Delusional Read online

  You would think that after weeks of awaiting this exact kind of thing, and a week that had been crazy and drama-filled even for the standards of a camp full of kids and desperate adults awaiting their deaths, that we would have an escape plan. But when you’re trapped at the top of a mountain in the middle of the desert, all escape options tend to go out the window as you realize you are utterly and helplessly subject to the mercy of the world. And this world is anything but merciful. This world is out to kill.

  The helicopters quickly flew forward so that their shadows loomed over the camp, their thick, shiny bodies reflecting in the aura of the last rays of colorful light being sucked from the sky. Not trying to waste any more time and have myself be the first to get abducted or killed, I started to run through the main area of the camp, hopping over picnic tables and the remnants and ash of the bonfire that was just lit at center of the camp before the government decided to show up and not only ruin our own little party, but blow up the house that it took place in.

  “Carlos!” I pulled him in my direction as I passed his body on the ground.

  “Stop. Dulce, it’s no use.” He pushed my arm away and sighed, seemingly content with sitting on the floor, awaiting his demise at the hands of a sempiternal force.

  Everything went by too quickly for me to say anything else. I couldn’t beg him to move, I couldn’t tell him goodbye, I couldn’t tell him that I loved him more than anyone else in this world. It was too late. They were here, and they were determined to kill us all.

  It all started with the sound of the propellers of the helicopter being turned up to the maximum speed and thus volume obnoxiously, which caused everything to feel like it was one massive vortex spinning into oblivion. Then an angry, yet oddly creepy voice boomed above the noise of the propellers, causing a massive gust of wind to blow my black hair into my face and block my vision.

  “Surrender and die! Surrender and die, my friends!” The way that his voice echoed through the air and rocked my brains until I felt like ripping my ears out was so powerful and omnipresent that I almost thought it was the man in the sky telling me my time was up, which would have been very rude of him to reiterate something that I obviously already knew.

  During all of this I kept running, hoping that somehow, I could escape down the side of the mountain before the blackness of their helicopters and the night absorbed me for good. The screams seemed to reverberate in the air along with the light, airy dust particles being kicked around everywhere with the movement of hundreds of legs trampling on the ground for dear life.

  I can get down the mountain. I can escape. I’m too small for them to even notice me. I took a deep breath, exhaling in a slow, steady stream as I tried to calm my nerves as I ran down the service trail to the top of the mountain, just one tiny body in the middle of a horde of people trying to break free from our worst nightmare.

  Then the first explosion shook the ground beneath me, causing my legs to collapse as the sound waves instantly flattened all the hairs in my ears. I screamed, but my mind registered my voice as nothing more than an inaudible vibration in the wake of the ear-blistering screech incessantly echoing in my head. A blast of wind pounded my body against the floor as I tried to get back up and begin running again, and before I could even open my eyes and try to register the pandemonium around me, a surge of flames coursed over my body.

  At first, I wanted to yell, but then I realized screaming would do no use because there was not a living being in the universe who could save me from my fate. Then I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were glued shut, my mind subconsciously saving them from being melted in the heat of the flame.

  Another round of explosions rocked the ground beneath me and rattled each bone in my body. Everything felt weightless for a moment, as a massive rush of blood swathed my mind along with another wave of ash, smoke, and fire. There was no doubt that multiple layers of my skin had been incinerated into thin air throughout my entire body, and it would only be a matter of seconds until my organs started to disappear with the numbing heat.

  I have to go. Every ounce of pain in my body was absent from my consciousness as I stood up, practically every muscle fiber firing in my legs. The initial shock of the government blitzing our camp at dusk had faded, and the only feeling rushing through me was a determination to run and grab on to everything I had left before it was burned in the flames forever.

  “Natalie!” My voice came out sounding more like a violent croak than an actual word. “Hunter!” I hoped that somehow my scream could carry to their ears through the wall of flames, but everything was black, and it was impossible to tell whether my eyes were closed or open.

  They must be around here. I frantically scrambled through the ash and soot, emerging from one of the remnants of an explosion with smoke suffocating my vision. They have to be here. I can’t let them leave me. I can’t let them be taken too. A surge of panic sent a sharp feeling through my chest as I cursed myself for not seeing Natalie and Hunter the second that the helicopters arrived on the horizon.

  Where did they go? They couldn't have escaped. It all happened too fast. They must be in the flames. I suppressed a scream from catapulting out of my throat as my vision began to clear up along with the slowly rising smoke that had perforated above the mountain to form into one heaping, black mass.

  I looked behind me toward the beginning of the service trail and connected with the bodies strewn across the floor lifelessly, shards of metal lining their dismembered, ash-ridden bodies which were rendered unrecognizable. The heavy, acrid smell slammed my nose, and filled my mouth with a vile, rotten flavor whose aftertaste would reside on my tongue forever.

  The whole scene around me was so surreal that I thought it was just a wild vision transported directly from one of nightmares. But the moment that the grip of the warm, leather gloves gripped my back and pulled me in its direction, I knew that I was being burned alive, and I knew that I had lost everything in my life for one last time, when I thought I had almost nothing to begin with.

  They can’t just take it away from me. They can’t just send me away to one of the cleansing facilities. They can’t kill me. I have to live. I violently jabbed my elbows into the body of the thing behind me, but it did no use to thwart its wrangling of my body due to the padded material lining its exterior. Another explosion rattled the ground beneath me, and the thing behind me tackled my body to the ground, smothering my entire self, which shielded me from the shards of metal and deathly heat. If I had my outer layers of skin, they would undoubtedly be scraped up from the coarse dirt and rocks that dug into my body with the forceful collision with the ground. I didn’t even want to imagine what all the bacteria infesting the dirt would do once they had a near-direct path to my bloodstream. The only thing I was worried about was the thing that had a leather-like protective coat wrapped around me, while pushing me deeper into the flames and over the mangled, melting bodies and articles of clothing that were strewn across the top of the service trail.

  They are forcing me to be burned alive. I flailed my legs backward, hoping to use my small, yet nimble body to escape the grip of the thing behind me. I didn’t care what would happen once I escaped; I didn’t even have to live more than a few hours. It would be better to be bitten by a rattlesnake, die of starvation, dehydration, or anything else that didn’t require my body ending up in the same state of the last name of the man that had destroyed my life in the first place: President Ash.

  I couldn’t bear to lose one more thing to him. I’d rather die at the power of natural elements, rather than his artificial power that had begun to eat every last piece of humanity away from America.

  I managed to jab my left heel backwards, and by the instant loosening of its grip, I guessed the thing currently assaulting me was a man, some sort of animal, or a cyborg that had a sensitive area directly between his two legs. There was actually some comfort in the realization that the thing viciously attacking me and forcing me to disintegrate at the hands of the fla
mes was a human rather than some sort of cyborg freak or robot, or even genetically engineered animal that the government had deployed to kill the free birds, or people who hadn’t taken the blue pill at the wake of Protocol 00, like me.

  If I escape, he might let me go. A hopeful burst of energy surged inside me and caused my body to wriggle its way out of his grip and dash backwards out of the flames in a split second. At least there is bound to be some humanity left inside of him. Maybe, when he looks at me, he will just let me go. Maybe he will grant me a temporary lease on a life that I have no legal right to.

  I exhaled, my body still surprisingly completely numb except for a pulsing pain from behind my eyeballs. I ran back down the service trail and out of the flames, being careful to not trip over any dead bodies or debris of tents and wooden picnic tables and even a wheelchair that were scattered across the mountainside. In the cloud of smoke absorbing every last molecule of air surrounding the mountain, everything was shrouded in a dark film of ash and smoke, and it made all the destruction around me look like haunted silhouettes in the darkness.

  I coughed, the vast amounts of smoke and carbon dioxide I had inhaled causing a warm, burning liquid to spew from my throat onto the ground below and a heavy, constricting feeling to entrap my lungs with each breath. I knew I couldn’t keep it up much longer, and I knew that if I couldn’t escape the wall of smoke that had now spread hundreds of yards down the mountain, my body would be forced to keel over.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Before I could escape from the smoke and destruction, and out into the fresh, cool air of the night, I felt the same rough leather material from earlier grip my bare shoulders and I decided that fighting the inevitable was only a useless attempt at delaying the pain.

  “I’m here to help.” The man pulled back the mask covering his face and whispered into my ears, his warm voice ringing in my ears uncomfortably.

  I naturally did not want to trust him. I wanted to run away, to scream, to punch him, and even kill him, but my might was nothing at the will of his strong hands, and tall, wide frame. I closed my eyes and let him wrap my body in the same leather coat that had protected me from the heat of the flames before and laid motionlessly as he picked my body up into his arms in a fireman carry and began to dash back into the very flames that had killed everyone I knew and loved for one last time.

  Is he just gonna leave me here to die? That thought had actually turned into a lovely alternative compared to the torture chambers that would await me if I somehow escaped this disaster. Is his idea of helping me saving me from my death and leading me to a world of torture?

  I couldn’t help but think about my parents, and how they had inevitably been taken away weeks ago on the first day that Protocol 00 was implemented, just like most free birds.

  I need to get them back. I have to save them. I have to make the same sacrifice. With the fleeting of just an ounce of adrenaline and endorphins inside me, an unbearable pain inundated my mind. I heard a click of something being strapped onto the protective suit around me, and there was another acidic, disconcerted feeling that bubbled up from my stomach as I swallowed the vomit that built up in my throat to prevent myself from having the disgusting liquid go all over my face.

  My body jerked as I felt the pressure beneath me from the arms of the man leave, and instead of falling into the hard ground below, I found myself suspended in the air, the cable I was attached to perfectly at the center of weight of my body. But instead of taking the opportunity to be smoothly balanced midair, hovering majestically above the flames, I began to shift, as I squirmed with fear, my body then sending itself into a wild roundabout motion as I was hoisted up above the flames, through the dark billowing smoke, and into the night above.

  I finally opened my eyes, a scream failing to be uttered from my voice box that was probably permanently damaged from the smoke as a singular, sleek, black helicopter that glimmered under the moonlight hovered just feet above me.

  I glanced down at the ground dozens of feet below, quickly deciding that my hopes at surviving the fall, even if I could manage to unhook myself from the cable, were very slim, and decided that my best bet at being maybe the lone survivor from this raid was to try and take a weapon from one of the guards in the helicopter.

  Another surge of adrenaline inside me sped up my heartbeat to a breakneck pace as my body approached the open hatch at the bottom of the helicopter. I didn’t know what I expected to happen, but I was assuming that the second someone reached down to grab my body from the latch, I would be blindfolded, and my dangerously charred body left to die in the corner.

  It can’t end like this. I can’t let it go like this. A fuzzy vibration finally crawled out of my throat as I let the last bit of terror out of my body for good. I wouldn't show any emotion when in front of the government officials; I couldn’t give them that satisfaction. No matter what they did to me, and no matter how I felt about it, I would have to remain motionless and calm. Showing that they had no control over me would be the only way to make the pain stop, but then I would be lying to myself.

  A hand reached down from the latch in the helicopter, illuminated by the light that emanated from the fires that had now spread from the mountaintop and begun to trickle down the mountain to some of the deteriorated homes below. In one swift motion, I was pulled up by my wrists into the helicopter, where a group of people surrounded me to take off the protective coat weighing down my body and unhook me from the metal cable. It was impossible for me to tell whether I was still floating in midair due to the fact that my body had lost all sense of touch and pain everywhere but in the deafening pounding in my head. By the lack of movement of the black walls around me, I could logically judge that my body remained stationary at the moment, but the silhouettes of figures in the dimly lit vehicle began to rush around, applying various creams and ointments to my body.

  “We are gonna have to knock her out.” A deep voice resonated in my head, and I was too numb to respond, except to blink rapidly. “This is serious. Real serious. We are gonna have to take her into the back and perform some operations now.”

  At his command, a number of people began to shift in their seats, and in a matter of seconds a clear mask was placed over my nose and mouth. A light, gaseous compound seeped through my airways, and I found myself absorbed in the blackness against my will.

  I didn’t move, I didn’t scream, and tried to not even think in fear that they could hear the panic clamoring in my mind.

  I knew no matter what happened, they would get what they wanted in the end, and I would be left with nothing but a faint remembrance of my shattered, broken self.

  Chapter 3

  My eyes fluttered open, and instead of a never-ending darkness inundating my vision, a bright white light blinded me. I shifted my body and felt surprisingly normal. I could feel the soft fabric of silky sheets coating my body and see the gray unfinished walls and floor that surrounded the large king-size bed I was in without any trouble.

  I was almost shocked at the fact that I woke up living, and even more so shocked that the government didn’t chain me up against a wheel full of spikes or hang me above a pit of flames to finish me off. I sat up, any soreness in my body already having faded, and my smooth caramel skin already restored to full health. The heavy wheeze that had plagued my every breath was now gone, and my lungs were back to feeling light and relaxed again.

  I’m still alive. I stood up, glancing out the window, which had a perfect view of a row of pine trees and the crisp, blue sky behind it, feeling victorious for once in my life. They didn’t get me yet! I’m not a pile of ash! I’m still breathing!

  I put a hand over my chest, and if I could, I would have run into my own arms and hugged myself due to how thankful I was to still be in my own body. For the first time in my life I was able to stick my middle finger up into the sky, which the all-powerful government ruled, and actually know that for once there was a true purpose behind the word. Me sticking my middle finge
r up was defying their will, me living was going against their doctrine, and me standing up walking around in my body that appeared as if untouched by their wrath was treasonous.

  I didn’t even care what would happen to me now. I was determined to find a way out of it. If I could escape the government bombing of Camp Camel, then I could get away from anything. If I could still stand here and smile after everything in my life was taken away from me, then I knew that the government had no power over me.

  “Yes!” I screamed, suddenly jumping up on the bed, my bare feet ruffling the sheets and molding into the mesh of the mattress. I had just noticed that I wasn’t wearing my normal pair of loose, torn-up jeans and a T-shirt that appeared as if it was a belly shirt due to how much I had grown since I had arrived at Camp Camel three years back. Instead, I had on soft, form-fitting pants and a shirt that were black and orange respectively.

  “You can’t tread on me!” I cited the line, remembering something from one of my history classes.

  The click of the door swinging open stopped me right before I was about to yell out another harkening bellow celebrating my momentary victory in life.

  “Someone is a little energized for just having third-degree burns all over their body.” A man stepped forward into the room, and I almost crapped my pants from surprise. I jumped forward onto the floor into an athletic stance, not knowing whether to try and jump out the window, run out the door, or attempt and try and stun him with a kick to his family jewels or punch to his gut. He better not pull out a gun. Just from the look of his broad shoulders and large chest, there was no chance that I would be able to wriggle the gun from his grip before he shot me.