The Freaks

chapter twenty

The first-time privates sleep separately for the first night.

The quarters are much smaller than the ones the other Soldiers sleep in. Since there are only five males in here, there are only five beds and five small supply trunks each. That's it. That's all we have in here.

I trudge over to the bed in the furthest corner of the room before anyone can say anything, the others following closely behind. Nox takes the bed next to mine as I open up the trunk at the foot of my mattress, shoving my belt along with my gun and knife in there without a care. It feels good to be rid of them at least for a good few hours. My head feels lighter without them nearby, without them in sight. Having something on your person that can easily kill someone does not settle nicely on my mind.

Something I didn't realize about the first-time privates is that Diego is one of them. I thought he was a step ahead of us. That's what it felt like when he took me off from guard duty. He smiles and nods his head once when he catches my eye, laying down on his bed on the opposite side of the room.

"I don't care what you say, Rhys," a boy named Marc says from his cot, laughing as he unties his bootlaces, "you're completely wrong."

Rhys shakes his head as he shoves his stuff into his own trunk. "I'm not wrong," he replies slowly, calmly, despite his sharp eyes glaring at Marc, "you're just being arrogant."

"No, I'm not." Marc moves to sit down on the edge of his bed, looking at Rhys as he sits down on the edge of his own mattress. "The radiation that wiped out the Earth five years ago took the adults and the young children. Not just the adults."

My heart almost stops. My fingers halt from where they were untying my laces, my back starting to hurt from where I'm hunched over my knees. I keep my ears open, ignoring every other sound until all I can hear is the conversation between Marc and Rhys.

"That still doesn't make any sense," Rhys replies, snapping the words as he runs a hand through his wavy red hair. "How could the radiation only have wiped out everyone but the adolescents?"

"How the hell am I supposed to know that?" Marc snaps, glaring at him with hard eyes. "Why don't you have a stroll out there and ask the Freaks? All I know is that it happened, okay?" He shakes his head slowly. "I mean honestly, dude, have you seen any small children around since coming down?"

As Rhys replies with a few mumbled agreements and curses, my mind wanders for a moment. All the years I've been a Freak, I've never stopped and asked out loud why it changed just us, the teenagers, and not everyone else. Now that I've come to think about it since it happened five years ago, it might be something to do with our growth, maybe even while we were going through puberty.

No one knows for certain. Definitely not the Soldiers who dropped down here from living in space to save themselves from it.

"Oh my God, you guys!" Diego exclaims from his bed, sitting up and glaring at the both of them in turn. "Why do you even care? We were all rich enough to be able to escape it. Why are you arguing about what happened to those who stayed on the ground?"

That's interesting. For the time I've been here, I've never realized they had to pay to go to space. People here, in London, never got that opportunity. We were never even told about the radiation coming. All I remember was the surface of the Earth getting hotter and hotter, then everything else around us just... died; our parents, our homes, our lives.

Not only did the Soldiers in America survive the end of the world, but they think they have the right to come here and take us from it, one by one? I'm not going to let that happen anymore.

I sit up straighter on the bed, watching the argument happen with my eyes but not hearing it with my ears. I open my mouth to interject, but I feel a sharp pain against my leg, snapping me away from the two Soldiers.