The atmosphere on the bus was surprisingly cheerful, considering every single person was ill with an inexplicable sickness. Somebody in the back was playing music on their speaker and there was excited chatter all around.
“Why is everyone so happy?” Noah muttered dourly. There were two soldiers on board, one on each end of the bus, but they didn’t seem to put a damper on anyone’s mood.
Leah smirked. “Why wouldn’t they be? As far as I’m aware, nobody else has been personally threatened by Insight, watched their friend’s family murder each other, and spent the night in a mausoleum all in the past twenty-four hours. This is just a free day off from school for most people.”
“Nobody’s concerned about Insight’s involvement in this?”
“Most people don’t watch the news. Half these kids might never have heard of the place before, especially if they’re not from around the area.”
“Even without background knowledge about them,” Brian cut in, “You’d have to be crazy not to wonder why a private company would go to all this effort to supposedly help. I wouldn’t be on this bus if I could think of literally any other plausible way to find a cure. If anyone could have come up with one, it’s the maniacs at Insight. They’re the dictionary definition of mad scientists.”
“Also, there haven’t been any more announcements about the symptoms,” May said. “Unless people have seen the worst effects for themselves, and I’m sure plenty have by now, all they’ll know about the sickness is that it makes you go numb. And that it makes your heart stop and all that, which is kind of alarming, but it’s still not as scary as eating people.”
“Why wouldn’t they have put out a message?” Brian demanded. “They obviously know about it by now. Keeping it to themselves will only endanger the entire city. If their justification is something as stupid as trying to prevent mass panic, I’ll never respect Oakridge again.”
Leah raised an eyebrow. “That’s probably their reason.”
Brian shook his head. “I can’t believe I attend this school. What an amateur mistake. This is how the zombie apocalypse starts.”
“They must have told the government at some point,” Leah countered. “The actual military showed up. That counts for something.”
“They’re doing a pretty decent job at keeping everything contained,” Noah grudgingly acknowledged. “The infection might not have even spread beyond the campus.”
“And with Insight helping, this whole thing could be wrapped up nice and neat before the day’s out,” May said optimistically.
“I’d still like to know why they’re even here,” Brian grumbled. “Sure, they expressed their interest in us yesterday thanks to a certain scum nugget, but there’s a big difference between experimenting on a couple kids and providing emergency medical care to an entire school.”
“The government could be paying them,” Leah suggested. “Or they’re trying to earn some goodwill back from the community.”
Brian tried to spit on the floor, but his mouth was so dry that nothing besides the sound came out. “Hah, fat chance. They’d have to cure cancer itself to come close to that. Nobody even knows what this weird sickness is; Insight can parade around all they want crowing they fixed it, but people will just wonder what exactly it was that needed fixing. If they’re trying to prove their munificence, they should have waited for everything to get horribly out of hand before they swooped in to save the day.”
“So, they’re getting paid,” Leah repeated.
“I hope.”
“Why do you care?”
He gave her a dark look. “It would be comforting to know they’re helping for something as straightforward as cash.”
“Okay,” Leah said, looking bewildered.
Noah looked back out the window to watch the trees blur by. “We’re going to Insight Labs, right?”
“I can only assume so,” Brian said. “Damn. We went through all that effort to run away, too.”
“It’s not a complete waste,” May said. “There’ll be less attention on us this way. We’ll just be part of the crowd, getting the same treatment as everyone else.”
“The same quick, painless, and extremely effective treatment.”
Leah glanced at Brian. “That would be ideal, yeah. We can pretty much rest assured that it’ll be painless.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Unless the first step of the treatment is to return our sense of touch. Man, that would suck.”
Over the course of their conversation, the trees outside transitioned first into warehouses, shopping centers, and sprawling parking lots, and then into increasingly taller and narrower structures.
Stolen novel; please report.
Glenmore was not the largest city, though it was the biggest in the area and had grown significantly in the past fifteen years. Insight Labs had been one of several corporations to set up headquarters downtown in that time, adding their monolithic operations center to the city skyline.
Noah caught glimpses of the laboratory’s angular shape jutting up in between buildings as they drew nearer. It was like a fat shard of glass, almost pyramidal in shape, with a base so wide that it occupied nearly half a city block.
The bus finally turned off the main street onto a one-way covered entrance road that plunged directly into the side of the prism-like building. The walls were entirely composed of mirrored panels, and all of the students peered out the windows at the captivating visual effect. Whoever was playing music in the back turned it off, and silence overtook the bus for an entrancing minute. It felt like they were entering another world.
Then the narrow paved passageway suddenly widened into a larger parking area and the bus screeched to a halt in front of a pair of double doors.
“Everybody off!” the driver called. “Follow the escorts into the building and do as they say!”
“Are you going to bring us back to campus later?” Some random kid asked.
“Nope. Don’t know about any return trips,” the driver answered. “I hope you brought pajamas.”
“What?” the kid muttered, among a few other others, exchanging worried looks and trying to figure out if their driver was making a joke.
Before anyone could ask any further questions, the soldiers aboard the bus stood and began herding everyone off the bus. Noah and his friends stuck close together and followed the pack off the vehicle.
The area was lit well enough that if Noah didn’t look up and see the mirrors reflecting a top-down view of the bus and students, he might have believed he was outdoors. Yet even standing here before the entrance, they were really already inside the building. It was all around them, forming a ceiling and walls, and though the space was large enough to accommodate a small parking lot, it was still essentially a very reflective room. There must have been many more such parking areas scattered around beneath the building, because there were certainly not enough parking spots in this single space to accommodate such a large organization.
The doors were the only parts of the building in sight that weren’t mirrors. They were formed of some kind of heavily frosted glass and had no handles to speak of. Their size and shape were their only characteristics that gave them away as an entrance at all.
They suddenly swung open, both at the same time, to reveal four people dressed in pale blue lab coats and matching respirator masks.
“Follow us,” one of them said in a very muffled voice. Noah honestly couldn’t tell which of them had spoken.
The students filed slowly into the building, showing a bit more nervousness now than they had on the bus. The two soldiers with them did not follow after them. Noah glanced over his shoulder to see them climbing back aboard the bus without a second glance towards their charges.
I guess whatever security Insight has renders them redundant. Noah watched the bus pull away into the passageway on the far side of the room, delving deeper into the building before presumably exiting somewhere on the opposite side and heading back to Oakridge to pick up another load of students.
He returned his attention to their progression into the belly of Insight. They were being led through a long, featureless hallway, with the walls composed of yet more mirrors. Noah got a good look at himself for the first time since the events of last night. It took a moment for him to realize he was looking at his own reflection.
I hope Insight can fix this, he thought. Everything about him was as pale and sunken as a corpse.
Repulsed, he glanced around surreptitiously, trying to gauge if anyone else was as visibly ill. Why isn’t anyone else this bad?
He unwillingly looked back at the mirrored wall and frowned to himself. If Insight was as fond of mirrors as this entrance seemed to imply, he’d be constantly confronted by his ghastly reflection. He wrinkled his nose and turned away, training his gaze firmly on Brian’s backpack as his friend walked ahead of him.
Their group finally turned a corner and found themselves standing before a second set of identical doors. A light centered above them turned green as they approached, and the doors automatically swung noiselessly open.
They students were finally met with the sight of something other than an empty hallway. There were a few workers hustling up and down this hall, all wearing Insight’s signature blue uniform, but none of them paid their group so much as a second glance.
They were led through a door immediately on the left. Instead of a handle, it had another green light that lit up as they approached. One of the employees pushed the door open.
“Wait here. An attendant will fetch you when it is your turn for treatment,” he informed them in the same muffled voice as earlier. He waited for the rest of them to file inside, then nodded and retreated after his colleagues from the room, shutting the door behind him. There was no handle on the inside, either.
Noah looked around and was somewhat comforted to see the space was filled with Oakridge students who had already arrived. There was plenty of seating, though it was incredibly varied and seemed to be more of an impromptu attempt to create a sort of traditional waiting room than anything else. The majority of the chairs were lab stools. There was a surprisingly normal white door at the back of the room, which was currently closed. In what must have been an incredible act of self-restraint, Insight had only made the back wall mirrored. The other three were painted light blue.
“So, we made it,” Leah said. She found an empty stool and dropped into it, then grinned in surprise as it swiveled her around in a circle.
The other three friends found nearby seating and dragged the stools closer together.
“I’m surprised they’re already helping us,” Brian said. “I thought for sure there would be at least two hours of waiting and paperwork.”
“Oh, Insight doesn’t do paperwork,” Leah laughed. “That’s far too incriminating.”
“What? Really?”
She grinned and shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Brian rolled his eyes and leaned over to a nearby unfamiliar student sitting slouched in one of the few cushioned chairs. He was scrolling on his phone with a glazed look in his eyes.
“Hey, you look like you’ve been here awhile. About how quickly are people getting treated?”
The guy glanced over and blinked. “Uh, real fast. Somebody gets called back every few minutes. They don’t come back, though. No clue where they’re getting taken.”
“Thanks,” Brian said.
He leaned back into their circle with a defeated look in his eyes. “We’re definitely getting murdered.”