JAKE’S STORY
Fighting Freedom PREQUEL
By: Paige Clendenin
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Paige Clendenin
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2018
Publishing and Cover Design by:
Hydra Productions
https://www.hydraproductionsonline.com/
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter One
I sat at a large desk in a comfortable chair, with papers strewn all around me. The intelligence lab at The Force compound had the best chairs and spacious workspaces. It was the perfect place to hide and read papers you were not supposed to see. I knew that if my father caught me with the papers that I had, I would be in serious trouble, but I did not care. Things had slowly been changing, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to know what was going on.
I started snooping around when I noticed the changes that were happening, and I grabbed the papers to see what The Elected might’ve been up to.
I flipped through the pages without really seeing anything that would indicate a red flag, but I could’ve been missing something. I knew The Elected were sneaky enough to slide things in right under everyone’s noses, so I needed to pay close attention to the papers and make sure I did not miss a thing.
I was still looking them over when my father, Maxwell Cole, came in. I quickly gathered them up and hid them under a folder on the desk. I didn’t want my father to know I was snooping. He would lecture me about getting caught. Even though I knew he would be right, I just did not want to sit through one of his talks… again.
I had been given plenty of them over the years. I knew he did it because he loved me and wanted the best for me, but sometimes you had to take risks to do what was right. He didn’t seem to understand that.
I was happy to have him, though, and in the event I did get caught, I would sit there and listen to any lecture he gave me, just to hear his voice. I had gone so long without him in my life that once we were reunited, I didn’t take anything with him for granted. Not even punishments for things I did wrong.
At least, I tried not to.
There was once a time that I thought he was dead, but somehow, the fates brought him back to me. Having him back cost me dearly, though. I sat back in my chair with a book in hand, pretending to read, when he came to the door of the lab.
He was the second in command to the great Captain E.J. Samuels. I found it hard to believe that he walked out on his family to work for the guy, but I guessed everyone had their dream job. I tried hard not to let it affect me to the point that I hated him, but sometimes, that feeling snuck its way inside me.
“What are you reading?” he asked me as he came closer to my desk.
“Just an old book that Cole used to like to read,” I replied softly.
We did not speak of Cole or my mother much. The pain was just too great for my father to bear, but I missed talking about them, and I always found ways to mention them. Even if I saw the hurt flash in his eyes for a moment. I knew by his silence that I had caught him off guard by saying Cole’s name.
“Sorry, Dad. It just kind of came out,” I said.
“You don’t have to apologize, Son,” he said with a look of pain on his face. “He was your brother, and you should be able to talk about him if you wish. It just hurts me to know I was not there that day to protect them.”
He seemed as if he were a million miles away for a moment, until something snapped him back to reality. He turned to me with a smile, as if the conversation had never happened.
“As you know, six months from now, new groups of students will be arriving,” he said as he sat in the chair on the opposite side of the desk I was behind.
“What you mean is that in six months, there will be more children kidnapped who we can train to fight The Elected,” I replied sarcastically. I sat one of my feet up on my chair, resting my arm on my knee.
He looked at me disapprovingly. I knew then that I’d better not say another word about The Force’s methods of acquiring soldiers. I didn’t agree with it, though. Never had.
“Anyway, I was wondering if you were going to be phase leader again this year,” he stated. “You have done a great job so far the past two years; I think it would be great if you would join us for a third year.”
I was almost nineteen, and I had been helping train the new recruits as phase leader for the past couple of years. However, I was not sure that I wanted to do it again, considering that I didn’t agree with their methods of gathering the recruits. Yet I knew that if I said no, it would greatly disappoint my father, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.
But I knew I had to start doing what was right for me, too. I thought about it for a few minutes before I said anything to him.
“I will be phase leader again this year, but I am pretty sure this is going to be my last year doing it,” I said with determination in my voice.
He looked at me with a strange look on his face and nodded his head. I could tell that he wanted to say something, to question me, but he didn’t. He stayed silent and stood from his perch in the chair opposite me, making his way toward the lab door. He stopped at the doorway and looked at me for a moment before leaving the intelligence lab.
I was surprised that he didn’t ask me my reasoning behind what I said, but then again, I was fairly certain he knew why. He had always known my hatred for the way The Force did things. Even as a small child, I was terrified of being taken by them, and my father always assured me that I would be fine.
One day, he disappeared, and we were told he was dead, but we never saw a body. My mother was given lame excuses that we all knew were lies, but there was no way we could fight it or get the truth, so we just took their excuses and tried to move on.
It was rough without him around. There was barely any food, as we barely had any money, but my older brother Cole was the bright spot that took the darkness away- or, he tried to.
The place that we lived at in the East Corridor was one of the poorest, but since WWIII had happened, no one had any money (except for what the government rationed to us, anyway).
There was barely enough money to get us through month
to month; if that wasn’t enough to deal with, we were only allowed to have running water certain days of the week. That meant if you got dirty on a day that the water was off, you had to stay dirty until shower day.
Mother often stored water in tanks and jugs on the outside of the house, but even on the days that we did have water, it was limited to only being used for twenty-five minutes a day. Often times, while Cole or I was in the shower, she was downstairs, pumping water to store up for a later date.
It was the same for electricity. There were only certain days when the lights could be used, so doing homework was nearly impossible. Not that we had a lot anyway. The Lecture Compounds were much different from the schools pre-WWIII. I loved learning about those days, though, and for that reason, I often took home as much material as I could get my hands on about the days that were lived much easier.
I wasn’t jealous, per se’; I had done this more out of curiosity than anything else. That was how I had learned so much about technology before I came to live at The Force. Even as a young boy, I would find things, take them apart, and put them back together just to see how they worked.
Another thing that bothered me so much about life outside The Force was the fact that if a corridor asked the government for more money or extra water, they always refused the request. Sometimes people were imprisoned for such requests. The Elected was cruel, and because of that, we could afford little. Not many said anything about the horrible things that went on.
I remembered one instance where my mother asked for assistance and received it. That was the ONLY time I had heard of an acceptance being made. Imagine my dismay when I found out, once I got older of course, that it was only because my father asked Captain Samuels to help us.
The Force had intercepted the request and obliged. I hated that I had given The Elected even a sliver of credit, even back then.
The Lecture Compound was the worst of all with the electricity and water restrictions. We barely had anything to drink while there, and we had to sit by windows to be able to read in the textbooks. On rainy days when the sun wasn’t out, we were allowed to use the electricity for an hour at max. On those days, we were sent home early because we were barely able to do anything workwise.
After Dad “died,” Cole took over being the man of the house and tried his best to provide us with the things we needed. Mother tried getting side jobs like sewing, but there was not much call for that where we lived. Cole took over calming my fears about being abducted by The Force when I was old enough to be taken, and he told me that it was not going to happen.
Then, as he approached the age where he could be abducted, I started to worry about him. He would laugh and pretend he was not worried, but I knew better. I knew he worried about it and had a hard time celebrating when he turned twelve.
Once a child turned twelve, they could be taken and trained in the ways of The Force. It happened every year in April like clockwork. We told ourselves that we wouldn’t let our guard down, but even in a time where you felt like you couldn’t walk safely around the corner, it was hard to defend yourself as a little kid.
I didn’t know what we thought we would do if The Force came, and when it did, we were certainly caught off guard.
Then, one day, when we were not expecting it, they took him. They grabbed him right outside our house as he was getting home from the Lecture Compound. We heard the rumble of the trucks and his scream as they grabbed him.
I had made it into the house before him, and as Mother and I went to the door, it was too late. They had loaded him inside the utility van, and I could hear him screaming for me through the back window.
I saw them struggling to get him away from the window. Then, they turned a corner, and he was gone. I have always wished that we would’ve stayed on guard and vigilant. I was so little, though, and even thought I hated myself for letting it happen, I knew there wasn’t much I could have done, even if we hadn’t had been caught off guard.
Mother and I were devastated, and I screamed for him well into the night and every night after for a long time. Nightmares plagued me, and I often dreamed that I would be next, and my mother would be all alone. I was terrified that if they took me, she would starve to death with no one to help her get money for food.
Many nights I crawled in bed with her and she held me as I cried, doing her best to calm me as Cole would have.
I cried so much as a kid. I guessed that was what made me so hard as a man. There wasn’t any room for such things as that now.
Not long after he was taken, a month or so, maybe, we were surprised when we found him at our door one night. We were overjoyed to have him home, but our joy would not last.
A few days after his return, people that I didn’t know burst into our home and killed my brother and mother. Why they felt the need to kill them, I still don’t know. I was hidden, and I did everything I could to keep myself quiet as I watched my mother and brother drown in their own blood from the bullet wounds. I stared into my mother’s eyes as I watched the light leave them. I knew then that I was totally alone in the world.
I stayed hidden in the cabinet I had crawled in until some people from The Force came and found me.
It was then that I was reunited with my not-so-dead father.
I had always wondered why he had to play dead, but he never really wanted to talk about it. I have told myself that maybe one day he will tell me why he had to lie and make us suffer until they died. There was a time after we found each other again that I hated him and wanted nothing to do with him because of his lies. Over time, I came to realize he had his reasons, and I should’ve been thankful that I still had a parent left.
Sometimes I still found myself hating him… Perhaps if he had been there, then Cole and Mother would still be alive.
I stopped the thoughts that were running through my head and grabbed the papers from their hiding place. I tucked them in my shirt and headed home.
It had been a long day and I wanted to relax. I also wanted to snoop more. I was going to do what I had to so that The Elected would fall… even if it was the last thing I ever did.
Chapter Two
I felt sweat run down the back of my neck as I thrust my fist forward, connecting with the punching bag that hung from the ceiling. The bag swung away from me, and then, it headed back towards me. I punched it again, harder than the first time as I thought of the look on my brother’s face when he fell to the kitchen floor. He was dead before he landed.
I punched even harder the next time as I thought of my mother struggling to breathe, watching me hiding in the cabinet. I gave it all I had as I punched the bag over and over. I thought about the members of The Force swooping in after I had been hiding for what seemed like days. I remembered the look on my father’s face as he pulled me from the cabinet and held me to his chest.
My mother had been the one to tell me to hide.
The bag swung fast and hard as I pelted it with punch after punch, the memories of that time flooding my mind. My heart had been broken, and I turned into a bitter person as my heart hardened. I acted out, and it took a long time for me to realize that I was wasting time that I would never get back by letting my anger overtake me.
It had taken me a long time to break down the wall between my father and me. It was still a work in progress, which is why I reluctantly agreed to continue being a phase leader. I would hold to what I said, though, and this would be my last time training the kids that the members of The Force kidnapped to fight The Elected.
A phase leader was someone that led the training of the kidnapped children through the different phases. There were a few different phase leaders, one for each of the various age groups. Each phase leader took to the age group they knew they would be best suited for. It was necessary to know what you could handle and know that it was going to take a certain amount of time with each child to show them certain skills they would need to fight The Elected.
Once that skillset was perfected, the group would move u
p in phases based on their fighting number… a number that we kept on a band that they would wear at all times. The color of the bands also dictated what phases they were in.
Even working so closely with the sixteen-eighteen-year old’s (the group I had chosen), I tried my best to not get close to anyone that went through phase training. Sometimes, however, it was unavoidable.
During my first year as phase leader, I met a fellow teenager named Joey who was scared out of his mind. I knew I was going to have to take him under my wing or he was going to end up getting cast out to The Forcefield. He was so terrified that it made him unstable, and the other phase leaders were terrified of him just because he was unpredictable.
Even my father talked poorly about the boy, telling me nearly right away that he couldn’t be trusted to carry on the needs of The Force.
So, I pulled him aside after training one day, and I told him I was going to help him stabilize himself and learn his way. We became close, and just when I thought he was going to be okay, he tried to take one of the girls from his group hostage so he could escape the compound.
He was going to harm her or himself. He’d snapped like I had never seen before. My father had to shoot him in front of me. Ever since then, I hadn’t let anyone in except for Samantha King, and that was only because she had become my friend at the same time Joey did.
I whacked the bag again as Samantha came in the gym through the side door and headed my direction. “Whoa, Tiger, what did that punching bag ever do to you?” She laughed as she grabbed the bag to stop it.
“I was just trying to lose some steam,” I teased her. “Some memories that I try to keep locked away found their way to the surface and I was trying to pound them back into their little box.”
“No wonder that bag was about to fly off the chain,” she said with a grin.
“Yeah, it happens occasionally. You look like you have something on your mind. Are you okay?” I noticed the strange look on her face.
“Oh, yeah. I am fine. I just thought I would tell you that I have been asked to be your assistant this year when it comes time to be Phase Leader.” She laughed.
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