look still twisting his features.
“They were. Before. I, this time, do not know. However, a bad idea, not taking them, is.”
Whether the smell had finally begun to fade since Hiss rewrapped the pungent stuff or Leon was simply becoming more acclimated to the odor, his nose stopped running and he was able to blink the last of the tears out of his eyes.
“Hiss,” he said, wiping at his face with the sleeve of his blue windbreaker. “Is there something else specific that we should be looking for? Random searching is only going to get us so far if we don’t have any direction or guidance.”
“Food. Water. For these things, search. Small tools, perhaps. Keys.”
“Keys?” Leon asked. “I think I saw something that looked like keys earlier. They were next to some boxes that… Malcolm! Where’s the…?”
Then he saw it. The box that Malcolm had crushed was still on the ground where it had fallen, surrounded by a circle of green carpet where the liquid that had once been inside the box had soaked into the white fibers.
“Over here,” he told Hiss.
The alien followed Leon to the spot indicated. Searching the shelves, Leon located the metal rings holding an assortment of small multi-shaped items. He plucked up one ring and held it out for Hiss to examine.
“Yes,” Hiss confirmed. “Keys, those are. I think. You, please, in your pocket, carry.”
Turning back to the shelf, Hiss found three other rings identical to the first. He selected one and slipped it into one of his own pockets. The other two, he tossed across the room. One landed at Kack’s feet, while the other fell near Sofia who was wandering over to see what they had found.
“Please, also carry,” said Hiss.
Sofia picked up the set of keys from the ground. “Do we need all four sets? Are they all different?”
Hiss touched his small hands to his chin. “Not different. The same, I believe. But all four, yes, we need. One of them, may be lost. One of us, may be killed. Redundancy, preferable is.”
It made sense, Leon thought. Better to have a spare and not need it than to lose the only set you have and die wishing you had another. He dropped the ring into the front pocket of his pack and zipped it closed. He watched as Sofia patted the front of her black pants, realizing the key ring was too large to fit into the tiny pockets they provided. She handed the keys to Michael who dropped them into a pocket of his recently acquired leather jacket.
As Kack secured the last set of keys in a pouch on his vest, Hiss shifted his attention to the broken box on the floor. The alien cocked his head side to side, examining the broken item, then looked up to explore the nearby shelves. Hiss found several more of the small wooden boxes that Malcolm fortunately had not gotten around to destroying, and he plucked up four of them, placing them one at a time into separate pockets around his vest. When this was done, he picked up two more and carried them over to Shoo. He laid them at her feet and stepped back, saying nothing. Shoo, also made no comment. She simply tapped one small hand to her chest, then bent to retrieve the proffered items. They disappeared into two of the pockets of her own black vest.
Leon wondered if he should also take a couple of the boxes, but he had no idea what they were for. He hoped if they were truly necessary, Hiss would have told everyone what they were and given the others a chance to collect a few for themselves. Even as he opted to leave the remaining boxes on the shelf, he realized that he was putting an awful lot of faith in the alien’s good intentions toward the human members of this group.
What choice did he have? If the aliens wanted them dead, Kack could have killed each of them with his bare hands one at a time as they appeared in the room. Their behavior toward the humans had been cautious but not hostile. Which was exactly the way Leon and the others had been acting toward them. What else could he expect? It seemed that everyone in this room knew they might need to rely on everyone else if they were going to get through this “test.” Still, a mutual desire for survival was not actually a basis for trust.
Leon decided to stay alert and hope for the best.
Along with the rest of the unwilling participants abducted and dropped together in this inexplicable setting, Leon continued prowling the room and searching for anything that might offer him an advantage through the trials ahead. It was difficult to gauge what would be useful and what was junk since they had no idea what they might face. Even Hiss could only guess, stating over and over that he did not know what they would find outside this room.
When Annie asked him if he thought they would be going through the same challenges he had faced before, Hiss explained that during his previous trials, the one person in that group with any experience – their “guide” at the time – acted consistently surprised by each new obstacle. Based on that reaction, he believed while some problems might be similar in nature, he was going to be unable to provide much specific assistance.
This revelation did little to bolster anyone’s mood.
Everyone made a full perimeter of the room at least twice before Hiss at last recommended they stop. There had been no food or water located in any cabinet, shelf, or container. Similarly, there were no communications devices that might allow them to talk to each other should they become separated. Anything else that had an obvious use, seemed likely to be of benefit, and did not weigh so much that it would be a detriment to carry, was collected and parceled out among the group members.
Leon, in addition to his axe and keys, had added a foot-long multitool with a few gadgets he recognized and several others he didn’t, a collapsible shovel, and a fist-sized yellow ball. The ball did not have any clear survival applications, but it was small, it bounced, and it had the consistency of a tennis ball. Leon was currently squeezing it in his hand as a stress reliever, trying to keep himself calm.
“Time to go, it is, I think,” Hiss told the group. “Us, to stay longer, pointless, is.”
“Is there a limit to how long we can be in this room?” Sofia asked.
Hiss was not certain, but he believed that they could remain in this room indefinitely if they chose to do so. While some of the challenges they would face might have inherent time limits, the first room did not seem to be one of them. The problem with staying however, was with no food to sustain them, they would eventually starve to death. The test would not end simply becaus
e they all refused to walk through the first door.
He went on to explain that once one member of the party exited the door, there was a time limit on how long the door would remain in place. They all needed to go out at the same time. Anyone left behind would be trapped with no way out. He did not know if the room would stay in place until any stragglers died of starvation, or if it would blink out of existence immediately, killing those left behind. All he knew for certain was that they needed to move forward as a group or not go at all.
“So, what are we supposed to do about the old guy?” asked Michael. He now had a worn-looking pair of brown hiking boots on his feet. In addition to picking up the shoes and the jacket, he had ditched his sweatpants for a pair of black, loose-fitting cargo pants. “If we leave the poor bloke behind, he’s going to die here.”
Leon and the rest turned to look at Honghui. The bare-chested holdout remained determined to ignore everything and everyone around him. Even as people had rummaged through the items on the wall directly behind him, Honghui never opened his eyes or spoke a word. He may as well have been a statue.
“Shouldn’t we at least give it one more try to convince him to leave with us?” No one spoke for or against the idea. Neither did anyone move toward the old man. Michael shrugged. “Well then, I’m going to. I can’t stomach the idea of walking out and leaving him here.”
Testing Grounds (On Dangerous Grounds Book 1) Page 5