The Mantis Effect

Chapter Two

"This your first time away from home?" He asked.

I nodded my head. It must have gotten easy to tell who was still a kid when you had been in the ranks for as long as he had.

"How old are ya'?" He asked

I told him I was eighteen. He smiled and began to talk to me. He was twenty when he joined the Elite class. It was scary but making friends is what saved him. He was so kind and well-spoken it was easy to like him. He had a calming effect; maybe that's why he and Ward worked so well.

"So how long have you been an Elite?" I asked.

Hap had been in the Elite class for five years and the Forces for a total of eight. When I asked him how he ended up here he said that he was called to it. I didn't know what he meant by that but the way he looked ever so slightly over at Ward every now and again while she slept was telling.

We came to a raised mound with two massive concrete doors as its entrance. Its perimeter was guarded by automated machine guns that were remote activated by someone on surveillance. The convoy drove slowly through the guarded perimeter and as we approached the doors they opened. They were the biggest doors I had ever seen.

We drove through and into a dark underpass. The tunnel was pitch black until red lights flickered on as they detected us coasting past them slowly. The air got colder the further in we went. It seemed like a mile into the red lit darkness before the vehicles came to a stop.

Hap began to count down from five and waking up with minimal attention to herself Ward bent over to tuck her head between her knees and covered her ears. An alarm sounded and it thundered against my eardrums. Rodriguez and the other recruits woke up in a panic. The alarm blared only momentarily before it stopped. Another set of large doors opened and blinding white light radiated through. It was so bright I could barely keep my eyes open. We rolled inside and came to a stop. When my eyes had adjusted adequately and I could open them without a struggle I looked around. Everything was white. It was an underground fortress of unknown magnitude. Military personnel and people I assumed to be scientists of some field made their way in the area.

As we unloaded from the trucks they stared at us as if doing a fly by analysis.

"Welcome to the base," Hap said.

I looked around. This was it, the Elite class base. It was certainly what I had imagined it to be and more. I'm sure we all looked like tourists the way our eyes looked to the chasm ceilings. I heard the front passenger door open and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ward climb out of the car like a little crab and at once Hap was at her side.

"Tired?" He asked.

She nodded.

Titus addressed us as 'gnats' when he spoke. He so crudely explained it was because gnats were worthless and above all things annoying just like us. He was rather scary and his intimidation would surely have half of us packed and on the next way home by the end of the week.

His indoor voice was not so indoor at all. Everything he said sounded like a shouted command. I wondered if that's the only way he knew to be.

What would come out of his mouth next would baffle us all.

"Your first test is gonna' separate the boys from the men-," he started.

"Or girls from the women", Ward's voice interrupted.

Titus looked at her with a look of discontent and she remained unshaken by the steel of his eyes. He did not like her and judging by the unaffected look on her face she either didn't care or the feeling was mutual.

"What?' he grunted.

Ward's eyes looked over to me and she pointed.

"That one's a girl and she's gonna' make it in", Ward said.

She was so certain and certain of me. She herself was one of the very few women in the Elite class and was the only female Olympian. She knew how hard and rigorous the training to come was going to be and here she was vouching for me, a complete stranger to her. We hadn't even spoken. I wondered what she saw in me that moved her to address something Titus had so obliviously overlooked. The way her eyes met mine allowed me to see a glimmer of who she might have been.

She was who I wanted to become, maybe I was who she remembered once being.

"She's going home just like most of the other girls-and boys for that matter. It doesn't matter", Titus tried to dismiss but Ward was relentless.

"Because she's a new recruit or because she's a girl?" Ward pushed.

Hap touched her shoulder as if to dissuade her from pressing any further. Everyone within ear shot grew stiff from the tension between the two of them. They stared each other down the way two wolves fighting to be alpha would. The bitter winter of Titus' eyes had found an equal match in the raging stormy nature of Ward's.

"Like I said it doesn't matter", he said with an unnerving harshness.

They stared at each other for a moment longer. Ward seemed to analyze him and strip his character to the core with her eyes. Very calmly she said,

"It mattered when a girl put that scar on your face".

A small menacing smirk crossed his face. He wouldn't allow her to win.

"Do we really wanna' get into comparing disfigurements, princess?" he asked simply and tapped above his eyebrow gesturing to her scar.

I could see her jaw flex and knew instantly the feeling she must have felt. With a scar as big as that you were certainly self-conscious about it no matter who you were, even if you were Ward.

Hap wrapped his arm around her hard as though he was trying to break her fixation on Titus. He whispered into her wild mess of hair and began to pull her away. I couldn't help but wonder what the extent of the resentment between the two Olympians was. I could hear Rodriguez let out a breath.

"I thought she was going to eat him," he whispered under his breath.

I did too. Titus turned to us again.

"Like I was saying, your first test is today, right now, right here. You really wanna' be in this program you'll stay right here until we come back and tell you where you're to go next," he yelled.

We all stood in silence. We were a bit confused but none of us wanted to openly admit that and receive the wrath of Titus. Our test was to stand here? How was that a test? And just as I thought that one of the new recruits was either brave or dumb enough to ask.

"Sir, are we to understand that you want us to just stand here?" the recruit asked.

Titus approached him and a cold sweat ran down all our backs. Titus towered over him and I squeezed my eyes shut.

"That's right. You're to stand here and I mean stand. If you sit your gone. If you lay down your gone. If you lean, bend, squat, or kneel...you. Are. Gone," he growled.

We all stood in silence and growing fear.

"Am I understood?" Titus shouted.

"Sir, yes sir!" we replied loudly.

The Elites and other soldiers began to walk away.

"Someone will be with you presently", one of them called back to us.

They all laughed and I knew then that we were in for a challenge.