The Trap (2 page)

David turns to Sissy. “What happens after one minute?” he asks, his voice trembling. “What happens, Sissy?”

She doesn’t answer, only swivels her head, her eyes nervously scanning the walls. She tenses. There is a row of doors set into the far wall. Her eyes flick back to the elevator,
narrowing.

Through the bars of the train cars, the girls’ eyes are wide with fear and panic. As one, they start exiting their train cars, first a trickle, then a flood of bodies pouring out.

“Fifty seconds.”

Sissy grabs David’s hand. “This way,” she says to Epap and me. “C’mon, hurry.” We start running toward the elevator glowing with white light.

The girls are stumbling on the pebbles of the tunnel floor. In their haste, and with their lotus feet, they fall and topple over one another. They are crying out now, their fear reaching
breaking point.

“To the elevator!” I shout to them, swinging my arms urgently. “Hurry, everyone!” Epap breaks away from us, races to the edge of the platform, starts pulling up a few
girls. But there are too many of them and too little time. I grab him, try to push him toward the elevator. He resists.

“There’s no time, Epap!” I shout.

“Forty seconds.”

Epap’s jawline ridges out. He lifts up one more girl, then lets me pull him away. The girls on the platform are doing their best to run, but their lotus feet can only plod along so fast.
Sissy, Epap, David, and I are the first to reach the elevator.

“Thirty seconds.”

For a brief moment, we can only stare into the elevator’s interior. Our hearts sink. It’s tiny inside, able to accommodate five at the most if we squeeze tight. It was never meant to
transport a whole
village
of girls. We tumble inside. There’s nothing. No button, no control, no switch. The walls are smooth unbroken panes of glass. I quickly examine the outside.
Same thing: no controls at all.

“Twenty seconds.”

Sissy’s forehead is scrunched into deep grooves of concentration. Then they smooth out, decision reached. “There’s still room for one more!” she shouts. “You all
stay here; I’ll be right back!” And then she runs off and disappears into the darkness.

“No, Sissy!” I shout. “There’s no time!”

Out of nowhere, a girl suddenly stumbles out of the darkness. It’s Cassie, the girl with freckles who’s proven to be a leader among the girls. Epap shouts at her, urging her to
hurry. She throws herself headlong into the elevator, her mouth distorted in a silent scream. And that’s it. There’s no more room inside. We’re shoulder to shoulder.

“Ten seconds.”

“Sissy!” I scream. “Sissy, get back here!”

No response. No sight of her. More girls are blundering toward the spread of light now, falling, shuffling, yelling. Then I see Sissy. She’s at the platform, bent over, trying to help more
girls up. But in their panic, they’re grasping, clutching at her, and though she’s yelling at them, they’re refusing to let go. Five, six, seven of them are grabbing at her arms,
her legs, and Sissy can’t extricate herself. She’s in trouble.

“Five seconds.”

I’m sprinting out for Sissy, knocking over a few of the girls on the platform. Behind me, Epap is shouting at David, ordering him to stay put. I seize Sissy’s shoulder, pull
backward. But there are too many girls clinging to her.

An electronic series of pings sounds from the row of doors on the far wall. Even from where we stand, on the other end of the platform, the sound jars us. Whatever is going to happen next,
it’s starting. Now. For the briefest of moments the girls’ hold on Sissy grows slack as they turn to the sound. I quickly slink my arms under Sissy’s armpits and heave backward. I
feel the snap of grips broken, and then we’re crashing onto the platform floor.

On the other end of the platform, the metal doors slam open. Black shadows pour out with frightening speed. Glistening fangs, gleaming claws. Wet, wild, desirous eyes. They move in a swift blur
of movement. The girls nearest to the doors are killed before they can even scream. All I hear is the wet splat of fluid against walls draped in darkness. More shadows glide out of the opened
doors, swim across the walls and floor. Then the screaming starts.

Now it’s Sissy pulling me up by the back of my shirt. Before I’ve even found my footing, she’s dragging me to the elevator. The screams sharpen and rise behind us, but we know
better than to turn and look. We run around clumps of girls panic-plodding toward the elevator, their faces frozen in the garish elevator light.

“Sissy! Gene!” Epap shouts.
“It’s closing!”
He’s standing in the doorway of the elevator, his back against one sliding door, his arms and legs
pushing against the other. But it’s a losing battle. His arms are crooking and folding with the pressure of the closing doors. Inside, David is searching frantically for a control switch I
already know does not exist.

The screams reach fever pitch. Knowing better, I glance back. In the wide cone of light, I see girls pouring out of the train cars in blind panic now, stumbling and falling to the ground. A few
are frozen in place, cowering in the corners of the train cars, arms wrapped tightly around one another, their hands white-knuckled on the bars.

Meters from the elevator, Sissy dives first, sliding between the closing doors and into the elevator. I follow a second later, banging my shin and scraping my back as I slide under Epap through
the narrowing gap. Epap, screaming with pain, can’t extricate himself; he’s too tightly bunched into a fetal position, his ankles pressed up almost against his head. Sissy, off the
floor, wraps her arms around his legs even as I grab hold of his shoulders. We give each other a quick nod, then lunge backward. Epap pops inward, ankles and wrists twisting in ungainly angles.

The elevator doors slam shut.

Outside, girls smack against the elevator like birds into windows. Their hands slap against the glass with staccato panic. Their faces smush against the glass, pleading, begging, distorting as
they’re pressed flat.

“We have to do something,” David whimpers. “We can’t just leave them.”

But we say nothing. Because there’s nothing we can do. There’s no way to open the doors, no way to squeeze in one more person even if we could. More girls smack against the glass on
two sides, then all around, encircling us. Cassie squeezes her fingers into the gap between the closed doors in an effort to pry them open. We don’t bother stopping her. Soon enough, she
gives up. She places her palms against the glass, head shaking, crying softly to herself. More bodies press up against the glass, flattening those already there.

And then the elevator starts moving. Slowly up the glass shaft.

A cry of panic sounds.

Epap puts his arm around Cassie. “You can’t do anything for them. You tried—” His voice stops.

I see the duskers. To my surprisie, despite the mass bloodshed and cacophony in the tunnel, it’s only a handful of them. I’d expected more. Their faces are blood splashed, eyes
delirious with this unexpected arrival of culinary paradise. Judging from their drab uniforms, these duskers are nothing more than low-rank crew consigned to work the graveyard daytime shift. They
came only to unload the train. Now they’ll have a tale to tell for the ages. But it’s not over for them. Not yet. Shielding their eyes against the light streaming from the elevator,
they bound toward the girls pressing against the glass shaft.

“Close your eyes, David,” Sissy says, and he does, burrowing his head into the crook of her arm. Vicious thumps rock the elevator, signifying the duskers’ arrival. Screams
erupt around us, screeching, pleading, seemingly loud enough to crack the glass. David cups his ears with shaky, pale hands.

The elevator rises. Blood splatters on the outside of the shaft like buckets splashing their contents. No matter how high we rise, the blood follows us, the screams surge up at us. Epap puts his
arm around Cassie’s quaking shoulders.

Until all is silent. Blood flicks up like the dotted splatters of a paintbrush. Spread beneath us, on the platform, inside the train cars, is the specter of gruesome atrocities. The elevator
rises and the arc of light thankfully withdraws from the scene of violence beneath. Darkness blankets the carnage below.

A dusker leaps up at the elevator, its pale body slapping stickily onto the outside of the glass shaft. Its face, only inches from mine, regards us coolly. Then its hold, compromised by the
slick blood, slips, and the dusker slides down.

We stare up, praying for an exit. The black ceiling looms ever closer. And only when it seems like we are going to bump up against it does it suddenly slide open to expose an even darker
blackness. The elevator ascends into it. And once again, we are swallowed by darkness.

N
OTHING HAPPENS FOR
five minutes. Long enough for the air inside the sealed elevator to grow stale. And for claustrophobia to set in.

“What happens next?” Cassie whimpers. “What should we do?”

Nobody answers.

Then we start moving, sideways, a slow trundle that quickly picks up speed. We must be on some kind of track, but it’s hard to tell in the darkness. We come to a stop again, then start
moving, in a different direction this time. The elevator dips and turns, the constant changes in directions and speeds disorienting. After a couple of minutes, we suddenly stop.

We wait with bated breath.

Searing light floods our vision. We clamp our eyes shut, then almost immediately pry them back open, desperate to see. The elevator sits in the center of an enclosed space, large as an
auditorium. Tracks coil around us in a tangle of crisscrossing and encircling loops.

David starts kicking at the door in panic.

“Don’t,” Sissy says softly, her hand on his shoulder. “It’s not helping.”

We wait for five minutes. Breathing shallowly, trying to conserve the diminishing air.

“Sissy,” David murmurs. “I can’t breathe.”

“Try to stay calm,” she says. “There’s air enough for all of us.” She brushes his hair back, slick with sweat.

“We’re going to die in here,” he says.

“No, we’re not. Sissy’s right,” I say. “We just need to stay calm. The light is meant to annihilate duskers, not humans. Any dusker somehow able to steal into this
elevator would be dead by now.”

David turns quiet, his expression pensive.

“We can be hopeful,” I say. “There wouldn’t be all this light to kill duskers here unless there are humans at the end of this ride.”

David puts his hand on the elevator door. “How much longer until we start moving again?”

“Any time now—”

The lights blink out. Just like that, we’re submerged in darkness. The elevator starts moving again, picking up speed, descending.

And then we’re slowing down. A thin vertical line of light suddenly pierces through the darkness, widening into a column as we draw closer to it. And finally we’re right up against
this light, then merging into it, blinded by its brilliance, the brightness flooding the interior of the elevator. A series of loud electronic beeps jolts us. The elevator doors suddenly open. And
just as quickly, they begin to close.

“Hurry!” Sissy says, pushing us all through the brightly lit opening. We tumble out of the elevator, falling to the ground.

It’s the smell that hits us first. A stench of unwashed hair, ripe armpits, the effulgence of raw sewage. A fluorescent ceiling light glares down on us.

The elevator door clicks shut behind us.

Silhouettes emerge out of the brightness in front of us, bony and angular. Their voices are male and young.

“There are
five
of them!”

“No way. Not five. There’s no way—”

“Count them yourself!”

“We’ve never had more than three at a time!”

“—doesn’t make sense—”

I stumble toward the voices, the silhouettes.

“Look at this one,” a young, boyish voice sounds from the dark. “Kind of old, don’t you think? Must be almost twenty. Positively ancient.”

I blink, coaxing vision into my eyes. Faces merge into view, young and uncouth, sneering. “Where are we?” I demand.

“Where are we?”
A rough, caustic voice, mimicking. The group of boys starts walking away.

“Wait,” Epap says.

They ignore him, keep shuffling down the corridor.

Epap grabs the nearest one by the shoulder. “Where are we?”

The boy regards Epap coldly, then whirls his arms around dramatically. A smile touches his lips, but his eyes remain icy. “This is the
Civilization
! Where all your precious dreams
come true!” The smile twists into a sneer as he turns to a group of boys standing nearby. “That’s what they always ask.
Is this the Civilization?
Without fail.
Please.
”

The boys break out in cruel, mocking laughter.

“Brother?” says Cassie.

And just like that, the laughter stops. One of the taller boys steps forward. He’s all bones and sharp angles. His cheekbones jut out.

“Is that you?” she asks. “Matthew, is that really you?”

His lips tremble. “Cassie?” The name comes out hoarse, as if long unspoken.

The other boys move away. Quickly, as if they know what’s going to happen next and want no part of it.

Cassie takes a tentative step toward Matthew. Her eyes are shaking in their sockets, glistening over. “You’re so tall now.” She reaches up, is about to touch his face, then
withdraws her hand. “And skinny. How long has it been? Since you were . . . sent here?”

“One year.” Softer and with sadness, he continues. “Three months, twenty-three days.”

“Where’s Timmy?”

His eyes cast downward.

Cassie’s lips wobble as tears pool in her eyes.

Matthew rubs his arm. “Come with me. I’ll get you some clothes to change into.” He looks at the rest of us. Maybe it’s the change in light, but a softness touches his
face. “Bring your friends, too.”

I
T IS A
world of metal and garish light. With only narrow, low-ceilinged corridors to maneuver within. Every corridor we walk down is
identical to the previous: metal and light, metal and light. On each side of us, recessed into the walls, are enclaves, rows of them stacked three high in perfect alignment and spaced apart with
mathematical precision. Each is the size of a large coffin, steel plated and embedded deep into the wall.