Static

INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER ONE

"Look over at Ant." She says and I have to strain my ears to hear. I search the sea of cursed girls before my eyes find Ant. Shes alone. Standing out in the middle of it all, eyes staring at everything but registering nothing. Her shoulders are slouched and she has her head inclined to the ceiling.

"What is wrong with her?" Flea asks, a slight bit of concern rising in her voice.
     I consider this for a moment before deciding on a statement to speak in reply.
"I think she's just... Tired." I settle on that even though I know it's not true. I mean, I'm sure she's exhausted but that's not why she's acting like that.

"Aren't we all." Says Flea matter of factly. "Ready to go again?" She asks and I nod.
"This time, Roach, don't go easy on me." I hesitate before nodding again and taking a couple steps away from her.
She doesn't want me go easy? Fine, I won't, I've got more power in my veins that's just itching to break free and I'm going to let it.

We fight for hours, taking only one more scheduled break to get a sip of water with the rest of the girls. Then, we go at it again until the monitors blast a high pitched scraping sound, like nails on a chalk board, to get our attention and signal that it's time for lunch.

Flea and I don't speak after that, there's no time to during our transition from the basement to the mess hall and of course there's the whole thing where we are severely punished for any noises that sound remotely anything like communication.

The mess hall is quite a sight, it's yellowing and chipping white tiles to its strange sent that seems to emanate from the kitchen. Not to mention the food they serve is the same disgusting slop and tasteless pieces of bread.
We walk through a line, us and the girls from bunker two, and receive our portions of the repulsive concoction and stale bread.

After, we go to our assigned seats surrounded by the girls from our bunker and eat in silence. Worm is on my left and a girl named Grub on my right.

I'm not sure when the monitors have their food, I never see them eat and whenever I dare to steal a glance at them, they're always watching. Like Hawks, they watch, they're eyes darting around the room, searching for anyone of us who might be breaking the rules.

I've mentioned before how empty and lifeless the eyes of the girls here look. How they are seeing things the way the people here want them to see the world. But the monitors, they have a totally different emptiness in their eyes. The absence of love giving them that look that the other girls have mastered without knowing it. I can't stand the way they look at us. Like they don't see teenagers who's souls are being striped out of their bodies, but instead they see animals, vile creatures who don't deserve to live and are just wastes of space and air.

We finish eating at sometime around 12 o'clock and the monitors guide us up another level in the Block up into the storage facility. This is where we break away from bunker two. We switch responsibilities every day, while our bunker organizes the storage and shelves newly delivered items, bunker two goes outside where they shovel snow and in the summer they do various yard keeping chores.

The storage facility is massive. To put it in perspective, the training room was about the size of a football field with a ceiling hight of about the length of a school bus.
The storage facility, it's still about the size of a football field but it's height is nearly four times that of the training room with shelves that stack from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves are in isles with those ladders that you used to see in libraries propped up against each side of each isle.

The monitors direct us to the new shipment of food and blankets and show us where they go. Then we start shelving them. This part doesn't last long but the monitors won't let us end early. So of course they decide it's time to switch the places where the uniforms go with the spot where the soap is. So we travel back and forth all the way across the length of the place from the uniforms to the soap and back again and again and again. Now, you might be thinking that this couldn't have possibly taken the five hours that it did. But don't forget the fact that there are only twelve of us and we are all extremely exhausted from the 6 and a half hours of training that we'd just gone through.