Green

Ch. 1

(By the way, this chapter is just bare bones. I decided to just get back to this chapter later since it wasn't going the way I wanted it go, but I wanted to move on. Thanks!)

Pond woke up with a grunt of annoyance at the sound of loud sirens and horns outside. It was a Saturday. A Saturday! And she had to drag herself out of her warm, fuzzy blanket and into the frigid air, heavy, crusty eyelids and a mind-boggling headache. Oh yeah, and it was four in the morning.

Once she could process her surroundings, Pond bolted upright. Why were there sirens, what was happening, what was going to happen? She thrust the blanket off her, leaving it in a crumpled pile, scrambled out of the bed, and squinted her eyes to look out the window at the commotion below.

People were screaming. More people were chasing them, fast as birds – Pond realized that these people were from nearby towns, all randomly scrambled up, along with people who were probably from towns she’d never heard of. There were a lot of towns over this land, so Pond would recognize very few of the people from them; there were a couple million people, against just about ten thousand in her town.

So obviously, everyone was panicking. The invaders were shouting “GREEN” and “Hawk… will become… green…”. And to Pond’s horror, amongst the blur of fighting, the invaders somehow were making some of her unfortunate fellow townsfolk chant it as well.

Then she realized it wasn’t the people doing that. A few hawks flew in and out of the crowd, joining the battle. She caught a hawk pecking its beak into one of the townsfolk’s arms, leaving a small cut with blood welling up, and when the hawk emerged from the cluster of people, that person loudly shouted, “GREEEEEEN!” and proceeded to start kicking people around them. People ran out of their homes shrieking, terrified, while hawks soared overhead, shrieking down at the townspeople, loudly flapping their wings.

Pond ran out of her room, leaving the window in her dust, and slammed the door shut. She was met by her younger half-brother Bob, whom she shared this tiny one-story house with, standing beside the dinner table at which neither of them ate dinner. Pond never understood how he got up so early every day. But he did go to bed ridiculously early, too.

“What’s going on?!” Bob cried urgently.

“What do you think?” Pond snapped back. “We’re being invaded by green-obsessed people and a cult of hawks, that’s what’s going on.”

The next thing they knew, everyone was being evacuated. Pond’s mind was racing. She was within a crowd of people moving slowly away from the town into who knows where, while soldiers fought off the invaders behind them. Could we move any faster? Pond thought impatiently as explosions rang in her ears, making her head feel like it would explode, feeling the sweaty warmth of the people being evacuated, the smell wafting up her nose, screaming, crying children, their parents joining them. She briefly turned around, looking into the distance, to see flames licking at her and her brother’s house, along with the buildings and foliage on the same street. The smoke flooded her nostrils, and she joined the numerous people in the crowd having coughing fits. She only realized she had lost sight of Bob when everyone had been evacuated and gone a safe distance away from the burning town.

Pond spotted Bob in the crowd and pushed her way through the crowd to reunite with him. She looked around at her new surroundings. It was a series of dry, barren lands that extended further than her eyes could see.