Our Darkest Memories

~ Lost Memory

2 weeks before forgetting

The headache that I felt when I started to wake up was like nothing I had ever felt before. When I was younger, my dad would always complain about the headaches he got from being hungover. I wondered if it felt the same as what I was experiencing at that moment.

The loud voices that seemed to come from every direction did not help. They only made my head pound even more with every second. I wanted to see where those voices were coming from to tell them to shut up, but my eyes were still closed and I was scared to open them. Flashes from what happened before started to play in my mind. We were in the car. We were attacked by SPFs. They took me.

Only when that realization struck, I started to notice more. The feeling of cold iron on the skin of my wrists. My hands that were uncomfortably tied behind my back. The typical sounds of a car driving. The feeling of someone else's leg touching my leg with every turn we made. The sounds of a crackling bag. The smell of something freshly baked coming from it. The hunger that it caused.

That hunger was exactly what made me carefully open my eyes. The darkness made place for the light and I slowly blinked a few times to orientate myself. I was sitting in a car with four other people. Two of them were sitting on either side of me. When they noticed I was awake, the one on my right said with a victorious voice, "Oh, look who decided to wake up."

I didn't pay attention to her. My eyes automatically went to the hamburger she had in her hands. The woman caught me looking and gave me a grin while waving it in front of my face. "I bet you must feel pretty hungry right now. Too bad we don't have anything for you to eat."

Not trying to show her how much she bothered me, I looked away. Sadly, my stomach decided that that was the perfect moment to growl loudly, which resulted in all of them laughing at my misery.

It was low of them. Very low.

But I kept staring out of the window as if I didn't mind. And I didn't mind, because there was only one thing I could think about. That one thing in the back of my head. That one question: 'Did they also catch Blaze and Raiden?'

I didn't want to ask. Both because I was scared of the answer and because I assumed that they would say they caught them anyway, even if they didn't.

The second car that came as backup during our fight was nowhere to be seen anymore. I didn't know what that meant. Were they still looking for Blaze and Raiden? Did they find them and take them to another camp? Or were they simply not needed anymore because they already had me?

All those options seemed valid and that only made me more nervous. I shifted on my seat and accidentally bumped into the man on my left, who, as a response, harshly used his knee to bump back. Noted. No more moving. So the next few minutes of the ride, I sat completely still in my uncomfortable position.

Meanwhile, I started to give names to the people responsible for my imprisonment. The man on my left was now called Beardy, the woman on my right Jacket. I named the man that was driving Glasses and the one in the passenger's seat with the hat on Pancake, because of the food he was holding.

Not very original, I knew that. But asking them was not really an option either. I inspected the car further. The small device that created the awful sound was laying on the dashboard. Not wanting to remember what horror it caused, I turned my eyes away from it. The navigation showed me that we were on the east side of Virginia. It didn't show the destination yet, but it was undoubtedly a rehabilitation camp.

I didn't even know why all the kids were being sent to those camps. The only person that was ever cured there was Clancy Gray, the president's son. But seeing as there were no other children that were cured so far, I doubted that that was true. No one else seemed to question it though, and they all believed his sugar-sweet voice that spread his so-called 'message of hope' through the radio. When I heard it, I just wanted to get loose only to turn the radio off. It was only lies he was spreading. There was no hope for us.