The Phantom School

"Where are you? I think I found the door to the corridor. We still have time to run before they arrive." Idil whispered. With the help of the beams dissipating from the flashlights, we could see our surroundings again.

"Wait, we are not going." the old man said. "Change of plans."

"What!?" I said.

"If that girl on the speaker is right... We need to inform the scientists that The Community is still here, no matter the outcome. This is more important than our escape." he said. "If she is right, defeating The Community shall be our common goal."

"I am telling the truth!" Cansu yelled. "Tell them, teacher, tell them that I"m not lying!"

"But what will happen once The Community is defeated? They are not the only evil here! What do you think will happen to us once The Community is gotten rid of?" Idil said.

"I agree." I said. "We can not directly confront the scientists. It is a dead end, it would guarantee our imprisonment."

"Trust me, I will get you out of here. I promised that didn"t I?" the old man said. "But you have to listen to me!"

"You never promis-" I was about to answer.

"He did promise that." Idil interrupted. "Well, not to you, but to me."

"What the h.e.l.l is going on here? Did you make some kind of deal?" I asked, and turned to the old man. "And I still don"t know who you are and what you are really doing here!"

"Hit the floor!" Cansu suddenly yelled. I immediately held Idil and pushed her down. We laid flat on the ground. A beam of light pa.s.sed above us, without revealing our position. But the old man was not fast enough to react.

*bang*

A gunshot was heard in the distance. I heard a bullet flying past overhead.

"Oh no." The words escaped my mouth as the bullet struck the old man in between his eyes. Like it was not enough to see him die once before, I watched him drop dead to the ground once again. He didn"t make any sound as his body fell back

"There goes our ticket back to the normal world above..." Idil said. We began silently crawling away from the surgery room, into the darker part of the corridor.

"What is so special about him?" I asked. "I can swear that I saw him die once before. He really is a weird part of this whole thing."

"It was probably his clone that you saw dying earlier." Idil said.

"A clone!?"

"Shush!" Idil closed my mouth with her hand. We saw two armed man with flashlights entering the surgery room. We had gotten out of the room just in time.

I pushed her hand away from my mouth as we got on our feet and ran into a pa.s.sage on our right.

"Tell me about him." I said Idil. "Please, that man is a key element-"

"Alright, alright..." she said. "He was a scientist working on that "experiment" thing... before he had secretly defected."

"How many clones of him are there?" I asked. "Can they clone humans in here!? How many people are cloned?"

"It is a long story, and it doesn"t matter right now. I will tell you about it once we are safe." Idil said. "Now, we must find a way out of here."

I nodded. We started looking around us to find a path away from the cell wing and the surgery room.

"You haven"t received the book, did you?" Idil asked me. I understood which book she was referring to. "If only we had that with us right now, it would be much easier."

"He sent that book himself, didn"t he?" I asked her. "I mean, after he defected..."

"It was my suggestion to send that book to you." Idil said. "We had a deal. I would help him destroy this facility and delete all of his service records, and he would help me escape this underground maze. With his knowledge as an ex-scientist, we thought we could acheive that. The only thing we didn"t antic.i.p.ate was the interruption of your new friend."

"All those years... You didn"t tell the old man about the existance of The Community ever before?" I asked her. "What were you thinking?"

"Only if I knew it would make so much difference, I would"ve told him before..." she answered. "Besides, The Community was avoiding appearing in this place anyway."

"Perhaps The Community was afraid of being noticed by the scientists down here." I said. "That could explain why they were avoiding this place. It sort of makes sense now..."

"Yeah. If they had any power over this facility, they would"ve destroyed this place instead of messing with people like us above surface." Idil said.

"But why are they so powerless against the scientists? What do they know, or have, that we don"t?" I asked. "They were hunting us one by one when we were up in the school building!"

"I don"t know, I never knew." said Idil.

I began hearing footsteps. Someone got out of the surgery room, with a flashlight in his hand. He was coming this way, but he had not yet noticed us.

"Shh... We have to hide." I whispered.

We walked past a few doors and turned left. In this new corridor, there was an open, unlabeled door on right.

"In there." I said. Idil and I got inside the room and closed the door. As we closed the door, it went pitch black again. There were no longer any light coming from the flashlights. We waited until we could no longer hear the footsteps, but we didn"t get out.

"It smells like a toilet in here." she whispered.

"I can"t control how the room smells." I whispered back. She sighed. We stood there in silence for a couple of minutes.

"So, I think we are safe for now. You can tell me more about that man." I said.

Just when Idil was about to begin, we heard bursts of gunshots far away in the facility.

"What is with the aggressiveness of those guys?" I said. "Are they shooting everything that moves just because the electricity went out?"

"I don"t believe that they would be so stupid. Perhaps we are not the only ones who antagonized them." Idil said.

I heard a weird sound behind me.

"What did you eat?" I asked her.

"It wasn"t me." she said. It took a couple of seconds for me to panic.