Who Were They?

F I V E - Training and Loss

A few days passed and Cathy was already used to the new routines at W.P.P.  She was learning new skills and knowledge and she was also learning about her own strengths and her own identity.  She was learning that keeping your head down and minding your own business kept you out of trouble and she realised that she wasn’t really cut out for the life of a spy.  She is after all just a simple Welsh girl with the dreams of going to college and having a normal teenage life, ‘fat chance of that happening’ she often thought.  The W.P.P’s routine was very harsh but was designed to prepare the body for any kind of strenuous events.

She was awoken at six every morning, along with everyone else, went for a scheduled run, ate breakfast, and then went on a huge four mile agility course designed to test the trainee physically and mentally.  The course included a huge cross country run, climbing up mountain sides without aid and swim against the hardest currents a river could throw at you, at the same time as carrying close to your own body weight in rocks in a backpack.  The course was hard but Cathy tried her hardest, she was never one for failing and she figured that the sooner she trained and did what the strange people asked she would be out of there as soon as possible.  After the first few days her muscles hurt less and sleeping came natural due to absolute tiredness.

After the course, the trainees went to the gym to learn hand-to-hand combat.  This is where skill counted the most.  The trainers weren’t kind people and very rarely cared if any injury was acquired during their session and most trainees left battered and bruised and sometimes had blood running down their faces and soaking their shirts.   As Cathy had been doing martial arts since she was a young child, she did well, but still left with her nose running with blood, and feeling like her asthma would be the death of her.

The one thing Cathy wasn’t overly pleased with was the strict diet and the inability to turn a corner without facing sniggers and stares.  She didn’t understand why people seemed to point and stare at her frequently as if they knew something about her that she didn’t know herself.

But the main thing that pushed Cathy to her limit wasn’t the food or the spine-breaking workouts or brutal exercises, it was the fact that she missed her family, her aunt and her uncle, and the thought that they were probably sat around their kitchen table every night by the phone waiting for a response or reply to Cathy’s where abouts.

She wasn’t wrong.

Two hundred miles or so away, across the Welsh border, in a tiny village, was a cottage that normally housed three people was currently home to two.  Mr and Mrs Jackson were sat around a scrubbed-to-death kitchen table waiting for any news of their precious niece.  The Jacksons were respectable, kind and gentle people who deserved none of the grief and heart-ache they faced now.  The pair hadn’t eaten much since Cathy’s disappearance and the stress was quickly draining them, Mr Jackson looked like he’d lived another age and Mrs Jackson looked dead on her feet. 

Neither was stupid and they’d both figured out where Cathy was.  They had feared the day for years, they knew that one day someone was going to come and take their niece away, the only thing that gave them life and hope and happiness was gone and they didn’t know if she’d come back alive or in a body bag.

Mr Jackson lost his brother to the W.P.P and he wasn’t up to losing anyone else.

Back at the W.P.P Headquarters…

 Cathy was curious about the amount of officials that seemed to be keeping an extremely close eye on her as if they thought that walking in a corridor could end up with her being consumed by some beast.

Cathy had always found it hard to make friends and at the headquarters there was no exception, in fact she was alienated.  It was fine with her that no one spoke to her because she had no care for the place she was in or the people at the place.  Her main goal was to get home and that is what she planned to do.

Five days after waking up in that immaculate white room Cathy could see the huge differences in her build.  She was looked a lot more muscly and tougher and quite content but if you looked close at her, her eyes looked like they belonged to someone else, someone about one hundred years old.  Earlier on that day she had been taken off to the medical centre in the next building block where she had her full health check.  She passed with flying colours, of course, other than her left ear which she had always been close to /.half deaf in and her asthma.  The one peculiar thing about the health check was the vaccine they gave her.  It was a silvery liquid with little glitter sized particles in it, which made it look slightly futuristic and a little bit metallic. 

Maybe it was some sort of disease fighter, or muscle enhancer or perhaps even a poison, who knew what those crisped, wrinkle-free suited men would administer to her?  But whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t normal and it left her feeling drowsy.

As she lay in bed that night Cathy stared at the ceiling and dreamt of the days where she was free again, free to go sailing,to see Marissa, to run over meadows, to see her aunt and uncle and to breathe some fresh Welsh air. 

Little did Cathy know that this would be the last night at the W.P.P headquarters.  Today she had endured hard and strenuous tasks but tomorrow it would be the start of the fight, the struggle and the uncovering of secrets and mystery’s that Cathy had pondered her whole life.