The Game

What You Do To Survive

Chapter 7- What You Do To Survive

 “Are you sure you’re okay?”

 “Don’t you think you should sleep?”

 “Can you tell us what it said just one more time?”

 “I’m fine, okay!” I screamed at the group of people around me. They backed away, looking hurt and frustrated but it didn’t matter to me if I had offended them. I knew they were still hesitant to believe me even though I had told them everything that had happened and what the mindscaper had told me.

 There were fey after us.

Of course the whole group didn’t want to believe me, since the very notion seemed impossible, but I knew it was true. And it was them, anyway, who had witnessed the wolves jumping through me, as they had described, just like they really were made of smoke. After I had jumped, I experienced a falling sensation, like you would in a dream, and it woke me up. My eyes snapped open to a horizontal forest in the dead of night, the smell of ashes filling my nose.

  Apparently I had passed out when I slipped into the world of the mindscaper, and instead of have being gone for only a few minutes, I was out for nearly two hours. Everyone had been terrified and had no clue what to do, so they had put me in a sleeping bag near the fire and hoped I woke. And once I did, I was immediately bombarded with questions. It had lasted all night, and now even as dawn appeared they were still doubtful.

 “Fey?” Samuel said, exasperated. “This is such bull.”

 “Why are a bunch of fairies after us?” Allison said.

 Jessie asked, “How do we even fight back if we don’t know anything about them?”

I wrapped my arms around my legs as I nibbled on my last granola bar. I had packed more food than necessary for a full weeks’ hike, but, just as the water had, it was cut in half. Now, I had just this one granola bar left and was hoping to somehow make it last the whole day.

“I can’t believe this,” Anthony had said for the hundredth time. I couldn’t really blame the poor kid. This had to be the only thing he knew nothing about. Surely his whole world was falling to pieces around him.

 “Well, believe it,” Greg said. He had obviously had enough of the whole group’s organized freak out, just as I. “Accept that we are being treated like playthings to a bunch of mythical creatures and let’s move on. Not believing it isn’t going to help.”

 I held back the urge to applaud.

 “So what do we do now?” Mikey asked, his tongue sliding against his braces as he spoke.

 “What do you mean ‘what do we do now’?” Greg asked, looking at him as though he were an idiot.

Nate intervened at this point and put a hand on his younger friend’s shoulder. “What Greg means is that nothing has changed. We still have to find the trail and get out of here. We now know what we’re up against, but the plan is all the same. It’s simple as that.”

 Jessie rolled her eyes, “There is nothing simple about it.”

 Nate didn’t appear to hear her because he just smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Everyone pack up and let’s get moving. North is that way. Make sure to stick together. If you see something out of the ordinary mention it to Greg or me. Are we clear?”

 The group moved forward into the forest, this time at a much slower pace than before now that we were unburdened with the sounds of wolves chasing after us. I had tried to explain to everyone that there had never really been wolves at all, only a group of mindscapers trying to mess with our heads. But they couldn’t understand, partly because I did not entirely grasp the concept to be able to explain it.