The Maze Runner Read Online Free PDF

been doing out there?
    The big door finally popped open, and with a deafening squeal of metal against metal, the boys swung it wide. They disappeared inside, pulling it shut behind them with a loud clonk. Thomas stared, his mind churning to come up with any possible explanation for what he’d just witnessed. Nothing developed, but something about that creepy old building gave him goose bumps, a disquieting chill.
    Someone tugged on his sleeve, breaking him from his thoughts; Chuck had come back.
    Before Thomas had a chance to think, questions were rushing out of his mouth. “Who are those guys and what were they doing? What’s in that building?” He wheeled around and pointed out the East Door. “And why do you live inside a freaking maze?” He felt a rattling pressure of uncertainty, making his head splinter with pain.
    “I’m not saying another word,” Chuck replied, a new authority filling his voice. “I think you should get to bed early—you’ll need your sleep. Ah”—he stopped, held up a finger, pricking up his right ear—”it’s about to happen.”
    “What?” Thomas asked, thinking it kind of strange that Chuck was suddenly acting like an adult instead of the little kid desperate for a friend he’d been only moments earlier.
    A loud boom exploded through the air, making Thomas jump. Itwas followed by a horrible crunching, grinding sound. He stumbled backward, fell to the ground. It felt as if the whole earth shook; he looked around, panicked. The walls were closing. The walls were
really
closing—trapping him inside the Glade. An onrushing sense of claustrophobia stifled him, compressed his lungs, as if water filled their cavities.
    “Calm down, Greenie,” Chuck yelled over the noise. “It’s just the walls!”
    Thomas barely heard him, too fascinated, too shaken by the closing of the Doors. He scrambled to his feet and took a few trembling steps back for a better view, finding it hard to believe what his eyes were seeing.
    The enormous stone wall to the right of them seemed to defy every known law of physics as it slid along the ground, throwing sparks and dust as it moved, rock against rock. The crunching sound rattled his bones. Thomas realized that only
that
wall was moving, heading for its neighbor to the left, ready to seal shut with its protruding rods slipping into the drilled holes across from it. He looked around at the other openings. It felt like his head was spinning faster than his body, and his stomach flipped over with the dizziness. On all four sides of the Glade, only the right walls were moving, toward the left, closing the gap of the Doors.
    Impossible
, he thought.
How can they
do
that?
He fought the urge to run out there, slip past the moving slabs of rock before they shut, flee the Glade. Common sense won out—the maze held even more unknowns than his situation inside.
    He tried to picture in his mind how the structure of it all worked. Massive stone walls, hundreds of feet high, moving like sliding glass doors—an image from his past life that flashed through his thoughts. He tried to grasp the memory, hold on to it, complete the picture withfaces, names, a place, but it faded into obscurity. A pang of sadness pricked through his other swirling emotions.
    He watched as the right wall reached the end of its journey, its connecting rods finding their mark and entering without a glitch. An echoing boom rumbled across the Glade as all four Doors sealed shut for the night. Thomas felt one final moment of trepidation, a quick slice of fear through his body, and then it vanished.
    A surprising sense of calm eased his nerves; he let out a long sigh of relief. “Wow,” he said, feeling dumb at such a monumental understatement.
    “Ain’t nothin’, as Alby would say,” Chuck murmured. “You kind of get used to it after a while.”
    Thomas looked around one more time, the
feel
of the place completely different now that all the walls were solid with no way out. He tried to