The Monolith: Chapter One

The floor was firm and cold, the feeling had reminded them of a hospital examination table. Thoughts of pain, needles and death filled their minds. Then the smell swirled into their nostrils - urine and blood; it was if someone had emptied their diseased bladder here.

Jack was the first to awaken, lifting himself with both hands, turning and then, as he got on his knees, he stood among the bodies. He counted. "One, Two, Three . . ." his voice trailed off and when he turned around there was lovely tanned girl staring at him.

It had scared him; perhaps anything at the moment would have jolted him. "Hmph," he sucked in lots of air and his arms reached for his heart, clutching. She smiled back.

"Name's Mendy," her arm was stretched out in front of her. "What's yours?"

He was amazed that the first question he had heard was about who he was and not about where they were. "Jack, Jack Barrera," he then quickly shifted the question to something more important - Prioritize Jack he thought to himself - "Where are we?"

The question seemed to be the missing piece to everyone's broken puzzle. A puzzle that brought everyone back to life. Had he awakened the dead?

"Uhhh."

"Gragh," the roomed filled with twenty-five people awaking around the two.

His intuition was wrong about the floor - it was black granite. Hard, shiny black granite that made you feel like you were looking through a shiny swamp of death and their stood another version of you and that version looked like someone you didn’t recognize.

The newly awaken began to talk to each other with sadness and fear. "Well, Mendy, it looks like someone . . ." he said as he realized she had vanished.

"Hi, I'm Nina," a girl said to him. The room was alive with life. People got up and let their instincts take over. They began introducing themselves. It was either "Hi, my name is this" or "Where are we?" Jack had no idea where he was and he was sure that no one else knew either, but he wondered why that wasn’t yet a cause for concern.

"My name is Jack," he said and the names circled in his head.  

“William!”

“Tegan”

“Katie!”

“Kaitlyn!”

“Katrina. Hey! We got three Kat’s!”

“I’m Brandi!”

“Lexy.”

“Marina!”

“Connie!”

“Breenan!”

“My name’s Elizabeth. Please to meet . . . “

“Stephen. My name is Stephen.”

“I’m Martin.”

“Gloria.”

“Lawerence.”

“George. Hi!”

“Mendy!”

“Sarah!”

“Park!”

“Paul!”

“Sawyer.”

“Simone.”

“Jade.”

“Hi! My name is Robin, Robin . . . “

“Raven. My name is Raven!”

The room filled with an emptiness that smothered.

The room was large enough to fit a large whale comfortably, but as he began to think about a whale, he couldn't think of much of anything else. Who's my mother? Who's my father? Where was I born? the thoughts filled his head but nothing came out. He had holes in his memory. He had holes in his life.  

"Wait!" he yelled at the top of his lungs and it caused his throat to hurt. "Can anyone remember where they are from?" The murmurs shrank slightly until it was gone and then one large fellow near a dark corner, screamed. Then the tears replaced the noise and like hiccups, it caught on.

There it was – fear.

"Okay! Everybody calm down," George, skin dark, voice strong, was calm as he raised his arms into the air. "Let's just relax and share what information we have with each other. My name is George and . . . I can remember things . . . images, like animals, buildings and . . . math, history . . . Thomas Edison comes to my mind."

"Shut up, who the hell do you think you are anyways," the girl’s voice carried and it felt familiar like a commanding older sister, stout and brave. Her blonde hair flew back as she approached George. "Look around, we all look to be in our twenties," she said and everyone looked around at each other, "this is some kind of experiment or . . . I don't know . . . worse."

A girl stepped to the side of Jack and she introduced herself without breaking her stare at the two who seemed to now be arguing. "My name's Marina. You seem nice. Can I tell you something?"  

He turned and looked at her, his gaze drifted around her body. She was cute and thin, her hair was brown and youthful, her lips took him to a place, a field, where he could stare at them and kiss them - he was attracted to her and it made his heart race. "Yeah, tell me," he replied, swallowing out of sheer panic.  

"I'm scared."

"Me too," he replied looking back at the now three people fighting. The number of people who argued grew until George yelled at another who was stronger, larger than he was. That's when the obvious yet overlooked was spoken.  

"Look at us. We are all wearing some kind of elastic clothing under our clothes," the boy was right. Even though it may look like they were all wearing different clothes, they weren't. They wore the same shirt but a different color and the boys wore loose jeans with what one boy described as football underwear. The girls wore shorts and after some investigation, found out they wore they same kind of compression material underneath. The all wore sneakers and the same black compression material underneath their colored t-shirts. Jack pulled at his shirt and looked at its red color. He could also see the material underneath, it was comfortable and provided a broad range of motion underwear didn't provide. Someone had also mentioned it also absorbed sweat, a small tidbit that felt familiar and comforting.  

The most interesting piece of clothing was the bracelet. It was just a plain, rubber bracelet, no markings, no words. Jack's and Marina had the same color bracelet - red.  

Robin, the girl that interrupted George, had made it clear that she thought they were part of a project or experiment. "I'm pretty sure we are college students or . . ."

A man laughed. He laughed like she had said something so funny that it hurt his side. He even grabbed at it and lifted a finger to his eye. "I'm sorry, go on," he said laughing through the sentence, practicing gestures that were almost foreign.

Robin annoyed, glared deep at the man. Her eyes penetrated the awkwardness. "Stop," she paused between each word hoping to create a more defiant stand against his mad laughter, "laughing!" The crazy thing was he did stop which lead to complete and total silence and that's when the walls came to life.

The lights grew bright and a deep old voice shook the walls. "One wish," the voice had said and it imprinted into everyone's mind. They looked at each other trying to find the location of the voice, searching the blank walls and high ceiling, the bright lights that hung above but they found nothing. It came from the walls. The only one who knew this one fact, stood alone, away from the group and she tried to talk back to it through the same way it talked to all of them - through their minds. Mendy didn't get a response.

Two whole minutes passed before the voice had returned. "One wish brought you here and one wish will be your reward. Your first challenge awaits you behind the first door. There is no turning back now. Please proceed with caution," the voice etched their mind with pain and then . . . it was gone.  

Three things happened when the voice went away. The first was the crying. Fear created the downpour. The voice had appeared and created an icy shiver through many of the people that stood on that marble floor. Robin felt the same when her mother died earlier that year.

Robin blinked when the second thing appeared. It wasn't the way the door opened that had her frozen in a stupor, it was the idea that she remembered something about her life before she woke up in the monolith – a door, opening searing the edge of darkness with a light that was so bright, she shielded her eyes.

Marina stood close to Jack. Her hand brushed his and it created goose bumps up his arm. He smiled until he saw the last thing to happen in that moment. The ground began to glow orange like hot coals. "I think we need to leave this room," Jack said. A boy who sat in a dark corner lifted his hands from the ground and yelped at the heat.  

Jack knew that whomever walked through that door would die. He wasn't the only one with that same thought, it drifted around and they all saw it. Their eyes were frozen on the darkness that waited for them.


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"Tonight live coverage of The Monolith as we get the run down from every contestant following their training, their history and their dream of obtaining that one prize: One Wish!”