It was a small sound and yet it meant everything to Noah.His hope.
His chance of escape.
It all relied on that damn lock.
Now that the lock had finally cracked open, he could finally leave the cage and escape this dark horrid place.
But as soon as he had gotten his hopes up, he heard it. The slow and unhurried steps resounding from the dark corridor once more.
I knew what it meant. This cycle had been repeating ever since I woke up in this darn place.
The figure.
He was making his way back.
I cursed internally; I was so close yet so far. Why would he come back now out of all times. Panicking as I heard the footsteps inch closer to us, I had to make a decision. I grabbed the open lock in my hands and once again locked it shut. Finally, after closing the lock I scurried myself back to the other side of the cage, mimicking the actions of the other kids as if it were a routine practice.
As I did so, the figure had finally stepped out of the dark corridor. He started looking around the room scouring for his next victim. After a few seconds of looking around, the figure started to make its move, now inching a bit closer towards the cages. The figure walked slowly as if bathing in the fear of the terrified kids. As he was about to walk past mine, he suddenly came to an abrupt stop.
Since my cage was on the floor, I could only see the figure from below his torso, but what I did see made me freeze in place.
His feet.
They were now pointing straight at me.
Once again, my thoughts started to run rampant.
Did he notice?
But my thoughts were cut short this time around as I heard a cage being opened. But, to my delight it was not mine.
It was the cage of the kid above.
He tried to fight back, just like everyone before him did. But yet again like clockwork, he was dragged down the dark corridor, his cries swallowed by the dark the moment he crossed the corridor.
Then the footsteps faded.
Although I felt bad for him, I could only let out a sigh of relief that it wasn't me who was taken away.
Then the agonizing screams came from the corridor.
I stopped listening after the first few seconds. I had gotten really good at that.
After making sure the figure was gone, I turned to face John, who was already looking at me from his cage next door, eyes sharp. No words were needed. We had already wasted enough time.
I pressed the twig back into the lock, and this time I didn't try to force it. Didn't overthink it. I just willed it. That quiet certainty toward it, the same way I had before, clean and deliberate, like I was telling the lock that it had no choice but to obey my command.
Click
This time the lock opened much faster than before.
In record speed, I was out of my cage and already moving to John's. The same insistence, met with the same quiet push.
Click.
John was already out before the door had fully swung open. He caught it with his hand so it wouldn't bang against the rusty metal bars and looked at me with a single nod, signifying our mutual understanding.
We moved down the row together.
I picked the locks.
John took the kids.
The action became like a rhythm almost immediately. I would press the twig on the lock, willed it open, move to the next one, and behind me John was already pulling the freed kid out of their cage, pressing a firm hand to their shoulder, pointing them toward the far end of the room without a single word spoken above a breath. Some of them moved immediately. Others needed that half second of eye contact from John before their legs remembered how to work.
We were faster this time. Much faster. The panic set from before had slowed me down at first, but now with real time practice, my hands and feet were moving as one. My hands were precise and steady, and my feet stayed quiet and nimble.
The last lock had finally clicked open.
I stepped back and looked at the row. Every cage door hanging wide open. Every kid now on their feet, clustered near the far wall, watching us with wide opened eyes and held breaths. The kids now contained a gleaming hope in their eyes, they knew, they knew that they now had a genuine chance of escaping this hell hole.
John moved to the front of the group and held up his hand, then pointed a finger toward the door at the far end of the room away from the corridor.
The message was clear enough. Quiet. Orderly. Now.
Everyone complied, seemingly glad to be getting away from that corridor that had already taken many of them.
We made it almost all the way there.
Almost.
The footsteps started again from the corridor behind us.
Several kids flinched at the sound. One of them made a small squeal that they immediately swallowed back down. I felt the air in the room change, that same suffocating pressure from before returning all at once like a tidal wave.
Then the figure stepped out of the corridor and into the room.
For a moment he simply stood there.
It looked at the opened cages.
Soon after, it looked at all of us.
Then it moved, and any pretense of unhurried indifference was gone entirely as he lunged at us. It crossed the room with a speed that had no right belonging to something that large. John shoved the nearest kid hard toward the door and then shouted.
"GO!"
The room immediately erupted into chaos.
Kids poured through the door into the hallway beyond, stumbling over each other, the kids were trying their best not to fall. I was near the back, John just ahead of me, and I could hear the figure closing the distance behind us in a way that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
The hallway outside the room filled with cages was wide but dark, lit only by thin strips of light that entered through the small cracks on the walls. The floor was concrete. The ceiling was not visible. And at the far end, where I had hoped to find a way out, the hallway split in two directions with no indication of which one led anywhere useful.
The group didn't hesitate for a second before picking their own path, whether right or left the kids didn't care, all that the kids had in their minds was how to escape this place.
"Left." John whispered to me without slowing down.
We went left.
The hallway curved and then opened into a wider space, some kind of common area or storage floor, filled with old furniture and stacked boxes many laying against the walls and debris scattered across the ground that made every step a gamble. A large window on the far wall let in enough grey light to see by, and through it I could make out the shapes of other floors above and below us through the gaps in the building's structure.
We were not on the ground floor.
With that realization a knot started to form in my stomach.
Behind us a very loud thud could be heard from the floor of the hallway we had just come through. The figure had caught up to one of the slower kids. We could hear his cries as he begged for us to save him, I heard his cries but could do nothing about it, I didn't want to be next, I hated myself for it but all I could do was run, run as fast as my legs could carry me.
The group once again split here. Some kids veered toward the window. Others followed John who had already spotted something on the far side of the storage floor and was moving toward it without a hint of hesitation.
A door. Old, painted red, the paint already peeling away indicating it's wear, but the sign above it was still readable even in the low dim light.
EMERGENCY EXIT.
John bashed through the door with his shoulder, bursting the doors open. We could now see a concrete stairwell, the sound of the doors opening echoing up and down the long flight of stairs. Cold air rushed in from somewhere below. The stairs went both up and down, the upper floors disappearing into the darkness and the lower ones catching a thin thread of natural light from what I hoped was ground level.
He turned and looked back at me as the remaining kids funneled through the door around him.
"Down." He said.
I didn't argue.
I crossed the threshold and grabbed the railing and started making my way downwards.