A Rebellious Nature

[SweetAsSuga]

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SOMETIME IN THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE

Three days. Rayna’s father told her to wait three days before she moved on. So she had waited, pacing up and down the forest floor until she’d worn a muddy track. Three days she waited in breathless anticipation for their party to return, trying not to let the children left behind see her worry. Her father had left her in charge while the small resistance group had gone to raid weapons from the militia.

The three days were up and it now fell to Rayna to move the children somewhere safe. Every one of their parents were, no doubt, dead and Rayna had no idea how she was going to tell them.

First thing first, however, she needed to get the children to safety. But where could they go? No place was safe anymore, not with the militia running things. Yet she had been given a direct order from her father, the leader of the Resistance, and she was going to obey those orders as best she could. Then, once the children were safely hidden away, Rayna would go looking for their parents so that she could know for certain what had happened.

It had been twenty years since the world had been ripped apart. At twenty-two Rayna couldn’t remember a time before the militia. But her father had assured her that one had existed. America used to be prosperous, he had said, it used to be the “land of plenty.” But, over time, the distance between economic classes had grown so vast that there were only two classes: those who were wealthy and those who lived in poverty. That’s when the war had started. It began with little skirmishes here and there. Fights between the poor and the wealthy. The two classes had organized themselves into armies and all hell broke loose. There had been no winner. Instead, the country had fallen into turmoil, cities were completely destroyed and everyone struggled to survive. Then the militia rose up to take power.

Headed by a man calling himself General Sullivan, the militia began to systematically overtake the country. Before long, General Sullivan ruled with an iron fist. No one was allowed to own a weapon, food became rationed, and astronomical taxes had to be paid to the General and his militia. But Sullivan was old, and times of war are never easy. After his death only a few short months ago, Sullivan’s son came into power.

It was during this time of transition that Rayna’s father decided it was time to strike. Defenses would never be this weak again, not once Sullivan’s son asserted his new power. But things had, apparently, gone wrong as the raiding party had never returned. Now it was up to Rayna to find out what had happened and to finish her parents' mission.

 

[top2bottom]

The night's heavy rain was weakening its bombardment of the valley floor. In a few hours, Sullivan decided, he would send a recon-squad down through the dense forest below, along the bank of the swollen river, to confirm the enemy losses. The young captain stood alone in the shelter of an armoured personnel carrier, smoking a strong, dark cigarette. His men knew when to avoid him.

The rebel force had made a bold, unexpected strike deep into the valley at sunset, taking the Union Guard scouts by surprise. With his masterly response, he had managed to mobilise four brigades and halt the advance with next to no losses. Yet the captain was a man with high expectations of himself and of others, and berated himself at being put on the back foot. The retaliation had been swift; choppers above the valley had lit up the ground like a floodlit playing field, as rapid-response squads had taken up positions on either side of the steep ridge, waiting in silence for his quiet, monosyllabic command: “Now”. Hundreds of rounds of ammunition had slammed into the foliage below, ripping into bark, mud, rock and flesh alike. There had been screaming, confusion, curses, spluttering... and then silence. His medical officer had reported their own losses; two dead, three wounded. Sullivan had simply nodded, curtly, as was his way, and the officer had slunk away to his duties.

At twenty-six years old, Matthias Sullivan's rise to the rank of captain had been a swift and celebrated one. The support of his renowned father had seemed only to make him more eager to prove himself in the six years since his commission into the mighty Union Guard. Having studied his late father's decisions risgorously, Sullivan now appeared to want to surpass the general's unrelenting stance towards rebel forces. Where his father had imprisoned rebel fighters and tried them for subversion, Matthias had them 'disappeared'. Where his father would have detained all adult males in hostile townships, Matthias burned those townships to the ground. Not even his men were immune from his all-or-nothing philosophy of loyality and obedience. There was talk of holidays, land-grants, and debauched parties for his favoured officers; those who failed him were only every whispered of. For Sullivan, the ongoing struggle was a black and white affair; “Side with me, and be rewarded,”, he often told the Guardsmen, “But challenge the Union, and be ground under my heel”.

Sullivan took a long drag on his cigarette and spat onto the ground. “Scum”, he snarled, as if confiding in the wind. He dropped the butt to the sodden earth and slowly pressed it into the mud with his boot. Narrowing his eyes to peer again into the valley, he watched for any sign of movement in the rain. Just a few hours more, he told himself, and he would know if any of the rebels had been unlucky enough to survive.

 

[SweetAsSuga]

A brisk morning wind cut through the air, making Rayna wished she had on something more substantial than her brown leather jacket. With her hair pulled back in a bun and tucked up under a black beanie, the back of her neck was exposed and little goose pimples rose up as the wind brushed over her. In the dim light of the dawn, Rayna could make out the tops of tents and the dull embers of the previous night's fires. Thankfully, none of the militia's soldiers were stirring except for a few guards on watch.

Rayna had trekked through the forest for two days after leaving the children at an abandoned shack she'd found deep in the woods. The days had been long and tiring. Rayna had packed light, bringing only enough food to get her to the militia's camp - she wanted to make sure that she had plenty of space in her backpack to carry back any supplies she was able to steal. She was tired, cold, and hungry and wanted to find out what had happened to the party of Resistance fighters. The sooner she found out the truth and got back to the children the better.

Staying low to the ground, Rayna made her way slowly towards the camp. Two guards stood fifty yards away from her hiding spot, talking quietly and trading a flask back and forth. They blocked her way to the supply tent and Rayna could only pray that they would move soon. As if they heard her prayers, the two men moved away from the supply tent, the guns strapped to their backs bumping against them with each step they took.

When she felt they were a safe distance away, Rayna moved quickly towards the supply tent and slid under a loose part of the canvas. Her left foot got tangled up between the rope and spike that anchored the tent to the ground.

"Shit," she breathed, struggling to get her foot free before anybody could see her hiking boot sticking out in the open.

 

[top2bottom]

Captain Sullivan sat at his table, deep in thought. He rested his head in his hands, elbows propped up on the table top, and stared at the muddied, blood-stained helmet in front of him.

The young solider had been awake since first light, when he had slipped away quietly from the camp and explored the forest floor once again. He had spent many hours combing the river banks in the two days since the night-time skirmish, but what he sought still eluded him. He picked up the helmet again and turned it around in his hands, deep in thought. He smeared the blood from the chin-strap between finger and thumb, looking at it intently, as if it held a secret. Slowly, he placed his finger at the bullet-hole as if re-enacting its path. The bullet had hit the helmet at at an awkward angle, having ripped the fabric and fracturing the material beneath in a long, shallow graze. Sullivan concluded that the bullet in question had glanced off something before hitting the helmet, delivering a stunning blow.

His men had spent a day recovering enemy bodies from the forest floor, and fishing them from the banks of the river. Sullivan had looked over the corpses again and again, but there had been no sign of the body that, above all others, he wanted to find.

He sighed with exasperation, slammed the helmet down onto the desk, stood, and left for the mess-tent. Thick black stencilling across the side of the helmet spelled out a single word: HALE.

- - - - - - - - - - - -


Guardsman Walker rubbed the sleep from his eyes and concentrated on his patrol of the camp perimeter. He was on his last chance, and he knew it. Since the skirmish of forty-eight hours ago, he had been disciplined by his sergeant for falling asleep on duty as he guarded the captain's tent. He was just thankful that the sergeant hadn't noticed the slight scent of whiskey on his breath.

He turned away from the perimeter wire, and paced back to meet the path of his fellow guard, at the supply-tents.

A swift movement caught his eye, and he span on his heel to face one of the tents holding provisions. He frowned and walked slowly towards the tent, unsure whether he had truly seen a boot disappear inside. Walker moved aside the cover to the tent, sighing; it was probably another guardsman up to some idiotic jape.

“If that's you again, MacNeil, nabbing some chocolate, I fucking swear...”

 

[SweetAsSuga]

“If that's you again, MacNeil, nabbing some chocolate, I fucking swear...”

Rayna held her breath as the guard's footsteps grew closer to the tent. Her eyes scanned the cramped space for somewhere to hide, but the tent was too dark inside to make out anything other than the hulking shapes of the boxes of provisions. The boxes, unfortunately, were too small for her to fit inside.

Things were not looking good as the flap of the tent was pushed aside. The stream of early morning sunlight that filtered in through the open flap was just enough that Rayna, hidden in the back corner of the tent, saw a small space between two boxes - a tarp resting on top of them - that she could fit into. Moving quietly and hoping he wouldn't notice her, Rayna squeezed herself between the rough wooden crates and tugged the tarp down to hide her further.

As the guard shuffled around inside the entrance of the tent, Rayna prayed that he would soon move on. Crammed as she was, her knees were pressed tightly into her chest, making it difficult to breathe. And the dust covering the tarp was starting to make her eyes water and her nose itch.

Don't sneeze. Don't sneeze. Don't sneeze. The mantra ran through Rayna's mind, but it did nothing but make her want to sneeze even more.

Feet shuffled somewhere off to her right, a little too close for comfort. Rayna turned her head to peer through a small crack in the tarp, and inhaled a handful of dust.

Fuck. A loud sneeze filled the tent and Rayna's heart dropped into her stomach as the tarp was pulled away from her hiding spot.