Renovation of an Empire

Ch. 1

     I stand, my hot breath turning to ice in the frigid air. As I catch my breath, all I can hear is the ringing in my ears. I can feel my blood pumping through my veins, high off adrenaline.

     I look down to see the blood-soaked clothes of a man with a knife in his back. My memory is slightly foggy, so I can only assume what exactly happened. The blood is still warm. The man is wearing a guard uniform, with his gun on his left. It must have fallen out of his pocket. I pick it up and examine it. A pistol.

     Might be useful, I think to my self as I put it in my pocket. I look around at the vacant wasteland that is my surroundings. It's mid winter, but there is no snow. Just dead grass. Dead everything, honestly. No wind at all. I suddenly hear someone else walking towards me. I yank the knife out of the guards back and turn around, ready to strike.

     I am Lilliana Avery. A girl of roughly 18 years of age. I lost track after about the third year of being out in this retched wasteland. Wondering how I got here? I'm not surprised.

It all started when Emperor decided one day he would like to take over my country, Erivale. Let me put it this way... he is a major control freak with murderous intensions. He basically banned all free will, and when someone would "act up" they would disappear. That's what happened with my parents. They disappeared when I was about 10, the same time Emperor came into command. I honestly don't know how he did it, but he managed to overthrow the government. Tricky fuckin bastard.

For the next few years I did my best to follow the rules, for survival. I watched as my peers slowly turned into lifeless robots, void of emotions. They... they weren't human. Not anymore, at least.

Not to mention the cameras. Everywhere there were cameras. The only privacy you could get would be in the toilet or in a dirt bunker. Although now thinking about it, they probably had cameras installed there too. Everywhere there were cameras. Everywhere you turned you would be watched. Every move, every breath, everything.

The listening devices were the worst. All clothing had them implemented. If you tried to take the device out of the shirt, you were zapped with a deadly dose of electricity. All old articles of clothing were to be burned. Luckily for me, I was able to hide my old clothes well enough, but I could never wear them. Why? You had to be wearing the listening device on a day-to-day basis. It was torture.

When I was around 12 I heard of people called "Runaways", a group of people who managed to make it out of the country, into the barren wasteland outside of Erivale. The new government informed us that anyone caught trying to leave the country would be executed. The mere thought of freedom was enough to keep me going. I didn't care if I lived or died. I wanted -no, needed- out, no matter the consequences.

I made a pact with my friends, the only two that wanted freedom as bad as I. We would get out together, no matter what. We started planning. Luckily for us, listening devices were not implemented yet, and we planned all we could. We would all meet up in my friend Evelyn's basement, which was really just a hole in the ground. No one knew of it but us. We hid clothing, non perishables, water, and other basic necessities like soap, thread, needles, ect. We also collected knives, bats, and other things we could use as weapons.

Around the time I was 14, the listening devices were implemented. It was also about the time when we set our plan into action. Our town was relatively near the border, so there were a plethora of guards in town and on border patrol. We slowly learned the paths of the guards, along with their schedules.

We decided the best plan was to sneak out after curfew. Curfew was at 8:00, and we decided to sneak out at 12:00, because most of the guards were on break, leaving only a few guards to patrol the border and around town. All we had to do was get to the edge of our town, a relatively small town at that, furthest away from the border, and go north for a few miles. While exploring a few years before, we had discovered a hole in the fence surrounding the border. It was well hidden, and only big enough to fit a smaller person through. We didn't pay much mind to it then, as it was before Emperor took over.

So with a not-so heavy heart, we snuck out under the cover of darkness. We managed to save some all-black clothes from being burned, and we wore them to avoid from being seen. We had grabbed all our supplies we had hidden the day before, and we put them in some all-black backpacks we had smuggled back from our supply hole.

We managed to meet up on the outskirts of town without being seen. Upon meeting, we nodded at each other and started heading north. We walked for a couple of hours, taking water breaks here and there. Finally, we made it. Arriving at the fence, we noticed something. The hole... it was gone. We looked at each other with concern. The only other option was to scale the fence, but it was way too high.

I suddenly remembered something. I had wire cutters in my backpack, just for something like this. I pulled them out and we all sighed in relief. I started to cut the fence. As I was pushing the fence out of the way so we could go through, I heard something that made my heart stop. A gunshot. It was close, but it wasn't aimed at us. We were well hidden behind some bushes.

I looked over to Evelyn and she was on the verge of tears. Her long blond hair was coming loose from its ponytail, and was falling in front of her pale face, her features illuminated from the moonlight. Her emerald eyes were filling up with tears. I turned to my other friend, Nori, whose dark brown tight-curled hair was a mess. Her dark features made her expression hard to see in the dead of night, but I could see her slightly shaking. I grabbed both of their hands as I heard footsteps slowly approach.

"Yes, yes, I understand sir. The fugitives were last sighted around here, but I can not find any traces of them. Yes, yes, yes sir. I will report back to base immediately," a deep voice said into a radio transmitter. We held our breath as the footsteps got quieter and quieter.

"We need to go, now." I whisper, and my friends nodded. I lifted up the fence, careful to make as little noise as possible. Nori crawled through the hole first, then Evelyn, then I. As soon as we were on the other side, we heard gunshots and shouting. I felt a bullet whizz by my leg, and I screamed, "WE NEED TO BOOK IT, NOW!"

We ran the fastest we could possibly go, and all of us being all required to take sports, was pretty damn fast. We booked it for a few miles, just until the light of the guard station was out of sight. We all collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily, near a outcropping of rocks. We crawled under a overhang, and decided to set up camp.

We were all tired, so we just set up a sleeping space. Even though we are all exhausted, we barely got any sleep, adrenaline still coursing through our veins. I managed to get an hour or so of sleep just before sunrise. I awake to a kick to the side. I wake almost instantaneously, every muscle in my body ready to book it again. I look up to see a boy's face, with dark brown eyes and longish brown hair.

We make eye contact as he says, "Who the fuck are you?"