Find Samuel Matthews
The screen went dark and the door behind the boy whisked open. He spun around just as three men came rushing through the door, each of them holding small silver rods; the ends point at the boy glowed red, and the rods made a low buzzing noise that grew louder and higher until the whole room was filled with a piercing whine so awful the boy covered his ears almost without meaning too. The men in white spread out as they piled into the room, their dark eyes focused on him, and the boy stepped back, pressing his bare back against the smooth, cold surface of the pedestal.
More men in white crowded the corridor outside the door, he could see them milling about and shouting at one another, and at the three men already inside the room. Why didn’t they all come in to catch him? He’d never be able to escape so many. They must think three men more than enough to corner him. Even if he made it past these three, he’d never get past the others.
The door slammed shut behind the three men—one of them cursed under his breath but none made a move towards the boy. Which was good, because the whine from the three red-tipped rods was making it hard for him to focus on anything. The sound was beyond painful, it felt like a pair of the sharp needles the Watchers used to poke and prod him during examinations were being pushed into his ears. He couldn’t move . . . he could hardly breath. The whining buzz rose even higher, and the boy fell to his knees. His vision blurred and doubled as he gasped for air, but still the men stayed back, huddling close to the wall. Why didn’t they come and take him? At least that would stop the noise.
The man standing between the other to pointed at the boy and shouted, “Get him! Get him now!” He sounded so scared that the boy would have laughed had he been able to breath. The other two men glanced at each other, one of them shaking his head. Neither moved. Red in the face like he’d been running all day, the first man grabbed the one on his right by the shoulder and pushed him forward. “Take him now, dammit! That’s an order! Hurry before something happens!”
The man he’d pushed muttered some word the boy hadn’t ever heard before and took another step forward. His partner on the left glanced one more time at the first man, the followed the other man towards the boy. When they were two steps away their rods clicked loudly, and the pulsing red light at their tips flashed to bright blue. The piercing noise vanished with the red light, and the boy gasped in relief, falling forward on his hands. The blue light coming from the two rods grew brighter and brighter and began to crackle and pop, tiny flashes of light leaping from the tip and snapping in the air.
“All right you little freak,” one of the men said, “Don’t move.”
The other man reached out slowly with a trembling hand, moving to grab the boy by the back of his neck. He didn’t understand what was happening—too many weird things had happened today for him to understand any of it—but the boy did understand one thing: if the men caught him, if they even managed to touch him, they’d put him back in his tube. He’d be stared at and pocked and prodded and cut by the Watchers, and he’d never be free again.
He couldn’t let that happen.
The man’s fingers were inches from his skin when the boy jerked back, rolling up onto his feet faster even than he would have thought possible.
He’d never spoken to another person before, not that he could remember, but he put all his strenght into one word, one sound that he screamed as loud and as long as he could:
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The room exploded. The banks of screens running the perimeter of the room shattered, jagged shards of glass and metal ripping through the air. The computer pedestals dotting the floor burst open, sparks racing across their bent and twisted surfaces, monitors and screens flipping through the air, crashing and rupturing against the walls and ceiling and floor. Fire, smoke and steam boiled out of the broken pedestals and gaping lines of missing screens, throwing the whole room into an even deeper darkness. The two men who’d approached the boy barely had time to scream before they were blown away, caught up in the rain of glass and heat. Then, almost faster than it had started, the storm was over.
The boy stood alone in the middle of the room, heart thumping so hard it felt ready to jump out of his chest, bits of glass that lodged in the ceiling tinkling down through the smoke aorund him. A screen that had somehow remained upright during the explosion crashed to the floor behind him and the boy jumped with a strangled shriek, hurriedly stepping down from the raised pedestal, bare feet crunching painfully across chips of broken glass.
The room was a disaster, every monitor blown, every light out. The four walls bowed outward, like a giant or something had pounded them out of shape. Smoke still swirled in the air, lit now and then by the harsh glare of sparks leaping from exposed wires. Alarms were blaring again, but they sounded thin and hollow, like they were far away. Air hissed loudly somewhere off to the right and the boy shivered. He could feel it getting colder. There were three limp shapes huddled against the walls, two to the boy’s left and right that he tried not to look at, and one slumpled against the door.
As for himself, the boy thought he was okay. His arms and legs were trembling, his feet hurt where the glass had cut him, his chest was still heaving, but other than that he was fine. Something, a quiet voice in the back of his head, whispered that this wasn’t right, that the glass and fire should have cut and burned him, that he should have been thrown from his feet like the three men where weren’t moving anymore. He shouldn’t just be . . . well, fine.
The man crumpled against the bottom of the door didn’t move when the boy tapped him on the shoulder, but the door behind him tried to slide open. It got caught less than half way open, and when the boy bent closer to investigate, he saw that it had been bent outwards somehow, like something had hit it. With a squeal of gears the door tried to open again. There was a grinding sound from inside the wall and then a shower of sparks rained down around the boy and the door ground to a halt. It was stuck.
There should be just enough room to squeeze through, the boy decided, after studying the thin opening for a moment. Just one problem: the man was still laying in the way; one of his arms had flopped out into the hallway.
He tried pushing the man through the opening first, but his stomach was too big, so he settled on dragging the man by his thick wrists. Being so close to the man was unnerving, and as he pulled and tugged the body across the floor, the boy tried to keep most of his body as far away as possible. The man was heavy, and despite the chill that seemed to be creeping into the room from all sides, the boy soon worked up a sweat. To make things worse, the man smelled strange. The boy didn’t recognize the odor, but whatever it was it was strongest near the man’s face, and it made the boy’s stomach growl.
By the time he managed to get the big man away from the door the boy was shivering, despite the slick of sweat on his skin. His breath steamed in small white puffs in front of his eyes as he picked his way carefully through the glass back to the door. Unlike the man’s fat stomach, the boy slid through the opening without a problem.
Outside the room the hallway had gone dark, save for the still-flickering light directly above. He could see the nearest tubes on either side, but beyond them everything was shrouded in darkness. The alarms that had been blaring right after the explosion had been silenced, and the only sound the boy could hear was the faint sigh of air rushing past him into the room, nice and warm on his chilled skin. He frowned. There hadn’t been a wind before. At least it was warmer in the hall.
Not only was the hallway dark, it was empty too. The crowd of men he’d seen through the doorway was nowhere to be seen. He tried to peer throught he darkness to either side, hoping to find some sign of where the men had gone, but he couldn’t see anything. It was too dark, and he didn’t want to step out of the dim light. Not at all.
The light flickered again, and something moved in the darkness beyond the tubes to the boy’s right. He gasped, spinning around to face the motion. He couldn’t see anything but the pitch blackness. Eyes wide, the boy kept watching, heart pounding in his throat.
Something moved again, a shape so inky black it made the shadows around it seem bright. The shape slid forward towards the boy, sucking in the shadows around it. The boy should have been able to see it better as it came closer to the light. Instead, the pale light seemed to retreat from the oncoming shadow. A wave of solid darkness rolled towards the boy, who scrambled backwards until he was hugging the far edge of the small circle of light.
Only once it was so close the boy could have reached out and touched it did the shadow stop, rearing up until it filled the hallway from one wall to the other, so dense and dark that the boy couldn’t even see the nearest tubes anymore. The shadow moved like steam, rolling and boiling inside of itself, thin tendrils like black fog waving gently in the air.
His eyes must have still been adjusting, because the boy suddenly realized he could see a person inside the black cloud. At least, it was a shape like a person. Only it looked too tall and too thin, with long arms and legs bent at odd angles. He could see eyes too, two points of light that glowed a sickly green-and-white deep inside the cloud of darkness. The sound of breathing filled the hallway, a long slow sighing that rattled the boy’s chest, and the Shadow Man took another step forward.
The boy was afraid. More afraid than he’d ever been in his entire life. Even the Watchers and their helpers in white uniforms hadn’t terrified him like this. He tried to scream, but his throat locked. He couldn’t run . . . he was surprised his legs hadn’t collapsed alread. The chill that had filled the room seeped out into the hallway, and his teeth started chattering, the snot in his nose froze and the sweat on his skin turned to ice.
Again the Shadow Man moved closer, leaning down to stare at the boy. Icey fingers that he couldn’t see ran over his bare scalp and then the boy’s throat unlocked and he screamed as those invisible fingers dug into his brain. He could feel the Shadow Man digging through his mind, searching, hunting. Hunting for what? The boy cried out again and fell to his knees as his mind was turned inside out.
The boy realized he was going to die.
And then the Shadow Man disappeared
The lights in the hallway switched on one by one, racing away from the boy on either side, bathing the tubes in their harsh white glare, and the boy squeezed his eyelids shut against the too-bright light. The air was warm again, so warm that it almost felt hot, and the frozen sweat on his arms and legs melted, running down his body and pattering on the metal beneath his feet.
When he finally opened his eyes, the hallway was empty except for the his brothers and sisters in their tubes, and himself.
Somehow, that didn’t make the boy feel any better.
Apologies, I know this is two posts in a week, but I wrote this out today and wanted to get some feedback.
Questons:
1) I'm trying to keep the writing a lot more simple in this book than in Spear of the Ancients. How does it read to ya'll?
2) are there any parts you got confused with?
3) How is my description of the surroundings? Confusing at any point?
4) Suggestions?
