The Outside (#wattys2016)

The Signs

I woke up to the ground shaking. "Mia! Let's go! We gotta get outta here!" I got up out of the tent and James was already up. I saw the roof of the cave falling apart. "Wha---" I yelled and James grabbed me and carried me out of the cave. We got out just as it collapsed. "Your okay." He said gratefully putting me down. "What about... Our stuff?" I asked, worried. "It'll be okay. It'll be okay." He said over and over. I kissed him. He was worried, I could tell, yet he was trying to calm me down. "Your alright." I said. "Your okay." I then hugged him tight. "Let's go. We're not going to get our stuff back." It was impossible. It was about, I guess 4:00? The only thing we could do now is hope we can make it to the Inside in a reasonable amount of time. "Come on, let's get going now." I said taking him by the hand. He was still shocked. "They did this." He said under his breath. "Who? Who did this?" I asked him. "We need to go. Now." He told me in a harsh tone. "Okay, then."

We took off with nothing, and I mean nothing. We actually went surprisingly faster with nothing to carry. We walked five hours strait hiking through the forest. We came to a clearing with a small river beside it. By then I was tired. "Can we stop for a second?" I said, sitting on a huge rock near the river. "Sure." He said, coming to sit beside me. "Who did that to us? The cave incident?" I asked him, worried. I was scared, but yet who out here would want to hurt us? "The, the... Inside. The Inside. We're close enough to them that they can track us." It all made sense now. The Inside put us there because of some reason and are not willing to let us out. And they'd do anything to stop us from getting to the Inside.

We left in time, but we didn't get far because we were both surprisingly hungry. My stomach felt like rocks by the time we finally stopped again. My throat was sore and dry and longed for water. We stopped past the clearing in the woods where there were a bush of berries. "Look!" I said pointing to them. "Don't eat them, they may be poisonous. Let's make a fire, it's getting chilly." He suggested. I gathered sticks from around the area but when I got back there was a pile of stones outlining where James already had a fire going. "You... Did this?" I asked in shock. "Come on. Sit down." I sat down next to him on the grass. "Do you think we'll make it?" He asked. My heart turned dark. "James, I'm so sorry. I don't." He looked confused. He led my eyes to look at him. "Think about it this way:" He argued. "if this Inside can track us, that means we're close." With the best comeback I could, I said: "Yeah, but we have no food, we'll be exhausted tomorrow, and we may die before we even get there. But even if we do get there, do you think the Government will even give us food?" He thought for a moment. "We have to try."

We went to bed early, but neither of us slept that night. Without the tent, we were sleeping on the ground, and the grass wasn't much of a pillow. Besides that, I kept these creepy noises that were just weird. They were like a creaky door opening, but louder. It had to be coming from a machine of some sort. James must have heard it too, because the first one sounded, and he tried to explain: "Probably some machine from the Inside." Then it hit both of us, I could tell. They were going to fire more attacks. I stayed up all night thinking. What if we got to the Inside, but they killed us right away? That night, I almost scared myself out of going to the Inside.