subject 13 // h.s. au

chapter three.

My eyes slowly opened, my body tensing as I heard a sound.

A sound.

I jolted up in a panic to look around me. The trees were still silent, nothing but the whistling of wind. My heart beat against my chest. Still silence.

Then I heard it again, faint, but the sound of an engine. It sounded like the generators that powered the air filtration system in the bunker. I didn't even think before shoving my blanket into my backpack and strapping my weapons to my back.

 I never thought I would need them, but protocol stated that if any Subject left the bunker they needed to be ready. So I was, with two machetes, a small knife, a handgun, and a semi-automatic rifle. 

I raced towards the sound trying not to trip on the small tree roots littering the dead forest as I made my way closer to the decimated town, miles from the bunker I once called home. The sound was louder now, but I still couldn't see past the mangled branches and I continued running.

As I came to the edge of the woods, I stepped behind the large trunk of what was once a massive tree, the black ash staining my hands as I grabbed onto a branch and peered around it.

I couldn't breathe.

Fifty feet in front of me was what Dr. Five had once described to be a large truck, covered in rust and peeling white paint. Three men in full hazmat suits with oxygen tanks carrying guns stood around it, scanning the concrete rubble. One of them groaned loudly, walking forward to kick a nearby rock.

"I fucking told him there wouldn't be anything here," he whined.

The other two men shook their heads as one of them replied,

"You wanted to come! You literally volunteered to come," the second man said with an exasperated sigh.

The third man chimed in,

"You're lucky I'm not a snitch because Harry would kick you out for saying shit like that."

I stood completely still, not sure yet if these men were good, or bad. I had been warned all my life of what people on the surface were like. "Power-hungry murderers and rapists,"  Dr. One had always said. Dr. Five had been the only one to say that some people could be good as well. 

I was snapped out of my thoughts when I suddenly realized that these people were alive.

No one was supposed to have survived "Judgement Day".

I didn't have time to process this fact when the branch my hand was wrapped around crumbled and crashed to the ground with a dull thud, the sound reverberating through the trees, and before I knew it all three men were staring at me, guns pointed at my head. 

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v short chapter sorry :/