Sure enough, he saw that the water atop the plywood was turning to ice. He’d never seen ice form so quickly. Within minutes, the plywood beneath him was covered in a layer of ice, and five minutes after that, the entire surface of this faux-ocean was icy as well.
Troy understood now why Victoria hadn’t wanted him to remove his pants. He glanced down at the icy water, at where he’d last seen them. They’d submerged far beyond his ability to retrieve by now. With nothing but his socks and underwear to protect him from cold, he would suffer terrible frostbite within minutes. His skin was already starting to ache and itch.
He was shaking so hard he couldn’t remain still. Was this what it felt like to freeze to death? There was a blur of motion some two hundred feet away. The blur was replaced by the Exit, sitting atop the ice.
Two hundred feet wasn’t that far, his logical mind told him. That’s a quick sprint. A few minutes, and bye-bye, Blue Room. Hello, whatever’s next. Whatever it was, it had to be better than this. As long as there was heat, he would welcome it.
“When I say go,” said Victoria, “you have to get to your feet and run as fast as you can.”
“Why?” he said through teeth chattering so hard he feared they might break.
“There’s no time. Just get ready. I know you can do this.”
Her confidence was heartening, but all he could think about was the terrible, bitter cold on his naked skin, and how he had to be mere minutes away from freezing to death. This was far worse than any trial or punishment he’d suffered so far. It almost made him laugh to think of how wonderful the roaring fire of the Orange Room’s maze sounded right now.
“Now, run!” cried Victoria. “Go as fast as you can, and don’t stop!”
Troy pushed himself up more slowly than he desired, and forced his legs to move. A stiff, steady gait was all he could manage. His skin didn’t stretch as he bent and straightened his knees; instead it was firm and rigid. Frostbite was setting in fast.
He’d barely made it ten feet when his feet slipped out from under him and he fell onto his back.
A loud crack accompanied his fall, and for a moment he feared he’d broken some part of his spine, until he realized it was the icy surface. His heart raced when the cracking sound didn’t stop, spreading out from his point of impact. It could only mean one thing.
“Go!” Victoria screamed. “The temperature’s going back up! The ice is melting!”
Numbed more by fear now than the cold, he crawled quickly away from the spot where he’d fallen until he managed to get back on his feet. Unable to shake the feeling that the cracking ice was pursuing him, he made every effort he could to speed himself toward the Exit, though he was feeling more than a little delirious now.
He imagined himself looking something like Wile E. Coyote, running in place with legs spinning like wheels. He felt like he was running at a dead sprint, but he was making slow progress on the slippery ice. He briefly wondered if he should try to ditch his socks, if maybe his bare feet could get more traction. But he knew Victoria would kill him if he stopped now, and then lecture him later about needing his socks for protection in some yet-to-come Room. Besides, they did offer some fraction of insulation.
Troy’s blood warmed at the exertion, and even though his bare skin was burning cold from the frigid conditions, he could feel his joints and muscles starting to unclench.
It was incredible how fast the ice was melting. His feet were making tiny splashes atop the ice. Another bracing reminder of just how artificial everything about this place was. It may have appeared to be a big, empty sea when he first entered the Blue Room, but it was all a cleverly crafted illusion. What was behind the Corridor’s walls? What mechanisms and technology powered its Rooms?
Was it normal to think about these kinds of things while fighting for survival? Troy had never felt normal in his life, so why should facing death change anything?
The ice was melting so fast beneath his feet, cracks were sounding every few seconds like tiny clinks of glass on glass. He hoped he might feel the warmth return to the Room soon, at least in some small measure, just to take the edge off the biting, glacial cold. But so far, the icy temperature was all he could feel.
His lips must be blue by now, he thought. Troy wanted to look down and see if any other part of him was turning blue or any other telltale colors, but was afraid that what he would see would be too frightening.
“This is taking too long!” said Victoria in a panic. “You have to—!”
Her words were cut off when there was a mighty crack beneath him and he abruptly plunged into the ice-cold water.
His entire body seized as every inch of it was assaulted, every hair follicle turned to an icicle, every pore contracted shut, every nerve ending blaring with the sound of ten thousand horns, every vein and artery turned to ice. A cold that he could feel through skin, bone, blood, and his very heart gripped him and delivered the most intense sensation of pain he’d ever felt.
He tried to force himself not to breathe, not to gasp at the all-consuming agony, but his body was incapable of suppressing it completely, and he swallowed a mouthful of water. In that moment, he knew he was finished. This was the moment he would end and join Victoria’s unsuccessful Runners, and however many other countless victims the Corridor had claimed.
His dying thought was a fleeting memory of something Victoria had said to him, hours, maybe days ago. Her words stung him now more than the bitter cold.
Surviving the Corridor is a matter of how much you want it.
Did he want it? Did he want to die here? Did he want the Corridor to win?
No.
He wanted to live.
Ignoring the pain, the cold, and the shock and spasms his body was going into, he put one hand out after the other and clawed through the water. Fueled by will alone, he broke the surface and wheezed, forcing his lungs to expand and take in air.
“Troy!” screamed Victoria.
He sank below the water again with his precious oxygen, but soon he emerged. The Exit was just twenty feet away now, but it looked like the longest twenty feet in all of creation.
Victoria called to him again, but he couldn’t answer.
For what felt like hours, Troy pushed himself through the water, inch by inch, using energy reserves he wasn’t aware he possessed. He refused to let the cold water win. When he finally reached the Exit’s threshold, a landing of cold metal that protruded a foot-and-a-half from the door, he rolled up onto it.
Lying on his side, curled into a fetal position with his arms tightly hugging his naked upper body, he trembled as if the entire Corridor was caught in a powerful earthquake. He hadn’t the strength to rise, to speak, even to move.
Victoria was silent, powerless to help him or even comfort him. There was nothing she could do or say that would make this better. He’d never experienced a pain so potent as this arctic cold, this simple, wretched thing that had brought him closer to dying than anything before.
Under the water, he’d known he was a mere heartbeat or two away from death’s clutches. It was a miracle he’d survived, but he had no desire to celebrate.
Warm tears ran down his face, and it occurred to him that he’d been crying uncontrollably for several minutes—probably since he’d made it up onto the Exit’s threshold. He couldn’t recall starting. Much of what had just happened, in fact, was already blurring in his memory or being compartmentalized or hidden beneath whatever curtain Troy would require to survive. He would force himself to forget the terror he’d felt, the horrific sensation of almost drowning, the sharp anguish caused by the icy water.
It was just like when his mother had died. He still remembered it, of course. But the worst details of her death, the most painful, most gut-wrenching parts of it, he had suppressed. Was it some kind of survival instinct? The mind’s way of compensating for the horror of loss, so that he could find a way to get past it and go on living?
Troy wished he’d taken the Corridor’s offer to
leave in the Purple Room. How dare life be so fragile that it could end this easily, or from any number of other causes. It was too precious a gift to be so maddeningly frail. Why was it this way?
“Congratulations, Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. You have escaped the Blue Room.”
He barely heard the announcement over his own sobs, which were shaking his body even harder than the cold.
“Troy.” He could hear heavy emotions thickening her voice. “You have to open the door.”
Right. Open the door. Okay. Whatever.
Sluggishly, he raised his stiff arm as high as he could manage, and passed it back and forth in front of the door.
It slid open without a sound.
TOO TIRED TO STAND, too cold to move, Troy rolled, side-over-side, until he passed under the steel door and it slid shut.
It was warmer in here. This was the first and only thing he noticed. No, that wasn’t right. He noticed also that there was something touching him on this side of the door, just beyond the tiny threshold. Something soft.
He didn’t care. The blessed warmth was worth more to him right now than any fortune the whole world could possess. Whatever world he was on.
“Troy?” said Victoria softly.
He didn’t reply. He couldn’t yet. He was still far too beaten. Too cold.
This was insane. All of it.
Death had coming knocking, and Troy had very nearly answered the door. He’d been in danger in the other Rooms, but this was different. He’d looked directly, unblinkingly into mortality’s abyss, and found it a much different experience than what he read about in books or saw in movies. He hadn’t watched all of his memories flash in front of his eyes, or gained any profound new insights on the value of life. All he experienced was darkness that was born out of absolute, crushing dread.
The terror he’d felt was so physical, so concrete. But hadn’t it had been his proper death that brought him to the Corridor in the first place? He was supposed to have died on the side of that road, struck by a speeding red truck. That end would likely have been instantaneous, wholly unlike almost freezing to death slowly, over however long he’d been in the Blue Room’s frigid waters. His skin was already discolored yellow and red, and extremely tender to the touch; by tomorrow, he’d have bead-like blisters of frostbite all over his body.
Another thing that didn’t escape him was the irony of almost freezing to death. So much of his life had been shaped by the loss of his mother. But the contrast between her final and his near-final moment couldn’t have been greater.
If she were here now, she’d be carrying a warm blanket and a mug of hot chocolate, and she’d bundle him up and put her arms around him, and tell him it was okay now, and…. She’d make everything better. She was so good at that, as all mothers are.
“Troy?” said Victoria again. “I’m so, so sorry. I wish you could just rest. But you can’t. Not now. This is the Green Room, and there’s…a sort of time limit here.”
Troy opened his mouth to reply, but found it dry. After a strenuous amount of clearing his throat, he managed to croak out a few words. “What’s a ‘sort of time limit’?”
“Like what happened in the White Room,” she said. “Things will get harder for you the longer you’re here. I’m so sorry.”
Troy delicately pushed himself up to his knees, and with great effort, pulled to an unsteady standing position. “It’s okay,” he said.
“No it’s not,” Victoria replied. “I wish I could make this stop for you.”
Troy absorbed his surroundings. Right before his eyes stood a wall of foliage that was as high as his chest—vines and plants with huge, green leaves. There were also dozens of tall, thick tree trunks spaced out at random. It was the thickest undergrowth he’d ever seen, so dense that he doubted it could exist in nature. There was too much overlapping greenery, too much vegetation in need of direct sunlight, for all of it to thrive under normal conditions.
He took a step forward, and though the plants bent and swayed against his body, they wouldn’t break. Every brush of a leaf or scrape of a stalk felt like saw blades against his sensitive skin. He bit his lips to keep from crying out with every step. Leaning and pushing as hard as he could, he managed to squeeze about a foot into the brush. But the vines and plants immediately settled back into their former positions, leaving him feeling as though he was stuck in quicksand up to his armpits, though he found that it helped support his weight. He distracted himself from the claustrophobia by massaging his shoulders, trying to rub blood back into them enough to warm himself up.
“How am I supposed to move through this stuff?”
“Maybe you could crawl under it, like, really low down on your stomach? The Corridor says there’s another canister buried in here, if you can find it.”
It took his tired brain a moment to catch up. “You mean water? The special water?”
“That’s right.”
As incentives go, that was probably the best one the Corridor could have possibly come up with just now. He couldn’t help shaking his head and smiling bitterly. The Corridor knew how to keep him going.
That was when he saw it. His eyes swiveled upward, following the incredibly tall trees, until his head turned toward the roof as well. But instead of the ceiling, the Green Room had a night sky, filled with stars.
No, that was impossible. It was another illusion. The Blue Room had had a sky, too, but that was just a disguised part of the structure. Still, these stars were beautiful. Like the real thing. Maybe better, because there were more vivid than the stars he could see at home.
They almost looked…closer. A lot closer, in fact.
Troy gazed back and forth, searching the sky for recognizable constellations. He found none, but there was something else, something even stranger. There was now no wall behind him where he’d entered. He was surrounded by a huge, dark jungle, and it stretched out in all directions, including behind the entrance.
“You’re starting to see it,” commented Victoria.
“See what?” asked Troy. “What am I looking at?”
“You’re standing on a small, self-contained planet. A tiny sphere, floating in simulated space.”
“Wait—what? You’re not serious.”
“The Green Room is a Room, like all the others. But it has its own physics, its own rules. The outermost part of the Room is a black vacuum, just like space, and in the center is floating the ball of earth you’re walking on, with its own gravity and atmosphere, and covered in foliage.”
Troy was speechless. That such a place could even be possible was beyond his wildest imaginings. “That’s… I mean, that’s just… Actually, it’s kind of cool.”
“It’s the most peculiar Room in the Corridor. That I’ve seen, anyway.”
“So what’s the catch?” asked Troy, turning somber. “And where’s the Exit?”
“The Exit is somewhere on the surface of the sphere, just like the entrance. You have to find it.”
“And if I take too long?”
Victoria sighed. “Little by little, the sphere’s gravity will decrease until it’s gone. It’s already happening. You should be feeling lighter soon, if you don’t already.”
Okay, this was less cool than Troy first thought. “What happens if I haven’t found the Exit before the gravity’s gone?”
Victoria paused. “Exactly what you think.”
Oh.
It was another race against time, just as she’d said. If he didn’t get to the Exit soon, Troy would find himself floating out in the Room’s space-like vacuum. Where there was no atmosphere. And no atmosphere meant no oxygen.
This thought drove him to drop to his wobbly knees and wedge himself down through the branches and creepers until he could see the dirt on the ground. He was relieved to find that the stalks and trunks of these plants and trees were more spread out than they appeared up top, where the leaves were so plentiful.
First things first: he had to find the water. Even if it was col
d, he would force it down, because it would increase his chances of survival. It wasn’t a miracle drug, but it sustained him, gave him a fighting chance, and Troy knew the water was largely responsible for keeping him alive this long. His wrist was still aching like mad, but the swelling had gone down; the deep burn on his back no longer felt like it was on fire—though that may have had more to do with the Blue Room’s ice water than anything else—but every now and then he noticed a tiny trickle of blood or pus running down his legs that could only be coming from seeping wounds on his back. The water he was trying to find now wouldn’t warm him back up or stop his uncontrollable shivering, but it might keep the frostbite blisters at bay before they had time to form.
“Any idea where I can find the water?” he asked.
“It should be near the door you just came through,” Victoria replied. “Maybe you could try going in a circle or a spiral outward from it?”
Squeezing himself through the inch-wide green stalks like a slithering snake, Troy crawled in a circle around the door he’d entered through. The twisting and turning around the plants didn’t make it easy to maintain a perfect circle, but he had a decent enough view of the ground here that if it was within six feet or so, he should be able to spot it.
Crawling wasn’t as painful as walking. The foliage didn’t brush up against him as much, and it gave him a chance to rest every few minutes. It also required a lot less balance and agility than walking or running.
It occurred to him that already he was compartmentalizing the horrors that had happened to him in the Blue Room. Just that fast. Could everybody do this, this survival mechanism, or was it a special talent? But wasn’t it also a form of cheating? Of not having to deal with or face up to the internal damage that his ordeal had caused? Was still causing?
Troy stopped crawling. This may have been exactly what had happened when his mother died. He told people he had moved on with his life, but maybe he had never really dealt with the grief of losing her. Maybe he’d locked those feelings away, buried them deep inside some hidden recess of his heart. After all, if he didn’t actively acknowledge his loss, then perhaps it would never hurt him.
Corridor (A MythWorks Novel) Page 8
