Marked
Chapter 20

In the darkness, the faces of the children she’d been trying to save disappeared like mist.

Replaced by them was the nagging sensation that she had forgotten something.

Something vital.

Opening her eyes, they immediately went to the canopy of trees above her head which filtered in light, making particles of dust float in sunlight.

Something about it wasn’t quite right, though...the colors were slightly off and the air didn’t smell like she remembered.

“Thermal readers aren’t picking up anything but there’s gotta be something nearby, I can feel it.”

Two poachers materialized, walking beside her.

One was a man and the other a woman with a shaved head.

A quick glance at her arms revealed that they were covered with grey fabric. Inspecting the rest of her body, as if it were something foreign, she found herself dressed in poacher gear, all the way down to the city issued firearm clasped in her right hand.

“Look over there,” The girl pointed ahead where the ground was ruffled and trampled through with footprints.

“Two people, recent.” The male poacher said, crouching down low to dip his finger into the mud.

“We’re getting close now. how exciting! Our first capture!” The girl said to Rachel.

Rachel opened her mouth but she couldn’t think of anything to say.

Why weren’t they killing her?

Surely they could tell she was unmarked?

She touched her fingertips to her forehead, feeling the smoothness of it but sure that there was a bar code tattooed there.

Drawing a hand over her face, a million thoughts rushed through her head but she couldn’t grasp a single one.

“Look over there!”

She did look, to the place where two figures were emerging from the thin stream that cut through the forest like a crooked knife.

“Let’s go get em!”

The poachers broke into a run and Rachel chased after them, somehow convinced that this was what she had to do.

But why...

As the group of poachers quickly gained on the two figures, the closer Rachel came to them the more easily she could distinguish them as two girls, both thin and tall.

One of them clutched onto the other, obviously injured.

“Go, leave me! Save yourself!” The injured girl shouted.

“No, Mira! I won’t leave you.”

The name sent a shock through Rachel’s spine.

Now that she took in their features—the long, wavy hair, the thin, athletic bodies and the high pitched voices, she knew it to be true.

They were Mira and Mila, from the compound.

“Get over here, you beggars!” The poacher man shouted.

“What are you waiting for? You’ve got the gun, shoot em!” The bald girl shoved Rachel in the arm. “Stop wasting time, stupid!”

“Only the injured one, she’ll be useless. We’ll need the good one.”

Mira collapsed to the ground and Mila struggled to pull her up.

When that didn’t work, she splayed herself over her sister’s body and faced the poachers with a fierce, protective look on her face.

This couldn’t be real.

There was no way Rachel would ever be working for poachers. In fact, she didn’t even want to hurt Mira and Mila, she wanted to save them and a real poacher would never feel that way.

Hector’s words suddenly echoed in her mind.

They just want to see that you won’t jeopardize their mission.

Because this was a test.

The gears in her mind clicked into place and her demeanor became a different one.

She was being tested and the last thing she wanted to do was fail.

The male poacher pulled a screaming Mila off of Mira and held on to her, injecting her with a dart that made her body go slack.

“Shoot her!” The poacher girl shouted again.

When Rachel didn’t react, her face twisted with suspicion.

Rachel’s tongue went dry.

Even if it wasn’t real, she hated what she had to do just as Hector had predicted.

She lifted her gun and tried to keep it from shaking.

God, why were they making her do this?

Was this really something she would have to do if she became a faux poacher?

Was it even worth it to become one if that was the case?

“Why aren’t you shooting!?”

Don’t jeopardize their mission. They’ll see you as a threat.

Rachel let her finger pull the trigger and Mira’s chest exploded with blood.

As Rachel bent over, ready to vomit, the forest dissolved around her and the dark room with the blue, flickering lights came back into focus.

Desperately, she dug the contacts out her eyes and gripped them in her palms while she gulped down giant mouthfuls of air.

Get a grip, Rachel.

Lights flickered on overhead, chasing away the last of the darkness and clean, white walls greeted her all around.

Rachel stood, forcing her legs to stop feeling like jelly.

The single door in the room slid open and Abby walked in, her lab coat slung over her shoulders.

She wore a tight pencil skirt and a ruffled blouse.

“I’m impressed,” Abby said, holding a hand out to Rachel.

Rachel looked at her hand but didn’t shake it.

“What was my score?”

“Walk with me, Rachel.”

Abby spun and began walking away.

With no other choice, and one last glance around the wretched simulation room, Rachel followed after her.

“Would you like to know what we scored you on during your three virtual realities?”

“Yes,” Rachel replied.

Abby entered an office surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked an ocean.

As Rachel knew they were nowhere near the ocean, she assumed the view must have been fake, just like in Debra’s office.

At least it made the rectangular office look less like a prison.

Abby approached a coffee machine sitting in a corner of her office and poured two cups. She motioned for Rachel to take a seat but instead Rachel went to the windows and grazed a finger over the glass.

Her fingertips sent the pixels scattering where she touched. When she pulled away, they dropped back into place.

“Coffee?”

“Sure,” Rachel replied.

She took the cup from Abby and pressed the warm liquid to her lips.

“Doesn’t it make you wish you could really be there?” Abby motioned with her cup towards the window and stood beside Rachel.

“I suppose.” Rachel replied, letting herself watch the undulating waves of an ocean that wasn’t really there.

“That’s exactly what we’re fighting for here, Rachel. That’s what we want you to be a part of. Tell me—” She took a sip from her cup and fixed her eyes on Rachel’s face.

They were the color of rain clouds flecked through with yellow. Her hair, which was dark but streaked with white framed a face that was surprisingly free of wrinkles.

“Don’t you wish you could be free to go anywhere you wanted? To be able to walk beside the ocean with the sand in your feet and the ocean breeze in your hair without the fear of being captured and marked? Wouldn’t it be nice if one day your children could live in a world like that?”

“Sure, Rachel said. “If I planned on having any. But why bring anyone into this world just to suffer?”

“I see your point,” Abby mused. “But still, you must have family—someone that you would love to see live a long, happy life?”

Sure she did.

She thought of Ruth and her friends, she thought of Jed and of Hector and of everyone she cared for.

She even thought of crazy Charles.

“Is that why you’re here? To give your kids that future?”

“Yes—that’s exactly what this place was built upon. We were once like you too, Rachel. Scared and lost in the wild. You see, when the mark struck, my kids and I had to flee to the mountains. My husband, who was a marine at this time, said this would be the safest place.”

Abby’s voice dropped and her eyes glazed over. Even though she stared at a fake sunset, Rachel could tell her eyes were seeing into the past.

“They were the first to be Marked, you know? The military.”

“How come?”

“Why else? Who better to rally up the civilians and to hunt down people than those who were trained to do just that?”

“So what happened to your husband?”

“He found us, of course. He told us, in his own words that ‘shit had just hit the fan’ and that we had lost the war. Disease was killing off people faster than they could reproduce worldwide and the mark was supposed to help administer food and medicine in a quick an efficient manner.”

“I never heard of that before.”

“Well,” Abby replied, her eyes shooting back over Rachel’s face once more. “I lived through it myself.” She sighed and turned toward her desk and sat down, clasping her hands in front of her.

Rachel followed after her, engrossed in the details of her world’s past.

She took a seat in the opposite chair and waited for Abby to continue.

“Soon after, our borders were sealed and communication to the outside world had been cut off. The media became nonexistent and there was no way for anyone to know what was going on outside our walls. The CN promised peace and safety but we had to get the mark. To ration food, water and the vaccine. But not everyone was convinced.

“Everyone had a simple choice—to be marked or starve to death—but the reality was that we needed an army and we needed it fast.”

Abby sighed and Rachel clung to her every word.

“The marked became the cruel and mindless people we now know as poachers. And the rest, you know.”

Rachel leaned back in her chair, surprised at this new bit of information.

She had never known their history quite like that before and she was shocked.

So that was the reason why the city people never killed children or the strong, she thought. The city needed them to expand their army.

But you only needed an army if you intended to fight a war.

What war was there left to fight?

“When things began to fall apart, my husband knew of a military bunker that had been abandoned for years. It had been built at the beginning of the third war but wasn’t active any longer due to maintenance malfunctions. That’s when he gathered a crowd of people and together, we fixed and built a home.”

“How did you keep the capital from discovering you?”

“It wasn’t easy but we moved quickly. In all the commotion and with trying to implement the mark and trying to outpace a deadly disease, the country was swamped. We had a hacker among us infiltrate the system and swipe any history of our new home from the web. He is also the one that to this day gathers death records from the capital in order to issue new marks.”

The older woman took a sip of her coffee.

“We waited a few months, with fear always hanging over us but they never came. Soon after they began discarding the dead like old trash bags (there were so many of them) and this part is disgusting but you should know—we dug their marking chips from each of them and gave our own soldiers new identities so that we could blend in if ever discovered.”

“Wow,” Rachel breathed.

“After that, we began searching for survivors in any corner of the world. We infiltrated the capital with our fake marks and our fake identities and now we are here, needing to outnumber them so that we can finally free our people.”

Rachel couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“I know you think us strange- to put you through simulations like that but we need to build only the strongest of soldiers and in order to do that we need to make sure that you are able to do three things to help us defeat the poachers.”

“And what are those?”

“First, we need to know that you would be willing to kill for the innocent. Second, you must prove that you are selfless enough to give up your life for the cause. And third, and most important of all,” Her blue-grey eyes stared at Rachel with intensity. “That you will not, under any circumstances, ever jeopardize the mission.”

She pulled out a thin, electronic device from her lab coat pocket and placed it on the desk. “Congratulations Rachel, it looks like you made the soldier ranks.”

She handed Rachel a white watch.

“You begin training tomorrow. Now go and always remember what you are fighting for.”