Born to Fight (2 page)

I untie my feet and swing my legs to the edge of the bed. My pee drips from the bed onto the floor. The single splashes and the constant sound of the heart monitor, make the room smaller. I'm panicking. It stings between my legs. I don’t want to know what that was, or what they've done to me.

I push myself off the bed, but my arm is weak and fuzzy. My vision is getting hazy. The floor is cold against my toes. My legs feel weak like a baby deer's. My first steps are awkward and uncoordinated.

I lick my lips and whisper, "Anna." Warmth washes over me and I shudder, staring at the door weakly.

I stumble to the wall and bend to unplug the heart monitor. I have to slide down the wall to get the cord. I jerk it and the sound stops. I want to cry, but I can't. I can't stand up again. Whatever he shot into my arm, is making me feel sick. I crawl along the wall to the tray of things. I pull out some alcohol and pour it over my arm. I wince and almost cry out. It stings. The scrapes are red and angry. I wrap a long, thin, white bandage around my arm and tape it there.

Then I drag myself to where his dead body lies. I slide my smelly nightgown off and tug off his pants and his coat. I dress myself painfully and slowly. I tuck my hair into the back of the lab coat. His shoes are ridiculous on me, like the clown at the circus I saw once with Granny.

I put on his socks. He lies there in his underwear and undershirt. He is pudgy. I look at his meaty body. Compared to the skin and bone I am used to seeing, he is huge.

I crawl to the door and prepare myself for the effort, I am about to use.

"Anna," I whisper again. She doesn’t come back. Did she not hear the commotion? Is she okay? Was she taken captive too? I don’t have time to ponder. I need to run, but like the feeling I had earlier, I fear I won't live through it. I'm too tired and too sick.

I use the handle of the door to pull myself up to my feet. Exhaustion is not the right word.

I stand and steady myself. I feel inside of his coat pockets. I need an inventory of what he has and what I need. The sliding card in his right pocket looks exactly like the one from the farm.

I wish Anna and, even Will, would come. I feel sick and my arm probably needs stitches. I can feel it's still bleeding, soaking the bandage. I look around the tiny room and try to fight the feeling that everything is hopeless before it's even started. Maybe she wasn’t real.

"She was there, Em. Get a grip. Anna was here. The doctor is dead." I whisper to myself. "You did one thing today." The words make a tiny smile cross my lips.

Granny always had lists. She would check things off all the time.

I glance back at him and see the check mark in my mind. Sometimes she would put 'Watch Days of our Lives' on the list. We would watch it and eat popcorn or chips. Everyday was Days. My favorite character was Sami. When I turned eight, I was allowed to start watching it with her.

I hold the cold, metal handle and force my mind back around to my own list. Die free with the wind on my face, is pretty high on it. I need to be more positive.

"Try not to die…not yet," I say hoarsely and turn the knob of the door. As I hear the handle hit the end of its rotation, I stop.

I should have waited an extra second. The drugs are making me crazy. I'm talking to myself and making mistakes.

I look around. Memories and skills are flooding my mind as I try to formulate a plan.

Do I stay in the room and wait for Anna to come back? I need weapons. I glance back at the dead doctor and turn the knob closed again. I stumble over to where his tools are splayed across the floor. I bend as best as I can and pick up a couple of the silver knives from the floor. The cold metal in my fingers feels just as amazing, as I imagined it would. There are bags of water and other things. I grab them and stuff a couple in my pockets and stagger back to the door. I put my hand back on the door and grip the cold knife with the other. I take a breath and imagine how the forest is going feel when I'm in it again. His fur and the cold air of the woods, my daydreams consist of so little.

The cold metal and stark white of the room make me feel exposed and naked. The door handle turns again with ease. I open it a crack and peak out. The hallway doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Anna is nowhere to be found, no one is. It isn’t like the breeder farms.

The lights are muted and flicker. They make me painfully aware of the fact that she probably wasn't real. She wasn't really there. I am still alone.

The old fluorescents flicker like they're running on something unstable. Brian's generator was like that. The lights would flicker. Granny's generator was too. I never ran it much, but when I did, it freaked me out the way the power felt half on.

The light in the hallway looks the same.

But the hallway itself isn’t immaculate and stark like the room I'm in. It's dingy and empty of life. I look down one end of the hallway. Nothing stirs. I can see papers on the floor and closed doors. It looks like people fled in a panic, like all the other buildings I've seen. I look down the other side of the hallway to find it looks the same. Nothing is the way I think it will be. It's not clean like the breeder farms or organized. Where am I? How could this be the place Marshall would bring me?

I have a bad feeling. What if Anna was real? Is she safe? Is she alone? I gag as my vision blurs. I don't have the strength to help her.

I whistle softly in case he's with her. Nothing moves or makes a sound. I look up to see if there are cameras or anything. Dad always hated the video cameras that recorded everywhere you went and what you bought. He hated being recorded. He had weird theories about the cameras and the information they gathered. I smile faintly when I think about how crazy I thought he was. He would have loved this place. It would have confirmed so many things for him.

My first steps feel forced, like I'm wading through water. I can't listen to the nothingness surrounding me. I don’t know if I hear everything correctly. The flickering lights are working against me. They're trying to drive me crazy. I twitch and shiver and know it's too late; I already am crazy.

There is too much suspense and empty space in the hallway. Sweat is trickling down the sides of my face, making me twitch and wipe it away. The flickering lights make it impossible to get a good view of everything. I see nothing but me, the papers, and doorways, but the flashes won't guarantee I am alone.

I try every doorknob along the hall, but they're locked. The cold of the metal against my fingers is shocking. I think I have a fever. He has injected me with poison and now I'm dying.

I put a hand on the bumpy wall to steady myself. I lick my lips. Everything feels slow and pronounced.

The lights flash at the same rate my heart beats.

I peek around the corner at the end of the hall. Again, I find myself alone in a long corridor with papers and debris on the floor.

A sharp pain hits me in the stomach. I break a rule, not that it matters—I think I've broken them all at this point.

I bend and cry out. I can't stop myself. The pain is agonizing. It feels as if my insides move. I drop to my knees and slide myself along the floor. I ride a piece of paper like it's a magic carpet and grip my stomach with my left hand.

The flashing lights are inside my eyes now. When I close them, I can see the flashing and the hallway. Even in my mind, nothing about this hallway makes sense. Except maybe, the flashing lights. The uneven power supply makes sense.

I move forward on my knees, until I feel like I can stand again. I grip a door handle and pull myself up. My legs shake and attempt to buckle. I refuse to fall.

The wall is holding me up completely.

"Leo," I whisper his name. I need his fur in my fingers. I always imagined it would be the last thing I touched. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I'm going to die alone in a hallway with nothing in my fingers and no wind on my face.

The pain is unbearable.

I lean on a doorknob for a breath, but instead I fall inside. The handle was unlocked. I hit the floor and cry out again. I wait for the room's occupants to attack me. I wait for the sound of my own tearing.

Nothing happens.

I look up and in the flashes of light from the hallway, I see something I never expected. Jesus is looking down on me with huge wide-open arms. He is smiling and telling me that everything is going to be okay. I drag myself into the room and kick the door shut. As the door closes, the light leaves us. Me and Jesus, perfect strangers, sit alone in the dark. I don’t introduce myself. He will know me soon enough.

Chapter Two

In the darkness of the closed up room, flashes of images pass in front of my eyes—memories of the beginning.

In the flashes and fever, I see the TV at Brian's. It's old and small. When we got there, I didn’t even know how to turn it on. I hadn't seen a TV like it before. Gramps had a huge flat screen. I miss Gramps and Granny.

My dad had his face plastered to the rounded screen, the entire time we were at Brian's hiding out. We barely made it there. I remember the panic and pandemonium. I remember the way he dragged me through the woods, yelling at me to hurry up; we needed to get to Brian's. We had left it too late. A tidal wave was coming and we needed to get to high ground and cut through the woods to Brian's. He screamed and I tried to run, but my legs hurt.

Once we made it to the bunker, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fight the urge to watch the news. It was so scary, and yet, my eyes wouldn’t leave it.

The same news lady was on everyday. I knew her voice better than my own. "We have passed the point of needing blood donations. The public is safer to stay inside and wait it out. Rations and remaining inside, are your best bet at this point. Right now, on the Western seaboard, we believe there to be at least one million cases of the Dengue fever that is sweeping across America. That number is reported cases. We do not know the exact number, as many people are trying to stay home and fight it out." Her face was tired, and the makeup didn’t hide the pain in her eyes. Her perfect brown bob was shiny and clean. She was the last clean person I remembered, before the breeder farms.

I was already dirty when I watched her on the news in Brian's bunker. I glanced back at Dad. I didn’t like the way he nodded, like he was part of the conversation with the news lady. He looked crazy when he looked at me and said, "We leave soon, kid. When the panic is over."

I nodded and hugged my knees in tighter to my body. I looked back at the news lady. Her dark-blue eyes were glassy. I imagined she knew something, but couldn’t tell the rest of us, like how bad it all really was.

She swallowed hard and continued. "In other news, Japan has again been hit by several strong earthquakes. They are ranging between 4.3 and 7.5. As we all know, the Dengue fever is considerably worse in Asia, so this couldn’t come at a worse time for them. Several small tidal waves have already hit Alaska and Northwestern Canada. Power outages and flooding have been bad along the Northwest Coast. Canada is suffering through its own earthquakes. The famous Hot Springs Island in British Columbia is dry. The hot springs are gone. In other news, New York and New Jersey are still underwater from the mass flooding that’s left over from the hurricanes this season." My stomach sunk.

Brian turned the TV off and we sat in the bunker in silence. Dad had been saying it would happen. He had been saying it for as long as I could remember. All the names I'd called him inside my mind, started to make me feel bad. I remember thinking bad things about him as he dragged me along the hillside, yelling at me that we needed to get to high ground. The highway was blocked and another tidal wave was coming.

Brian left the bunker a lot. He turned the handle and opened the sealed door in the ceiling. It made a noise like Granny's Tupperware did. I could imagine the outside world. The news images were horrifying, but I would still see it the way it was when we came into the bunker. Only Brian and my dad got to leave. The only fresh air I got, was when they cracked the door open to leave. The cold wind shot down the ladder. I would get goose bumps and feel excitement every time.

I hated the bunker. We ate canned food and dried food and watched the small TV. The panic was all just the way Dad said it would be. The news footage was scary—looting and bombing and countries at war. Everyone blamed each other for the Dengue fever. Then they all started bombing areas to kill the sick, who weren't dying from the fever. It seemed like it would never end.

But then it did, when the TV stopped working. When the power and the water turned off, we sat in the candlelight and spent the days wondering and imagining. What was it like out there?

The day we left the bunker was a bad day. The TV hadn’t been on for two weeks. The last thing I saw was the President making a speech and crying. I missed half of it. I was sleeping. That's all there had been to do in the bunker. I woke to Dad packing the jeep and the bunker door opening.

When we got into the jeep, Dad told me and Brian his plan, again.

He was as impassioned telling it the hundredth time, as he had been the first time. "So we'll cross the freeway at the Green Mountain exit and take the back road till we get to the base of the mountain range, where the cabin is. It's a day's hike up then. There is an old farmhouse there at the base of the mountain that the cabin is on."

I was so tired of the plan. I was so tired of his voice. I could scream with frustration. The only thing getting me by, was a copy of a book I found, called
Twilight
. I'd read it three times in the bunker, always wondering if she ever got what she wanted?

I gripped the thick book to me in the jeep and held back the screams that clogged my throat and left me breathless.

Dad looked back at me, "When the people who live at the farmhouse die off, we can go and see what they have. Farmhouses always have the best stuff. Canning and dried foods, and not to mention, the best survival supplies. Ropes and shovels and extras of everything. Remember that, Em. It's us and them now." I had heard it so many times, I could have choked him. There were moments I hated him.