Read Darklandia for Free Online Page B

bench in Central Park. And though I didn’t recognize the signs on Saturday, my grandmother cried beneath that sack at her rapture celebration.
    “Are you aware that not drinking your rations at the prescribed hour is a punishable offense?”
    My head felt disconnected from my body as I nodded. This was happening to someone else, not me. I did nothing. I would never do something so foolish as not drink my rations. I was still inside Darklandia. That was it. I was still trapped inside that world where people went to do their dirty deeds. That was it! Six hours was too long. The pod must have overheated, or something, and now I was trapped.
    I had heard of people getting stuck inside malfunctioning pods until they wasted away to dried sinew and bones. No wonder I was so hungry and thirsty last night. I was trapped inside a pod. Oh, sweet felicity! How long before they found me?
    The darkroom on Broadway had very few regular users. As long as one of the three pods remained available, no one would realize I was trapped. They would come and go, never the wiser. I would be raptured in this pod and no one would find me for weeks, possibly months.
    The panic returned just as the lights in the evaluation room went out. Yes! They found me! The pod was going to open and release me from this virtual nightmare. Someone stirred next to me and I held my breath, my ears trained on the clink of metal against metal.
    The lights stuttered and flickered back to life. Specialist Dodd stood next to the door of the evaluation room looking confused. The brief respite from the darkness was cut short as the lights went out again. A brief flash of blue light sparked near Specialist Dodd revealing a shadow behind him.
    “Dodd, you’ve been relieved,” said a young male voice from somewhere near the door.
    “Relieved by whom?” Dodd asked.
    “Minister Locke.”
    Jane Locke?
    The blue light flashed again, lighting up the darkness for a fraction of a second. Footsteps. Someone undoing the belt over my ankles. Hands on my wrists as the restraint on my right arm was released followed quickly by the restraint on my left arm. Soft fingers closing around my hand tugging me forward.
    “What’s going on? Who are you?” I asked, as I slid off the chair onto the tile floor.
    “Sh!” the young man hushed me as he pulled me toward the door. “We only have four minutes.”
    “Four minutes for what?”
    “Before the lights come on and they turn you into a walking billboard… or worse. Don’t let go of my hand.”
    He clutched my hand in his and the blue light flashed again. From here I could see it was his sec-band flashing from inside the scanner on the wall. The door slid open and I could glimpse just enough of the lobby through the darkness to see that the girl at the semicircular desk was gone. I stepped forward toward the glass doors that led to the corridor and the elevator, but the young man jerked me sideways and I finally saw him. It was Mr. Half-smile.
    I jerked my hand back. “Where are you taking me?”
    Through the shadows, I could see a crease form between his eyebrows. “If you want to keep asking questions, that’s fine. It’s your purification, not mine.”
    “Okay. I’ll go.”
    He led me to the corner of the lobby where he knelt and yanked up a corner of the carpet. Underneath the plush braids of blue wool lay a steel door twice as wide as my shoulders. I glanced at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling.
    “It’s not on,” he whispered as he slipped his fingers into a groove in the door and pulled up. “The generators only supply power to the doors, so people aren’t trapped in the event of an outage. Go ahead.”
    He pointed at the opening in the floor and, though everything inside me told me this was a bad idea, I lowered myself down a steel ladder into an even darker room below. He followed quickly behind me, making sure to pull the carpet into place over the door before it closed, plunging us into complete