Inside

by Kyra Anderson

  Mark motioned me to him and, taking a deep breath, I made my way to him. He grabbed my arm, motioning for Keiko to follow as we turned to leave.

  There was a rancid smell in the air that caused me to wrinkle my nose and Mark to stop. Both of us scanned the trees, Keiko stopping as well when she came upon the stench. It was sharp, stabbing the inside of my nostrils and causing my stomach to flip.

  Keeping an eye on the camp of soldiers, even though they were preoccupied with their horrific torture, Mark stepped in the direction he thought the smell was coming from. I followed.

  Paula let out a scream that caused me to cringe and shiver, closing my eyes and trying to keep myself from being sick at my own inaction.

  I took two more steps forward, following Mark, when he suddenly stepped back and wrapped one hand around my mouth turning me around quickly and standing completely still. I almost let out a choked cry, shocked at the sudden movement, but I held the sound back, trying to glance at Mark over my shoulder, confused about his behavior. I looked at Keiko and saw her eyes wide with horror, her hand over her mouth as her face went pale.

  I understood.

  The smell was dead flesh.

  And they were trying to keep me from seeing the horror.

  I could call it morbid curiosity, or something I simply needed to see to understand what our friends had suffered through, but I angrily pushed Mark’s hand away and whirled around, coming face to face with the gruesome sight.

  Sydney was hanging from a tree by her ankles, her blonde hair drenched in blood, dripping into the earth as her intestines lay down her body, draping her front in a tangled, bloody mess. My stomach heaved at the sight, my eyes following the horrific gore down to Jared, a nineteen-year-old who had been a quiet and gentle person. He was tied naked to the tree below Sydney, his eyes and face contorted from a broken jaw and shattered bones in his face. His body had been bleeding from the ropes that were cutting into his flesh, his genitals also cruelly twisted in a bloody rope. There were stains on his body that were obviously not mud.

  Next to him was a stack of four dead bodies, slumped over one another, naked and bloody, their eyes glassy and their faces forever locked in expressions of terror.

  Mark came up behind me and turned me around again, taking my head and pulling it to his shoulder, trying to shield me from the horrific sight of our mutilated friends as the angry bile rose in my throat, getting hotter and hotter. Every time I blinked, the image flashed before me, carved into my mind with razor sharp precision.

  * *** *

  “Dana! You son of a bitch!” I bellowed into the dark woods. After being sure that Mark and the others were fading into sleep, I had slipped into the woods, getting past Clark by saying I was going to dig a hole for a toilet.

  In truth, I had decided that that was the night the game would end.

  I stood in the dark trees, unable to see anything around me, my gun holstered at my waist. I spun around, looking for any movement, knowing that someone nearby would hear my screaming.

  “Are you satisfied?!” I screeched. “You’ve torn us apart! You’ve tortured and killed people I loved and cared about! How could you do that, Dana?!”

  Somewhere in my mind, I heard his voice.

  “You were the one that did this…not me.”

  “You said that you wanted me to come home to you!” I screamed into the shadows. “You wanted me to give up so that you could do what you wanted with me!” I spread my arms wide. “Here I am! You want me, come and get me and get it over with!”

  There was a silence that followed my bold challenge. There was no way that no one heard me. I was screeching at the top of my lungs, hoping that someone would hear, even if it was the people who had raped Paula and tortured my other friends to death. At least they would be able to end it.

  I wondered if Dana had ordered them to kill everyone, including me, or if there were special instructions for my capture.

  Either way, I wanted it over.

  “Dana!” I bellowed. “I know you’re out there, you motherfucker!”

  There was nothing but silence.

  “I’m giving up!” I yelled. “I’m ready for you to take me to the Commission and do what you want with me! I don’t know if that will make you stop, but I am telling you now that I am giving myself to you!”

  The silence was as heavy as the darkness surrounding me. I listened carefully for noise of anyone drawing closer, believing that at any moment I was going to be shot, or tackled to the ground by the soldiers around me. There was someone waiting around the trees…waiting for me to turn my back so they could pounce…Dana was holding his hand up to everyone…telling them to wait until I was frantic before they fell upon me…

  Any moment now…

  The silence made me fall to my knees. The quiet invaded my senses, absorbing my words into the trees and strengthening the shadows around me. It knocked me down, forcing me to confront the reality of my situation.

  I was insignificant.

  I was unheard.

  I was nothing.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  I stumbled back to the trench as the sun was coming up, unable to keep my balance and feeling as though I was drunk from lack of sleep and sobbing pitifully. My throat was raw from screaming through the night, demanding Dana to take me then and there. I felt sick, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

  When I got back to the trench, there was panic.

  Mark pulled me into the muddy depths of the corridor in the earth. I was confused by the mud until I recalled that it had rained the previous night, for about an hour, as I was trying to stumble back to the others.

  It took me a while to realize that there was a real sense of panic in the trench. Mark pulled me along behind him, passing others who were loading the weapons we had brought with us and tying some long strings together, though it escaped me why they were doing so.

  Finally, I saw Griffin and Tori, though Griffin was just lifting Tori up out of the trench and she ran as fast as she could across the open field somewhere.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Oh my God, Lily, where the hell have you been?!” he gasped, grabbing my shoulders. “Minsoo saw the main camp send a bunch of troops our way, even some tanks. We’re preparing to fight.”

  I felt sick.

  “Fight?” I squeaked.

  I knew where this was going.

  “We don’t have any other option,” Griffin shook his head. “We took a vote, and decided that if we were going to die, we would rather die fighting then be taken back to a camp and tortured to death, or worse, taken to the Commission.”

  Oh… He was talking about Sydney and Jared…

  “Lily!” Griffin said, shaking my shoulders. “Snap out of it! What is wrong with you?!”

  I could not answer, opening and closing my mouth uselessly.

  We were going to lose.

  That was what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him that no matter what, we were going to lose and then we would be nothing apart from a blip in the great history of social unrest.

  There was no way to fight against Dana Christenson and win.

  “Griffin,” Clark called, coming up the other side. “Tori’s gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she doing?” I asked.

  “She’s going to go around and try to take out some of the tanks,” Griffin explained. “She should be able to at least take a good portion of their men out.” He looked at Clark. “Is the line planted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Griffin turned back to me. “Better get some ammo…”

  I looked back in the trench where I had helped bring the ammunition in the previous day, lining it up depending on the size of the bullets. I ignored the running of everyone else in the trench as they prepared for battle.

  Prepared as if this was a battle in a war rather than impending annihilation.

  For all the quick preparation we made in the early morning, we were
sitting and waiting for a long time, waiting for Tori to destroy what she could of the approaching army.

  The anticipation was worse. A few of the people who were scouts were watching out of the trench, standing on empty ammunition cases to see over the edge. Others were leaning against the front wall of dirt, holding their guns and taking deep breaths. Some were praying, others were crying. The feeling of fear was ricocheting off the walls of earth, bouncing back to hit everyone left in our little revolution.

  I was looking at Mykail, who was standing next to me, his face pale, but he insisted he would help. He had bombs strapped to his body and two guns that he would shoot from the air. I had asked him not to fight or fly, knowing that it was going to kill him, but he just smiled at me, stroked my cheek, and then ignored my pleas.

  It was early evening when we finally heard the sounds of distant crashing through the forest.

  Our lookouts did not report seeing anything, but everyone could hear the noise, and it made our hearts knock angrily against our ribs.

  This was a real battle.

  I had always watched war movies with my father when I was a young teenager. He was a fan of the war movies. It didn’t matter if it was about the World Wars, the Revolutionary Wars, he just liked following the stories of the heroes that half the time died, and the other half made it through to be reunited with their loved ones.

  My loved ones were in the trench with me. I wasn’t sure how that boded for my survival.

  “We have five jeeps!” one of the women with binoculars said.

  My heart picked up speed.

  “And following them?” Griffin called.

  “Several walking soldiers,” a man announced. “At least fifty so far!”

  My stomach turned over and I closed my eyes, trying to keep myself from passing out.

  “What the hell do they have there?” Griffin hissed. My brow furrowed in confusion, worried about Griffin’s confusion. Several others in the trench looked at one another, not sure what it was that Griffin saw.

  “Oh my God…” the woman next to me gasped, crouching down, her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide with horror.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “…it’s Tori…”

  I grabbed her binoculars and stepped on the case, wondering what she was seeing. If it had not been for Griffin’s confusion, I would have thought Tori was kicking ass out there. That was not the sight I was greeted with when I put the binoculars to my face and focused on the approaching jeeps and soldiers.

  I focused on the lead jeep and saw the terrible spectacle.

  Tori’s head was raised high above the first jeep on the antenna. Her arms were tied between the lead jeep and the second jeep, stripped naked, her legs extended behind her to the two jeeps following the first two. She was decapitated, drawn and quartered, and the army was showing us the cruelty as they charged at us, ready to destroy us all.

  Our strongest experiment had been killed before the battle even began.

  I understood from the horrible torture that her body had endured that the long delay into the afternoon was likely due to Tori actually causing damage to the military forces. Seeing them come at us so strong with the Ward Ten experiment dead, made us all realize we were staring at our own fate.

  Griffin was livid.

  “Clark, when those motherfuckers get close enough, blow them to hell!”

  We watched with nauseous stomachs as seventy-five foot soldiers, a tank, and five jeeps came toward us, intent on their mission. By all respects, the group was small, but it looked as terrifying as thousands of soldiers to the tired, frightened people in the trench.

  Griffin raised his hand, watching the jeeps get closer. When they were in range, he motioned his hand down sharply. Clark yanked the tied together strings and, a few seconds later, there was a boom that resonated through the walls of the trench. Dirt was sent flying high into the air and came showering down on us.

  I climbed back up on the empty ammo case and looked at the two front jeeps. One of them was turned on its side and the other was on fire in the front. Most of the people in the jeeps that had been hit were dead, but one or two climbed out, limping over the bodies of the soldiers that had also fallen prey to the buried grenades.

  However, there were many who were still charging. When the soldiers got close enough, Peter pulled on the second string on the other side of the trench, setting off the second, and more powerful, row of grenades. This time, the dirt came flying into the trench to cover us in a blanket of earth.

  “Go!” Griffin ordered.

  People clamored out and ran toward the soldiers while I, and many others, fired from the trench, poking our heads out just enough to aim. I pulled the trigger fifteen times on my gun, pointing at the soldiers whose faces I could not see, despite their close proximity. I saw a few of them fall, others collapse because I hit them in the leg. I quickly replaced my clip and fired again, watching more uniformed men fall to the ground meters away from the trench.

  After my third clip was empty, I dropped into the trench to reload the clips. There were only a few boxes left, and already people were scrambling to reload, grabbing bullets and taking them to other ends of the trench. I grabbed one box and sat in the mud to reload my gun.

  Mykail looked at me and nodded, spreading his wings and taking flight with a powerful stroke, soaring into the air as I protected myself from the displaced air.

  Seconds after I turned back to my task, there was a loud boom that nearly ruptured my eardrums while several in the trench screamed. I heard a commotion that I could not relate to anything I had heard before and turned to my right, where Mykail had been moments before. Several large portions of the rocks above our trench had tumbled down and crushed two people.

  I holstered my gun and ran to the hand I could see sticking out of the rocks.

  “Lily! Look out!”

  I turned around quickly and saw a soldier standing at the top of the trench, pointing his gun at me. He stopped and blinked.

  “Lily?”

  The man’s head snapped to the side as a bullet hit his temple. He went limp, falling into the trench in front of me as I turned to see who had fired the shot. Clark nodded once and I smiled weakly back.

  I had been correct.

  There were special rules regarding my capture. My name had been passed through the ranks.

  I grabbed the dead man’s weapon, stepping over his body and handing the gun to a person looking for bullets.

  I asked some people to run forward and get the guns off the dead soldiers, but Jessica told me that the ones out of the trench were already doing so.

  I peered over the edge of the trench to see that the people, mostly the experiments, were being surrounded by many soldiers, and were still able to hold their own very well. I was shocked to see Mark use one of the soldiers as a shield while he shot everyone surrounding him before picking up one of the guns from the dead soldiers and shooting a straight line across the soldiers coming toward the trench.

  I looked at Griffin, who was making his way to the tank. The tank explained the booming and the shattered rock in the trench.

  Many of the bigger guns were focusing on Mykail, who was dropping bombs on the large groups of soldiers trying to surge forward. He avoided most of the bullets, but his attention was suddenly diverted up the hill in the distance where the military forces had come from.

  There were more jeeps making their way down the slope and into the darkening valley. The coming night made me more concerned, knowing that we were not going to be able to fight in the dark.

  In Mykail’s distraction, one of the gunners on the back of the jeep that had crashed into the overturned jeep turned his gun upward and shot several rounds.

  I saw Mykail’s body jolt and his wings snapped in several places, causing him to spin in the air and then plummet to the ground. I watched in horror as he fell to the earth, making contact with an audible thud on his shoulders and mangling his wings further.


  I let out a horrified cry and, before I understood my own actions, I scrambled out of the trench and ran to him, shooting as I moved, though I was sure I did not hit anyone. I crouched next to Mykail, failing to rapidly determine whether or not he was dead. I grabbed onto his arms and pulled him along the ground, dragging his body with more strength than I should have had.

  My arm snapped to the side and an incredible pain surged through my body, causing me to fall to the ground and grab at my bicep.

  I had been shot.

  Fighting the pain, I reached to my gun, shooting the soldier as he was approaching.

  There were special instructions. He had been running forward to see who I was.

  Seeing the trench nearby, I grabbed Mykail’s arms and pushed my way along the soft dirt with my feet, finally tumbling into the deep trench, which jarred my arm and made me inhale a mouthful of mud and dirty water.

  Choking and spluttering, I reached up to Mykail, teetering on a box as I grabbed his arms again.

  My eyes went upward, seeing Griffin charge the tank and try to lift it with his altered strength. The man operating the tank opened the lid, shooting Griffin in the chest, though all that did was startle the experiment.

  Griffin grabbed the man’s gun, ducking the spinning turret and trying to pull the man out of the tank. The man grabbed onto the experiment’s clothes and pulled him closer before screaming one word.

  “Forward!”

  The tank lurched forward, the tracks hitting Griffin’s legs and pushing him to the ground before covering him completely, his bones shattering under the weight of the weapon.

  I watched in horror as Griffin’s body was practically flattened.

  Grabbing Mykail, I hauled him into the trench, though he landed on top of me and caused more pain in my arm.

  After a few moments where I caught my breath, I pushed myself upright, the tears forming in my eyes as I fought against the pain in my arm and the pain of my chest being ripped apart.

  I grabbed Mykail and pulled him closer, cringing and groaning as the pain tore through me. When he was next to me, I rested my hand against his neck, feeling for a pulse as I looked over the mangled bones and white feathers that had been his wings.