by Noah Porter
We go into a small, white room with an opening nearby. She taps a few more buttons on a computer nearby, and my bed goes into the opening, leaving only my head outside.
A few more buttons, and I feel a chill go through all the part of my body that’s inside the strange opening.
Another button, and there’s sudden pressure over parts of my body. Twyla presses one final button and there are giant pricks being opened all over my body. They feel like sword wounds happening all over me simultaneously, but the wounds are much deeper than they should be if they were from a sword.
Twyla bends over me a second later, and as more and more pricks come and target even more parts of me, a blackness spreads across my vision until I don’t see anything.
Chapter 10
Darkness. Belts all over me from my neck down. Confusion. Anger. Thousands of meaningless emotions and feelings are in my brain. They’re flooding it, so quickly I can’t count them.
I open my eyes and find out I can see. I’m in a forest, with fires all around me and bombs exploding. A clock is ticking. Some strange voice tells me to find the solution.
My brain overloads and a raw, pulsating energy is frantically racing through my head.
I spot a bomb and, when my eyes begin to follow its descent, it explodes in midair and doesn’t harm the target it had been hurled at.
This goes on for minutes, hours, and with each bomb that explodes in midair, the energy pent up in my head slowly decreases.
Suddenly, the hallucination I just had seems worthless, as the scene changes. But it seems more real, less like a dream than the other had.
I’m standing back on the fields of Marlyn, but there are no bodies and the fields look like they did before the war and natural disasters hit. All of a sudden, I see a figure standing far away. It’s still recognizable as Mariella, but her shoulders sag as she walks and, all of a sudden, she collapses. Her brother, Matthew, coming out from a house nearby, gives a shout of shock and runs to her side. I follow suit, but when he picks her up and I try to help him, my hands go right through her body.
Mariella’s eyelids are fluttering erratically and she’s turned as pale as a corpse. Matthew rushes her to a car, and I can only watch as the car drives away with her in it. The scene changes, and I’m standing in a hospital by Mariella’s side. Although signs of the illness she appears to have had before are gone, her eyes are lacking a certain something and she doesn’t respond when Matthew calls her name. He leaves with racking sobs I’ve never seen him have before.
Again, the scene changes, and a doctor stands before him.
“She’s infected with the strain of DEK,” says the doctor. “You need to leave before you’re infected too.”
“And what will happen to her? You’re all evacuating because of the hurricanes due to hit here! She’ll die with no one here to protect her!”
“That’s a risk you’ll have to take. Unless you’d rather become a zombie too?”
Matthew looks broken and tormented inside. “I’ll do whatever I need to in order to save my sister’s life,” he says stubbornly.
“I wash my hands of the matter,” says the doctor, as he leaves quickly.
Matthew bends over Mariella, asking her motionless form, “What do I do?”
Yet again, the scene changes, and Matthew’s being forced into a truck.
“Mariella!” he screams. “I would never leave you! I love you, Mariella!”
Then the men who forced him into it shut the door, and the last thing I saw was the haunted look in his eyes, the look of prey that’s been cornered.
The scene changes. A democracy is going to seed as people argue without cause, without reason. They’re just bickering; in the meantime, the country that once was strong turns to rubble and ruins. Soon only memories will remain of it.
The voice tells me to fix the problem. Again, my brain overloads with possible solutions, until only one choice appears to be the right one in my mind. Before I can execute my plan, the scene changes again.
A crying child in a building, while a firefight goes around all her. What to do.. what to do…I gently lift her to her feet, look into her solemn eyes and tell her we have to run. I begin sprinting faster than should be possible with her on my back.
Yet again, the scene changes. Someone’s strapped to a bomb, and with each ticking second that goes by, a second of their life is gone. I grab something to cut the bomb off the person, and wordlessly tell the person to run once I have it in my hand. There’s no escape for me, no one to cut the bomb off me.
It explodes in my hand and all goes white. Yet the scene’s not ended; instead, nothing’s playing in my head but voices from far away. One is the one telling me to find the solution; the other is an unknown voice.
“Remarkable selflessness.”
“No sign of the bad side effects.”
“Superhuman.”
“Same as the other ones.”
The voices all jumble together in my head, and when I try to wake up, I do and am, for once, completely aware of what is happening. Twyla is standing next to me with a triumphant look on her face. Two unknown nurses are next to her.
“You should be able to hear me same as usual, Sarah,” says Twyla.
My first instinct is to punch her until her face is bleeding, but I keep my emotions held up in my mind. “Of course I can hear you.”
She says smoothly, “Good.”
The belts that I remember restraining me release me and I’m almost completely out of the hole I remember going into. When I glance down at myself, I gasp. Small, green circles are covering my whole body. Scars from.. from what?
She laughs as she looks at the scars, the scars that run deep in my body like gashes the length of a broadsword were there.
“We needed testing objects. You were perfect. DEK341 is finally a success. There are superhumans in the world.”
I feel a sense of revulsion as I feel the scars covering me.
“This is a hallucination. I’ve just gone mad,” I say to myself.
She laughs again. “No, although all those scenarios you were in were induced hallucinations. This, however, is real life.” She proudly smiles at me.
“You turned me into a superhuman with those needles. Without my consent. And you forced me into those fake scenarios.”
The words flow smoothly, and the built up anger inside me demands release. Then I remember the dream involving Mariella, and say with gritted teeth, “Was the dream with my friend Mariella just to torment me?”
Twyla laughs again. “What dream? You must’ve actually gone to sleep.”
I’m completely released from the hole. I stand up fully, and she smiles at me as you would at a pet or a completed project you’ve worked on for ages. I realize that’s what she views me as; just a completed project to do her bidding. I guess what she doesn’t expect is for me to slap her full across the jawbone.
“You monster,” I spit. “You just wanted a test gerbil.”
She flies across the room like a rag doll, losing her composure for a split second before going right back to smiling. As she gets up and massages her jaw, she says venomously, “Of course we needed a test subject! You think we would subject ourselves to this treatment and risk getting injured ourselves, turning into zombies? Imagine how pleased we were when we got not only one test object but four, healthy and having survived most of the apocalypse so far! A male and three females.. all superhuman.”
She’s lost in rapture when I begin to walk out of the room.
“You can’t go! You’ve got to decimate the other country! The war never should’ve ended. Now it will end with Murlyn victorious!”
I swivel on my heels.
“You wanted me to destroy for the sake of a war? There are children dying and cities collapsing. This is worse than that scene you put me in with the world falling apart! Instead of arguing about what to do to save your country, you’re only interested in winning the war! You think that’s going to save the world?
No! It’ll create MORE death and destruction!”
She looks shocked. “You’re the best test subject though! You can’t leave, it’s not in your programming!”
I seethe with rage, and get up in her face. She flinches as I reply.
“My programming? You think I’m some sort of robot that will listen to everything you say? Listen up; I’m no toy for any child to play with. I’m a human being with emotions and, well, a soul! You, you have turned into less than a human being; your blindness has turned you into a machine to destroy and kill!”
I walk out and find Ben, Lily, and Aria all standing there, and by their grim expressions, I assume they’ve had similar situations. Together, we walk to the nearest exit, rummage through a container until we find parachutes, and jump after preparing the parachutes. What we’re jumping into, we have no clue.
We could be jumping into a forest, or an ocean, or the mountains.
I guess you could say that, for now, we’re just jumping into the future, wherever it leads us.
Second Act
Prologue
If you’ve read my first journal, you probably already know that I survived the apocalypse so far and I escaped an evil place called Tieryl City. Does that name ring a bell? Yeah, that’s where they turned me and my best friends into superhumans without our consent, using a program known as DEK341.
That probably sounds okay to you, minus the whole ‘without our consent’ thing, but it wasn’t. The last time they tried to make superhumans, it went wrong and the ‘superhumans’ turned into zombies, creating the apocalypse. Some pretty deep stuff, and it’s really upsetting, to say the least, that they turned us into superhumans knowing the risk of us turning into full zombies.
I guess that pretty much catches you up, other than two things. One, we were the ones who originally found the plans to DEK341. The people on Tieryl City claimed them, so we’ve lost them for good (at least, for now. We think).
We also lost a member of our group along the way, and now have jumped down into a jungle- literally- after escaping Tieryl. It still hurts that I lost both my best friend, who had caught the plague to turn her into a zombie; I also lost Maria, a young girl who died because we couldn’t save her from a bombardment of zombies in time.
Anyways, I need you to be a little bit patient with me as I catch you up with everything that’s happened since that day we escaped Tieryl.
What are we waiting for? Let’s get started.
Chapter 1
I feel the wind blowing back my hair from my face as my friends and I parachute down from Tieryl. Below us, the only thing we can see is a mass of varying shades of green. It looks like extremely weird grass until we get up closer, and we realize we’re in the jungle.
Pretty cool, except for the fact we’ve got to parachute through the foliage and land on a safe part of the grass below, all while managing to not get eaten by some strange animal that would sooner kill us than look at us to make sure we were edible.
The jungle is relatively foreign to most of us. I only even know its name and the sort of creatures that live in it because of a diorama my teacher made me make in 6th grade. Not like that diorama is going to help me with what I’ll need to do here. ‘Jungle Surviving 101’ or ‘Surviving in a Jungle for Dummies’ would probably be more useful than my diorama and the book she made me read about the jungle.
When we begin to near the absurdly gigantic trees, I yell into the wind, “Go through foliage or try to land on a thick tree?”
Aria tries to yell something back at me but her words are snatched away by the wind.
Instead, Ben screams, “Go through the foliage if you think you can, if not, better land at top than crash land at bottom.”
We all nod (or do as best as we can to nod). Of course, everyone other than me decide that hey, it’s probably safer to land at the top. So I’m just pin wheeling through midair alone, probably alerting every predator in the area where I am by my grunts of pain when I hit multiple, thick tree branches as I free fall downwards, plummeting like a stone.
Maybe a normal-sized tree branch wouldn’t do me any damage with the whole super-human thingy, but these monsters are more than thick. That word doesn’t even do them justice. Each tree branch is about the size that a young sapling would be at home.
Obviously, superhuman does not equal invincible to sapling-sized tree branch attacks.
I (very unfortunately) disregard the whole ‘don’t crash land at bottom’ thing Ben said, face planting on the ground with a big grunt. I successfully have the wind knocked out of me and, in the process, twist the parachute around my body.
And of course, my head hits a rock, causing me to squeeze my eyes shut in pain. But that doesn’t stop me from noticing that there’s an eerie quiet all around me, which is really strange for a jungle. Usually, there’d be some form of wildlife within earshot, unless there’s a predator lurking, in which case there’d be an eerie quie- uh-oh.
I slowly open my eyes, and when I see nothing around me, I visibly relax. Before I can blink an eye, I’m surrounded by tigers, and I eye one so large and brawny that it must be the leader. I’m surprised when, instead, a somewhat small but still strong and agile-looking female tiger steps forward.
Huh, I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked. I mean, look at Lily and Aria and me. We’re sort of small but size doesn’t mean anything.
The female tiger steps forward another two steps, and the other tigers follow suit. My heart is beating rapidly as they close the circle more and more, until the female leader is almost right next to me
.
She stares into my eyes aggressively, and I can tell I’m only a single move away from becoming tiger-meat.
“Calm, Cilla,” says a voice from behind one of the trees, and the tiger growls at me but doesn't attack, instead staring me down.
I’m about to ask what the heck is happening when a net closes on me from above. Out comes a girl about my age, but her brown eyes are hostile as she looks into mine. They soften a bit when she sees how ensnared I am in both the parachute and the net.
“Sorry. Security issues in the past have forced us to always take precautions,” she says. “Kilo, bring her and the other prisoners you captured to the Ricomuz.”
A brawny man who I just now noticed comes out of the shadows of a tree, nodding and trying to force his way through the circle of tigers.
One playfully snaps at his fingers, but he snaps his fingers out of the way just in time. He simply says “Miss Arcya”, standing there but somehow not looking utterly terrified (as many people would be in his place).
“Cilla,” says Arcya, semi-sternly but also a bit reproachfully.
The female tiger growls at her sort of playfully, but there’s also a firmness in her growl.
Did I just say that?
Arcya repeats “Cilla” (must be the name of the tigers’ head honcho), then lapses into some strange growling I can’t understand at all. Cilla growls back at her, but it seems more like a conversation than an actual threatening growl.
Arcya growls back at Cilla again and the tigers do back away, although they’re reluctant. They begin fading away into the greenery of the jungle so quickly that I understand how I hadn’t seen them before they surrounded me.
Now that’s skill.
Next thing I know, I’m slung over the back of Kilo and, being reasonable enough to know I can’t do anything and probably shouldn’t try if these people have TIGERS at their command, promptly fall asleep.
Chapter 2
When I wake up, my head’s spinning and I realize I’m incredibly parched. Oh, and did I mention that I’m being secured by metal to the walls of whatever building- she called it “Rico”-something – that Kilo carried me to? And I’m blindfolded. (Maybe they’re not total barbarians. They have metal, somehow. They must have to venture out of the jungle to a mine way out there, where the plague must not have affected, because these bonds look new).
I’m only awake for a few minutes whe
n I hear voices outside the building, arguing as quietly as they can but not quite reaching the level they must’ve wanted, because I can hear them through the walls. (Yay for superhuman hearing. Note the sarcasm, though yes, the ability is very occasionally useful).
“You have to,” says a man.
“No.”
“You will do it and play your role well. Your grandfather would approve.”
“No.”
“You would do well to listen to your elders, impetuous one. I could force you to do it.”
The other voice shakes a bit, and I’m shocked when I realize that it’s Arcya talking to the mysterious man.
“You wouldn’t dare do that.”