Again, after going through the remnant, that unpleasant sensation expanded through my core, taking away my breath and letting me taste death. This time, the invisible force that pulled and tensed my muscles left me sore and stiff. Then, my sick stomach gradually disappeared, the pulse running through my veins slowed down and my senses started to function again. Next thing I know, once I opened my eyes, was that everything around me was pitch black. I felt someone on top of me and remembered Abril had jumped towards me to try and protect me.
"Abril?" I called, trying to push her aside. God, my limbs were killing me. I heard her growl and twisting next to me, upset, "Hey, get up."
"The light?" she asked, disoriented.
"Don't know."
It was hot and smelled like wet soil, but the floor felt soft, like tiles. I stood up with effort, rising my arms and looking for a wall. Abril sneezed behind me.
"I think I sneezed on you."
I stopped.
"No, you didn't."
"I think I did."
"I felt nothing," I turned around, trying in vain to see her, "If you knew I was on this side, why did you sneezed in this direction?"
"Didn't react on time, sorry."
Silence.
"Get away from me."
"I said I'm sorry," I pictured her rolling her eyes, "I'm a good friend."
I laughed.
"Well, 'good friend', I can't believe you tried to protect me from a 'remnant'," I mocked her, shaking my head, "I don't know what to think of you."
I heard her gasp. If I could only see her, she would for sure be blushing. Remnants eat up everything that fits inside of them, there was no escape once you were on their way. Her sacrifice was useless.
"It was a reflex, I couldn't stop myself!" Abril explained, I heard her taking some distance, "And you should think that I'm an amazing friend for trying to save you, that means I care about you!"
"Yes, yes," I mumbled, still looking around, "Help me find a way out, 'great friend'."
She snorted, and I heard her steps going farther away.
"How can we have such bad luck? I mean, being swallowed by a 'remnant' twice? To think I used to complain for not winning school raffles,"
"Well, it IS weird that 'remnants' suddenly started to hate us to death today. Maybe we're attracting them somehow..."
I heard a loud thud followed by Abril cursing. Then, a dim light came from behind me, where the girl was. After turning around, I saw a seven-story tall tower of boxes. Each had a small screen that was now turned on; in the darkness, that blue light was barely enough to help us see where we were.
"Abril! What did you do?"
"I didn't saw it!" the girl was rubbing her nose and spitting curses under her breath.
After carefully inspecting the screens, it wasn't hard to realise by the interface that it was the same kind from the previous Center, with the exception that its language was russian. We were at a warehouse, but where exactly? Were we back on Earth? I got closer to another pile of boxes and hit them so they'll glow too, and soon Abril did the same. It was now easier to distinguish the inside of the room. We made our way through the labyrinth of boxes, hearing more and more the sound of machinery in the distance.
The place didn't seem to be inspected often, because various layers of dirt were accumulating on top of the metal boxes and the floor, causing us to leave black footprints behind us, which were insignificant before the filth. Finally, we reached a long metallic door that, after opening it, we discovered hallways so big that they eventually disappeared in the dark. Some lamps were attempting to traverse the gloom with their light with little success, painting long and disfigured shadows behind us. There were doors like ours at both of our sides, but they were close and needed a code tapped into a number pad. Oddly enough, the one from our door was shattered: crushed buttons, burned sides and the screen was reduced to mere tiny and irrelugar crystals. Abril and me exchanged a frightened look, feeling our souls at the edge of our bodies, our thoughts heading in the same direction.
"…We didn't do that," Abril hastily excused.
"Damn," I muttered, "Do you know how many hits this pad can take? It costs a ton!"
"Why do you know how much it costs?" my friend frowned.
"Because I go shopping," I answered, stating the obvious, "And a smart purchase must always be properly informed."
"You're becoming an old lady"
"I'm surviving" I corrected her.
If anyone finds us like this, they'll think we did this, I glanced towards the hallways around us.
"Let's just go," Abril seemed uncomfortable, her lips shrunk into a grimace, "I just want to go home."
I nodded, although I couldn't shake off the sensation that something was off; it was too much of a coincidence that we had landed twice at an Exportation Center. I wasn't sure if I could call it good or bad luck.
The corridor had desolate look, slightly sinister, and I wondered what kind of living being would want to work at a place like that. It looked like the perfect stage for a horror movie. We walked for a couple of minutes, amazed by how much movement we were hearing, but whose source we couldn't find. The eco of all those sounds seemed to come from both sides, and no matter how much further we moved, there were no other unlocked doors. I suggested that we were on the bottom floor and everything happened above us, so we were only hearing residual noise; Abril, on the other hand, thought that we had to be close to the source, but were also completely lost and, therefore, couldn't find it.
In the midst of the quietness, my thoughts eventually went back to the events of the last planet. I was sure those boys were part of the rebels but, kids? Had the rebel forces gone so far as to use middle school kids to do their dirty job? For what reason? They had given me a weird sensation, perhaps they were fanatics? Young ones that were being used as cannon fodder to do the more dangerous tasks.
Besides, what happened with Jolly? Tension slid down my muscles just by thinking she could have been left alone with those boys back there after unconsciously moving away from the 'remnant'. At least she had a gun...
"Hey," Abril took my arm when we passed through a crossroad, pulling me out of my thoughts, "I think that's the way out."
At the end of one of the hallways was a bright light. We traveled the rest of the way and little by little, until we saw part of a forecourt and some buildings. The dry and hot air blowed inside the hallway, and I started to feel anxious. The language in the boxes was russian, but Russia wasn't hot...
We stood in front of a long stone forecourt surrounded by numerous small white buildings, where hundreds of human workers and some drones were working on different sections. A sky like syrup, thin but hot air that burned my lungs with each breath. In front of us, about a thousand hundred feet, lied a huge imposing building, an easily recognizable one on top of that, considering how famous they were around the universe.
I snarled.
"And... another Center," I sighed, I had hoped I was wrong, "And unfortunately, it's not in Russia..."
"What made you think we were in Russia?"
"Well, the boxes's language was in russian,"
"You recognized that?"
I stared at her, dumbfounded.
"What does it matter? Point is, we're still not on Earth."
I had barely opened my mouth to suggest looking for help, when we saw a door from a building at our left burst open, followed by three figures. Two of them were men wearing a white security suit, tight against their muscles. They were pretty tall, with dark and gray hair, and had so many wrinkles that their skin looked like crumpled paper. Both were aggressively pulling a much smaller girl. A redheaded one.
"Shit!" Abril shrieked, as both of us retreated cautiously to the tunnel from where we had emerged. Jollibeth did fall with us but the remnant had throw her out somewhere else, and it seemed that her attempt at getting help had not gone well. I thought impossible that she had not tried to explain how she ended up here, but perhaps they just didn't 'understand' her. Going back to the dark tunnels behind us seemed to be the optimal choice...
"I think they're going to lock her up," I muttered, "I don't think they believed her story about the 'remnant' spitting us here,"
"Then, what do we do?!"
I have no idea, I thought, as upset as her, Being honest and surrender is the only rational thing to do. We're not criminals.
Nevertheless, Jolly was being treated like one, and her fight was drawing the attention of the rest of the workers. For a short instant, while she tried to free herself and was looking all around for a way out, her gaze fell on us. We never knew if she was going to scream at us for help or tell us to run away, because right before anything could come out of her mouth, an explosion caught everyone's attention. One of the buildings at our right was being engulfed in flames. The workers started screaming instructions, some ran towards the scene while others fled it, seeking a safe location. The sky was flooded with fire fighting drones that were never able to reach their destiny, as a powerful wind striked them and sent them straight to the floor. It was so intense that, inside our hole, it felt like a tornado trying to push us through the stairs.
Wonderful day for choosing my sports uniform, I thought for an instant, since the hot air would have cooked me alive if I had been wearing pants, and I didn't even want to think about a parallel world where I had arrived here in a skirt...
The sudden chaos growed at an unprecedented speed. The wind feed the flames and gave them a terrifying form: a fire tornado. This time everyone ran away together, as fast as they could, while the destruction and the blaze spread to other buildings, and if this wasn't enough, the ground beneath our feet started shaking. Cracks like roots appeared on the floor, water running through them coming from exploding pipes. We were about to go back inside the dark hallway, when a few rocks began falling from the ceiling.
The screams, the desperation, the fear, the calamity... A nightmare.
I've had this nightmare before. One that still made me go to my psychologist and had me locked up in a mental asylum for a couple months. One that took my family away and the life of many other innocent people. This chaos was similar to the incident that left me alone; a sudden, uncontrollable fire that wouldn't stop growing. A moment in which the universe made use of all of its elements and decided that everything had to be erased and destroyed, with no exceptions.
I hadn't noticed how immersed I was in my dread until I felt my arm being fiercely pulled. I turned to see Jollibeth, and was surprised for never noticing when she had escaped from the officers and ran all the way to us.
"We have to go!" she was shouting, the wind dampened most of her voice.
Abril joined almost immediately, but both of them hesitated, like me, when they saw even bigger portions of the ceiling falling inside the hallway. It appeared that it was going to crumble at any moment, but then, where could we be safe? It was evident that we weren't going to find salvation in those tall walls of stone that were being shattered piece by piece. Bigger chunks of the roof were piling up behind us and my body, rather than running away, got paralyzed from head to toe while the memories of my harrowing tragedy came back to me.
I can't stop coughing. My visibility is gradually being lost with the amount of smoke coming from the fire. My eyes fall on another pile of huge rocks, from the thousands that are falling, and I freeze a moment later.
There's a hand, varely visible, coming out from the boulders.
Next thing I knew, I was being dragged by my friends, with the redhead leading the way. They were both shouting something, but her voices sounded as damped as if we were underwater. My head seemed to be stuck between the present and the past, seeing a combination of images from my biggest tragedy and the current chaos. I couldn't breathe and my chest felt like it was going to explode due to my rampant heartbeats and what felt like my rib cage shrinking and suffocating me little by little.
I'm going to die. I'm going to die. My eyes could only concentrate on the fire tornado and the aggressiveness with which the flames were spreading through the Center. At this point, I wasn't even conscious of people, beside my friends who were still pulling me amidst the chaos, although if they had a destination in mind, it was unknown to me. Frankly, I can say that it was even irrelevant to me; I was only focused on what appeared to be my imminent death.
It's just a panick attack, just that. You're not dying, I kept repeating to myself with desperation, You need to calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.
I was so focused on my breathing and trying to relax, that I didn't realise either when we got into a white basement with metallic walls, but whose strong smell was impossible for me to recognize. Aside from trying to regain control of my brain and convince it that I wasn't slowly dying, my head wasn't processing much of the details around me. Nevertheless, when the firm hands of my friends rested on my arms and their soft but worried voices reached my ears, the sea of anxiety that was drowning me began to yield. After several minutes, I felt my rib cage expand again and my heartbeat slow down. I was able to focus my attention on what was in front of me, this time being able to see and hear every detail: it was a cleaning room.
"You're fine," my friends were saying, although not at the same time, "We're here."
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