The Fighters

The Fighters: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

When I came to, my face was being dabbed and picked at. I pulled my eyebrows together as I opened my eyes to see Maria removing pieces of wood from my face that lodged into my skin from the explosion. My skin felt like it had a major sunburn, and I was happy for once that I didn’t have a mirror lying around. “Feeling better, little hero?” I heard. But it wasn’t Maria’s voice. It was a voice I knew… a voice I hadn’t heard in a while. And then his face came into view. “Leon,” I whispered. His face had never been more beautiful, and I pulled his face closer, and brushed his lips against mine.

I felt a sting. “Ouch,” I said. Even my lips were burned. “It’ll be okay, we put some burn cream on it. Don’t you ever do that again,” he said. His voice sounded like a warm summer night, the wind carrying his scent to my nose and his every word encasing me, intoxicating me in his beauty. “Never,” I said. And I sure meant it; I would never risk losing Leon, or risk me causing him harm ever again. But I didn’t exactly know at the time that he was there, anyway, so in my head, it didn’t count.

I sat up quickly, making my head spin. I looked around in the desert, which was almost pitch black now, except for dim lights overhead, and saw no one. “We must be dead last,” I said. I looked at my group and they all nodded. Leon, Maria, Giselle… but where was Gunner? “Where is he?” I asked, knowing they would know who I was referring to. “We had to run out, the fire kept spreading, I tried to go back, but…” Maria trailed off, looking down. I noticed her eyes were red. She must have been crying.

“It’s my entire fault,” I said. And it was. I thought only about myself and killing the monster than anyone else. “If you hadn’t done what you did, we’d all be dead right now.” Leon reassured me, his hand on mine. It had been so long since I felt his touch. My body felt warm, even though it was registering in my head that it was freezing cold now. Leon stood up and my warm feeling went away.

“We need to keep moving if we want to catch up,” Maria said. We all walked along the sand, waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did. Not until Maria spotted a box. She was wearing her lenses and saw that there was a box inside one of the bushes. We all stepped toward the bush, when Maria stopped us. “It could be a trap.” She moved in slowly and pulled out the box. Maria looked at us, and shrugged. “Anyone got something to pry it open with?” she asked. I tried to pull out my discs, but I found out I was completely out. “Damn,” I said. Giselle painted a thin metal line, and that did the trick. Inside, there was equipment.

Everyone was running low on something, so we took as much as we could get. We walked for a while, until we felt a rumbling under the sand. “No,” I said. Maria looked at me with worried eyes, and I could see she was scared. Hadn’t we had enough to deal with for the day? We kept moving, faster now, and the dark just kept getting darker. The rumbling stopped after a while, and we finally reached the third and final checkpoint. We began to see sleeping bags and groups camping out, which helped us all to relax a little bit. We were almost finished.

Giselle was the smallest out of all of us, and she was shivering violently. “I… c-can’t handle the c-cold,” she said through chattering teeth. It was really cold, and we were all shivering, but Giselle’s lips were blue and her hands rubbing her arms for warmth weren’t enough. I took out my back pack that had blankets, and threw one over her shoulders. She began to relax more, and we all took out our equipment and wore the blankets. I decided to keep watch, considering I had been passed out for a while.

But the truth was, I was thinking too much to be able to sleep. I paced back and forth, stroked Leon’s hair for a while and soaked up lost time, and finally, I restlessly walked up to the end of the second checkpoint to peer out into the final phase of the Battle. I watched as water lapped up onto the sand, and I bent down to wash my hands in it. I looked ahead and saw a long, winding trail of a strip of land, the water reaching oblivion. I felt the rumbling under the sand again. I backed away from the water and watched as I saw fins poking out of the water and travel down the long river. Some kind of serpent was inside these waters, but I hadn’t heard of an alien adapting to the water.