A story by Journey Hart
“Come on! Faster, Emma! I think I found something!” Auburn’s voice bellowed through the trees, sending birds flying in a frenzy overhead. I watched a feather fall to the grassy floor and sighed. Against my better judgement, I followed her call.
A frame of dangling leaves waited for me to push them out of the way. In doing so, I stopped with a start to find Auburn standing before me in a small clearing. Usually she ran ahead for her lack of the ability to stay in one place, but for some reason, she had stilled.
“Auburn?” I prodded warily. “What is it? What did you find?”
From behind, there was a tilt to her to her head that left her brown ponytail hanging almost to the back of her knees. I looked up.
Above the treetops, a massive building, concrete and cracked, loomed over us. It was covered in plants. Vines choked it, slithering into its windows like snakes into eyes that gazed at me in contempt.
“No,” was my only reaction. “No, we are not going in there.”
Almost immediately, she turned to look at me with that familiar expression, one that meant she would beg and plead and persist until I finally gave in. At which point, my dignity would be stripped away, and I’d have to regain it again by telling our friends at school what we’d done.
“Come on, Emma. You can’t tell me that doesn’t like the most insane place we’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s even better than that hospital we explored.”
“I hated that hospital,” I muttered.
In response, Auburn crossed her arms and took a subtle backstep toward the building. One that I noticed with growing anticipation. “I distinctly remember you bragging to everyone that you fought off a raccoon with a syringe.”
I was merely trying to delay the inevitable, and Auburn knew it. With a final, terrifyingly excited smile, she grabbed my arm and pulled me farther into the forest, closer to whatever lay inside a building trapped in the middle of the woods.
The more we walked, the more distinct the building became, until the trees parted and the full horror of the structure was revealed.
We stood frozen, staring at its gray-green walls. They were cracked and tinted with a coat in green moss. Trees surrounded it, closing in as if trying to squeeze the life out of it. Vines wrapped around its exterior and choked any hope it had of surviving. Urban exploring had met its finale.
Auburn Beamed at it.
“This is going to be the most exciting thing we’ve ever done. We should have brought cameras.” Her casual tone only added to the distress I hadn’t been able to shake since laying eyes on the structure. She was going to kill us both. All I could think about was that this was going to be the end of my adventures, if not my life.
Without waiting for me to respond, Auburn sprinted to the entrance. It was a large hole in front of which two doors lay, as though holding out its arms in an unnervingly sweet welcome. Auburn walked in without hesitation, a quality I deeply resented.
“Auburn, wait!” I cried, hurrying after her though I loathed to quicken my pace. “We don’t know what’s in there. It could be a psychotic homeless man, or some animals, or something that could seriously injure us.” My soon to be ex-best friend disappeared into the darkness of the building’s waiting mouth. I let out a last “Let’s think about this for a moment,” before I followed her into our doom.
It took my eyes a while to adjust to the light. Before then, I had to feel around for any obstacle in my path, which soon proved to be difficult. I kept bumping into things, hitting my shins on what felt like large metal boxes, and slipping on randomly strewn sheets of paper. It had be a mess in there. I couldn’t walk three steps without crying out in either pain or fear of breaking my tailbone.
After a bit of wandering, my surroundings appeared to be less pitch-black, and Auburn’s silhouette became clearer. I was able to pick my way through the piles of garbage thrown haphazardly onto the floor, allowing me to survey them as I passed. There were syringes, test tubes, shattered glass, files, and metal cabinets that lay on their side, waiting in vain for someone to help them up. It looked as though someone had ransacked the place without bothering to break anything, just mess everything up and leave.
“This is just like that abandoned hospital we went to…” I whispered, clinging desperately to my last bits of sanity.
“Hey come look at this!” I whipped my head up to find Auburn holding a sheet of paper. As I walked closer, it appeared to have a familiar symbol on the top, though I couldn’t tell where it came from. “Remember this?”
“Vaguely,” I answered. I took the paper from her hands and started reading it, quickly realizing the scientific gibberish was indiscernible.
“This,” Auburn turned to look me in the eyes. “Is the same symbol the hospital we went to had. This is the same kind of information we found in the hospital’s paper files.”
My eyes widened as she continued.
“Remember that one paper that said ‘Test Subject 040’ at the hospital?”
I nodded.
“This one says ‘Test Subject 041. I can’t be a coincidence.”
“This is too weird,” I whispered, harsher than I meant to. “We have to get out of here.”
Auburn’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you kidding? You want to leave now that we’ve discovered this? Hospitals having test subjects? Maybe even having a secret laboratory in the woods? This is insane!” She threw her hands over her head and started walking away. “You’d be insane to want to stop now!”
I stared at the paper in my hand, trying to find anything on it to disprove Auburn’s theory. Maybe then the nagging sensation in my head would leave.I scanned the page, but no consolation came from it. Instead, something else on the page caught my eye.
Something that jolted the unease into a full-blown panic.
I ripped the sheet in two, threw them to the floor, and ran after Auburn.
When I tried to go the way she had gone, the hallway split into a cross where I could go straight, to the left, or to the right. I looked frantically left and right, trying to find which way Auburn had gone, but she wasn’t anywhere I could see. I started to cry out for her, but my throat wrenched out a hoarse whimper, too quiet for anyone to hear. I was terrified that there might be someone else here. That if they heard me, they would come after me.
For a moment, I turned to stare at the exit. The door was right behind me, the sunlight calling me out of the darkness. I could abandon ship and go back to safety right now. There was a path we had followed in the woods. I could get home alone.
I stared until tears came out of my eyes, my hands wringing themselves until they hurt. What if Auburn was in trouble, or got lost, or hurt herself, or couldn’t get back home because-
“Hey, Emma!”
I jumped and whirled around. Auburn’s self-satisfied face poked from a door lining the hallway to the left.
“Don’t do that!” I screamed, throwing my hands to my sides. “Don’t leave me alone in here.”
“Oh, stop being such a baby and follow me.”
Begrudgingly and brimming with fear, I hastened after her as she stepped the rest of the way out of the room, marching further down the corridor.
“Look,” she gestured to something in her hand. I could tell she was trying to sound sympathetic, giving me something to do so I’d forget about her leaving me, but at the moment, I didn’t want to do anything but go home. “I found this map. It’s supposed to lead to some big project the people who ran this place were working on.”
I did nothing but look at the map, then look away. After a few moments of rolling the map’s purpose around in my head, and despite the coolness I tried to convey, I reached a point of absolute hysteria.
“Can we not just leave?” I begged. The thing I’d seen on the Test Subject paper careened to the front of my mind. I gulped and tried to push it back, but the image burned itself there. The impression drove me to sureness. I did not want to know what the project was. It would be better if we remained ignorant and happy.
Auburn brushed off the desperation in my voice. “Yeah, right after we see what this is about. I promise. When we see it, we’ll leave immediately. Deal?”
My opinion never mattered anyway. With a frown and a weak nod of my head, we began following the path to the project. We went left one crossway, right on another. We were moving further into the building with each turn. The deeper we got, the brighter Auburn’s eyes became.
“Auburn?” I whispered, a tremble in my voice.
Either she didn’t hear me or she was ignoring me, because a smile broke onto her face, her pace quickening. She didn’t even look at me.
She grinned. “We’re almost there, Emma. Just inside that door.”
I looked. Down the hallway, straight in front of us a door stood. As I gazed at it, I could feel it staring back, beckoning us into its depths. My mouth parted and my brow furrowed.
“Auburn? Do you remember that sheet of paper you found earlier?”
This time, Auburn nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t listening. We were halfway to the door now. It seemed tall and looming even from this distance.
“It had something on it.”
Auburn was running now. I didn’t want to run, but I had to get through to her. Maybe if she knew what I’d seen, she would be as frightened to go into that room as I was.
“Auburn!” I cried, sprinting to catch up. “That paper, it had my-“
The door burst open.
Auburn’s hand was clenched on the doorknob. Her whole body had gone still. I stopped where I was, breathing hard and terrified at what I’d see.
She turned back to me, leaving a clear visual of what was in the room. Fear had taken over her every movement.
In the room there was a test tube.
And in that test tube was me.
“I breathed, “It had my name on it.”