Disorder

by Martha Adele

  The new kid runs out of the group of trees from my right and swings his long stick around our open and treeless space. He grunts with every swing as he runs up to us. Charlie and I both point our sticks toward him and start screaming back. We both lunge forward and start going after the new boy but are interrupted when the kid starts shuffling backward and whining, “Hey! Hey! What are you doing?”

  Confused by the boy’s defensive response, both Charlie and I let up on our duel attack. The boy stops running and turns back to us. Charlie, still holding up his stick, shouts at him, “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What are you doing?” The boy pats off the ashy residue we left on his shirt and looks to Charlie and whispers, “I came here because you guys were screaming! I thought you were being attacked! I was just trying to help!”

  “What do you mean?” I scoff in a quiet tone. “Did you not see that there were no animals around when you came running out of the woods?”

  The kid drops his stick, still whispering, “Yeah, I did! But I had too much momentum to stop immediately, and the moment I started to stop, you both attacked me with your flaming weapons!”

  I nod to him as he adjusts his shirt. There is a long pause between the three of us as we wait for Charlie to lower his weapon. I nod and ask the new boy, “What’s your name?”

  He breaks his gaze from Charlie and looks over to me, still breathing heavily. “Logan. Logan Forge.” His breathing seems to have a slightly rhythmic state. It is almost as if he breathes in three times and then out three times.

  Ignoring his breathing patterns, I plainly respond, “Sam Beckman.” Logan and I fix our eyes on Charlie, who refuses to lower his weapon. “And this is Charlie,” I interject.

  Logan nods at me and then to Charlie. “Hey.”

  Charlie slowly lowers his flaming staff. “Hey.” His head jerks into a tilted position. His eyes squeeze closed once again as he struggles to regain normalcy.

  We have a short and small standoff to see who will move first.

  I decide to make the first move and head over to the fire. Logan follows without breaking eye contact with Charlie until Logan takes a seat beside me, and Charlie takes one across from us. I break the silence by asking the question that I know two out of three of us had to be wondering. “Logan, how long have you been out here?”

  Charlie shifts his gaze back to the fire in front of him and waits for the answer. Logan and I first watch Charlie to see if he is going to do anything, but we look back at each other after a moment. Logan answers, “Two days. I showed up yesterday afternoon and slept in a tree last night.”

  The crackling of the fire seems to be soothing Charlie, but not enough to keep his breathing steady. His nostrils flare the longer he listens to us talk, but I don’t care. “Was it the draft?” I ask Logan.

  He nods to me.

  I continue, “Same with Charlie and I. What state are you from?”

  Logan sighs. “Minje.” The smooth crackling of the fire seems to grow louder in the quiet of the night with only the rustling of the leaves to keep it company. “What about you?”

  “Bouw.” We both look to Charlie, who seems to be scowling at the fire. “Charlie is from Bloot.”

  Logan smiles. “Ah, a Koe and a Bloot, huh?”

  I smile back, but only for a moment. Logan’s comment seems to have set Charlie off.

  Charlie slowly stands up and pulls his stick back out of the fire. “A Bloot, huh?”

  Logan and I glance at each other as we stand to even the playing field.

  Logan holds his hands up and out in a similar way to Charlie that I did when I first met him. “Hey, you might want to lower your voice.”

  “Oh yeah?” Charlie shouts. “You want me to lower my voice? Am I embarrassing you?” He swings the stick around like he did earlier and is once again drawing in the air with the tip of the glowing stick. “Am I embarrassing you in front of your new friend, Sammy Boy? Or should I say, your coworker?”

  Logan glances over to me, looking for an answer. I clench my fists and buck up to Charlie. “Man, I told you, we are in the exact same situation you are in. We didn’t put you here!”

  “Shh, guys!” Logan loudly whispers. His head jerks around sporadically as he checks the woods. “Last time I got really loud, a pack of small rat-looking things came out of the woods and chased me up a tree.” Logan picks his staff up off the ground and continues looking around.

  “You, you …” Charlie continues to shake the stick at us both. “You both are working with the officials.” He backs away with his flaming weapon. “You are ganging up on me!” Charlie’s voice echoes through the trees in what sounds like a giant ring. It starts on my right and flies around me to my left and back to Charlie. He swings his head around and starts twitching his head and neck as his eyes flick in every direction possible. “There are more! There are more of you!”

  Logan steps forward with his hands still held up. “Shh! Charlie! Come on, man!”

  “No! Get away!” Charlie launches his staff at us, almost hitting me in the process. Before either Logan or I can do or say anything, Charlie takes off running in the opposite direction of us. It doesn’t take long for his dark-colored body, mixed with his brown scrubs, to get lost in the dark woods surrounding us.

  “What was that?” Logan whispers to me, now squeezing his eyes shut with every blink.

  I shake my head and look from him back to the direction that Charlie ran off in. “I don’t know. I wish I could tell you.”

  Logan and I sit down by the fire. I ask him if he had eaten anything since he had been put out here and if he has ran into anybody or any animals other than the pack of rats he had just mentioned. Logan tells me that he found a few berries when he was walking earlier but didn’t eat them because he didn’t know if they were safe to eat or not. “They didn’t look like birch berries, but I still didn’t want to take a chance.”

  Logan goes on to explain that he found a water hole that someone had dug before him earlier that day and that he had drunk a few cups. He also says that he killed off one of the rats by accident when he kicked it, but he didn’t eat it. Logan says that he “wasn’t hungry enough to eat a rodent.”

  We chuckle at the thought of starving to death and make jokes about what we would eat if it came to that point.

  “Rat kabobs, dirt stew, and so much more,” Logan chuckles.

  After discussing all of the wonderfully disgusting courses we could think of, I ask Logan what he thinks is happening. I explain that from the moment that I met Charlie, he seemed extremely paranoid and that he seemed to be dead set on believing that we were exiled because of “population control.” I fill Logan in on everything that Charlie said about his theories and everything about Carl. I then ask Logan if he thinks that this is training or something else.

  Logan shrugs. “I think that the whole ‘population control’ theory is plausible, but then again, so is the ‘training’ theory.”

  I scoff. “So in reality, you have nothing else to bring to the table.”

  He smirks. “Pretty much.”

  We sit by the fire and listen to the crackling for a while and think. I think about Mom. I think about Dad. I think about Grandpa, Meir, Charlie, Carl, and Logan. I glance over to him to see him lying back, propping his head up with his hands, and staring to the ceiling of leaves above us.

  The fire makes his skin look reddish in tint and his hair even darker than the darkness around us. He has all the same major features that people would use to describe me. Dark hair, white skin, and tall body; and yet he doesn’t seem as birdlike as I feel. His nose doesn’t seem to protrude from his face like mine does, and his body looks a lot more fit than mine. I feel like I am with my twin, but one that stole all the nourishment in the womb and left the crappy parts for me.

  My comparison between myself and Logan is interrupted by a
shriek from far out into the woods that shakes me to my core.

  I hop up and let out a whisper. “Charlie.” It is undeniably his scream.

  “They found him,” Logan whispers. The shouting sounds like it is about half a mile away, which feeds both my flight response and Logan’s. “Go!” Logan whispers as he picks up the staff Charlie had thrown at us.

  Our feet launch us away from the fire and through the forest, in the opposite direction of the horrid sound of Charlie being torn apart by whatever beast found him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Logan

  The low-hanging branches are easy for me to duck under and dodge but seem to be a challenge for Sam. I can hear him grunting and stopping every time I pass another branch.

  I slow down, only slightly, and turn to see him caught on a set of thorns.

  Running back to free him of the branches, I shout a hushed “Come on!”

  We pick up our pace, and I make sure to stay close to Sam to help him through the woods. The sound of Charlie’s screams ceased minutes ago, and the screeching and bellowing of what sounds like animals fighting over his body lessen the farther away Sam and I get.

  Other than the shrieks, the only sound I can hear is one I can feel in my head. My heavy heartbeat is quickening as it pounds in my ears and against the back of my head. The nearly blinding pain of the beat doesn’t stop me. What does stop me is Sam.

  He grunts behind me as he trips over an unearthed tree root and lands on his hands and knees.

  The thudding sound of his impact to the ground is muffled by the spongy grass-covered floors of the woods. I shuffle back and extend my hand to help him up. “Are you okay?” I ask.

  Remaining cautious, I continue to look around and make sure we are safe as he slowly rises to reveal dirt and grass on his pants. “Fine.” He wipes off the debris from his hands onto his shirt while trying to catch his breath. “Do we have to keep running?” Sam squints and looks around as he brushes off his shirt and knees. “Can’t we just hide?”

  What he is saying makes sense. At this rate, we don’t have very many calories to spare, but I still feel that waiting to be eaten by something bigger than us is not something that I want to do. I glance back to Sam, who is clearly in need of rest.

  “How about the tree?” I ask. Sam follows my pointed gesture to the tall and large tree behind me with thick low-hanging branches that would be very easy to climb.

  Sam finishes wiping the dirt off his hands and follows me over. “I guess so. As long as we can sit for a while.”

  Ducking under the leaves that are on the end of the branches, I make my way toward the trunk, which splits into two separate trunks at about ten feet up. The branches of this tree are arranged like some of the trees back in Minje, my state.

  Minje is mainly a mining and power province and has very few forests. Most of them were cut down for resources and replaced with power plants and wind turbines. The few forests and trees we do have are very small and are mainly by the wall. A few of my friends and I would sneak off whenever we could and go racing through the trees. The fact that it was considered illegal by certain officials made the task all the more fun. I guess all that “training” came in handy.

  I make it to the top of the tree in less than twenty seconds, while Sam struggles to climb behind.

  “Do you need help?” I whisper.

  Sam pulls himself up onto a branch like he weighs three tons. “No,” he moans back, “I got it.” After about two minutes, he makes it up to where I am and sits on an adjacent branch, out of breath.

  I sigh and lean back against one of the trunks of the tree. “How long do you think we will be out here?” Sam turns back to me and raises one eyebrow. I continue, “You know, if this is training.”

  The sounds of crickets’ night songs grow as I wait for his answer. Sam turns back and looks out to the walls of leaves that surround us. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think this is training?”

  He continues to stare outward without responding.

  “I don’t.” I think back to the sounds of Charlie being devoured and attacked by the unknown beasts. “At least not anymore.”

  When I first woke in the woods, I had no idea what was going on. I rose from the ground, feeling dizzy, and looked around to see that I was surrounded by trees. For a moment, I thought that I was out in the woods a few miles away from my house. I figured that I had fallen out of a tree or something and hit my head, but I slowly came to realize that none of the trees surrounding me looked like any of the trees I had ever seen before. They appeared to be much larger, much thicker, and had bark much rougher than the trees back home.

  A fuzzy feeling in the back of my skull became more apparent the longer I stood in that one spot. I started walking to see if the pain would go away, and the memories of what had happened came back to me in flashes—a flash of my grandpa waving goodbye to me, a flash of the inside of the Stellen officials’ van, and a flash of the small syringe one of the officers stuck into my arm. The more I tried to remember what happened, the more my head hurt. I decided to try to walk it off, just like Dad would have told me to.

  As I sit here in the tree, I listen to the surrounding sounds of nature and the soft snoring coming out of Sam next to me. I try to fall asleep but am stumped by constant scenes of my past flying through my brain. I think about Dad and how hard he tried to give me a good life. I think about how he tried to make up for the “lost love” ever since Mom died, and about two months ago, I lost him too.

  There was an incident in the mine where he was working, an explosion. I can still remember the sound of the large boom in the distance. Everyone shuffled out of their houses, classrooms, workshops, and any other indoor place they were at to find a large sum of smoke floating over the mountains on the horizon. Later that day, Governor Rome, my precinct’s leader and head of security, came onto the block’s show box and explained that due to a lack of focus and an incompetent worker that would not be named, mine number 1-9-4 had an explosion and crumbled. I can still hear his voice telling me that “there are no survivors” from the explosion.

  After Dad died, an official assigned me to live with Gramps, my dad’s dad. To me, Gramps looks just like my dad, just older. The top half of his back is always hunched over, causing the once-six-foot-three-inch man to be about five foot ten inches. He has the same head as my dad—just tanner, wrinklier, and balder. Gramps has hair only on the sides of his head, but he is in a constant state of denial. Instead of shaving it all off, like I tell him, he tries to grow out the sides and force an extreme comb-over.

  Bald or hairy, I love him. He took me in and stepped up when he was needed. He sacrificed being the happy-go-lucky grandparent who gets to spoil their grandkids to being a dad who has to discipline and teach his child. It definitely isn’t an easy transition, especially if your kid is me—Chump, as Gramps always calls me. He has always thought that I am too soft just because I have always taken the words of my mother to heart.

  One of the most memorable things my mother ever said to me was “Remember to debate, never argue—for arguing is you versus the other person, while debating is you and the other person versus the problem.” She lived by this motto.

  According to Dad, Mom was the nicest person you could have ever met. She always told me all about how beautiful the world could be if everyone accepted everyone else in spite of their flaws. She would go on and on about how wonderful it would be if instead of yelling at people when things weren’t going your way, you would hug them and spread the love and joy that should be filling humanity.

  Gramps, on the other hand, considers this compulsion a weakness. “The only people you should be hugging is your family … And only on special occasions!” He has always been a tough person who shows his love in different ways from others.

  His voice echoes through my head as I sit on this branch, staring out to the wa
ll of leaves surrounding us. Sam’s breathing begins to annoy me as I take notice of the lack of pattern.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  In. Out.

  In … out.

  In, out …

  No pattern. No rhythm. Only pure madness. His foot twitches against his breathing patterns, causing my unrest to exacerbate even more. I have never been bothered by this type of thing before, but at this moment, this is all I can think about.

  Not long after I try to shift my focus from Sam to the rustling of the leaves all around, I notice that my hands have found their way to each other and have begun to rub each one of my fingernails. From the top knuckle, running to the tip of my finger.

  First, I use my right thumb and rub my left thumbnail. One time, two times, three times. Then my left thumb does my right thumbnail. One time, two times, three times. The rest of my fingers follow. I loudly breathe in and out to try to drown out the sound of Sam’s nose whistle and establish some sort of peace.

  After sleeping a total of maybe two hours in the last two days, I drift into a painfully light sleep that seems to make me more tired than I was before. I wake for what feels like every five minutes and glance around to make sure nothing has found us, then drift back into my uncomfortable slumber.

  A bloodcurdling high-pitched scream pierces my ears and jolts me awake from my first stream of continuous sleep since my exile and almost knocks Sam off his branch. He gasps as he grasps the branches beside him for balance and turns to me to whisper, “What was that?”

  By the time that he finishes his question, I am already three branches below him.

  I have to go help whoever is being attacked.

  “Logan!” Sam scream-whispers as he hobbles down the tree. “What are you doing?”

  My feet meet the hard and mulch-like ground underneath the tree as I fix my grip on the staff I managed to keep with me throughout all of this. “We have to go help!” My feet launch me out from underneath the guard of the tree’s natural barrier and forward through the maze of trees around me. I hear Sam’s thudding footsteps behind me as he tries to catch up.