The Weapon (The Hourglass Series Book 2)
Read The Weapon (The Hourglass Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Casey Donaldson
THE WEAPON
THE HOURGLASS
SERIES
PART 2
Casey Donaldson
Text Copyright © Casey Donaldson 2015
For the readers who wanted more.
Table of Contents
One hundred years ago the world’s population was
decimated by new, horrifying diseases, destroying cities and toppling
governments. A new world government, the Collective, was established. This soon
split into two factions: the Covenant and the Accord. Differing in their
opinion on how they should manage the disease, they waged war.
The disease petered out.
The war never ended.
This is Sarah’s world. She is fourteen years
old.
Behind
both the Covenant and the Accord exists the Hourglass Group. Responsible for
manufacturing the vast majority of weapons for both sides of the conflict, the
Group is more powerful than either of the warring parties.
Sarah
has their logo burnt onto her shoulder. She doesn’t know why.
A simple misunderstanding with a stolen pie
leads to Sarah’s incarceration in a juvenile prison ship. It should have been
easy. Keep your head down. Do your time. Get out. But the Hourglass Group had
other plans. Plans that included illegally kidnapping the inmates for use in
weapon experimentation. Sarah, along with her friends Finn and Marland, managed
to escape the clutches of the Hourglass Group with the help of one of the
prison guards. Just before the prison guard died, he told Sarah that she was
the key to ending the war. She had to be, he had said. After all, she had the
scar.
“Did you hear that?” asked Finn.
Sarah and Marland stopped behind him, listening.
Nothing.
Only the usual forest noises disrupted the
stillness.
“Never mind,” mumbled Finn, but he continued to
look around cautiously as they continued.
“It was probably just my stomach,” muttered Sarah
darkly under her breath.
They had been tramping through the forest for a
day and a half. They were tired, hungry, thirsty and dirty, and had no idea
where they were. Granted, escaping from the clutches of the Hourglass Group
hadn’t exactly left them much time to plan ahead, but it wasn’t exactly how she
had imagined life on the outside.
Finn stopped. This time Sarah and Marland had
heard it too. There had been a definite crack. Finn turned back to them and was
about to say something when a man stepped out of the bushes.
He had a gun.
It was directed at them.
“Don’t move a muscle,” he said, and then added
oddly, “I would hate to have to kill you.”
“Oh good,” replied Finn nervously, hands raised
slightly in surrender. “We would hate to have to die.”
The man with the gun was shortly joined by five
others, also carrying guns. Surrounded, they were led through the forest,
occasionally breaking to check their location via an old fashioned compass that
their leader, a stern-looking woman, was holding. It was, Sarah felt, extremely
intimidating. At least, it was until she noticed that one of their captors, a
boy about their age, was making eyes at Marland. She would have been concerned,
but Marland seemed to be making eyes back. None of their captors, she was
relieved to see, were wearing the Hourglass Group insignia. After six more
hours of tramping, the tree line finally broke and they found themselves at the
edge of a small, friendly-looking town. They were steered into a rather drab
building on the outskirts of the town and seated
along one side of a large table
in the centre of a mostly empty room. The woman, who Sarah had decided was
their leader, took the seat opposite them. Watching the three of them as she
sat down, the woman drew her handgun from her belt and laid it on the table in
front of them. The clunk as it came to rest on the table seemed to reverberate
around the room. Two of the men drew up seats next to the woman. The others
positioned themselves around the rest of the room, watching. Involuntarily,
Sarah’s eyes kept on sliding away from the woman and down to the handgun on the
table.
“What
are your names?”
“Wren,”
Sarah said.
“Lucas,”
mumbled Finn.
Marland
said, “Holly.”
“Well,
those are lies.” There was no doubt in the woman’s voice. She had known they
were lying as surely as she knew her own name. “But we can return to that. What
were you doing out in the woods?”
“We
wanted to get away from home,” said Finn. “There was nothing there left for
us.”
“Right,”
said the woman, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “So the alarm from the Hourglass
compound that went off two days ago had nothing to do with you? And I suppose
that those barcodes burnt onto each of your wrists doesn’t mean you were
prisoners either? Young prisoners, maybe,” she conceded, “but prisoners all the
same.” Their hands, the ones with the barcodes, all twitched simultaneously. They
had known that the barcodes could be a problem that would need fixing. They had
just hoped that they would have had more time to fix it.
“Are
you going to turn us in?” asked Sarah, biting her lip. The woman didn’t need
any more proof in order to turn them back over to the prison system. Or the
Hourglass Group, she added mentally, if that was who they worked for, although
by this point she thought that extremely unlikely.
“That
depends on what you tell me,” said the woman.
The
three of them exchanged glances. They all shrugged imperceptibly. It was not
like they had much choice.
Sarah
went to blurt out their story and then hesitated. “Are you… first, would you
tell us who you’re with?”
“Excuse
me?”
“Which
side does the town belong to? The Covenant or the Accord? Or… the Hourglass
Group?”
“We’re
neither. Especially not the Hourglass Group. This town is independent.”
Sarah
blinked, confused. She heard Marland drawing in an awed breath next to her. How
was that even possible? There were no independent towns or cities. Even if a
town had wanted to stay neutral it wouldn’t have been able to access medicines
or food supplies without an alliance. The militaries controlled the supply of
everything.
“How
does that even work?” asked Finn, voicing Sarah’s thoughts. “How can you not
have all starved to death? Or died of disease or something?”
“We
have our methods,” replied the woman enigmatically. “For now though, I’m
interested in you.”
The
man sitting next to her pulled out his own gun and laid it on the table in
front of him with a clunk, a repeat of the woman’s act earlier and a demoralising
reminder of the predicament they were in.
“Ah,
right.” Sarah swallowed nervously. “Ok, so we were on a prison ship, we-”
“Which
one?” cut in the woman.
“Er,
the
Anoscosa
.”
The
woman and man exchanged a quick glance. “Go on.”
“Yes,
right. So we were on the prison ship, but for stupid things. We’re not, like,
murderers or anything. I was in there for petty theft, he was there for forgery
and she, um, destroyed a shed.” Sarah trailed off a little here. Marland
actually burnt down her mother’s shed without really thinking of the
consequences. Arson was an ugly, ugly crime and could hurt many people, which
thankfully didn’t happen in Marland’s case, but at the same time Sarah was
loathe to reveal the truth in case it pushed their abductors into a decision
against their favour.
“You
shouldn’t have been on a prison ship for that.”
“If
only,” muttered Finn. The woman looked at him questioningly. “We were meant to
be sent to a farm,” he elaborated, “but there had been bombings and the farms
were off limits so we all got sent to the ships.”
“And
then the Hourglass Group kidnapped us to use in their experiments,” added in
Marland, still seething. “Those two managed to escape and came and got me out,”
she flashed them a grateful smile.
The
woman’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You two escaped a prison ship? Or the
Hourglass Group?” She sounded impressed with either version.
“We
had help,” said Sarah. The image of Mr Wall falling over the edge of the ship
after being shot by the warden flashed through her mind. She shivered. Mr Wall
had aided their escape. He also thought Sarah’s Hourglass insignia scar meant
something. She only wished she knew what that was as well.
“So
why weren’t you with the others?” asked the man, speaking for the first time.
“The
others?”
“The
rest of the escapees from the Hourglass Group’s compound," she explained. “Most
of them were picked up by Hourglass personnel within an hour after the alarm
went off. We watched it.”
“Oh,”
said Marland softly. She seemed to deflate a little.
Sarah
thought of the Queen and felt a small wave of relief. The Queen was a fellow
inmate who had terrorised her, Marland and Finn over the past few weeks,
promising bodily harm if they disappointed her. Sarah couldn’t help but feel a
little bit happy about the fact that she was still locked up.
“We
escaped first,” said Finn. “We left the others keys to get out. Some of them
weren’t exactly friendly.”
“But
you still let them out?” asked the woman.
“Like
we could leave them to an organisation such as the Hourglass Group,” snorted
Marland contemptuously.
This
time the woman regarded Marland with something close to regard. The boy who had
been making eyes at Marland during the hike over there positively beamed at her
from his positioned in the background. The woman smiled at them.
“When
was the last time you had something to eat?”
****
Most of their captors left them to it, except for
one man guarding the door. The boy returned a few minutes later with food and
water. To Sarah’s amusement he sat himself down at the table and stared at them
in wonder as they tucked hungrily into the food. It was a thick soup with
potatoes and lentils and heavily seasoned. Sarah thought she had never tasted
anything so delicious in her life. After holding out for a full thirty seconds,
the boy punctured the silence made by their eating.
“My name’s Gary,” he said happily. “I just want
to say, wow. I mean, wow,” he repeated again. Sarah and Finn exchanged an
amused glance that was completely lost on Gary.
“I mean,” he continued, “what you guys went through? The people that you
defied? It just blows my mind. I mean, we’ve been trying to get something on
the Hourglass Group for ever, and then you guys-”
“Gary,” growled the man warningly at the door.
Gary looked a little sheepish. “Ah, right, I’m
meant to leave it to Harmony to tell you what’s going on.”
The man at the door groaned again. Sarah got the
impression Gary wasn’t supposed to give out names just yet. She also figured
that Gary was often like this.
“Wait,” said Marland, “so you’re like, some kind
of resistance group?” she looked impressed.
Gary glowed. “Well, I-”
“Gary!” snapped the man at the door.
Gary winced. “Maybe I’ll come back later,” he
muttered. He glanced up at Marland. “Definitely come back later,” he adjusted.
Marland blushed and Gary got up to leave the room. As he exited, the leader,
Harmony, Sarah now supposed, came back in. She looked at Gary leaving and then
back up to the guard.
“How much did he tell them?” she asked, her voice
already defeated.
“Well, they know your name,” replied the guard.
Harmony sighed and continued into the room.
“Good,” she said, looking at their bowls which
had been scrapped clean. “I’ll give you the tour.”
Harmony took them around town, explaining how
things worked.
It
was a small town, only a few hundred people or so. They grew all their own
crops and farmed their own animals. They had a large, ancient, industrial water
filter that had been running ever since the war had started to claim all the
smaller towns as well as the cities. It was looked after almost religiously,
every nut and bolt cleaned and kept free of rust, every filter rinsed and dried
on schedule. They had a resident “medic”, who had been trained by the previous
medic, and him by the person before. Originally there had been a doctor, and
although the current medic’s skills weren’t quite as proficient, they generally
managed fairly well. The town, ironically enough, was split into two factions.
Those who wanted to live as peacefully and as anonymously as possible, wanting
to do nothing that could draw the attention of either the Accord or the
Covenant, and those who wanted to actively fight against the two regimes for a
better, independent life for other people and towns currently under the thumb
of either one of the main political groups. The group that Harmony led were part
of the latter group. They had gone to investigate the alarm that had issued
from the Hourglass Group’s compound, which they had been keeping a close eye on
in case any opportunity arose for sabotage. It was shortly afterwards that they
had spotted the three of them.
“Harmony?”
asked Sarah as they ended the tour, “how did you know our names weren’t Wren,
Lucas and Holly?”
“We
heard you discussing aliases before we nabbed you,” said Harmony, her face
splitting into a barely contained grin.
Sarah
blushed. “Oh.”