The Maze Runner Series Complete Collection (52 page)

Winston shook his head with a quick jerk; his body continued to tremble.

Thomas looked up to see Minho and Newt and Aris and all the other Gladers just a couple of steps above them, all staring down in complete shock. The brilliant glare from above shadowed their faces, but Thomas could still see their eyes—wide like those of cats stunned by a spotlight.

“What was that shuck thing?” Minho murmured.

Thomas couldn’t bring himself to speak, just shook his head wearily.

Newt was the one to answer. “Magic goop that eats people’s heads, that’s what it bloody was.”

“Has to be some kind of new technology.” This came from Aris, the first time Thomas had seen him participate in a discussion. The boy looked around, obviously noticing the surprised faces, then shrugged as if embarrassed and continued. “I’ve had a few splotchy memories come back. I know the world has some pretty advanced techno stuff—but I don’t remember anything like flying molten metal that tries to cut off body parts.”

Thomas thought about his own sketchy memories. Certainly nothing like that came to mind for him, either.

Minho pointed absently down the stairwell past Thomas. “That crap must keep gelling around your face, then eat into the flesh of your neck until it cuts clean through it. Nice. That’s real nice.”

“Did you see? Thing came right out of the ceiling!” Frypan said. “We better get out of here. Now.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Newt added.

Minho glanced down at Winston with a look of disgust, and Thomas followed his gaze. The kid had quit shaking, and his sobs had calmed to a stifled whimper. But he looked awful, and was surely scarred for life.
Thomas couldn’t imagine hair ever growing back on the red, raw mess of his head.

“Frypan, Jack!” Minho called out. “Get Winston on his feet, help him along. Aris, you gather the klunk he dropped, have a couple of guys help you carry it. We’re leaving. I don’t care how bright or brutal that light is up there—I don’t feel like having my head turned into a bowling ball today.”

He turned around without waiting to see if people followed his orders. It was a move that, for some reason, made Thomas think the guy would end up making a good leader after all. “Come on, Thomas and Newt,” he called over his shoulder. “The three of us are going through first.”

Thomas exchanged glances with Newt, who returned a look that had a little fear in it but was mostly full of curiosity. An eagerness to move on. Thomas felt it himself, and hated to admit that anything seemed better than dealing with the aftermath of what had happened to Winston.

“Let’s go,” Newt said, his voice rising on the second word, as if they had no choice but to do what they were told. Though his face revealed the truth: he wanted to get away from poor Winston just as much as Thomas did.

Thomas nodded and carefully stepped over Winston, trying not to look at the skin on his injured head again. It was making him sick. He moved to the side to let Frypan, Jack and Aris past him to do their jobs, then started up the stairs, two at a time. Following Newt and Minho to the top, where it seemed like the sun itself waited just outside the open door.

The other Gladers moved out of their way, seemingly more than happy to let the three of them be the ones to see what was outside. Thomas squinted and then shielded his eyes as they got closer. It was getting hard to believe they could actually step through the door into that horrible brightness and survive.

Minho stopped on the last step, just short of the direct line of the light. Then he slowly held his hand out until it entered the square of brilliance. Despite the boy’s olive complexion, it looked to Thomas as if Minho’s skin shone like white fire.

After only a few seconds Minho pulled his hand back and shook it at his side like he’d hit his thumb with a hammer. “That’s definitely hot. Definitely hot.” He turned to face Thomas and Newt. “If we’re gonna do this, we better have something wrapped around us or we’ll have second-degree sunburns in five minutes.”

“Let’s empty out our packs,” Newt said, already taking his off his shoulder. “Wear these sheets like buggin’ robes as we check things out. If it works well enough, we can stuff the food and water into half our sheets and use the other half for protection.”

Thomas had already freed his sheet to help Winston. “We’ll look like ghosts—scare away any bad guys out there.”

Minho didn’t take the same care as Newt; he just upended his pack and let everything drop. The Gladers closest to them scrambled on instinct to stop the stuff from tumbling down the stairs. “Funny boy, that
Thomas. Let’s just hope we don’t have some nice Cranks to greet us,” he said as he started untying the knots he’d made in the bedsheet. “I don’t see how anyone could just be hanging out in that heat. Hopefully there’ll be trees or some kind of shelter.”

“I don’t know,” Newt said. “Then they might be hiding, bloody waitin’ to get us or something.”

Thomas was just itching to check things out. Quit making guesses and see for himself what they were up against. “We won’t know till we investigate. Let’s go.” He whipped out his sheet, then pulled it over himself and wrapped it tightly around his face like an old woman in a shawl. “How do I look?”

“Like the ugliest shanky girl I’ve ever seen,” Minho responded. “You better thank the gods above you were born a dude.”

“Thanks.”

Minho and Newt did as Thomas had done, though both of them took more care to grip the sheet with their hands under it so they were completely covered. They also held it out to make sure their faces were shaded. Thomas followed suit.

“You shanks ready?” Minho asked, looking at Newt, then Thomas.

“Kind of excited, actually,” Newt responded.

Thomas didn’t know if that was quite the right word, but he felt the same urge to act. “Me too. Let’s go.”

The remaining steps above them went all the way to the top, like an exit from an old cellar, the last few glowing with the brilliance of the sun. Minho hesitated, but then ran up them, not stopping until he’d disappeared, seemingly absorbed into the light.

“Go!” Newt yelled, smacking Thomas on the back.

Thomas felt a rush of adrenaline. Blowing out a deep breath, he took off after Minho; he heard Newt right on his heels.

As soon as Thomas emerged into the light, he realized that they
might as well have been draped in see-through plastic. The sheet did nothing to block the blinding light and searing heat beating down from above. He opened his mouth to speak and a raw plume of dry warmth shot down his throat, seeming to obliterate any air or moisture in its path. He tried desperately to pull in oxygen, but instead it felt like someone had lit a fire in his chest.

Although his memories were few and scattered, Thomas didn’t think the world was supposed to be like this.

With his eyes screwed shut against the white brilliance, he bumped into Minho and almost fell down. Regaining his balance, he bent his knees and squatted, tenting the sheet entirely over his body as he continued to fight for breath. He finally caught it, sucking air in and puffing it out rapidly as he tried to compose himself. That first instant after exiting the stairway had really panicked him. The other two Gladers were also breathing heavily.

“You guys all right?” Minho finally asked.

Thomas grunted a yes, and Newt said, “Pretty sure we just arrived in bloody hell. Always thought you’d end up here, Minho, but not me.”

“Good that,” Minho replied. “My eyeballs hurt, but I think I’m finally starting to get kind of used to the light.”

Thomas opened his own eyes into a squint and looked down at the ground just a couple of feet below his face. Dirt and dust. A few gray-brown rocks. The sheet lay draped completely around him, but it glowed so white it was like some odd piece of futuristic light technology.

“Who you hidin’ from?” Minho asked. “Get up, ya shank—I don’t see anybody.”

Thomas was embarrassed that they thought he was cowering there—he must look like a small child whimpering under his blankets, trying
not to be seen. He stood up and very slowly lifted the sheet until he could peek out at their surroundings.

It was a wasteland.

In front of him, a flat pan of dry and lifeless earth stretched as far as he could see. Not a single tree. Not a bush. No hills or valleys. Just an orange-yellow sea of dust and rocks; wavering currents of heated air boiled on the horizon like steam, floating upward, as if any life out there were melting toward the cloudless and pale blue sky.

Thomas turned in a circle, didn’t see much change until he faced the opposite direction. A line of jagged and barren mountains rose far in the distance. In front of those mountains, maybe halfway between there and where they now stood, a cluster of buildings sat squatting together like a pile of abandoned boxes. It had to be a town, but it was impossible to tell how big it was from this distance. Hot air shimmered in front of it, blurring everything close to the ground.

The white-hot sun above already lay far to Thomas’s left, and seemed to be sinking toward that horizon, which meant that way was west, which meant that the town ahead and the range of black and red rock behind it had to be due north. Where they were supposed to head. His sense of direction surprised him, as if a piece of his past had risen from the ashes.

“How far away do you think those buildings are?” Newt asked. After the echoing, hollow sounds their speaking had made in the long dark tunnel and stairway, his voice was like a dull whisper.

“Could that be a hundred miles?” Thomas asked no one in particular. “That’s definitely north. Is that where we have to go?”

Minho shook his head under his sheet-hood. “No way, dude. I mean, we’re supposed to go that way, but it’s not even close to a hundred miles. Thirty at most. And the mountains might be sixty or seventy.”

“Didn’t know you could measure distance so well with nothing but your bloody eyeballs,” Newt said.

“I’m a Runner, shuck-face. You get a feel for stuff like that in the Maze, even if its scale was a lot smaller.”

“The Rat Man wasn’t kidding about those sun flares,” Thomas said, trying not to let his heart sink too much. “Looks like a nuclear holocaust out here. I wonder if the whole world is like this.”

“Let’s hope not,” Minho responded. “I’d be happy to see one tree right about now. Maybe a creek.”

“I’d settle for a patch of grass,” Newt said through a sigh.

The more Thomas looked, the closer that town appeared. Thirty miles might even have been too much. He broke his gaze and turned toward the others. “Could this be any more different from what they put us through in the Maze? There, we were trapped inside walls, with everything we need to survive. Now we have nothing holding us in, but no way to survive unless we go where they told us to. Isn’t that called irony or something like that?”

“Something like that,” Minho agreed. “You’re a philosophizing wonder.” He nodded back toward the exit from the stairway. “Come on. Let’s get those shanks out here and start walking. No time to waste letting the sun suck all the water out of us.”

“Maybe we should wait until it goes down,” Newt suggested.

“And hang out with those shuck balls of metal? No way.”

Thomas agreed that they should get moving. “I think we’re okay. Looks like sunset’s only a few hours away. We can be tough for a while, take a break, then go as far as possible during the night. I can’t stand another minute down there.”

Minho nodded firmly.

“Sounds like a plan,” Newt said. “For now, let’s just make it to that dusty old town and hope it’s not full of our Crank buddies.”

Thomas’s chest hitched at that comment.

Minho walked back to the hole and leaned over it. “Hey, you bunch of sissy, no-good shanks! Grab all the food and get up here!”

Not one Glader complained about the plan.

Thomas watched as each one of them did the same things he’d done when he first exited the stairway. Struggling gasps for breaths, squinty eyes, looks of hopelessness. He bet that each one of them had hoped the Rat Man was lying. That the worst times had been back in the Maze. But he was pretty sure that after the crazy head-eating silver things and then seeing this wasteland, no one would ever have such hopeful thoughts again.

They had to make some adjustments as they readied for the journey—the food and water bags were stuffed more tightly into half of the original packs; then the free bedsheets were used to cover two people as they walked. All in all, it worked surprisingly well—even for Jack and poor Winston—and soon they were marching across the hard, rock-strewn ground. Thomas shared his sheet with Aris, though he didn’t know how it had ended up that way. Maybe he was just refusing to admit that he’d wanted to be with the boy, that he might be the only possible connection to figuring out what had happened to Teresa.

Thomas held one end of the sheet up with his left hand and had a pack draped around his right shoulder. Aris was to his right; they’d agreed to trade off the now-much-heavier pack every thirty minutes. Step by dusty step, they made their way toward the town, the heat seeming to suck a full day of their life away every hundred yards.

They didn’t talk for a long while, but Thomas finally broke the silence. “So you’ve never heard the name Teresa before?”

Aris looked sharply at him, and Thomas realized he’d probably had a less-than-subtle hint of accusation in his voice. But he didn’t back down. “Well? Have you?”

Aris returned his gaze forward, but there was something suspicious there. “No. Never. I don’t know who she is or where she went. But at least you didn’t see her die right in front of you.”

That was a punch to the gut, but for some reason it made Thomas like Aris more. “I know, sorry.” He thought for a second before he asked the next questions. “How close were you guys? What was her name, again?”

“Rachel.” Aris paused, and for a second Thomas thought the conversation might be over already, but then he continued. “We were way more than close. Things happened. We remembered stuff. Made new memories.”

Thomas knew Minho would’ve laughed his face off at that last comment, but to him it sounded like the saddest three words he’d ever heard. He felt he had to say something—offer something. “Yeah. I did see a really good friend die, though. Every time I think about Chuck I get ticked off all over again. If they’ve done the same thing to Teresa, they won’t be able to stop me. Nothing will. They’ll all die.”