My name is Jac Ol’atte, or (Coco) as my friends called me. I come from a small town in Minnesota. Where the seasons, like my mother’s cafe, are expressive. So, why am I telling this story, you may ask? Well, recently, I was diagnosed with a tumor in the brain, and my insurance didn’t want to pay for the procedure.
I am sixteen years old and not the sharpest tool in a shed. But I did sense something was off about my condition, besides the fact that my previous doctor died in a car pileup a few months back and had been replaced by a man who should be on every list. This was followed by the very extensive check-up done by the new doctor, who appeared to be a more sociopathic scientist than the actual pediatrician.
Sadly, hindsight is 20/20, and at the time, my young mind was convinced that I was dying. Thus, another doctor informed my mother and me of an experimental procedure that may help me. Of course, I begged her to let me try it. I didn’t want to die after all.
Last night, I believe, while I was sleeping in the hospital, I, along with a bunch of similar patients around my age, was taken out of the hospital, loaded into trucks, and taken somewhere far away. We were all given diaries and pens to write down our experiences as a way to stay sane and mark drastic changes to our conditions. Nothing of note has happened as of yet, although I am quite worried.
We each have a plain white windowless room with a single door out, a bed, and a desk. The bathrooms are communal and down the hall. Although it appears that there are only guys on this side of this prison—I mean hospital—there are no means of entertainment or stimulation, physical or technological—at least none that we’ve found. Worse, there appears to be no coffee.
Now…while it may not be necessary to you, if I don’t have my coffee in the morning, I’m not awake. I was nursed on coffee. It runs through my blood. Ok… I’ll slow down. Coffee does not… At this moment, I hear screaming.
I placed my diary on the desk and listened. The neighbor on my right was a slightly older guy with brown but nearly ginger hair. He wasn’t particularly tall or short; in fact, he was mostly average in many ways. To be fair, I was no one to talk to, with my coffee-brown hair and black coffee eyes. They were so deep that one would wonder if my irises and pupils were one and the same.
“Stop! It hurts!”
I wouldn’t say I was a good person, as I was totally bored sitting here and writing in my diary. It was my motivation for getting up. If my neighbor was having a mental breakdown, I didn’t want to get attacked after all. Deciding to be safe, I slipped the pen into my long sleeves before opening the door. Oddly enough, I didn’t see anyone else in the hall, which was concerning.
Moving to my neighbor’s door, I found that it was locked. So I knocked.
“Huh? Let me sleep in peace, unless its dinner!’ The voice was deeper than the one I heard. Yet I could have sworn I heard…”
“Someone! Help! It hurts!”
The scream was loud and painful, but now it was coming from his left. Which meant that it was further down and not as muffled.
“How can you sleep with all that screaming?”
“What screaming?” The voice down in the room asked.
“I think I must be getting antsy after being so cooped up.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m sleeping.” The young man yawned before he started snoring. It was pretty loud. Yet I couldn’t hear it from my room.
I ducked back in and decided to test it out. I could not hear the dude’s snoring from my room, which meant that the screaming may have occurred in the hall or come from somewhere else.
“Help!”
Jac clicked his tongue a third time and was surprised no one else left their room. Deciding that his captivity was driving me insane, I decided to walk towards the screaming. As I did, the wails got louder and stronger. The pressure made my head feel as though it would burst. And yet I found myself at a loss when I was stopped by a set of locked double doors.
“You! I can sense your presence! Please, you must save me!”
“I can’t. Your locked in a room with a passcode.” Replied aloud.
Suddenly, the cries went deathly silent. The double doors then opened on their own. As I walked about, I noticed various organs in jars that looked inhuman and strange.
“You must help me. Come close.”
“Where are you?”
“Take five steps forward.”
I took four steps forward, only for an invisible field to stop me.
“Trickery! Liars! Why do you stop!”
I felt pain well up in my skull before easing away just as quickly as it arrived.
“It seems to me that you are the most sensitive of the patients. To think you were the first to hear its voice.” Said a thin, gangly man in a white lab coat.
“First? Then who called me?”
“I believe that was the dream eater. Hearing it at such a high frequency from so far away, it seems you’re sensitive to Braun’s waves.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Uh huh… So I’ll just go back to my room.”
“You passed the first trial. Which means you get to be the first to receive treatment.”
I turned to escape, only to face two huge men in lab coats who looked more like bodybuilders than doctors.
“Someone-” I started as a needle was injected into my neck, and everything went dark for what seemed like minutes.
While sleeping, I dreamt of a worm carving pathways through my brain, only for some strange liquid to fill the gap and solidify. There was no pain in the dream, but as I awoke, I noticed my heart was beating excessively fast, and my body was sweaty.
“Welcome to the new world, Jac. How does it feel to be our first Esper?” the doctor said, all this slowly.
“I don’t feel anything.” My mouth said slowly, and my thoughts did not match my mouth and ears. The feeling faded seconds later as the world returned to its normal speed. Mostly returned, things appeared to move at a minor lag while he was unbothered, which led to me outpacing the scientist a few times, needing to fall back as he was taken to a new lab.
“Are you sure you don’t feel any different?”
“I mean… I feel as well as I do after drinking my morning expresso.”
“Ah, that would be the stimulant.”
“Hmm?”
“We injected a stimulant into you to wake you up.”
“After you used one to put me to sleep?” I didn’t like the man’s expression or lack of common sense. I also didn’t quite know what he meant by Esper.
The rest of the walk was eerily quiet. Upon my arrival on what appeared to be the second floor, I was handed a new journal with map paper. The doctor and his bodyguards then took a step back, allowing a gate to rise upward.
“What are you doing?”
“You are to navigate to the exit of this maze as fast as you can. If you wish to avoid starvation, you will need to hurry, the cafeteria is on the other side. Be careful, there are monsters within this maze, if you aren’t careful you could end up injured.”
I immediately turned around and hurled my pen at the scientist’s eye, only for an invisible field to redirect the pen. Causing it to fall to the floor uselessly.
“Patient 000, you don’t understand the position you’re in. You are my lab rat, and for the sake of humanity you better prove useful. Otherwise I’ll pull the plug and trigger the explosive that I planted in your brain. Can’t exactly let your secrets fall into the wrong hands.”
All that fear I had about an early death turned into rage as things began to fit together. We weren’t patients. We were lab rats, and if I was going to survive, I’d need to play their stupid game. I’ll be honest, while it wasn’t the first time I contemplated violence. As I did have some training from video game boxing…and a few street fights that may or may not have been with people older than me,…fifteen year old me may not have been a saint, but for the first time, I wasn’t regretting it. Which wasn’t much in hindsight, but better than nothing. I also had a fascination with dart throwing.
Our cafe had a dart board, so growing up, I learned from all the adults who were exceptionally good. If you find it odd, it had more to do with the fact that the coffee shop was only so early in the morning; it became a cafe in the early afternoon, and at night, it became a bar. My uncle on my mother’s side was the one who ran the bar and allowed me to deal with the extra drunk and violent customers.
Our town was kind of in the middle of nowhere, easily driven past. As a result, quite a few motorcycle groups frequented us during their travels. They were good customers for the most part and way nicer than that amateur bank robber who tried to pay with dyed money. One of said regular motorcycle groups dealt with him after he pulled a gun on my uncle.
You know… I’m starting to suspect that my uncle wasn’t a regular old bartender, I thought to myself before I began walking into the maze. Oddly enough, I wasn’t hungry, but I was in a hurry. Eventually, I arrived at a two-way split and, on instinct, turned right. I walked down the path and scowled as it led to a dead end with a wooden crate just sitting there.
I removed the lid and found a ton of weapons and tools. Withdrawing a bandolier with various knives and a baseball bat. I strapped it over my chest and turned to go back to the left path. Before I made it, however. I heard a loud scream, a surprised shout, and the sound of something wet hitting the floor.
Speeding up the pace, I arrived at the scene as a small green wolf lay dead. Its body was covered in various holes, and the floor and bits of the maze showed signs of cracking.
A young man with blond hair and a tired expression looked at me. “That was tough. What was that power I just used.”
“I wouldn’t know as I just arrived.”
“Oh so you must be number five.”
“Number? I may have not been paying much attention.”
“Why would I be five?”
“Because I’m number four, I had been traveling with three before the idiot turned tail and ran.”
“Curious. Why go by a number and not a name?”
“This is secret agent training. Of course we’d use numbers.”
“Guess it was too secret to tell me.”
“Maybe it was because I was number four.”
I highly doubted he was actually number four, given that I was zero. Unless genders shared the ranking and we were kept separate.
“Do you need a weapon?”
“Where did you get weapons!?”
“There was a crate on the path to the right. I rushed here when I heard the noise.”
“You ran to danger. Good for you. I think my power revolves around crushing things. You?”
“I don’t know. So far I’ve just been good at noticing things.I sensed the crate for example.” I didn’t reveal that I also sensed the monster.
“You could prove useful when searching for items.”
“How is that useful?”
“We need all the tools we can use if we want to get out alive.”
“Right, I also feel a little bit stronger after killing that monster.”
“Stronger?”
“I think these monsters make us stronger when we kill them.Maybe it’s related to these strange powers.”
“Thanks for the info…Four.”
“You’re welcome Five.”
“Please just call me J—”
“No names. I don’t want to get attached. If we survive then I’ll tell you.”
“You’re rather pessimistic.”
“You’re the one with heroic tendencies. Now let’s get going!”
“Right.”
Four ran off, and I followed him.