The Clone’s Mate by Susan Trombley

Three

Even knowing that I was in an alien experimental maze didn’t stop me from hoping for escape. There had to be hope, always, otherwise, why not just lay down and wait to die. I didn’t have it in me to give up that easily. I would rather bash my head against the wall in an effort to put a hole through it before just fading away quietly.

I made my way cautiously down the tunnel, worried that some dangerous obstacle or trap would pop up in front of me. Instead, I just faced endless white walls dotted by bright lights and bare floors, with that strange dark tunnel above me.

When I rounded the bend, I spotted the first intersection of the maze, proving to me that I’d been correct in my assessment. The problem the rat always has is that they don’t know why their captors want them to find the cheese. They just go blindly in the direction of that promised treat.

I wanted to put at least a bit more thought into my progress than a rat, though perhaps my captors expected that. Maybe they wanted to see exactly how creative I could get.

I liked puzzles, including mazes, but that was when I was sitting on the couch in front of the television listening to a show playing as I drew my path over a paper maze. Now, that maze could kill me, or lead me to something worse than death. I had to think carefully about which way I wanted to proceed.

Deciding to do this very methodically, I chose to always take the right path, so that I could backtrack. Since I had nothing to mark my progress with, I was out of luck in that respect. I couldn’t even scratch the walls with a fingernail. None of the paneling or flooring showed any kind of marring or irregularity that would serve as a landmark either. These bastards expected me to remember everything in my head. At least the rats had their nose to sniff out the cheese. All I smelled was my own body, which at the moment appeared to be clean, so my odor wasn’t strong or offensive. It was, however, enough to cover the very faint scent of the plastic or sterile cleanser environmental odor. I still wasn’t entirely sure which it was that was putting out that odor. Perhaps the walls themselves.

Or maybe they’d cleaned this maze with sterilizing cleanser that left behind that faint odor. If they’d cleaned the maze, my guess was that they’d used it before. Maybe it hadn’t been simply animal or human waste they’d had to clean up—but rather blood.

Curse my overactive imagination! It can pop up like some twisted gremlin out of the blue, scaring the shit out of me. As if I needed it to now, but hey, why not add to my stress?

“They’re just cleaning the waste,” I whispered to myself.

Thinking of that, I felt a mild fullness of my bladder. If this maze went on too long, I might not have a choice but to cop a squat for a minute.

Yes, it did occur to me that if I could also poop, I might be able to overcome my childhood potty training to use it to mark my path.

Gross.

I wasn’t at that point of desperation yet. Fortunately, for now, I had nothing knocking at the backdoor. I wasn’t sure if that was because the aliens hadn’t fed me in a long time, or if my body had been “cleansed” in an unpleasant way. If the second was the case, then I would be so glad I wasn’t conscious for that.

I paused as I wondered if I’d been given an enema to keep me from pooping to mark my path, then wondered if the aliens could think that far ahead or even predict such behavior from a civilized human over the age of three.

I wish I knew exactly how prescient they were. Clearly, they were still experimenting on humans, so they didn’t have us all figured out yet. Also clearly, humans were still experimenting on rats on Earth, and I was pretty sure we had them figured out for the most part.

So…. Yeah.

Taking all right-hand paths as the maze grew more complicated, presenting first two paths, then three, then four, I thought I could detect a pattern. Then the damned maze shifted on me, one opening sliding closed while another slid open.

Oh, these guys are total assholes!

“What do you want from me?” I shouted as I stared up at the dark tunnel above my head, clenching my fists in frustration as tears filled my eyes.

I’d just returned from a dead end to find my expected path blocked, forcing me to go another way.

That blank wall where there had been an opening just minutes before almost broke me, and since none of the bastards bothered to answer me, I shuffled onward, selecting the next right-hand path, though by this time, I realized that methodical choices wouldn’t help me. Neither would marking my progress help me. Since they kept changing the maze, their intention wasn’t clear.

How could they want me to find the end goal of it if they kept shifting it around?

I paused again, sniffling as I tried to bite back a helpless sob. Maybe they were changing things in a discernible pattern that I could predict. Maybe, if I figured out that pattern, I’d find the solution to the maze.

I should point out at this point that I’m not a damned genius, so if the aliens were hoping I’d figure this all out and skip merrily to my goal, they were out of luck. They should have abducted someone in MENSA.

Then it occurred to me that they had abducted other women.

If I could only find them, we might be able to put our minds together to figure this maze out. Now, I started calling out again, but not for the damned aliens.

“Amy?” I sped up my steps as I headed down a tunnel. “Are you around here, Amy? It’s me, Rhonda. Uh… the paint-stained sweats lady from the hardware store.”

I know she had to have seen me just as I spotted her being led by the creepy hot alien. I didn’t know the name of the other woman who’d been brought along, but I still called out for her. “Hello, any human? Screw those alien bastards watching us! We can help each other get out of this.”

My voice echoed a little bit, but there was a sound-deadening quality to the acoustics of this maze that made my cries die too quickly to travel far. I realized that if I had a better ear, I might have been able to use sound to help navigate the maze, but the alien bastards had apparently thought of that too.

Amy and the other woman could be right on the other side of any of these walls, and they probably wouldn’t hear me even if I shouted my head off. I knew who would hear me though. I wondered if pleading would help.

“Please, whoever you are, let me go!” I sobbed again, feeling that hopelessness creeping back in like a damned sneak thief to steal my motivation to keep moving. “I don’t know what information you’re trying to learn from experimenting on me, but I’ll bet I can answer your questions more accurately than my actions will.”

I waited, biting back sniffles as I swiped impatiently at my wet face. No one answered me and after several more tries with the same lack of response, I gave up and screamed in frustration, lobbing every curse I could think of at the invisible watchers. Probably a bad move given I was completely at their mercy, but my emotions took over control of my mouth.

Like the other sounds I’d made, the echoes of my screams and insults died away quickly. Then another sound raised the hair on my neck as I slowly turned in the direction of it.

The wall had shut about ten feet behind me with a nearly silent snick, cutting off my escape, but what scared me more was that it was moving towards me, closing in on me.

I ran down the remainder of the tunnel and more doors shut in front of me as I reached a fork in the path, forcing me down another direction—then another. More of the walls slid towards me, and I realized that the maze was forcing me to take random paths, rather than allowing me to choose my own way.

Although perhaps the paths weren’t so random. Nothing about the maze changed except for the scent.

I’d been sweating with fear and the warm temperature of the maze, but it wasn’t enough to cause a lot of odor at this point. What I smelled as I was forced down one path then another was the increasing scent of something indefinable but unquestionably alien. The scent was strongest in the air around my head, though as I grew closer to its source, it had sunk down to fill the entire area, telling me it was likely coming from the dark tunnel above me.

I stared up at that darkness, barely able to see the ceiling of the above tunnel through the grating. I sniffed that scent, trying to identify it, to classify it.

It had a strong tinge of petrichor, but that wasn’t the most significant note. There was nothing floral to it at all, nor fruity. Perhaps some kind of spice, but nothing I’d experienced before. It wasn’t a grassy green smell, or any kind of weed. It was just… bizarre, and frightening because I couldn’t categorize it, which told me it likely didn’t originate anywhere near Earth.

It wasn’t a bad smell, like strong body odor or waste or anything objectionable, but it still bothered me, chilling me to the bone. I didn’t know what it was, and that meant it was potentially dangerous. And since the strength of that scent had increased, I was likely drawing too close to its source.

I frantically turned around to face the wall moving towards me, pushing me further towards the odd odor source, still unseen above me. Then I spotted a part of the wall slide open just before the other wall moved past it, forcing me to dive into the space as the other wall passed it, blocking my escape.

Still, now I was in a tunnel moving away from the odor, though it still hung heavy in the air. I felt a small sense of relief but knew that opening hadn’t appeared by accident. Whatever game these creeps were playing had only just begun.

Then I heard a sound from the direction I’d just escaped that made me so cold with fear that the warm temperature of the maze wasn’t enough to stop me from shivering.

The grating above me vibrated as something moved over it, but it was the purely alien shrieking and then horrifying chittering sound that emanated from far too close by that caused me to break into a run down the tunnel, desperately seeking a way to escape the source of that sound.

Overhead, new walls blocked the dark overhead tunnel, interfering with the path of whatever it was that moved towards me now, causing it to shriek again as it was forced—like me—to take a different path to its goal.

A goal I feared was me.

My gremlin brain decided to take that moment to provide a new scenario to my imagination. Perhaps I wasn’t the experiment in this maze at all.

Maybe I was the fucking cheese!