Lost Memories

Chapter 4 - Alice

Alice's POV

We stayed there until the sun rose, the light showing me what the earth really looked like for the first time. It was amazing, truly amazing. Wherever the light touched beauty shone and I couldn't get enough of it. I swear I sat there for hours, not saying anything, not talking and just taking it all in.

We climbed down from the tree after a while, its rough bark felt cool under my fingers. Once my feet touched the ground I wiggles my toes in the grass and took in my surroundings. It was more spectacular then I had imagined. The trees blocked the prison from sight and the rolling hills in the distance made it look like a fairy tale and I had finally begun living in it.

"Come on, this way I can hear a river up ahead, we can have a wash and drink from it if it's clean." Annie said, looking at home between the trees as she skipped away.

I followed her through the tangle of pine trees as I continued to admire this place that was almost too perfect. The only thing to make it really perfect would be if there were baby animals everywhere, but seriously this wasn't a happy go lucky story about a girl that has a perfect life. No this was my life, which was the complete opposite, just one amazingly good thing had just happened to come along and change it completely. In reality, animals would be too scared to step a foot in the path of a human being, even though I would have wanted nothing more than to be even more amazed by what the world had to offer.

The river was clean from what we could see, with a sandy riverbed. The clear water ran over rocks a bit further up stream before toppling over them and into the slow paced river that we invaded. I've never swam before so I stayed around the shallow waters, whilst Annabelle swam up and down, clawing against the current, before coming over to me and splashing me. We fought with the water until we were out of energy, I never knew swimming and splashing could be so tiring. So we lay down on the bank, looked up at the sky, where clouds floated lazily in front of the blinding sun.

"Do you remember what that guard said about the memory wiping last night? What is that? Memory wiping I mean." I asked her quietly.

"Every few months a batch of prisoners arrive and when they do, the guards gather them together and they each get their memory wiped, in other words their memories are kind of sucked out of them, so they don't remember who they are or what they did to get into the prison. They know all the fundamentals of basic education and all that stuff, so like knowing where they are, what everything is and how to speak, but all their memories are taken away of their life before the prison."

"Do you think that's what happened to me?"

"Probably, it happens to every prisoner." Then she realises what that meant. "That means you could've only been in there for a short amount of time just you think you've been there for your whole life."

"But that still doesn't show why I was there."

"No, but that something we're going to find out. Come on let's get a move on before the guards come back or more guards come." Looking behind us just in case, we headed off in a different direction to the one the guards had gone in. We headed towards the hills not going to slowly but at a pace that wouldn't tire us easily. We had had some water from the river as it seemed clean, but we were both hungry and with no food, it was going to be a problem.

*****

We had been walking for a few hours and were nearly at the hills. Our stomachs were dying of hunger and we were both too tired to go any further. So we set up camp hidden between the trees, within the brush and decided that Annie would watch for guards half the night and I would the other half. I fell asleep fairly quickly because of the strenuous activity, which I wasn't used to. I dreamt that Annabelle and I were running through the woods, giant dogs chasing us, gaining on us, so much so that I could see the white of their bared sharp fangs. One pounced at me pulling me with it to the ground, looming over me ready to kill.