Maurice held his face like a two ton-truck had just slammed into it. His chubby cheeks grew rosier by the second as his blood flowed to the affected area and the nerves left a stinging pain in their place. Disbelief cascaded through his crystal-clear eyes as he glared back at me, tears touching the tinges of his eyes.
"Stay back!" I yelled at him, jumping to my feet and squatting ready to lunge out of the way if he came after me. I felt like I was playing a game of Kill the Drone, the knife poised in my hand as I waited in suspense for the perfect moment to strike. "I will hurt you!"
"You already have!" he whined before turning to face the tent. "Bryce! Bryce! Help!"
"What now?" a course reply echoed as Bryce emerged reluctantly and somewhat guiltily from the tent. It took him a moment to gather his thoughts and assess the scene, before it sunk in. He knew I had no intention of being sold, and slowly, he reached into his coat pocket.
Without taking a second guess at what was in his pocket, I sprinted as fast as I could towards the trees and leaped over the yellow puddle Maurice had left behind. I ran straight for the gathering frost as it gathered lower in the clearing. It was unusually low tonight, but that was the weather these days. The People's War had left the terrain so ruined, plants didn't even know what season it was. Flowers bloomed where winter once stood in a magnificent array of yellow and purple.
"Fuckin' hell Maurice!" Bryce shouted from behind me as he raced after his escapee.
I made out the muffled sound of Maurice vaguely apologizing as he followed Bryce into the forest. It never occurred to me that this would be how I escaped from certain death, but somehow, I felt like I was heading towards it instead. Maybe it was the sound of their footsteps becoming louder that threw my senses off? But whatever it was, the gnawing feeling in my stomach didn't release its grip.
The lack of food and sleep produced a poor amount of energy and the shear will of running drained every ounce of strength from my limbs. I stumbled over my feet and slid across the dirt in a frantic fashion I didn't recognise in myself, unable to get any grip on the slippery surface. I leaped over fallen logs and swung wildly around thin tree trunks, all whilst routinely checking over my shoulder at the advancing duo.
Maurice quickly began to fall well behind Bryce and I sprinted harder, allowing pure fear to flood every ounce of me. The last time I had felt this way, I'd been hunted, and it wasn't even in a game of biased tag. It was in a game of Kill the Drone gone wrong.
Kill the Drone was the game to play for youngsters during the height of the Secret Rebellion. Like a game of neighborhood tag designed to cure boredom, the game was widely regarded as fun by the youth of the Rebellion effort. It required an unsuspecting attacker, a crowd of watching children to confirm the kill, and of course, an unsuspecting Drone. The whole aim of the game was to creep up behind the Drone, distract it and as soon as it turned to you, thrust a knife into its field vision scanner. The more you killed the more you were regarded as a hero, and the annual hunting season provided a perfect way in which my brother, Allan, scored most of his hits.
Allan wasn't really my brother, not biologically anyways. He was just the guy who lived around the corner from me and my father, and just so happened to be the neighborhood scout leader. From the moment we first met, it was decided that I was his second in command and he would raise me up through the ranks of teenage proprietorship. He was the best of the best and thought it was about high time I learnt how to kill a Drone myself.
The pair of us had taken refuge down an alleyway and were watching the late afternoon street traffic go by. Soon enough, his scouted Drone hovered into view. He lurked out from behind the dumpster waiting for it to go by, a large grin on his face. He glanced back at me, his green eyes shimmering with delight, and nodded, trying to reassure me he knew what he was doing.
He followed the Drone out onto the street and let a high-pitched whistle escape his lips. It hovered still for a moment before it turned to him.
"Hey! Dip shit!" he yelled at it, waving his hands like a maniac. Its blue light went red and it was then that my brother understood he had made a mistake on this one. Drones weren't usually so alert. "Shit!" he yelled. "ELLIE! RUN!"
The Drone pursued my brother as he ran towards me, the machine chasing him down the street and back into the alleyway. He grabbed my hand, pulling me behind him. My chest felt restricted by a virtual rope full of panic as we dashed down the pavement in the hopes of losing it.
We didn't notice at first, but the closer we got to the end of the alley, the taller the brick building loomed over us. We were blocked in. With nowhere to go, and our fate sealed in the hands of this one Drone, we knotted our fingers together. Slowly we turned, stood tall and were met with a rain of bullets.
The fear I felt then, was my energy now. It consumed me. I knew Maurice had given up a long time ago. His large, unfit shape left him far behind, panting and keeling over. But Bryce was still gaining on me.
No matter how much I tried, I couldn't shake him. He was like a disease. The person I felt secure with was chasing me in a bid to survive themselves. Tears began to flow down my cheeks. They paved a path in the dirt that filled my pores. I felt cheated. Why did I let myself be fooled so easily? My vision blurred with salt as I continued to run in the darkness and I brought my sleeve to my eyes, wiping them away.
I skidded down a muddy embankment and stumbled, falling flat on my stomach. Panting and in shock, I looked back over my shoulder, the knot in my stomach tightening its grip. Bryce now stood at the top of the slope staring down at me. His light complexion was illuminated by the frost that had gathered around him. I could see his chest heaving up and down. He smiled, shining a torch down on me so it blinded my sight. I tried desperately to stand but I only stumbled again, exhausted.
"Come here," he panted as he jumped down.
He fell on top of me, so we were level with each other's unsightly faces. I felt his heavy breath beating down on my neck as his eyes shined brighter. I lay frozen underneath him, scared and unsure of what to do. It was all too much. If this was my life now, then I didn't want any piece of it!
"Kill me already!" I shouted at him, frustration seeping through my voice as I lightly pounded his chest and burst into a fresh batch of tears.
He looked slightly taken aback. "I wasn't planning on it."
I stopped, surprised. "You weren't?"
He shook his head. There was still a chance to get away and if he wasn't going to kill me, then what was the worst that could happen? With the last ounce of strength I could muster, I kicked him right in the balls. As he cried out in pain and rolled on his side, I slipped out from beneath him, grabbed his torch and dashed off through the trees.
"Hey! I'm trying to help you!" he shouted as he recovered.
I didn't want to hear what reason he had concocted to try and prevent me from leaving, I only knew that I wasn't going to hang around and wait for the answer. I worked my tired muscles harder, dodging the snatching, low hanging branches the best I could. I let the torchlight dance across the forest floor like it was a solo ballet dancer with a single spotlight pointed at it as the trees slowly thinned themselves out.
Frost billowed out from my mouth as I wheezed, and my hands slackened as I skidded to an abrupt halt with nowhere to go.
"Fuck," I muttered, realising what was in front of me.
Frost rose up and billowed out over the edge, the crater stretching for miles either way in front of me. It was the biggest Frokost I had ever seen. Most of the ones I'd come across in my lifetime were only a few meters deep, but this one went straight down to hell. Frokost's tended to contain hot bursts of steam during heat waves, and unbelievably cold bursts of frost in the opposite kind of weather. They were essentially the exposed underground tunnels from where bombs had hit the pipes, disrupting the network of our heating and water systems, causing the soil to create an unusual wave of effects. I shivered at the frost blinding me. There had to be a way around it.
I scanned the Frokost, boulders creating a natural barrier along the ridge, the ground falling away beyond that. The war had caused the earth to falter and now, it opened its wounds for anyone who dared to look at the ghastly sight, and it seemed it was only getting worse.
Panicked and out of breath, I turned to see Bryce come to a halt. Fear and concern crossed his eyes as he stuck his hand out.
"Stay back," I said as I shone the torch in his eyes and made him squint.
"I don't want to hurt you," he said calmly, inching closer to me.
"How do I know you're telling the truth?"
He looked at the ground and then back at me. His death-defying blue eyes containing an eerie softness to them.
"Why?" I persisted, shaking the torch around slightly.
"Why what?" he asked, taking another step towards me.
"Why me? Why did you save me? Why did you pick me up?" I asked, desperation seeping into my voice. None of his actions made sense in my brain, and the fact that he had pursued me made me even more confused.
"Our plan went wrong. I needed to bring back something and you were discarded cargo," he simply said, shrugging. "You were with the New Government, I assumed you were important to them."
"Well you were wrong," I spat. "I am nobody."
"You had to be someone for them to behave like that."
I shook my head furiously. "Not a chance."
He sighed then shrugged. "You're important. In my world, important escapees equal a bounty-hunters food for the month."
So, he was a bounty-hunter then. That's what his little encampment was. He was licensed by the government to kill the slaves and outlaws that ran away. That was his job. I shivered, not from the cold, but from the realization that his entire way of living in the New World was to hunt and turn people in, and he somehow saw worth in me when I'd rolled myself off the back of the truck.
"How much?"
He glanced at me. "You'd do almost a year of food, I reckon." He took a cautious step towards me and stopped as I stepped back closer to the edge.
"Please come away from there. Come back with me," he said, his hand beckoning me to come off the edge.
I shook my head. "So, you can sell me back to them?"
"Please."
"Not a chance."
"I promise I won't take you back."
"How can you make a promise like that?" I pointed out.
If this young man, not much older than myself, expected me to go back with him, then my entire conscious told me I couldn't. I wasn't going to go back to tagging bodies or Matthew or Sergeant Hill. I was tired and alone and I seemed to have an endless life. My secret and the book would have to die with me.
I took another step back and teetered along the rim of the Frokost. A stone came loose and fell, clicking along the side of the cliff as gravity pulled it towards hell.
"Don't do this!" he pleaded, reaching out for me. "We can make a deal! I promise!"
"I'm sorry," I said as I let myself fall backwards into the fog.