Project: Death for Classroom Zero

Chapter 4: Trust and Spinning

Spinning.

If someone would ask Carlissa what she was feeling, she would probably say, she’s spinning—or more so, the world is spinning.

Her feet were wobbling, dancing in an unharmonized Tango, tangling each other like a cooked noodles. She could hear the noise of the left and right honks of the cars, growls of the engines, and the frustrated sigh of the drivers as they wait for the long traffic to move.

She was walking beside the road, along with other people busily minding their own world, trying to catch the fortune of life, even they were about to catch now the deepest curve of the night.

It was eleven thirty of the evening, and she was just about to go back to her house. Not home, for it was not anymore. She needs to rest. To sleep. So that tomorrow, she could go back to a pub again, and drink, and smoke, and eat, and drink again until she’s wasted.

Holding in her hand was a bottle of liquor. She drank through it. Despite knowing she had reached her limit, and that the world is heavily spinning before her eyes, she did not stop from quaffing the alcohol until its glass container would fill empty. Dry.

At the last drop of her drink, her body dropped onto the ground as well. Her energy felt flushing down as the bottle of beer was flushed dry too. She grunted and squinted, for her head was painful. Heavy.

“Help.” Busy steps, incomprehensible murmurs, left and right coughing of engines. There were more than a hundred—perhaps thousands—of people in this city. But neither of them, for five minutes, have helped her stand up, or ask if she was okay.

Having a drowsy-looking eyes, she scrambled up. Having weak muscles made by the toxic alcohols she have burned in her stomach, she kneeled in the middle of the walk way.

Without any reason, she smiled. Smirked. And made a disturbing laugh.

“f**k humanity! f**k the world! f**k the life!” she screamed out of nowhere.

The people who were walking near her had shifted their directions, and avoided her for a radius of about one meter, as if she was a carrier of a deadly disease. Some people laughed at her and her foolish shouting.

There was a tone of cellphone’s ring that popped at the pocket of Carlissa’s dirty clothe. Her phone.

“Oh, someone messaged me,” she said, in a manner that she was exaggerating.

She grabbed the phone in her pocket, and exposed it to the world, to the people who was laughing at her. It was a brand new phone. A great, newly-released model. Earlier, after her son went to his new school, she immediately went on a mall, and there streamed through different fanciful materials. Knowing that she would need a cellphone for her next transaction, she bought one—and she chose a fancy model which took her the whole night to study that it gave her a hard migraine.

Now that she was used to it, she exaggerated the way how she hold her phone, exposing it to anyone who could see, to tell them ‘be envious, you poor creatures!’, forgetting that there might be snatchers on the roll in the street.

She scanned the notification that popped at the screen, pressed it with the index finger of her other hand, and read through the SMS.

Finally finishing reading the message (it took her five minutes to read four simply constructed sentences), she smiled back again. She laughed.

And yell. “Yohooooo! f**k me world, and I’ll be coming!”

Drops of icy rain started to trickle on her face. Some of the people around her opened their umbrellas, some ran at a safer place where they can shed until the rain stops. But Carlissa did not crumble from her position.

“f**k me money! More money!”

There on her phone lies a text message stating that a three hundred thousand dollar money were transferred to her bank account. Everyday, long as her bet would perform better in that school, she would get that huge amount. Everyday. Which, in whole month, a total of nine million dollars, if and only if, her bet would survive until the end.

“I will become rich!” she shouted, “I will become a millionaire! First talented, genius millionaire of our clan!”

Thanks to Tristan Fauxier, she was enjoying the wrapped feeling of having a lot of money on her back—thanks to her son who she sold to the devils in order to get her pesky fancies.

But thanks to her, as she indulge with the taste of her sinful-originated money, her son’s life was facing in an unfair danger.

Very unfair.

****

“We need to know where our quarters were, first.” Tristan looked at a piece of paper that came off from the machine located beside the doorway of the room they have entered awhile ago, along with Miss Buenaventura.

The number of the quarter room they were assigned to corresponds to the number etched and printed in the small piece of paper they were holding.

“Our living quarters are sitting beside each other. We’re room neighbors,” Rain said, scanning the numbers inscribed in each door at the hallway they were walking at.

“What do you mean?”

Rain showed the number on the small paper she get. Clipped at her index and middle finger, the number twenty-four was printed.

“My room’s number twenty-five,” Tristan said, despite the fact that Rain already knew about it.

While walking, Tristan started to ask questions that would clarify him about their situation.

“So Rain, what was this place really was?”

“Still Josen High School of the elites. But unlike the rich students on the academy, we are under the Zero program. Or they mostly call it Project Zero.”

“Project Zero?”

“It was a first-phase project needed by the intellects of the school. They were trying to get and complete the data they need so that they could now proceed to the next phase of their wider-framed project. It was a too confidential information that even I, do not have any idea yet.”

“What could that project be? Zombies? Aliens? Robots? New species? Monsters?”

“Probably. We could not tell what that is, but we could tell that there is a high chance that they could do it.”

“But what was our role to the project Zero?”

“We are called Class Zero, and the whole batch of scholars were under the Classroom Zero. We are the fifth batch on this horrible place. And according to what I know, the reason why they are doing this is that because we are the primary source of data in their project.”

“You mean we are treated here as hamsters? Guinea pigs?”

“If you want to take it that way,” Rain said, still staring at the numbers on the doors.

“How are we the data? The experimenting species?”

“Only the higher ups can tell. But for us, we’re just players here.”

“Players. You mean we’ll play everyday? Just like what happened earlier? Staking our life, not knowing if perhaps after the timer closes, we could still live or not?”

Rain nodded. “That’s part of the contract you’ve signed when you enrolled.”

Tristan stopped his walk. “I … I did not sign the enrollment form. It wasn’t me.”

It was his mother.

Tristan remembered the smile on his mother’s face when he was about to climb upstairs, and when he was about to leave their house. Those smiles that he hadn’t seen for a long time. Those smiles that he thought gave him creeps just because he wasn’t used to that. All his life, he had seen his mother with frowning and angry faces. And when he saw that smile, he felt that something was wrong. There is.

He felt a painful pang on his chest, burning and giving him hard time to breath. It was way more painful than how they were electrocuted earlier outside the building.

“Crying won’t do you any good here,” Rain said. She sighed, and looked above. “It was my father who have me sent here. He was the one who enrolled me in this place. And now, I have to face the battle of life. The literal one.” From looking above, she looked at Tristan. “That’s why you’re not alone in this battle,” she assured.

“Why would they send us here? Do they want us dead?”

“No, Tristan. Because of poverty. We will be part of classroom Zero for thirty days. Under that thirty days, each day that you’ll remain alive, you would be rewarded three hundred thousand dollars. For thirty days, that would be roughly nine million in total.”

Tristan’s eyes grew wide. “That huge?”

“That huge. But the consequence is, we do not know if we’ll remain alive or not within that period of time.”

“That means Ma sent me here so that she could have the money while I am a prisoner of this place?”

“Precisely.”

Tristan’s shoulders felt heavy as he heard Rain’s explanation. The information she has exposed was totally blowing his mind, hard to process in one single gulp.

“Perhaps, the first three hundred thousand dollars was sent to your Mother now. Same with me, to my father.”

Finally reaching the doors to their quarters, Rain looked at him straight in the eyes. The ashen color of the window of her soul felt hypnosis to Tristan, that’s why he have to break away of it.

“I know that is a hard thing to accept. Take time to analyze through it.” She turned her back at him, and went to the door of the room twenty-four.

She placed the paper on the slim slot found on the door. Like an ATM card. The hidden place to the key opened below the slim slot.

Getting the key, Rain opened her room.

Before Rain could enter and rest to her room, Tristan called her. She stopped mid-door, and looked back at him with her blankness—which gave Tristan a hard time to read her real personality.

“Thank you. For the help. For the trust. For clearing everything to me.”

“I know that is not what you’re about to tell me.”

“No! I mean, yes… I mean what I said. Thank you,” said Tristan as he scratched his head awkwardly.

“And then you are about to ask me another question, isn’t it?”

Tristan nodded. “How did you know all of it? The project, this place, the rules.”

Rain pursed her lips, and said; “there are things that I could not tell you, Tristan. But if you trust me, you would need not to worry anything about me.”