Corridor by Robin Parrish

Author:Robin Parrish
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: StoneHouse Ink
Published: 2012-03-11T22:00:00+00:00

TROY LANDED, NOT WITH a thud or a crack on hard ground, but with an enormous splash. He heard the announcement as he returned to the surface to tread water.

“Congratulations, Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. You have escaped the Purple Room.”

The water was cold, sending chills across his skin.

“Blue Room?” he asked between gasps of air.

“Yup,” said Victoria.

The fall had been a long one—longer than he’d expected. Soon after he hit the part of the spiral stairs that was cloaked in murky blackness, he’d spotted the Exit shining like a beacon, just a few dozen feet straight down. He waved his arm frantically so that his bracelet would activate the door before he slammed into it. Thankfully, this door opened in a bright flash, unlike the others, and he plunged straight through the opening. Another fifty feet or so of free-falling, and he was in the water.

Troy kicked with his feet to tread, but swimming was not one of his strengths.

“Any advice?” he asked, kicking like mad and holding his face as high above the water as he could manage.

“Don’t drown.”

“Did you forget the part,” he gasped, “about not being athletic?”

“Look around,” Victoria said. “There should be something there.”

Something like what? Couldn’t she be more specific? What was he supposed to find in a big, empty—

Troy spotted it. A thin sheet of plywood drifted in the water about ten feet to his right. He turned and paddled toward it as best he could. When he reached it, getting himself on top of the thing proved difficult. It looked so easy in the movies; he should’ve been able to just crawl up onto it.

Its thinness made the wood incredibly lightweight, so as soon as he grabbed the edge of it, his own weight pulled it down into the water.

“You’re going to have to do this very slowly and deliberately,” said Victoria. Then she added, “I warned you it would get harder.”

It took a good ten minutes of wrestling with the infuriating piece of driftwood, but he conquered it at last by lying exactly in the center of the board, holding it by both edges with his arms outstretched. Unfortunately, his weight pushed the whole thing under the water by a few inches, so there was no way he could stay completely above the water. His soaked jeans added pounds to his thin frame, so he took them off and tossed them away to better his chances of floating—over Victoria’s objections. He argued that they were freezing his legs anyway, saturated as they were with the chilly water. Normally, he’d have been horrified to be out of the house in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs and socks, but bashfulness had lost its meaning in a place that was purely about survival.

He swallowed a few gulps of the water and found it fresh, clean, and ice cold. When his monstrous thirst was satisfied at last, he raised his head to look around at the huge body of water he’d been deposited onto.

“Whoa. I know this is just a Room, but seriously…whoa.

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