The Scorch Trials - James Dashner [14]
Newt nudged past him, walking forward with his slight limp until he stood in the very center of the room’s carpeted floor. “This is impossible,” he said, turning in a slow circle, gazing up at the ceiling where the corpses had hung from ropes only minutes earlier. “Not enough time passed for someone to get them out. And no one else even came into this buggin’ room. We would’ve heard them!”
Thomas stepped to the side and leaned against the wall as the other Gladers and Aris came out of the small dorm room. A hushed sense of awe spread across the group as one by one, each person noticed the missing dead. As for Thomas, he once again felt a numbness, like he just might be done feeling surprised at anything.
“You’re right,” Minho said to Newt. “We were in there with the door closed for, what, twenty minutes? No way anyone could’ve moved all those bodies that quickly. Plus, this place is locked from the inside.”
“Not to mention getting rid of the smell,” Thomas added.
Minho nodded.
“Well, you shanks are right smart,” Frypan said through a huff. “But take a look around. They’re gone. So whatever you think, somehow they got rid of them.”
Thomas didn’t feel like arguing about it—or even talking about it. So the dead bodies were gone. They’d seen stranger stuff.
“Hey,” Winston said. “Those crazy people quit screaming and yelling.”
Thomas put his weight back on his feet, listened. Silence. “I thought we just couldn’t hear them from Aris’s room. But you’re right—they stopped.”
Soon everyone was running for the larger dorm room on the far side of the common area. Thomas followed, intensely curious to look out the windows and see the world outside. Before, with the Cranks screaming and pressing their faces against the iron bars, he’d been too horrified to get a good view.
“No way!” Minho yelled from up ahead, then, without further explanation, disappeared inside the room.
As Thomas moved in that direction, he noticed that every boy hesitated a second, wide-eyed at the threshold of the door, then went ahead and entered the dorm. He waited as each Glader and then Aris funneled their way inside, then followed.
He felt the same shock he’d sensed from the other boys. As a whole, the room looked much like it had when they’d walked out of it earlier. But there was one monumental difference: at each window, without exception, a red brick wall had been erected just outside the iron bars, completely blocking every inch of open space. The only light in the room came from the panels on the ceiling.
“Even if they were quick with those bodies,” Newt said, “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have time to bloody throw up some brick walls. What’s going on here?”
Thomas watched as Minho walked over to one of the windows and reached through the bars, pressing his hand against the red bricks. “Solid,” he said, then slapped at it.
“It doesn’t even look fresh,” Thomas murmured, stepping up to one himself to get a feel. Hard and cool. “The mortar’s dry. Somehow they’ve tricked us, that’s all.”
“Tricked us?” Frypan asked. “How?”
Thomas shrugged, that numbness returning. Still wishing desperately that he could talk to Teresa. “I don’t know. Remember the Cliff? We jumped into thin air and went through an invisible hole. Who knows what these people can do.”
The next half hour passed in a haze. Thomas wandered about, as did everyone else, inspecting the brick walls, looking for signs of anything else that had changed. Several things had, each one just as strange as the next. All the beds in the Gladers’ dorm room were made, and there was no sign of the grungy clothes they’d all worn before changing into the pajamas provided the night before. The dressers had been rearranged, though the difference was subtle and some people disagreed that they’d been moved at all. Either way, each one had been stocked with fresh clothes and shoes, and new digital watches for each boy.
But the biggest change of all—discovered by