Five A.M.
“March!”
That was Captain Clone. Her real name was Cloen, but everyone called her Clone behind her back. This is because she looked like all the other female enforcers in the Block - hard jaw, fierce look, hair pulled back into a bun so tight you’d be amazed it didn’t take all the circulation out of her face. Maybe it did, because her monotone expression never changed.
I was jabbed in the knee, a reminder to keep up the pace, and kept in formation. This was Disciplinary Military Courses. Basically, it was a class for all of us to follow orders. Like all of our other classes. This one required us following patterns according to the blows of the whistle, always running, always in step and in sync.
Pretty soon I realized that I wasn’t out of formation, but the person who kept jabbing my knee was Carra Lorner. She’s got flowing blonde hair, a long and enviously stunning figure, and a pair of blue gemstone eyes embedded into her model-worthy face. She hated me. And now, after all we’d been through, I hated her, so the relationship was mutual. Unfortunately, we still had to share a cell that was about the size of a shoebox. A long nail of hers reached to dig into my side once Clone had her back to some others again.
Then it was time for the punishment. Basically, they pulled out anybody with the worst lag; no excuses. Pretty soon I was hearing the normal numbers be called. “90395!” A 9-year-old girl with a consistently bad cough was pulled from the pack. “84-308!” A boy about seventeen who had somehow managed to stay overweight after the five months we’d been there on minimum portions came forward. Then I heard it. “28-90137!” That was me. My lungs were clouded and deflated. My breath gone. Of course I was called. I’m always called. It always made me remember my mom saying, “Oh, asthma’s not the worst thing to happen to you. It could be so much worse.” She hadn’t known that any of this would happen though, had she? It was moments like that I missed breathing. And didn’t even want to think about missing my parents.
I went to the center along with the other stragglers. “Kneel,” Clone ordered. I knew the drill. This happened on a near-daily basis, all depending the day’s schedule. Other numbers were called out, and around me were the rest of us hopeless souls. Out came the henchmen, as we called them, all big overgrown versions of men, each with a whip in his meaty hand. I felt the footsteps on the floor as one stood behind me, the smell of blood emanating from his clothes, meat from his breath. Closing my eyes, I flinched as Clone said, “Now.”
There’s some sort of charge that runs through you when you’re struck. Maybe it’s a feeling of pain, or maybe of fight. Either way, it practically overcomes you. The first time I’d been punished, I’d screamed and shrieked and cried until I’d slipped into unconsciousness. The sounds of the others were even worse than my own cries. Now I’d learned to turn everything out, but it’s not like it stops hurting. It opened up the previous welts on my back also; the wet feeling of blood was dripping down my back with mingled sweat.
Then, as usual, I fainted.
I woke up in the usual place. Oh, the good old medic ward. Isn’t that a laugh? They hurt us, heal us, and hurt us again. Killing us would be just too easy, wouldn’t it? But until they forced me back out, at least I’d get to spend some time in a nice, sheeted bed. There was a bad taste in my mouth that was the typical medication. Giving pain-killers must’ve been banned, because no matter how bad it hurt nobody’s was given anything. Even in surgery they used bare minimum anesthetic. I rolled off my stinging back to lie on my stomach, when I noticed the person in the bed beside mine.
A stranger? No way.
We are Block 13. There are dozens of blocks. The lower the number, the worse the conditions. Anyone under eighteen years old who's not supporting the Parygium Order came here to be “corrected.” When your eighteenth birthday comes around, you get the decision - support the army, or die. That is, if they don’t kill you instantaneously, like they’ll do to me. It depends on a lot of factors, but your history in the Block is the bulk of what decides your fate. I’ll admit, I haven’t been good. I’m ready to die. My family’s dead. My friends most likely are, too. My guess is that the stranger on the bed beside mine must’ve done something worse, so that he’d been moved down a block, or up as a reward for good behavior. But there was always a grading point for that when they moved people around. Why would they move him out of the blue like that?
He looked unconscious; there was a big purple bump on his head, and like everybody else he was scratched up, but he was definitely alive. You learn to recognize the dead after so long. I sat up and leaned over, scanning him like he was something new entirely. He had a mottle of red and brown hair that fell over his forehead longer than the rest of his hair, the way my little brother’s had - although he was older than my brother, probably even older than me. My heart softened a little as I thought of my little brother McCall. Where was he? My only hope was that he was in a safer block than this one, but I knew the chances that he was okay were slim. I remembered watching the flames swallow up the world around us, coming closer and closer, then from the embers seeing the soldiers, breaking through the only door, taking him from my arms, then taking me…and had I done right when I told him not to fight it?
I pulled away from the stranger and sat back on my own bed. There were footsteps coming from the next room, and I buried myself into the blankets and stayed motionless. By the sounds of the footfalls, there were probably four or five people stopping at the end of the newbie’s bed.
The first voice I recognized. It was Chairman Mercen, the Block manager. He’s the definition of a human snake - icy eyes, pale skin, and slicked-back silver hair that was the only thing that distinguished him as sixty rather than forty. His ambition, like all the other Block Chairmen, was to climb the ladder until reaching Block 1, where horrors almost unimaginable awaited the most rebellious. “Where’d you find him?” he asked in his severing hiss.
“Over by Greenvale. Tiny little town in Thritrova.” That was one of the medics.
“Thritrova?” Mercen said in surprise. “Huh. Who’d have figured? A runt like this from a place like that, weaseling away from the entire army.”
A nurse with a chirpy voice replied, “Do you want us to kill him, sir?”
“Kill him? No, wouldn’t dream of it. Not with the information he could hold,” Mercen decided.
A man with a curious accent added, “Doubt it. His survival’s purely luck. Do we add him to the block?”
“But telling the others that someone’s made it past our soldiers…that we’re not so unbeatable…that someone has escaped...” a woman’s sensual voice rang in.
Peering through the sheets tentatively, I say Mercen brush back the boy’s hair almost exactly as I had; his look was more scrutinizing than mine, though. Deliberating. Finally, his verdict came: “Not much to look at. Bruised. Beaten up. Pretty scrawny too, eh? If this was the one to bring up a revolution, I’d eat my own heart. Like I’ve already said, he’s nothing but a scrawny little brat who somehow managed to slink into the shadows while we worried about more important things. Keeping him here to be brutalized with the others will just show that we aren’t afraid. As soon as his eyes are open, he’s assigned a cell. I’ll make sure his arrival’s well-explained.”
There was a consent of “yes sirs” and “have it your ways,” and all but the chirpy-voiced nurse left. She proceeded to pour something into his mouth, set a timer, and was gone. After a while I sat up and grabbed the ticking alarm. It was set for four hours. I slept, and that was what I woke up to.
The boy woke up too. Clearly expecting it, two bulky henchmen and Chairman Mercen were standing around his bed. The boy’s eyes became wide, revealing his deep brown irises painted with shock and confusion, and just before he sprung to his feet he was grabbed by the mouth, arms and chest. It was just the way it had happened to me. Before I could stop myself, I screamed, “HEY!”
All eyes whirred towards me, the large brown eyes of the boy, the icy hazel ones of Mercen, the multiple pairs of henchmen eyes that were small on their beefy heads. I don’t know where this sudden ounce of courage came from, because I’m as much of a self-fearing coward as any other kid in the Block, but I said unwavering, “Let him go.”
There was a chorus of gruff laughter from the henchmen and a look of irritation on Mercen’s face. “One of you can handle her, I assume.”
One man did; he pulled a large brown sack from the pouch strapped to his back, and before I knew it it’d been pulled over my head, slamming it and me into a wall, and then welcomed dreary unconsciousness once again.
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