REMEFORN [completed]

There Eyes Were Watching Rox

Knocking woke Rox up in the morning. She opened the door to find Daniel waiting for her.

"You know you don't have to do this."

"I have to and I don't feel like hearing anymore of your failing persuasion."

With a sigh, he replied, "Well please take this." He took her wrist and hooked a black watch onto her. "It was Eli and my mother's. I'm hoping it'll bring you luck and keep you safe."

"Daniel, I'm not gonna take this.", Rox said beginning to take the watch off, but he stopped her.

"No, Rox, I'll trade you for your word. You take this and you promise you'll come back."

"I promise."

•

Rox was overwhelmed with all the equipment they had given her. It seemed like they were preparing her for war. They gave her a large backpack that was somehow light and filled it with about a week full of clothes and food. They wouldn't give her back her gun but gave her a bigger and better automatic one.

Dr. Whitaker and a group of military men escorted Rox to the exit of The Base. "You will leave The Base and have a boundary of two-hundred miles. There will be a 24-hour tracker in you. Both I and you will have a monitor to locate your exact position and this way you will be able to map out your moves. You have a maximum of seven days to find all that you can and return to The Base."

Rox recognized the long stairwell that she first used to enter The Base. She turned around at the sound of Dr. Whitaker calling her name. He was holding a metal box with a screen and something extending from it. "Come, let me put in the tracker." Rox timidly approached him and when they came face to face, he moved aside her hair and stuck her in the neck.

She immediately felt something cold and quick crawl inside of her. Up her spine, through her spine, into her head. When she opened her eyes again, nothing was the same. Her head had a pounding pain, and everything's color was more intense. She looked at herself in the reflection of the metal wall, and her eyes were a deep red.

She wanted to cry at what she had just easily let them do to her, but she wouldn't let herself show any signs of weakness in front of them. She simply turned and walked up the stairs into the sunlight. Instead of running because of the limited time she had, she found herself laying on the thin dry grass and staring at the clouds. She'd missed them so much.

She screamed in horror when red lines and circles flashed in the sky, like grids and points on a radar. As she looked around she saw that the lines weren't in the sky but in her eyes. They were on top of everything she saw. Rox quickly took the tracker remote out of her bag and screamed into it for them to stop. Dr. Whitaker's voice replied, "It only happens when we're tracking you. Just testing it now."

Rox spent the majority of the day navigating to find fields that might have a lot of the plants she needed. The administration had given her a list basically made of medical plants: aloe vera, globe artichoke, Chinese yam, tea tree, sea buckthorn. Rox had no luck the first day, at finding plants anyway.

Rox set up camp for the night in an abandoned house that was on it's way to falling completely apart. The floorboards were broken and part of the ceiling was falling out, but somehow she felt more at home than she ever felt at The Base. The main thing she needed the house for was it's fire place. In her bag was fire glass. It produced more heat than real wood, gave off no smoke, odor or ash.

She was sitting by the fire, going through her bag, when she heard the light creak of the floorboards. Rox turned and saw a woman, about her own age, running towards her and immediately grabbed her gun. The woman dropped to her knees and the words, "DON'T SHOOT!", filled the air. Rox couldn't help but think of Eli.