Earthbound (Slow Updates, Sorry Guys)

Chapter Five- I'll Find Her

How could this have possibly happened? One minute I’m rushing this small little mutant and next thing I know she’s busting my head into a wall. I thought out loud as Jeremy, an unnaturally tall man with a buzz cut, walked into the room.

“How could something so tiny knock me out like that?”

He looked at me sympathetically. I hate sympathy. I failed my mission, I let the mutants escape and let my squad leader get killed. I am better off dead.

“What are you saying Will, she’s a genetically enhanced freak, you’re lucky she didn’t shoot you with her laser vision.”

“Would you stop doing that.” Jeremy said plopping down in the chair across from me. His T-shirt was stained with dirt and his face riddled with scratches. He’d been out, scouting what the mutants call sector four, a wasteland.

I’d been there once and never would I want to do that again. Sector four was all dirt and sand and wrecked cars. After the influenza attacked our kind, things went downhill. What was left of us went crazy trying to protect themselves from the diseases, then others took a more suicidal approach to this.

A cure.

Sounds wonderful but these doctors and scientists had no idea what they were doing to the human race. They thought that by replacing your bones with mechanical wires and giving you synthetic blood cells would keep you safe and would save the human race. But no, doing that was just replacing us, moving us forward in the future. Maybe I just didn’t want to let go, or maybe it was the other one hundred and two that didn’t want to let go either, but these mutants could not just replace us.

We banded together as rebels, brothers and sisters and have declared war on these scientists. I was the one that suggested we search through all the labs and destroy any experiments or prototypes that were hidden there. We had almost completed our last lab, and then she killed Tom, knocked me out and suffocated Bill.

Now I sit in a small square room, staring at the wall in front of me, wishing to have just one minute alone with her, so I could wrap my hands around her neck and…

“William Herd are you listening to me?”

I glanced at Jeremy and rolled my eyes. “How could I ignore you?”

“Stop kissing my butt and start listening.” He crossed his arms tightly over his chest and sighed deeply. All the lines in his face grew deeper like small trenches in his skin, and relaxed when he unclenched his arms. He was only a couple years older than me but he aged more in the past few years that he’d been with the resistance.

He’d just turned twenty-one the past weekend and had celebrated with his girlfriend and the rest of the front line squads, I on the other hand locked myself in the bathroom and tucked myself away with the game plan we wrote up. I studied that for hours until a few knocks and a few shouts to open the doors finally made me weasel my way out from behind a towel rack and head to my room.

I would’ve kept reading if I slept alone but four boys were assigned the same room and knowing Jeremy, he wouldn’t put up for a flashlight under the covers. Obviously, he has super eye sight and can tell even with eyes closed that a light is on.

“They are taking another attack team out there to search the lab.”

“Why?” I could feel a lump rise in my throat. “I searched that place inside and out, they were all gone.”

“I get that,” he said quietly peering at the door. “But you hit your head pretty hard and after that Kenny said you were a little disoriented and they just wanted to double check.”