Linked

Lights flash and blur above Rusty as he gets carted down the hallway. It’s something he’s seen half-a-dozen times before. Strapped down to the gurney, in a white hospital gown, Rusty can barely move his arms or legs. He knows better than to lift his head to see where they are taking him. They’d put him in the machine longer than normal, and he’s already in for so long. 

Besides, he already knows where they’re going. He goes there once a week. Rusty has the route memorized. Twenty lights, elevator, three floors up, a left, sixteen lights, a right, three lights, there. It’s a cruel and vile room. With steel walls and grey floors. Lights that barely rid of the dark, bottomless shadows hiding in the corners. In the very center of the large room is a machine that has two seats, back-to-back with tubes and a headpiece that Rusty still has yet to figure out what it does. He’s been going into that room for weeks and he still has no idea how they do it. How they connect two separate conciseness together. 

“Subject 1497, prepare to be Linked.” A voice says from the intercom in the room. Rusty, Subject 1497, allows himself to be unbuckled from the gurney and manhandled to the chair facing away from the door. Another subject is already in the other chair, strapped and locked in. Silent tears are glistening down her cheeks.

Rusty is roughly shoved into the chair, his wrists, arms, legs, chest, and neck get locked in by cold, unforgivable metal cuffs to prevent too much wiggling and movement. It’s sterilized, since the metal often breaks skin in the struggle when the Link begins. 

He doesn’t have it in him to fight when his head is guided back, not anymore, held in place by metal plates. The headpiece is lowered on both sides. The near soundless click loud in the otherwise silent room is deafening. The men in the white coats have already left, they leave the moment your head gets held in place by the metal.

“Subjects 1497 and 5023, prepare yourselves for the Link. Linking will commence in ten...nine…” Rusty blocks out the rest of the countdown. Taking one last deep breath before his mind becomes one with another person’s, Rusty thinks of what his life could have been. “...one. Link commencing.”

The sudden blinding pain that erupts over Rusty’s entire body, leaves tremors as it passes through his body before the process repeats it. Rusty bites down on the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from screaming. He can taste the copper taste as a blue light disorentes him. This part is worse than the pain. The merging of two minds. Rusty is reliving every moment of his life, along with another’s. 

He catches fragments of a woman dancing around in a dress with a man. Fragments of an older man and lady smiling at someone. He sees himself and his wife on their wedding night. He sees his son graduate from high school. 

Suddenly, the scenes disappear as they stretch out and distort until they’re one white mess. Hundreds of memories in just the span of a couple seconds. From both himself, and the woman he is temporarily linked to. 

The white light vanishes and Rusty finds himself face-down in a forest. Green trees gently sway in the breeze, leaves dance on the forest floor as particularly strong gusts of wind sweep through. The ground is cool beneath his fingers. Rusty looks up and holds up a hand to block his eyes from the sudden onslaught of light from the beaming sun and blue sky. The sun is warm on his skin. 

“Hello! Is anyone there?” A voice suddenly screams into the wind. Rusty immediately stands. Patting himself down, looking for a weapon, he notices that his clothes are different. A faux brown leather jacket, a dirty and torn shirt, stained and ripped trousers, and brown boots. He’s never woken up like this. The last time he Linked, his partner and him ended up on a boat out at sea, before the pollution turned the seas red and the sky black. 

“Can anyone hear me?” The voice calls out again. Rusty follows the direction it’s coming and finds the woman from the chair standing in a crystal blue river. Her hair is matted and blonde. She’s wearing the same thing as him, soaking, but she has a necklace around her neck. A black thread is looped around a golden amulet. 

“Hey!” Rusty snaps, her yelling would no doubt attract someone to their location, and if Rusty knows anything about being Linked, someone will come. “Stop your yelling and get out of the water, girly.” He orders. 

She hesitates for a second, probably trying to figure out he’s trustworthy. Rusty would be offended if it weren’t for the fact that he knew for a fact he’s not. Trustworthy that is. The girl wades her way through the water but she doesn’t leave it when she nears the shore. Instead, she stops a couple feet away from Rusty and stares at him.

“It’s your first time.” It is not a question. There’s no way an experienced Linker would be as reckless as she just was. Rusty doesn’t wait for her to respond, just rolls his eyes and produces his hunter’s knife from one of his inner jacket pockets he had found when he was patting himself down. They never send you in without a weapon. 

The girl stumbles back in the water. Droplets splash on his pants and boots. Rusty doesn’t know if he should be protective or annoyed. He’s leaning more toward being annoyed. 

“Girly, if I wanted you harmed, I wouldn’t have come over here.” Rusty would have come over this way, no matter if she were here or not. Water means there’s food nearby. Water also means there’s going to people nearby, which could either end horribly, or horribly spectacular. Also, they’re Linked. They have to keep each other safe in order to survive. 

“Do you know what’s happening to us?” The girl whispers. Yep, this is definitely her first time being Linked to someone. 

“Yes, we’re sharing memories with each other through a process called Link.” Rusty reaches a hand out and grabs her by the wrist to tug onto the shore. “We have to keep each other alive long enough for them to pull us out.” Rusty explains. Why do they always partner him up with the noobs? Why can’t he be partnered with the Veteran Linkers?

The girl struggles against his hold but he’s unyielding. She’s not the first uncooperative partner he’s had but she won’t be the last. He keeps a hold of her wrist and drags her away from the river and deeper into the forest. 

“What do you mean we’re sharing memories? How long will it take for them to pull us out? Who even are they? Who are you?” Girly questions. He should really learn her name but names mean attachment. Most of the new Linkers don’t survive past session number one, despite Rusty trying his hardest. 

“We’re Linked. Meaning we’re temporarily connected to one another until they pull us out in five days. No one knows.” Keep it short and sweet. The less you talk, the more likely it is you won’t get attached. It’s one of the first things Rusty learned while in the session. Keeps him from forming too many attachments. Apparently, his answers weren’t enough because she keeps talking, and talking.

Don’t fight her. Don’t fight her. Rusty repeats to himself. He needs her to survive. They need each other to survive, despite what Rusty wants. 

“Lady, if you don’t stop talking I will do it myself.” He warns once. It doesn’t have the desired effect. 

“My name is Isabelle. Not ‘girly’, and not ‘lady’.” She rips her wrist from Rusty’s grip and rubs the skin. A bruise is already beginning to form from where his hand was. Rusty should feel bad, he knows he should but he can’t bring himself to care. “Are you going to show any other emotion that isn’t annoyance?” She grumbles. 

Great, now he has a name to go with the face. Great, just what he needs. A talker that now has a name. Great.

“Maybe if you weren’t so annoying I would.” He continues walking. If he can find someplace safe to camp out for the night, they’ll have a better chance. The water was too close to where they arrived, meaning more people would be around. The program might be stupidly intelligent, but it repeats patterns in most of the sessions.  

“Do you even know where you’re going? We’ve been walking for ages!” Isabelle complains. Rusty wants to stab her. He considers it, deeply. 

“We haven’t even been walking for an hour. Stop your complaining and stop falling behind.” A deep sigh leaves his body before he can stop it. Isabella snaps her head to look at him, disbelief written all over her features.

“You have no idea where we are! Look, you might be ok with this but I’m not! I don’t want to be here! I want to go home!” Her voice steadily rises. Too loud. Rusty rushes forward and clamps a hand over her mouth. Isabelle never had time to register that he even moved. A squeak from her is muffled because of his palm. She starts to trash against his hold. Her nails dig into his skin from where she’s gripping his wrist. Only even, he guesses.

“You can’t go home. Once you’ve been Linked, you can never go back. The only way to leave this is to die, or survive.” Rusty hisses between clenched teeth. Something feels off about this entire thing. By now, they should have come across other people. Not other Links, there are only ever two links per session. 

“You need to be quiet and listen to me. If you listen to me, you will get out of here alive.” It’s not a promise. Rusty stopped promising to get his partners out alive. Not after he lost three partners. The man knows that Isabelle wants to be able to go home but there’s more of a chance neither of them making it back than a first-timer making it.

Isabelle studies him for a moment. “How many times have you done this?” She whispers. Her shoulders are shaking like she’s about to cry. Oh Lord, Rusty can not deal with crying. 

“This would be my twenty-seventh Link.” And each time it has gotten harder and harder to continue. Some days Rusty just really wants to die in the sessions, to end the pain.

“You’ve done this twenty-seven times?” Isabelle exclaims. Her voice is shrill. Rusty lunges again and roughly slams his hand over her mouth, for the second time in a matter of minutes. 

“Lady, stop talking. You’re going to draw people to our location.” Rusty growls. He’s just about to start moving again when a twig snaps behind him.

“I fear she’s already given you away.” A gravelly voice says from behind Rusty. The veteran spins around while simultaneously keeping Isabelle shielded. A group of men surround them, each man is dressed in dirty, torn, and black clothes, varying from leather to simple cloth. Most of them are holding automatic guns, others are carrying swords or knives.  

Isabelle whimpers into his back from where she’s pressed against him. Rusty spins his knife between his fingers. There’s at least twenty men. Only two or three of them are holding blades, the rest with guns. For two experienced Linkers, this many men would be a breeze but for one experienced and one noob, only one of them will make it out of this fight alive.

“Oh you have nothing to fear from us, gorgeous.” Gravelly says with a tilt of his head. “Him on the other hand? You have everything to fear.” 

Rusty can’t help it. He laughs. It’s just too funny. These people think he’s the one who's going to cause her trouble. Oh, that’s just too good.

“Find something funny?” Another man snarls. He’s one of the Gunners, as Rusty dubs them.

“Yeah, you folk thinking I’m a danger to her.” Rusty jerks his thumb back to point at the shivering form of Isabelle. 

That must have done something because suddenly the second is lunging forward. Just like that, the fight is on. 

Rusty dodges as much as he can from the spray of bullets that rain down on him and Isabelle. Truthfully, neither of them would make it out. The group had them surrounded on all sides. The ones with blades were standing behind the apparent leader, Gravelly. 

THere’s only two of them against twenty. Isabelle doesn’t know how to fight from the looks of her diving to the ground in an effort to avoid the bullets. Where they even got weapons such as guns all the way out here is beyond Rusty. 

Rusty falls to the ground before he manages to take anyone out. His skin pierced a dozen or more times with bullets. He’s aware of Isabelle screaming but not much else. Distantly, he can hear facility alarms going off and sees crystal like prisms in his vision.

As his chest makes contact with the leafy ground, Rusty feels strangely at peace. Like his time has finally come, his time to finally see his wife and son again. Rosy and Caleb. They died before he got the chance to say goodbye, perhaps now he finally can. 

A neon blue light takes over his vision and suddenly he’s not on the ground of a forest anymore. He’s in a metal chair with his limbs strapped down. The headpiece is lifted up but Rusty doesn’t see it. Movements blur together, the people becoming one big blob of white and grey. Rusty is grabbed from the chair, moved to a grungy, and wheeled away.

Rusty can never see his family again. Once you survive ten Links, they’ll never let you die. They’ll keep bringing you back until you can’t remember your own name. Rusty was never meant to get past the first session, but he did. He wishes he hadn’t.