STUCK: IT'S ABOUT TO GET VERY WEIRD

CHAPTER 11 - Gymnastics for Boy

I follow Ben for at least twenty minutes.

We weave through a maze of junk and rubble, as the sun, already red and partially blocked out by a grey haze, sets behind what's left of Aspen City. Finally he slows, then stops and turns and says "Step EXACTLY where I step, unless you want to lose your head, your noggin."

He tiptoes in a zig-zag fashion, with me behind him, stepping exactly in his footprints in the dust. I see he's got traps rigged everywhere somehow, which explains the zig-zagging. We reach an opening in a half-destroyed cement building, and Ben looks over his shoulder, scans all around, and crawls in a small hole. I follow him inside, and he pushes a large wooden block over the hole behind me, and then lifts one end of a huge steel pipe down over the wood. We are barricaded in. Then he pulls an old brown tarp over the wood and steel. "To keep the light secret, secret light."

I don't know what light he is talking about, because it's pitch black and I can't even see six inches in front of my face. Suddenly there is a bzzzzt sound and a flame appears. Ben is holding a small lantern. He has just lit the oil in the lantern by touching two cables from a car battery on the floor. The sparks from the cables lit the oil. Smart kid.

I look around at his little secret cave. It must have been some kind of basement storage room before the world got destroyed. It's only the size of a janitor's room, and Ben has a kind of nest in the far corner made of a pile of blankets. There are no windows, and the door to the right is completely blocked by a huge slab of cement that looks like it fell through the roof. Probably safer like that I guess. There is a shelf with a couple of cans of food, and bottles of camping fuel against the wall. He also has a lot of camping gear stacked in the corner: bows and arrows, cooking tins, camping stoves, knives, and camouflage hunting clothes. I notice that the arrows have the tips taped up with thick rings of duct tape, so that they aren't dangerous anymore. It seems strange that a kid who needs to survive in a wilderness like this would make his weapons less deadly.

"Better get some sleep, gotta hunt in the morning, show you the tricks, all the tricks," Ben says, and with that he throws me some blankets and curls up in his nest in the corner but he doesn't close his eyes. He is staring at me as he lays there for a long time while I make my own makeshift bed with the blankets. He finally says to me before closing his eyes: "Good thing you came, I need to teach someone. She taught me, so I will teach you."

"Wait, teach what, who taught you? What do you mean?" I ask, but I already hear snoring across the room. I curl up under my blankets and drift off to sleep almost immediately, exhausted from everything that has happened since the day it all went weird at school.

I wake up to Ben shaking me and saying something. "Wake up you, it's time to get food! Food, we need food again."

"What?" I mumble, still half asleep. It seems like only a moment passed since I closed my eyes, so it must have been a good sleep. I remember dreaming of my mom, my dad, and my sister, which I haven't done for years. It felt like we were all back together, like the old days.

"You! Get up, you!"

"Hey, I have a name," I say, still feeling sleepy.

"Well, tell me then, you didn't tell me then." Ben says.

It's odd how he rhymes like that. I suppose if you are all on your own your whole life, you might become a bit odd.

"My name is Sierra. How long have you been here?" I ask him.

He looks at me and smiles. "Sieraaaah. Sierr-rah! Sierr-raahhh." He's playing with it, sounding it out. Finally he says "Yep, I like it. I think I'll call you that."