by Martha Adele
I listen to the bullets raining on the path behind me as I push through the woods. Every time I look back, I see the dirt behind me bouncing up, flying high, and raining around me, just like the bullets.
Who is shooting at me? Why are they shooting at me?
My flustered thoughts are interrupted as my foot gets caught on an aboveground tree root. My whole body is flung forward as I throw my arms out to catch myself, only the ground isn’t there.
My plummeting body crashes against the grassy bowl of the large sinkhole, causing the pain in my arm to radiate to the rest of my body as I tumble. I lie for less than a moment on the soft basin before I hop up and continue to run. The adrenaline pumping through my body allows me to overlook the pain as I flee from the open fire. I run for at least a full ten minutes away from the wall before I realize the gunshots have stopped.
As my pace slows, I look back at my arm to find that its gashes have begun to scab over. My arm is cloaked in so much dried blood that it looks like I had someone cover my arm in maroon paint. I slide my right hand over to meet the torn skin, feeling as if the wounds are being retorn in the spot where my fingers make contact. I jerk my hand back and glance around the woods to find that I still have no idea where I am.
The towering trees look like the ones that surrounded me when I first awoke. The trees surrounding me now have thickets engulfing their bases. I know that I am not back where I started physically, but mentally, I am.
I am back to wondering where I am and what is going on.
I continue wandering around hopelessly in the woods for what feels like hours when I am interrupted by another menacing growl. The growl of hunger.
My first thought is Food. I need food.
My second thought is Am I going to starve?
All I can think about from this point on is food. I wander around, looking for berries or a squirrel or something that is familiar for me to eat. I am absolutely not going to eat something that I am not 100 percent familiar with. Dad used to always warn me about eating unknown foods. He forced the idea that “there is a good chance that it could be dangerous” in a way that I can’t help but abide by it. He was very serious about following this rule because his baby brother died at a young age due to the natural curiosity of what birch berries taste like.
Birch berries are small poisonous bright-green berries that grow in bunches on vines. We often planted them in hanging planters and hung them up around gardens or places where we didn’t want birds. Due to their poisonous nature, birch berries are a natural bird repellent. I guess when the birds realized that the berries were poisonous, they decided that it was best to stay away from them altogether, which can help those who know how to use them.
The whole time that I wander around the woods, I never once see any sign of game or fruit, which puts a damper on my hunter-gatherer spirit. As the sun begins to set, the temperature begins to fall, and any hope I have left begins to flee. I can’t imagine how I am to survive the night without any food, water, fire, or shelter.
But I push myself to keep walking.
After hours of running and roaming, a glimmer of light catches my eye through the bunches of trees. For a moment, I feel another hint of fear, not knowing what the light is coming from. Could it be another animal? Another weapon?
The thoughts fly through my mind as I quickly duck behind a tree. The longer I listen, the more I hear the soft and smooth crackling noise that belongs to one of man’s greatest utilized tools. The fear that originally strikes me when I see the fire quickly flees and is replaced by relief.
I connect the dots and speed off toward the light. I see, through the trees and bushes, a boy sitting on the ground with his legs crossed as he uses a stick to stoke the fire in front of him.
CHAPTER TWO
Sam
The leaves around me crunch as I spread the bushes apart. The dark-skinned boy quickly turns his head in my direction. He hops up from his grassy seat and aims a staff-like stick that he had been poking the fire with at me. His eyes narrow at me as the smoke rises from the orange-glowing tip of his staff.
His deep voice booms through the air, straight into my ears. “Who’s there?”
With my hands raised in surrender, I emerge from my hiding place behind the bushes to what seems like the only open area in the whole forest. “Sam. My name’s Sam.” His defensive stance lessens none, and his staff remains pointed at me. I continue, “Samuel Beckman.”
The boy continues to hold his weapon toward me. Our eyes meet as the fire beside him flickers light on and off his face. His eyes scan me up and down as he inches toward me. “What are you doing here?” Before I have the chance to respond, he shakes his weapon at me and screams, “Answer me!”
I flinch, but my hands stay in the air as I answer, “I … I don’t know!” The boy cocks his head as if he is confused. He loosens and readjusts his grip on his weapon as I repeat, “I don’t know.”
The boy lowers the stick as he straightens his posture. He closes his eyes and twitches his head and neck as if he is fighting back an urge.
I stay in this one position and continue, “I was hoping you would know.”
He squints at me. The silence between us seems to make the crackling of the fire grow louder. The tension slowly eases, and I lower my arms. He stares at me for a moment as we listen to the wood shift in the fire.
Feeling safer than I did just moments ago, I ask him, “What about you?”
He takes a deep breath and continues looking at me.
I step forward. “What are you doing out here?”
His grip on the stick tightens as I move closer, so I stop. Still holding my gaze, he sighs. “I don’t know either.” He slowly backs up to the fire, keeping his tight grip on the stick. I follow him to the fire as neither of us let up on our slightly standoffish position. He motions with the stick to my blood-covered arm. “What happened?”
I glance down to my wounds and then back at him.
“Briars,” I answer.
He stays silent and raises one eyebrow to me.
I continue, “I was running from a … a thing. It was like a big cat …” I look around to see if I can find the wall, but the plants surrounding us cover it all. “And bullets.” I pause and think back to the hailstorm of bullets. “I was running from bullets, hundreds of them. I just kept running until the firing stopped.”
The boy’s large and fit body seems even more muscular the closer he gets to the fire. He turns away from me and sits back in front of the flames, continuing to poke the fire with the stick. He squeezes his eyes closed and tilts his head, seemingly freezing in a state of pure will as he tries to speak. “Bullets and a cat, huh?” The boy chuckles as he pats the ground beside him. He continues, staring straight into the fire, “I guess I have been lucky enough to not have been spotted yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a boy here before me.” He sniffles and wipes his nose with his knuckles. “His name was Carl. Carl Montey. He died two days ago after a bear-looking animal invaded his berry spot.”
I raise one eyebrow to him, though he still doesn’t look back at me. His eyes twitch as he twists the stick in the fire. I have so many questions I want to ask, but I have no idea where to start.
The boy blankly stares into the fire, forcing out the words, “Carl showed up here the same way I did.” He pauses and looks at me as if I am supposed to understand what he means.
The first question that came to my mind pops out of my mouth. “How?”
“Draft day came. He told his family goodbye, got in the officials’ car, and woke up in the woods.”
I break a twig that had been lying beside me, and the boy flinches. After a few more moments of silence, I throw it into the fire and ask him, “What state are you from?”
My feet twitch. I look down to them as if they somehow decided to do that
on their own. I tighten my legs and make sure my feet are still as the boy answers, “Bloot. Carl was from Hout.”
I nod. “I’m from Bouw.”
“Ah,” he chuckles, “so you’re a Koe.”
I turn back to him and smirk. “Yeah. And you’re a Bloot.”
“Sure.” He sighs. “But you can call me Charlie.” He extends his hand to me, and I return the gesture. Our hands shake for a split moment before we break apart and continue to stare into the fire.
Bloot is the smallest state in Bestellen, but it happens to be next to my state. I had been to only one of Bouw’s borders, and it is the one that separates us from Meer. The border wall is a thirty-foot electrified barbwire fence. It runs from as far as you can see from one side to the other. The fences are always on the very ends of the states. The buildings and houses, along with any other things that our citizens would need to go to or use, always lie at least a mile inland from the fence; so when you are standing by it, you cannot see anything from either state because of all of the hills around. I guess that the people who helped build Bestellen designed the floor plan for the states for security purposes.
I have always wanted to know more about the other states, but I figure that it is not the right time to ask. I continue snapping twigs from around me. “What do you think happened?” I throw one half of the stick into the fire and begin peeling the other. “Do you think this is a test? To, you know, train us for the military?”
Charlie leans back and puts all of his weight on his arms, finally releasing his grip on the staff. “I had this same conversation with Carl. He thinks that this is some sort of sick training regime.”
I stop peeling the stick and toss what’s left into the fire. “Well, what do you think?”
He sighs. “I don’t know what I think. It could be training. It could be a way to reduce our population.”
“Reduce …” I pause, allowing his guess to sink in. “The population? As in just throwing us away?”
Charlie nods his head and squeezes his eyes closed. “Yes. There were rumors in Bloot.” He continues bobbing his head up and down. “There were a lot of rumors in Bloot. This population one was a far shot, but apparently, it could be true.” Charlie turns to me and stares for a moment. He turns back to the fire and squeezes his eyes closed again. “They say that in order to keep Bestellen in a state of ‘prosperity,’ they get rid of extra people in order to have more to give to the rich.”
I have never bought into any of the conspiracy theories about Meir, and I am not about to start now.
The only theories I ever indulged in were stories that my grandfather used to tell me. He used to speak of a people that called themselves the Diligent. Like Meir, they believed in low spending and that everyone is equal. The only real difference I could ever tell between Meir’s reign and the Diligent’s ideals was the Diligent believed in something called “druppelen.”
Apparently, druppelen is the idea where if you work, you reap the benefits of that work without sharing with anyone else. Some people become rich, while other people become poor. Our teachers in school always taught us that if everybody works hard, then everybody will get paid equally so that nobody falls behind. That way, everybody is equally rich.
Grandpa used to have a small tattoo on his back of two hammers crossed over each other inside of a circle, which was the Diligent’s seal. He was a huge sympathizer. For some reason, he always told me not to ever mention his beliefs to anyone. Grandma and Mom always backed him up in that command. Mom always told me that “tattlers have never prospered, and they never will, so mind your own.” Meanwhile, Grandma would stick to the cliché “snitches get stitches.”
I still don’t know why Grandpa was so ashamed of his beliefs, but I always respected his request to not tell anyone about his fairy tales. I did ask my teacher about druppelen once, but she just pushed it off and told the class that it wasn’t a real thing. That was one of the very few moments I had ever really questioned my teacher, but my curiosity didn’t last. I couldn’t ask her about it because I was afraid that she’d ask me where I got such ideas.
The last day that I saw Grandma and Grandpa was the day that some Stellen officials came by to take them to pensioen. Pensioen is the dream retirement plan that most people only hear rumors about, much less get taken to. Grandpa was the winner of the randomly chosen early retirement reward for Bouw, and Grandma got to go with him. Until then, I had never met anyone who had ever won. They were taken to his reward the same way those who are drafted are taken, by an official’s van. The officials come to your house, give you a ride to your next location, and there you begin the rest of your life.
Or at least that is what I hope is happening. I hope that I am sitting by a fire in the middle of the woods with a Bloot named Charlie because this is all part of me serving my country, part of my training.
That is all I can hope for.
Charlie and I sit in front of the fire. After a few moments of silence, I ask him about his home. I ask him if his family worked in the textile mills and how life was in Bloot. Charlie continues to stare into the fire. I consider mentioning all of the rumors that I had heard about Bloot, about them being poor and neglected by Bestellen.
Instead, I stay quiet and wait for him to answer.
His grip tightens on the stick that he was threatening me with earlier. I can feel the tension between us thickening the longer the silence floats between us. Staring at the side of his face as the light of the fire flickers off it, I notice that his grip on the staff tightens. Very calmly and quietly, he asks me, never taking his eyes off the fire in front of him, “Why do you care?”
“Well, um … I was just curious. I figure that if we are going to be together through this training thing, we should know more than each other’s names.” I chuckle, trying to ease the tension.
It doesn’t work.
Charlie twists the stick in the fire and shifts some of the embers. “Why would you need to know anything other than my name? I already told you where I am from.”
The tension between us thickens even more, causing the air to feel more defensive than before. “I didn’t mean to pry.” The end of his stick breaks off into the fire and seems to make Charlie even more tense. I continue to try to ease our situation but stutter through the statement. “You don’t have to answer anything if you don’t want to. No worries.”
Charlie stands, yanking out his staff from the fire. He swings it back at me, inches from hitting my face in the process. I feel the heat spread over my face as he holds his now-flaming weapon at me. I lean back and put all my weight on my hands as I sit at stickpoint, trying to distance myself from the flames.
His voice shakily makes its way to my ears as the brightly colored fire makes everything around me appear pitch-black. “Why, you were just trying to convince me …” Charlie shakes the stick in my face and starts scratching his head as he very obviously twitches. “You tried to convince me that this is all part of some Stellen training regimen!” He pulls back his stick and swings it around. “When obviously, it isn’t! This … this is all some big way to … to control population!” He swings his stick back to me, burning the tip of my nose and causing me to scurry back to keep myself from getting seriously burned.
“Charlie.” I put one of my hands up to try to show him that he has no reason to hurt me and that I won’t hurt him. “I don’t know what you are talking about!”
“Oh yeah? Of course!” Charlie raises his voice, producing a great echo through the woods. “The boy from Bouw doesn’t know what I am talking about!” He turns around and screams to the trees like they are listening to him. “This rich boy from Bouw doesn’t believe that his precious Bestellen would do such a thing!”
“Charlie, I—”
“Well, guess what, you privileged prick! Bestellen isn’t the best place in the world. There are killings every day in Bloot. Officials would br
eak into any house they deemed ‘unfaithful’ and kill anyone they believed was a threat to their delicate little society! I guess you never had that issue in your state.”
I stand, avoiding his flaming weapon, and begin screaming back, “My state? Rich kid? I don’t think so! We are the scrappy little farmers. I am sorry if you feel like you had such a bad life in Bloot, but look around. Where has whining gotten you? Here, abandoned in the woods. Left to—”
“Ah!” Charlie swings his stick back to me and points it back at my face. I take a step back and brace for a fight. “So you admit it! We are abandoned!” Charlie’s eye twitches, along with his neck and head. “You! You are with them!”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You! You are all part of their plan! You are helping the officials! You are helping them kill me! And Carl! You probably killed Carl too!”
“Carl? Charlie! I don’t know what you are talking about!”
Our screams overlap each other as he accuses me of being the person who put him out here to die. I deny his accusations, causing him to only grow more infuriated. We stand by the fire yelling at each other for a good minute before I pull out a thick, long stick from the fire to defend myself. We both hold out our sticks and have them pointed at each other as our screams echo through the trees.
The darkness around us becomes more and more apparent to me as the creaking noises and the footsteps in the woods grow louder. Charlie takes notice just as I do. I shake my head, just as he does, and get back into my normal and rational state of mind. No more unnecessary screaming, but necessary preparation for the worst. The thudding footsteps of something smaller than the beast that chased me earlier in the day is growing louder, meaning the new animal is getting closer.
Charlie and I get back–to-back and aim our small and flaming sticks out to the woods surrounding us, only to be startled by a boy holding a stick just like ours, without the fire, running toward us while screaming what seemed to be a battle cry.