Decrepit///Ben Parish

Chapter 5

Getting used to life at Camp Haven is not a walk in the park.
This may only be my second full day, but I can barely walk. I have reached a new level of soreness in my muscles. The so called 'food' they serve us is repulsive, and I question if some of the things they serve is edible. Nothing is fresh and it mostly consists of gray-colored meat and canned fruit.
My first night sleeping in the barracks I had a dream that I accidently shot Reznik during shooting practice. I could easily do that in real life and make it look like an accident. I really do believe that he is clinically insane. Who knew that a person could get so much joy from another human being suffering.
I don't even want to mention P&D. P&D stands for processing and disposal, of bodies. Once a week, we go to a white tent they set up on the base, that's full of bodies. There are Teds and unTeds that we have to take care of. The Teds are marked with green dots on their foreheads.
We all have jobs to do there, and we're usually in there with one or two other squads. First, we put the body on a table, then we process the body. That means going through their pockets. We put the items we find in corresponding buckets. The valuables go in one bucket, and the other things we find, go in another bucket to be thrown way. After that is disposal: which means the body is burned. The P&D tent smells worse than North Ridge did during the Third Wave. It reeks of death and burnt hair. If you've never smelt that before, be glad. It's the worst thing I have ever smelled, after a few hours I couldn't handle it anymore and it took all I had to hold down my breakfast. I just wish they would have found me later in the week so I would have gotten to miss P&D this week.
Our work out regimen is nothing I could have ever imagined. Reznik does not mess around. Every morning right after we wake up, we run three laps around the base as a squad. The unlucky person who finishes last, has another lap. Zombie always takes the last lap. I mean I get it, he's the leader and all, but something about it pisses my off. The slow people could use the extra lap. Maybe it will help with their other aspects of training.
I'm just going to be blunt: our squad sucks. We have no hope of graduating at this point.
Poundcake is the best shot on our squad.  Everyone else is dog shit horrible at shooting. Me included. I can't hit the target to save my life. I also am bad at hand-to-hand combat, my body can't handle the strength conditioning, and I can't seem to get down the survival skills. I know I have only been here for two days, but I'm awful ,and It's amazing that I made it so far living on my own.
I miss the simple days of living on my own as Scarlett. Enigma is emotionless with no heart. Scarlett had a heart of gold and a smile was always present on her face. Enigma hasn't cracked a smile since I arrived. It's kind of alarming how fast my personality turned around.
It's like as Reznik called me Enigma for the first time, my heart turned to stone as the syllables rolled of his tongue.
Enigma's jumpsuit is always on with no wrinkles when Reznik comes for inspection, her hair is always up, her bed is always made, her boots are always shiny, and she always is in bed and awake on time. Scarlett was never a morning person. She liked to lay in bed for as long as possible in the mornings, and stayed up into the wee hours of the morning whenever she got the chance. Enigma is everything Scarlett wasn't.
That's a good thing, right? My mom would want me to let go if my past and fully become Enigma so I could train properly and make sure my eye was on the prize: graduating so I can fight the Others. If I keep holding on to the old me, I can't reach the full potential of Enigma.
Scarlett wouldn't be able to handle being in real combat. Enigma will be able to...I think. I can do it, right? I'll have been going through this rugged training every day for months by the time we graduate, if we graduate. I'll be able to handle hand-to-hand combat by then. I won't collapse after twenty push-ups in a few months.  And I won't have nightmares anymore about what happened a few months ago with the Twiggs. I had to kill them. It was self-defense, I can do it again. And that was Scarlett who killed those men back in North Ridge, Enigma will be able to kill without thinking twice. 
That's why I must let Scarlett go. She makes Enigma weak. Scarlett was so weak, that she never stopped thinking about the idea of leaving her sister behind while she was sick with the Red Death, because she could barely stand to see her like that. And she did end up leaving Audrey for a few days.
I remember leaving for a two days, and then coming back (because I felt to guilty), and finding Audrey in her final stages of the sickness. She couldn't even remember who I was, where she was, or her own name. Even still, I held her while she was bleeding from every opening in her body. I left my beautiful home, where my mother and sister were buried in the backyard, coated in my little sister's blood.
I'll never forgive myself for leaving her while she was dying like I did.
Enigma will be strong enough to handle someone's death, because she won't get attached like Scarlett did. Enigma won't run.
I will do anything I can to reach the full potential of Enigma, even if that means becoming human clay in Reznik's hands.

I don't know how I feel about this chapter, it's kind of all over the place. I was trying to capture Enigma letting go of Scarlett, but it just came out bleh. I edited it like 5 times and it always ended up staying like the same so maybe it's supposed to be this way.
Anyways, next chapter we'll see how Enigma acts with the squad and during training and stuff with Reznik.

Gif creds to: @ohlovelyvampires on tumblr