THE LAST GAMES: PROJECT PANDORA

CHAPTER V: N E W H O P E

I wake from my slumber. What time is it? My body has curled up in a ball in reaction to the freezing winter cold. I hear nothing but my heartbeat against silence from the dead of night. All I see around me are leaves and branches. It must be a pretty big bush. I yawn and wipe the sleep from my tired eyes. It looks, maybe one am. I try hard to remember what happened and how I ended up here, but I can't. I sit up slowly and have to wait for about twenty more minutes before it comes to me. The tracking device. But where? I look around myself but see nothing, except for a strange slight glow of light under my sleeve. I pull of my T-shirt, which feels good, as I haven't done so since this whole thing started, and I have no idea how long I have been in that prison, so that could have been months ago. The fresh night air tickles my bones and makes me feel nice. The glow has brightened, and I see it's coming from a little bump on my right bicep. It is obviously under the skin, but I have no idea how I'm going to get to it without cutting it out. I see no other way. And I'm not sure I have the mental strength to do that. Instead, dreading what I will soon have to do, I relax against the inside walls of the hollow bush. The wind has picked up and is now whistling through my ears. I can no longer hear my heart beating against my chest.
It is time. I take out the small knife I stole from the guard. My hands start trembling but that quickly turns into violent shaking. It will be even harder with my left hand.
"Well here goes nothing. . . Or my arm," I whisper to myself. I bring the sharp blade to the bump in my bicep. Then close my eyes and count down from three. Three. Two. One. I slice wright under the bump. Blood starts flowing out of the cut and roaring in my ears. I bite my lip and bring two fingers to the wound. One just above it, and the other just below. My whole arm is shaking and I push with my two fingers. Out comes a lot of bright red liquid and a small, almost spherical device. It is night blue and only about an inch in diameter. It glows, pulsating with radiant red light. But I think I may have bigger problems: my arm. The blood is not stoping. Not even slowing. What if have burst an artery? I begin to panic. I rip off my left sleeve and tie it around my upper arm. It is quickly soaked with blood. Warm, wet and sticky. So I take it off. They have planed this all out. If I try to get rid of the device, I die. My only hope is to stitch it up. But how? Now I'm panicking. I rip a lose strand of string further until it comes undone. Now I need a needle. Hmm... I pick up a rock with my good arm and smash it violently against the knife. The knife shatters, with shards of it littering the ground. Now I am shivering feverishly. I lift one of them up to my eye so I can see it and tie the string around it, which is almost impossible if you're shivering and shaking as hard as I am. My left arm is shaking so hard I no longer have any control over it. I am not sure I can bring myself to do this, but I have to try.

With my wound stitched up(not very well), I feel a bit woozy from blood loss. No. Who am I kidding, not a bit. A lot. I must have lost, what? A pint or two? I rip off the other sleeve and soak up the rest of the blood. I stand up, peeking my head out of the bush. It is still very dark, with no sign of the sun. There is also not a cloud in the sky. I look around to see the prison I have escaped from, but I can see nothing. It must have some sort of camouflage or invisibility field. I look to the other side and find I am not out yet. A giant industrial wall is encasing around me. It must be at least a hundred feet tall, and maybe twenty feet wide. I slowly exhale. The wall has flashing red lights around it, circling the top, ensuring to blind anyone who gets too close. I put what is left of my shirt back on and finger the ground for the tracking device. I find it and pick it up. Oh, nope. That's just a abnormally smooth rock. I scan the ground and pick up the the actual tracker. It is not to wait any longer. I gather as much strength as I can and throw it over the wall. Or I try, It doesn't even make it half way with my bad arm, but it stops. Just hovering inches off the wall, but thirty or so feet off the hard ground. Then a little camera of sorts pops out of the side of the wall and scans the device. Red beams of light race across the surface with surprising speed. My eyes will not stop staring at the sene, it's crazy! I don't blink, just stare. It's so engaging, even hypnotising. I shake my head, I don't know what's come over me, but I cant look away. Then I think it is probably designed to hypnotise people and made them walk into some evil dungeon and forever be a slave or something so I look away. The beams change from red to green and the object rises over the wall and starts to float down. I realise that was probably my only safe way out and I should of took it out after I got over, but it's too late now. But it does have old overgrown vines and greenery all over it, that tells me this place was made decades - or even centuries - ago. And they look pretty strong, maybe I could climb it. . .

I turn my head from left to right to check that the coast is clear. Nobody to be seen. I get up. And run. I run as fast as my legs will take me. . . which is sort of getting a bit old. Why is there so much running? The world speeds past me in a blur. I get within a meter of the colossal wall and jump, just catching the bottom of a thick mess of vines. My arm aches but I pull my body up a bit higher and start climbing. In what feels like ten minutes I have scaled half the wall, but I don't look back. And in the blink of an eye, ten minutes has turned into an hour. I am soaked from head to toe in sweat and blood - mostly sweat - and I see the top. Finally. I tilt my head up and see a mesh of green, but I also see the top, the edge, the sky. I feel sense of achievement. Then I make the mistake of looking slightly to the right. Intense red light blinds me and I bring my arms to cover my eyes, letting go of the vegetation I was holding onto. My legs curl around two vines in reaction to me begin about to fall, but my body swings back. My head smashes hard against the wall and I dangle upside-down, with the wind knocked out of me. I let out a muffled scream in pain. My eyelids start to grow heavy but I can't let that happen. The blood rushes to my head, which makes it very hard to blackout and I climb back up, clutching hard to the vines I slipped from and making sure not to look in any direction but up. Once I have reached the very top, I throw one leg over. The I sit there for a second, wondering why that scanner thing I saw when I threw away my tracker hasn't appeared yet. Then it pops out of the wall and starts to scan me. Just my luck.
It almost instantly turns red. I gulp, and an ear piercing sound wails smoothly. Then I realise it must be an alarm. I have no clue what to do, only that I don't want to be here in ten minutes or so. And so I'm free to act entirely on whim.
My first whim is to to look over the edge of this gigantic wall I am sitting on. My second whim is to scratch the back of my neck. That's around when I ran out of whims and just go back to worrying. Then I jumped off the wall, land with a smooth commando roll, and just when I start to think that I am absolutely amazing, I roll into the stump of a tree and groan in agony.
Arghh well, I'm sort-of free now, that's the main thing. I look up at the night sky. It looks beautiful. Stars peaking out of the night. It must be a solar eclipse tonight, as I see the black moon with the sun glaring behind it. This makes me think of Winter. Winter Eclipse. When I'm around her I always feel nervous. The way her hazel hair blows into her face. I sigh. Just for a moment my mind is taken away from this place. I look to the snow covered mountains in the distance. A few miles from it's summit I can see the ruins of "The Last City". That's what we called it, but with all the lies we have been told I doubt we are the last ones. I doubt anything we have been told is true. I remember Kai once said "the truth is burden, and sometimes is better kept hidden". He was a good guy. And so were all the others that died. Their blood is on The Programs' hands. And I will avenge them.
Just then I am lost in thought. A single snowflake falls on my faces and I remember that I've got to get out of here. The last city is tiny from here. It looks at least forty miles from here. I look back to the mountains, and concentrate on a flicker of red. It looks about ten times smaller than an ant, but I decide it must be a fire when I see a slight puff of smoke. Looks like I've found my friends - or at least some people - so I set off for the fire. At least, I think it's a fire. At last. New hope.