Amy seems to have been confident in her food source. Did it just stop working in the past decade or so of disuse? She said it wouldn’t produce a full bottle if she was in the room. Could that also apply to her dead body? I get a chill thinking about dragging a corpse a hundred rooms, but the hunger cramps in my stomach are not going to go away. If Amy couldn’t find another food source for tens of thousands of rooms, what are the odds that I can? Did she write her messages in this room, because she knew the dead body would keep them from being erased? I’m so tired, but I know I should attempt the grisly task right away before I get weaker.

  I retrace my route to Amy’s room. I am not yet ready to call it the smoothie room. I peel back the carpet from the room outside the doors, but it is very hard to rip, so I peel back the padding and then rip off a long strip about seven feet by ten feet. When I go through the double doors, I put the handbag back on the counter and then I spread the padding out near the body. I gently lift her up. I was afraid she would crumble or break, but she stays stiff, and her intact leathery skin and her clothes seem to be holding everything together. She only weighs a few pounds. I place her on the padding and fold a length over her. I then carefully roll her up. She wasn’t lying flat when she died, so I might be damaging the mummy, but the main thing is just to get her out of here. I grab the bag and put it over my shoulder. I also scan the room for any other items. The rubber padding is damp but hasn’t absorb much water, so I am able to pick up the roll with the body inside. I go backwards through the double doors, which are still propped open. I feel bad about moving the body and I decide I will move it to be with James Mason and his dog if this works. At least she won’t be alone.

  Before I start testing my theory, I retrieve all of my possessions from the nearby room and leave them, along with the handbag, twenty rooms to the left of Amy’s room, so I don’t lose everything when I move her. I go back and retrieve the wrapped mummy and backtrack to my new camp, then continue a mostly straight course eighty more rooms. I place the roll on the ground, and I wonder if I should go a bit further, just to be safe.

  There are now a hundred rooms between me and the room with doors. Actually, there are only ninety-eight rooms between us in terms of columns of rooms. Does the room she’s in count as part of the hundred? Do rooms up or down from her row count? I was forced to turn away from the straight path by walls a few times and I used my own method of always turning right until I return to the straight path when that happened, so I have really walked one hundred forty-seven rooms. It would have been nice if Amy’s instructions were clearer. I make the base assumption that the hundred rooms does not include her room and extends in all directions making a box two hundred one rooms on a side. I can retest as needed. I go two more rooms to make sure I’m outside of that box and deposit the body in the far-left corner of the room.

  I return the way I came, and things have obviously changed before I even get to the double doors. The carpet is no longer torn up and the rubber is back in place beneath it. The pieces holding the doors open have disappeared and the doors are now closed. I open them and see the broken glass is gone and so is the smell. Most importantly, on the counter is a bottle with a pale whitish fluid inside. The bottle reminds me a bit of a twenty-eight-ounce sports drink, except it is a little larger, made of glass with a metal lid, and has no label. On the lid it has a cryptic symbol of a black triangle with a circle inside. Inside the circle are the letters “C” and “D” stylized to form a circle. What could it mean? It’s not a company logo I recognize. Carbohydrate drink? There is no way to know. The bottle doesn’t indent around the middle, so I assume it must be about thirty-two ounces. I unscrew the cap with a bit of difficulty and hear the little pop as the vacuum seal is broken. I swish the liquid around the bottle a little bit and it is very thick. I may try to thin it out with water at some point, but for now, I just want something in my stomach. The smell is faintly of almond milk and when I touch my tongue to a bit, it tastes slightly of almond too. Amy thought she was being poisoned. Isn’t cyanide supposed to smell like almonds?

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  Even if the drink is poison, hunger will kill me soon anyway and since Amy lived on this for years, I don’t hesitate any longer. I start with sips, but it’s impossible for me to control taking a huge gulp. I almost feel like I am gagging as I try to drink the thick substance down. Once I feel my throat is clear of it, I drink some water from my bottle too. Alternating sips between smoothie and water and slowly increasing how much I swallow, I get about a quarter of it into my stomach. I screw the cap on to let my shrunken stomach settle and expand.

  Next, I move all I have collected from twenty rooms from Amy’s old room to near the man and dog room. Then I move Amy to sit beside them. On my way back to the smoothie room, I notice a nearby sprinkler that had been leaking water no longer is. I open the door and see another full bottle on the counter. Everything else is in its reset state. I take the first bottle out of my pocket and top it off with water from my plastic bottle. After shaking it, I guzzle down about half of the drink.

  My anxiety over starving to death in the next few weeks is gone, but the mystery of the rooms is now greater. How do the rooms reset? Is there a work crew that pops in and fixes things up when the captives are far enough away to be a risk to them? Is there an automated system? Could it be something paranormal or am I in a sort of simulation in my mind and not really here?

  Did that tree kill me? I do not think so. I believe I really am here, but what here is, is outside of normal human experience. I will not take Amy’s way out. She said everyone who gets out of here gets out the same way after she found only dead bodies, but anyone who did get out, she would not have been able to find. They’re gone. I intend to join those people.

  With my hunger satiated for now, I return to my collection of items near Amy’s new room, taking additional sips along the way, and climb into my usual sleeping roll. Upon awakening, I drink some watered-down smoothies and begin searching the area. The surrounding rooms show signs of some of the materials she harvested from the rooms themselves, missing carpets, pads, ceiling tiles, and drywall. It doesn’t take long before I find out what she did with the things she removed.

  In the room that shares a common wall with where the two human and one dog mummies are, I find where Amy must have lived. She had built a small house in the corner using stacks of four-foot-wide strips of carpet to section off part of the room. The walls are about seven feet high and topped off with a roof made of drywall. You have to walk around to the wall side of the structure to enter, which is probably to prevent any direct light from the humming fluorescents from shining into the house. There are a few large pieces of drywall resting nearby that could close off the entrance if desired. The inside is dimly lit but contains some personal items and a makeshift bed that even has a sleeping bag on it. I also notice a flashlight and a lantern, but I decide to walk around some more before investigating the dim carpet-walled shack. In the next room to the left when looking at the wall to Amy’s new room, I find where she stored everything she looted during her years in the rooms.