Cursed Souls - Chapter 10 10 The Compound

Everyone had been busy these days. People didn’t have much time to just lounge around anymore, and they couldn’t afford to cower in their rooms forever. The building was shifting. Changing frequently. Community meetings had been a thing in the past. What happened in the outside world? What is this place? Most people tended to question this often.

Chris was tired of pitching in and being in a “community”. He didn’t mind the groups of girls drooling over him, however. Most of them attempted to flirt and throw themselves at him. He had a room alone. No interconnecting door. No unit. No pattern… or at least that’s what he pretended reality to be. Maybe he was just meant to be alone he thought. Or maybe he sometimes wondered… maybe I’m too much of a freak to be comparable with someone. Chris, in reality, did have a room. He just never bothered to check it’s location or has a partner. Over the first month and a half Chris had noted many “in the works” as he called them, observations. He noticed that most people were paired up with someone with a similar personality. He also thought it was worth noting that people were placed on different floors now. Not alphabetically. But instead based on their actions somehow. He scratched his head at first.

It had been a week since he had seen her….oaki that was. He couldn’t exactly place it but he knew in his heart she was different. Some rare-ity in the grand scheme of things. If it weren’t for her, he wondered, … would they have found the discovered? He tried to push past the images in his mind of the chained up lethargic 102. Why were they put down there and who put them down there? Is there someone controlling this jail?

He went back up to the top floor and laid on the ground. No one else came to this floor. He would often sleep up here under the stars. He looked up. Then closed his eyes and could picture oaki. Her astonishment and wonder as she looked out at the clouds and compound. How she dove down into the slide and the smile on her face when she talked about water supply and etc. He opened his eyes and looked back up at the stars. He could see in the constellations what he thought looked like a lonely girl holding an umbrella.

Somehow no matter what he looked at the thought of her. He missed the smell of peaches and her green-gray eyes. I missed her strong-willed nature, but her tender and caring heart. However, he tried to put that out of his mind. Thinking of her brought him pain. She still hadn’t woken up and it had been a week. And Noah refused to let him in to see her. Sometimes he would stand in the doorway and peer in from the outside and see her laying in bed. She looked beautiful and at peace. He wished she would wake up. Be that same girl that saves everyone. Be the girl who wasn’t afraid to stare death in the face. He looked out at the stars again going back to his thoughts trying to distract himself from Oaki.

He took out a notepad and pencil and propped himself up in the corner. He wrote in the middle of the paper “compound”. Underneath, he listed his thoughts.

#1 Changing rooms #2 live feed #3 102 #4 jail cells #5 caverns #6 pairings #7 division of jobs #8 stadium #9 personal belongings drawer and #10 rules.

As far as he could think he couldn’t come up with many rules. So he then flipped the page. Going out past 11 results in death. Leaving compound results in jail. He paused… there have to be more rooms or a secret floor he thought. Someone has to be watching them. Controlling them. But how could this be? He put his notebook aside and laid back down to look up at the sky. Just then one of the glass panels glimmered from above. He scooted over to it and looked up again.

Then he saw a video playing. Headphones slowly dropped from the ceiling. He watched the video footage of what happened. There was a white biosphere that enfolded a huge radius around the school hotel and courtyard that projected over the area. He saw planes flying over then falling out of the sky. Then planes stalled and dropped onto the biosphere. As soon as they hit the surface the exploded on the outside and fell down the side.

Then there was a huge ray from the sky. The atmosphere and everything outside the biosphere were turned a bright yellow. Inside the biosphere was blue. It seemed to protect the inside by quickly adapting from white to blue. It reminded him of sunglasses and how they protected your eyes from the UV rays of the sun. He continued to watch. The old hotel changed and adapted into a new building.

Scientists ran out of the building. Just as they were running the hotel trapped them under what appeared to look like a glass jar. The 12 scientists that were trapped suffocated inside the glass jail they were under. Then they were thrown against the wall of the biosphere onto a red panel. Their bodies hit the red hot colored side and disintegrated them into ash. The hotel went back to looking like a compound.

Then students seemed to be scoring the building in pairs walking next to each other with closed eyes down into a staircase then directed to different caverns. They laid on the floor and fell asleep into a rest. He watched the video shocked by what he was seeing. The stairway closed after all students were in the cave taverns. People slept on the cold ground for three hours while rumbles and shifts were made within the complex.

Duffel bags of clothes appeared in the courtyard. Like luggage, each duffel bag looked different and had a name tag of the student. These duffel bags were on what appeared to be a rolling cart in each hallway. They were emptied out into one two drawers in each room. Then the bufflehead bags were thrown onto the red panel and turned to ashes. Slowly one by one appeared in the hallway with there partner. The video turned off.

All he could do was cover over his mouth in shock. He released the headphones and in exchange, a small tablet was lowered from the ceiling. He grabbed the table with the footage on it. He looked through his notes and wrote, the enemy is our life support. The outside world was clearly destroyed. Within the biosphere… this was the only life left on earth. He came to realize, they were imprisoned within a sadistic ‘SMART’ hotel.

Like a self-driving car except… well not… he looked down at the black tablet. But why the cages he wondered? He thought about it. Maybe it doesn’t want us to leave it. And the punishment of leaving and disobeying the rules is being trapped like an animal. To train an untamed animal you first have to break it… and that… that’s the lesson she wanted us to see. He distinctively in his mind referred to this “smart compound” as a girl. What did the death box want? He laid back in the ground trying to put his mind back at ease.

He closed his eyes and imagined Oaki’s. He opened his eyes again. This time seeing a room unfamiliar to him. He felt the ground. His body was still on the top floor roof but his eyes were somewhere else. The odor surrounding him was the fresh scent of peaches. The smell was so strong it felt like it engulfed him. He felt a Euphoric rush. He closed his eyes and saw Oaki sitting in front of him on the rooftop in a white nightgown. Her curly hair flowing in her shoulders. She stood up and spun around smiling in a dress. The dress flowing around her. As he watched her dance around in this circle he felt as if he was watching an angel. He opened his eyes again and saw Noah walking out of the bathroom without a shirt. He reached down and stocked what felt like his cheek. She shook his head and closed his eyes shut. He breathed heavy and opened his eyes again. He was back on the rooftop. He stood up dazed and confused. He looked around.

“What was… was I dreaming?” He said aloud.

He looked back to the tablet. He stood up and exited the rooftop sprinting out the doorway.