"Put him down. Watch his head."
Everything was dark, I heard someone pull shut the metal door behind us and shoes shuffled everywhere. "Who's got a light?" I asked urgently and to my relief, Aris clicked on his flashlight, illuminating the room enough for me to be able to see the unconscious boy being slowly let down onto the ground. He still wasn't moving.
Aris kneeled down next to Minho as Thomas grabbed hold of his shirts collar, screaming his name over and over as the rest of us stood around, mostly in shock. We couldn't do much as we watched. Suddenly, Minho gasped, causing me to let out a breath I didn't realise I had been holding.
"There he is." Newt said with a laugh, bending down next to him to grab only his shoulder gently. "Are you okay?"
Minho lifted his head up enough to get a good look at the rest of us - his usual smirk had been wiped off of his face completely, replaced by a look of pure confusion. "What happened?"
Thomas looked over to Newt with a look on his face I couldn't quite decipher - turning back to Minho a second later, his breathing calming down slightly before he replied. "I think you got struck by lightning."
"Oh... cool." The Asian boy replied with a grin on his face - causing the boys surrounding him to burst out into scattered laughter as they stood up and helped him stand up.
I turned around, the building was now bright with the lightning outside causing it to look almost day whenever it struck close by. It turned out we were in what looked like another abandoned warehouse of sorts. The vast empty space only broken apart by the occasional pillars that were placed around the hall, and some strange boxes.
Teresa walked up to me, frowning. "What's that smell?" She asked.
Before I could say anything, a loud yell rang out from my right and something grabbed onto my arm causing me to scream and rip it away from whatever creature at taken hold of it. Newt and Thomas were by our side in a second, the blonde pulled me backwards and spun me around to face him. "What's wrong!? Are you okay?"
I nodded, needing a few seconds to catch my breath before replying. "Yeah, its just a scratch or something. Newt... there's something here. It grabbed hold of me." As I spoke, something lunged at us again - snarling. In seconds it became very clear there were multiple things around us as the group huddled together.
The same infected we had had to escape earlier were surrounding us - but I noticed something strange through the commotion of torch beams being scattered everywhere and confused shouts. They couldn't seem to reach us no matter how hard they tried, lunging out only to fall back and try again.
"Hang on! I think they're chained up." I said as loudly as I could.
"You'd be right about that. I see you've met our guard dogs." An almost teasing voice called out from somewhere in the darkness - at least 3 flashlights were spun in that direction to reveal a girl. She didn't look much older than the others in our group - with short brown hair and a smirk on her lips as she walked briskly in our direction, the infected reaching out to try and grab her from both sides as she moved closer.
She stopped a few feet away from us, taking a quick look at our disheveled states and sighing. "You guy's look like shit... come on - follow me."
No one moved, stuck in a state of shock. What had just happened? Why was there just a random uninfected girl living here in the midst of hundreds - maybe even thousands of the zombie like creatures. Even stranger, she didn't seem the least bit bothered about the situation, or the fact that there were a bunch of half-starved teenagers standing before her in what I guessed to be the area she lived.
After taking a few steps back in the direction she had just come from, the girl turned back to see if we were following. Noticing our lack of movement, she crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow. "Of course... unless you want to stay here with there guys." tilting her head towards the things still adamant on reaching her.
Thomas looked back at us, and I could see his decision in his eyes before the boy even said anything. "We have to... I don't see any other option." he whispered in a voice low enough only we could hear.
Begrudgingly, our group slowly started moving forward, not really knowing what else to do. We followed to girl down the zombie cat-walk and through a door of some sorts that led into a room lit with warm lights. One thing I was pretty sure of - this was not the right arm.
As we walked further into the new warehouse we seemed to have entered, I caught sight of many people standing around fires - staring at us curiously as the girl led us past all of them. They didn't seem to be infected, or at least... they didn't seem to be ripping at each others throats just yet. I didn't know how the virus worked or what all the symptoms of it were - for all we knew we could be walking into a place that will have turned completely into those things by tomorrow morning.
"Jorge wants to meet you." The girl stated, leading us up a set of stairs, even further into the building.
"Who's Jorge?" Thomas asked, trying his best to keep up with our apparent tour guides fast pace as she sped across the room - making the rest of us half-jog to stay behind her.
She just smiled, turning her head back slightly to look at Thomas. "You'll see. No one has come out of the Scorch in a long time... well, at least not alive. You've just got him a bit... curious." giving Thomas another look, she smirked. "And me too."
Teresa frowned, glaring at the back of the girls head before looking over at Thomas - who just looked confused. I turned to look at Newt, who was staring at the grinning people who had started following us at some point. They may not have been trying to kill each other - but there was definitely something... not right about the look in their eyes. A look of hunger that sent another shiver down my spine.
"Anyone else starting to get a bad feeling about this place?" The accented boy asked in a low voice. I couldn't agree more, but there was no doubt we'd be outvoted - and besides, there was no time to stop and have a whole meeting over what we should do at that moment.
"Let's just hear him out, see what he has to say." Thomas reasoned, keeping on walking. But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were currently walking to our deaths.
The girl led us up another set of stairs - this time they seemed to open into what was the attic of the building. The lightning strikes outside seemed a bit too close as the whole roof lit up with each one, the loud sounds making me flinch each time. A man sat in a chair, best over a desk facing away from us.
"Jorge, they're here." The girl said, but the man lifted a hand in the air and hushed her, still not bothering to turn around from whatever he was so intently working on. I soon realised it was a radio - the faint chatter of voices fading out as it squealed, the man twisting some knob on it before I could try and make out what the words meant.
"Damn it." He said softly, finally standing up. The girl had moved away from us and thrown herself onto a couch nearby - watching us with a mildly interested look on her face. The rest of us were now standing in front of him, gathered together in the small area.
"Do you ever get the feeling the whole worlds against you?" Jorge asked, turning around to face us with his hands on his hips in an almost tired fashion. No one really had an answer - Thomas just turned to face Minho, giving him a look, causing Jorge to continue. "Three questions," he started, "where did you come from? Where are you going... and how can I profit?"
Thomas swallowed hard, as if contemplating whether we should keep on humouring the man or try make a run for it. "We're headed for the mountains." He finally said. A few scattered laughs from the people now filing into the room behind us caused my skin to crawl. I didn't like this place. At all.
Jorge took a long sip of water from his glass he's picked up, not breaking eye contact with Thomas for even a second. "You're looking for ghosts... you mean."
No one said anything, causing the man to scoff and continue his interrogation. He took a few steps closer to our group and I immediately backed up as he pointed towards Thomas again. "Second question - where did you come from?"
"That's not your business." Minho was quick to retort, seeming to have got a bit of his sarcastic spark back, I noticed to my relief. Jorge simply shrugged, and indicated something to the men behind us. Before I really knew what was happening, they started closing in on us, some of them tackling the boys around me to the ground and onto their knees.
Teresa seemed to give in only a mere few seconds later, letting the guy who had grabbed hold of her push her to the ground, but I wasn't going to give in so easily. The person who had tried grabbing me let out an excited laugh as he had taken hold of my arms roughly, but I whipped my head around and aimed a quick kick to the mans stomach, causing him to let go and double over.
"Don't you dare touch me you fu-" Two other men had tackled me at this point, pushing me against the floor before I could finish cussing them out.
"Looks like we got a fun one here, boss." A disgusting voice said from behind me, his face feeling awfully close to mine.
"I swear to god if you bloody hurt her-" I heard Newt say in a cold voice I'd never have thought I would hear from him out of all people. If I was being honest the boy seemed to a bit too nice to be going around threatening people.
"She'll be fine, you people are just being a bit too... stubborn." Jorge said, cutting him off.
I managed to lift my head off of the ground just enough to see what was going on - the girl had pulled out some sort of device and was now bent over Thomas, pushing his head to the front as she held the thing to the back of his neck. "Shut up you big baby." she spat as the device made some sort of strange noise - Thomas still shouting and struggling to get away from her grasp.
A few seconds later, once the thing had stopped beeping, the girl moved back, looking over at Jorge with an almost awestruck expression painted on her face. "You were right..."
The man took the thing from her hands and examined whatever it had done, interested. He suddenly laughed, taking off his glasses as he regarded Thomas with a new look on his face. "I'm sorry, hermano, but it looks like you're tagged. You came from WICKED... which means... you're very, very valuable to me."