Book Eight, Chapter 51: Down the Hall

We were Off-Screen for a while, without anything particular to do. There were no instructions coming from our ArGIS units, as they assumed our characters would be sleeping at the outpost.

We had found our way to the soldiers’ sleeping quarters, but we weren’t quite comfortable. How could our characters sleep after seeing four men whose deaths were unexplainable?

I gave everyone a warning before we were due to go back On-Screen. We each took our places, trying our best to bring out the details of the story we needed in order to grasp our situation.

Cassie lay on one of the bunks, flipping through the Morgenstern’s Book of Fairytales with a look that exceeded mere interest. It was more like amazement, or even pure rapture.

“You shouldn’t be looking through that thing,” Camden said. “That looks like banned reading material.”

In fact, it was banned. There was a red stamp on the front of it that said contraband but it was so faint we worried the cameras would not pick it up.

“My parents had one like it when I was a child,” Cassie said, flipping a page. “It was this exact title, I think, but not this edition. It wasn’t this beautiful. There was this cabinet near the apartment we lived in. It was out of the way in a maintenance corridor. We kept all kinds of books in there, passed down through the generations. Mom used to read it to me, but then somebody reported the cabinet, and it and all the other books got taken away.”

We were building off what we knew about this society.

“It isn’t in the interest of Culver’s Bay that people obsess over children’s stories,” Camden said.

“Yes, I’ve read the posters,” Cassie said. “That if we keep reminding ourselves of the world that was, we will never be able to achieve the world that can be.”

“Exactly,” Camden said. “So throw the book away and let’s get some rest so that we’ll be prepared when the ArGIS gives us new directions. Wherever Command is sending us, it’ll help us get to the bottom of what happened here.”

Cassie smirked. “You really do believe everything Command says, don’t you?”

Camden acted offended as best he could.

“You’re not one of those conspiracy theorists, are you?” he asked. “It is a matter of incentives. Why would Command lie to us? People like to assume that those in charge have secret plans and dark mandates, but the higher I’ve grown in the hierarchy, the more I realized that no one has time for that. We have real problems to deal with. Running a social engineering feat like you people accuse us of would be pointless.”

“Oh,” Cassie said. “What country are we in right now?”

Camden paused and stared at her.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“You don’t know,” she said, “because our ancestors were all told they were being taken to different locations when they arrived at Culver’s Bay blindfolded, so that they didn’t actually spill the secret to anyone who wasn’t invited. And now we don’t know which was the truth. Are we in Louisiana or Australia? Maybe South America somewhere.”

“That’s different,” Camden said. “It was about safety. If people knew where the terradomes were before the bombings, they would have been overrun, and the light of humanity would have been extinguished.”

“Okay, whatever you say, boss man,” Cassie said. “But I prefer my fairy tales over yours any day.”

They had rehearsed that scene for a while, and I thought they nailed it. The choice between believing propaganda and rejecting it, even if that meant not knowing what to believe, fed right into the misinformation theme.

After they got through their lines, I decided to take a walk down the hall where Anna was waiting. Just as Cassie and Camden went Off-Screen, Anna went On-Screen, but all she was doing was staring into a darkened room. There was no expression on her face, except perhaps a longing.

What was interesting was that while she was On-Screen, I wasn’t, even when I stood right next to her, because she was in a daydream, and it was the dream itself that Carousel was filming. How it pulled that off, I didn’t know, but I assumed it had something to do with sound stages and other movie magic.

When I saw that I was about to go On-Screen, I realized she was about to snap out of it, so I decided to time things right for a good little moment.

Three… two… one.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, just as I went On-Screen.

As predicted, Anna jumped in surprise, because she had no way of perceiving me while she was in her daydream.

I looked over in the darkened room where she had been staring.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s pretty spooky out here, isn’t it?” I asked.

We both stared into the dark room, but neither of us dared to enter. That strange feeling of not knowing what was in the room started to inflate in my stomach, to the point I was afraid I was going to burst.

“Can’t wait to get out of this place,” she said.

“Me neither,” I agreed.

We both took one last look into the darkened room as we returned to the others.

When we got back all in a group, we had some time before we went back On-Screen, so we tried to get some sleep, though I wasn’t particularly successful. Normally, there was no argument for bringing Out Like a Light into a storyline, but this might have been the exception.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

We stayed there for hours, sleeping in shifts just because it made us feel better, and as we went On-Screen after so long, the scene began with a loud sound in the distance.

It was like something running, a terrible beast making its way through the converted shopping center, but there were conflicting reports on that.

“Soldiers,” Camden said as he sprang awake. “They’re back.”

We were all prepared to hit the ground and run. We didn’t have to spend time collecting any of our belongings.

“What are you talking about, soldiers?” Cassie asked. “There’s a monster out there. Don’t you hear it?”

Camden looked at her, confused.

We paused for a moment, because that’s all the time we had, and as we listened, it was true. The sound in the distance could have been a large monster breaking through the building, or a huge platoon of soldiers marching in unison, their boots echoing off the walls. It was like one of those Internet illusions where you heard whichever word you were trying to hear.

Except in this case, if we picked wrong, we would die.

We burst out of the sleeping quarters and started heading in the opposite direction of the sound, down a very long hallway. Even Camden was hesitant to trust his senses. The loud noise in the distance might have been friendly soldiers returning home, but it could have been anything else.