The cackle of Cranks had grown more distant. He saw nothing but sky above him, no buildings. Pain in his shoulder. Oh, the pain.
A fire licked and spit somewhere close. He felt the heat wafting across his body, hot wind through hot air.
Someone said, "You better hold him down. Legs and arms."
Though his mind still floated in fog, those words didn't sound good.
A flash of light on silver in his vision, the fading sun's reflection on ... a knife? Was it glowing red?
"This is gonna hurt somethin' awful." No idea who said it.
He heard the hiss right before a billion pounds of dynamite exploded in his shoulder.
His mind said goodbye for the third time.
He sensed that a long spell of time had passed this go-around. When he opened his eyes again, stars like pinpricks of daylight shone down from the dark sky. Someone held his hand. He tried to turn his head to look over, but it sent a fresh wave of agony shooting down his spine.
He didn't need to see. It was Brenda.
Who else would it be? Plus, the hand was soft and small. Brenda for sure.
The intense pain of before had been replaced. In some ways, he now felt worse. Something like an illness crept through the inner workings of his body. A gnawing, itching filthiness. Something foul, like maggots squirming through his veins and the hollows of his bones and between his muscles. Eating away at him.
It hurt, but now it was more of an ache. Deep and raw. His stomach, gurgly and unstable, fire in his veins.
He didn't know how he knew, but he was sure of it. Something was wrong.
The word infection popped up in his mind, then stayed there.
He drifted off.
The sunrise woke Thomas in the morning. The first thing he realized was that Brenda no longer held his hand. Then he noticed the cool air of early morning on his skin, which gave him the briefest moment of pleasure.
Then he became fully aware of the throbbing pain that consumed his body, dwelling in every last molecule. It no longer had anything to do with his shoulder and the bullet wound. Something terrible had gone wrong with his entire system.
Infection. That word again.
He didn't know how he'd make it through the next five minutes. Or the next hour. How could he possibly go through an entire day? Then sleep and start the whole thing all over again? Despair sucked at him, an empty, yawning void that threatened to pull him down into an awful abyss. A panic-laced craziness struck him. Suffusing it all, the pain.
That was when things got bizarre.
The others heard it before he did. Minho and everyone else were suddenly scrambling, searching for something, many of them scanning the sky. The sky? Why would they be doing that?
Someone―Jorge, he thought―yelled the word Berg.
Then Thomas heard it. A deep thrumming, full of heavy thumps. It grew louder before he even realized what was going on, and soon it felt as though the noise were inside his skull, rattling his jaw and eardrums and sluicing down his spine. A constant, steady pounding, like the world's largest drums; behind it all, the massive hum of heavy machinery. A wind picked up, and at first Thomas worried that a storm was starting again, but the sky was perfectly blue. Not a cloud to be seen.
The noise worsened his pain, made him begin to shut down again. But he fought it, desperate to know the source of the sounds. Minho shouted something, pointed to the north. Thomas hurt too much to turn and look. The wind grew stronger, gusting across him, ripping at his clothes. Dust flew and clouded the air. Suddenly Brenda was beside him again, squeezing his hand.
She leaned over until her face was only inches above his. Her hair whipped all around.
"I'm sorry," she said, though he barely heard her. "I didn't mean to―I mean, I know that you ..." She fumbled for words, looked away.
What was she talking about? Why didn't she tell him what was making that horrible noise! He hurt so bad. ...
A look of curious horror spread across her face, eyes widening, mouth dropping open. And then she was being pushed away by two ...
Panic seized Thomas now. Two people, dressed in the strangest outfits he'd ever seen. One-piece, baggy and dark green―letters he couldn't read scrawled across the chest. Goggles covering their faces. No, not goggles. Some kind of gas mask. They looked hideous and alien. They looked evil, like giant, demented, human-eating insects wrapped in plastic.
One of them grabbed his legs by the ankles. The other put his hands under him, gripped him by the armpits, and Thomas screamed. They lifted, and pain went coursing through his body. He'd almost grown used to the agony by now, but this felt even worse. It hurt too much to struggle, so he went limp.
Then they were moving, carrying him, and for the first time, Thomas's eyes focused enough to read the letters on the chest of the person at his feet.
WICKED.
Darkness threatened to take him again. He let it, but the pain went with him.
CHAPTER 41
Once again, he woke to a blinding white light―this one shining directly into his eyes from above. He knew immediately it wasn't the sun―it was different. Plus, it shone from only a short distance away. Even as he clenched his eyes shut again, the afterimage of a bulb floated across the darkness.
He heard voices―more like whispers. He couldn't understand a word. Too soft, just out-of-reach enough that they were impossible to decipher.
He heard the click and clack of metal against metal. Small sounds, and the first thing he thought of was medical instruments. Scalpels and those little rods with mirrors on the end. These images swam up from the murkiness of his memory bank, and combining them with the light, he knew.
He'd been taken to a hospital. A hospital. The last thing he could ever imagine existing anywhere in the Scorch. Or had he been taken away? Far away? Through a Flat Trans, maybe?
A shadow crossed the light, and Thomas opened his eyes. Someone was looking down at him, dressed in the same ridiculous outfit as those who'd brought him here. The gas mask, or whatever it was. Big goggles. Behind the protective glass, he saw dark eyes focused on him. A woman's eyes, though he didn't know how he could tell.
"Can you hear me?" she asked. Yes, a woman, even though the mask muffled her voice.
Thomas tried to nod, didn't know if he actually did or not.
"This wasn't supposed to happen." She'd pulled her head back a bit and looked away, which made Thomas think she hadn't meant that comment for him. "How'd a working gun get in the city? You have any idea the amount of rust and gunk must've been on that bullet? Not to mention the germs."
She sounded very angry.
A man replied. "Just get on with it. We have to send him back. Quickly."
Thomas barely had time to process what they were saying. A new pain blossomed in his shoulder, unbearable.
He passed out for the umpteenth time.
Awake again.
Something was off. He couldn't tell what. The same light shone from the same spot above; he looked to the side this time instead of closing his eyes. He could see better, focus more. Silver squares of ceiling tile, a steel contraption with all kinds of dials and switches and monitors. None of it made sense.
Then it hit him. Hit him with such shock and wonder that he scarcely believed it could be true.
He felt no pain. None. Nothing at all.
No people stood around him. No crazy green alien suits, no goggles, no one sticking scalpels in his shoulder. He seemed to be alone, and the absence of pain was pure ecstasy. He didn't know it was possible to feel this good.
It wasn't. Had to be a drug.
He dozed off.
He stirred at the sound of soft voices, though it came through the haze of his drugged stupor.
Somehow he knew enough to keep his eyes shut, see if he could learn anything about the people who'd taken him. The people who'd evidently fixed him up and rid his body of the infection.
A man was talking. "Are we sure this doesn't screw anything up?"
"I'm positive." This from a woman. "Well, as positive as I can be. If anything, it may stimulate a pattern in the killzone that we hadn't expected. A bonus, possibly? I can't imagine it leading him or anyone else in a direction that would prevent the other patterns we're looking for."
"Dear God above, I hope you're right," the man responded.
Another woman spoke, her voice high, almost crystalline. "How many of the ones left do you think are still viable Candidates?" Thomas sensed the capital letter in that word―Candidates. Confused, he tried to remain still, listen.
"We're down to four or five," the first woman answered. "Thomas here is by far our greatest hope. He responds really sharply to the Variables. Wait, I think I just saw his eyes move."
Thomas froze, tried to stare straight ahead into the darkness of his eyelids. It was hard, but he forced himself to breathe evenly, as if asleep. He didn't know exactly what these people were talking about, but he desperately wanted to hear more. Knew he needed to hear more.
"Who cares if he's listening?" the man asked. "He couldn't possibly understand enough to affect his responses one way or the other. It'll do him good to know we made a huge exception to get that infection out of him. That WICKED will do what it has to when necessary."
The high-pitched-voice lady laughed, one of the most pleasant sounds Thomas had ever heard. "If you're listening, Thomas, don't get too excited. We're about to dump you right back where we took you from."
The drugs coursing through Thomas's veins seemed to surge, and he felt himself fading into bliss. He tried to open his eyes, but couldn't. Before he drifted off he did hear one last thing, from the first woman. Something very odd.
"It's what you would've wanted us to do."
CHAPTER 42
The mysterious people were true to their word.
The next time Thomas woke up, he was hanging in the air, strung tightly to a canvas litter with handles, swaying back and forth. A large rope attached to a ring of blue metal held him as he was lowered from something huge, the whole time accompanied by the same explosion of hums and heavy thumps that he'd heard when they'd come to get him. He gripped the sides of the litter, terrified.
Finally, he felt a soft bump, and then a million faces appeared around him. Minho, Newt, Jorge, Brenda, Frypan, Aris, the other Gladers. The rope holding him detached and sprang up into the air. Then, almost instantaneously, the vessel from which he'd been lowered vaulted away, disappearing into the brilliance of the sun directly overhead. The sounds of its engines faded, and soon it was gone.
Then everyone spoke at once.
"What was that all about?"
"Are you okay?"
"What'd they do to you?"
"Who was that?"
"Have fun in the Berg?"
"How's your shoulder?"
Thomas ignored it all and tried to get up, but realized that the ropes holding him to the litter still bound him tightly to it. He found Minho with his eyes. "A little help here?"
As Minho and a couple of others worked on untying him, Thomas had a disturbing thought. The people from WICKED had shown up to save him pretty quickly. From what they'd said, it was something they hadn't planned on, but they'd done it anyway. Which meant they were watching and could swoop in to save them whenever they wanted to.
But they hadn't until now. How many people had died in the last few days while WICKED stood by and watched? And why did that change for Thomas, just because he'd been shot by a rusty bullet?
It was too much to think about.
Once freed, he got to his feet and stretched out his muscles, refusing to acknowledge the second volley of questions flung his way. The day was hot, brutally hot, and as he stretched, he realized that he felt no pain other than the slightest of aches in his shoulder. He looked down to see that he was wearing fresh clothes, and that there was the bulge of a bandage under the left sleeve of his shirt. But his thoughts immediately went to something else.
"What are you guys doing out in the open? Your skin is gonna bake!"
Minho didn't answer, just pointed at something behind him, and Thomas looked to see a very shabby hut. It was made out of dry wood that seemed like it might crumble to pure dust at any second, but it was big enough to provide shelter for everyone there.
"We better get back under that thing," Minho said. Thomas realized that they must've run out just to see him delivered from the huge flying ... Berg? Jorge had called it a Berg.
The group trekked over to the shelter; Thomas told them a dozen times that he'd explain everything from beginning to end once they were settled. Brenda found him, walked right next to him. But she didn't offer her hand, and Thomas felt an uneasy relief. She also didn't say anything, and neither did he.
The miserable city of the Cranks lay a few miles distant, huddling in all its decay and madness to the south. No sign of the infected people anywhere. To the north, the mountains loomed now, only a day or so away. Craggy and lifeless, they sloped up higher and higher until they ended in jagged brown peaks. Harsh cuts in the rock made the whole range appear as though a giant had hacked at it with a massive axe for days and days, letting out all its giant frustration.
They reached the shelter, the wood dry as rotted bone. It looked as if it had stood there for a hundred years―maybe built by a farmer in the days before the world was ravaged. How it had withstood everything was a complete mystery. But one flick of a match and the thing would probably burn down in three seconds.
"All right," Minho said, pointing to a spot in the far end of the shade. "You sit there, get yourself all nice and comfy and start talking."
Thomas couldn't believe how good he felt―just a dull ache in his shoulder. And he didn't think he had any trace of drugs in him anymore. Whatever doctors WICKED had unleashed on him had been brilliant at what they did. He took a seat and waited for everyone to get situated in front of him, sitting cross-legged on the hot and dusty ground. He was like a schoolteacher readying to give a lesson―a blurry flash from his past.
