Mistrunner - Chapter 19 - A Month of Hell

After Mirabelle’s mother died, I took it upon myself to raise her. At the time, her father was still around, but he couldn’t even take care of himself, much less a little girl. Two years later, he was gone, too. A tragic, but ultimately common tale in Nova City.

Jeremiah Braddock III

The next day passed in much the same way, but this time, Jo introduced me to her friends. After that, we spent a pleasant day exploring the town. Not only did we revisit the market, where I bought some new clothes – after begging Jeremiah for a few extra credits – and some souvenirs, but she also showed me the ruins of an ancient fort, the remains of a sizable, domed building, and took me on a tour of the curiously shaped high-rise that had, according to Jo, been the government’s seat before the Initialization. It almost felt like a vacation – the sort of thing I’d only ever seen on the entertainment feeds where the characters of my favorite shows visited new and increasingly exotic locales. Of course, I wasn’t so foolish as to believe any of those ridiculous stories represented reality, but it was a nice fantasy.

It was a new experience for me, being part of a group of friends. In school, I’d never been mistreated by my peers, but everyone there knew precisely who my uncle was. As such, they all held me at arm’s length. Certainly, I’d never had any close friends. Jo showed me how different it could have been, and, after taking a little while to adjust, I loved every second of it. However, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with my brief vacation from my training.

That night, I barely slept. Jeremiah hadn’t minced any words about how difficult the coming month would be. He’d referred to it as hell, and I knew he wouldn’t use such a word lightly. If he considered it hellish, then I had little choice but to expect the worst. So, it was with some trepidation that I found myself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. In the corner of my HUD, I could see that I was only a few minutes from my alarm going off. Logic told me that I should just get up and face the day, but I couldn’t bring myself to rise. Not until the incessant beeping of my alarm echoed inside my head.

I flicked my eyes, shutting it off with a thought, and, with a groan, climbed out of bed and started getting ready for the day. I took a steaming hot shower, then tied my hair back before getting dressed in my black fatigues and heavy boots. Still, I hesitated, my nerves getting the better of me for a few moments.

But then the weight of expectations – both mine and my uncle’s – settled onto my shoulders. I had been given a great gift. I had the potential to become extremely powerful. Millions of people out there would’ve loved to have the chance I’d been handed. What was a little discomfort next to that?

What’s more, I had an inkling of what was coming. The post-Initialization world was a brutal place; there was no doubt about that. And, according to my uncle, once the Integration began, things were going to get much worse. So much so that he’d worked for the better part of a century just to give me a chance to survive. The least I could do was complete the training he’d planned for me.

With a sigh, I squared my shoulders and left my room. My steps echoed on the stairs as I descended into the common room, where I saw Jeremiah enjoying a cup of coffee with a trio of swarthy men who were each wearing camouflage fatigues. I approached and sat down next to Jeremiah. Jo appeared a few seconds later, setting a bowl of oatmeal in front of me.

“This is it?” I asked.

She shrugged and nodded at Jeremiah. “Talk to him,” she said with a hint of apology in her voice.

I turned to my uncle, who said, “The next month’s going to be tough for you. You don’t get any creature comforts. You’re barely going to sleep. And you will learn exactly what it means to be truly uncomfortable.”

“W-what? Why?” I asked.

“Builds character,” came the accented voice of the man across the table. I glared at him, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice the slight smirk playing across his face as he tucked into his own hearty breakfast.

Jeremiah filled the silence with introductions. The man who’d spoken, who was short, stout, and wearing a floppy-brimmed, camouflage boonie hat, sported a thick, black mustache that matched his hair. My uncle said that his name was Angel. The other two were apparently named Diaz and Buck.

Buck was almost as tall as my uncle, but he was a lot thinner, and Diaz was averaged size, except for his sizable midsection. I was tempted to give them all derogatory names, at least in my head, but I figured that wouldn’t be very productive.

“You’re going to hate all three of them before the day’s out,” my uncle said. “Go ahead – eat up. We don’t have any time to waste.”

I wanted to ask more, but I recognized Jeremiah’s tone for what it was. So, I jabbed my spoon into the tasteless brown gruel and started to eat. It was worse than I expected, but at least it was filling. After I’d finished eating, all five of us headed outside and got into an open-topped vehicle with enormous wheels and knobby tires.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” said my uncle, looking back at me from the passenger’s seat. I was sandwiched between Potbelly and Slim. Stupid Hat was driving. Yes. I gave them names. It was easier that way. The vehicle sped off, the tires crunching on the gravelly road as we made our way through the town and eventually toward the wall. The gate opened, and we left civilization behind, heading south.

It felt so different, driving through the ruined city without a roof over my head. On the way in, I’d been surrounded by metal, and that isolation had given me a sense of security, false though I knew it probably was. But being out in the open? That was different. Scarier. I was so nervous that I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye, but when I’d turned to try to catch a better look, nothing was there.

“You’re not seeing things,” said Potbelly.

“W-what?”

“There are things living in the city,” he said, his voice bearing the same accent as Stupid Hat’s. “Lots and lots of evil creatures that would just love to eat a little girl like you alive. Remember that.”

I swallowed hard. Of course, I knew he was just trying to scare me, and most of the time, I wouldn’t have taken it to heart. But I was convinced I had seen movement, which only made his statement that much worse. I pushed it from my mind and tried to focus on other things as we sped down the road, dodging debris and detritus along the way. Like that, almost two hours passed until we finally pulled to a stop next to a sandy beach.

At first, I thought we’d found the ocean, but the smell of the brackish water and the fact that I could see land off to the east told me that it was more likely a protected bay. Hammering home that fact, I could bits and pieces of an enormous bridge that had once spanned the body of water. When I looked at the water, from which tall reeds sprouted, all I could think of was that giant alligator that had attacked our convoy outside of Nova City. To distract myself from that, I studied the rest of our surroundings.

Nearby, there was an oddly shaped building that was balanced on stilts. Made of wood – which was odd in and of itself – the structure was half of dodecahedron. I felt pretty sure that that wasn’t normal. When I remarked on it, my uncle said, “It’s a holdover from before the Initialization. It was abandoned and in a different spot, but Milo and me, we moved it over here and restored it.”

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Growing up, it was a noticeable building,” he stated. “I saw it every time I crossed the bay. So, when I saw that it had survived – at least mostly – I couldn’t resist the urge to preserve it. Call it a keepsake of a forgotten world. But you’re not here to appreciate fine architecture. You’re here to have the weakness squeezed out of you.”

That certainly didn’t sound good, but I kept my mouth shut. My uncle continued, “At any time, you can call it. Just let one of us know that you want to quit, and it’ll end. But after that, we’re done.”

“W-what?” I asked, not understanding.

“With the training,” he answered. “You’ve got enough to get you through, I think. Maybe. I don’t know. But something I’m sure of – if you drop out of this, you don’t have the heart to keep going through the rest of what we have planned. I’ll give you some money, and you can start a life back in Nova City.”

“You’d abandon me?”

“What? No!” he said. “I’m not a monster, Mirabelle. We’re family. If you can’t do this, you can’t do it. I won’t judge you for it. But I also won’t waste my time trying to force you into something you’re not suited for. Consider this your first real test. You’ve already got the bare minimum I think it’s going to take for you to survive the Initialization. This next month, it’s to see if you can thrive.”

I bit my lip. Thriving certainly sounded good, but what did that even mean? I had the feeling that Jeremiah wanted to turn me into a warrior of some sort, but to what end, I had no clue. And he wasn’t exactly sharing his plans with me.

As far as I could tell, it looked like I had a choice to make. Did I want to do the hard thing, persist through what promised to be a hellish month? Or did I want to take the easy way out? The comfortable path that would see me living a luxurious, but mundane life? My heart said one thing, but my head told me something else entirely. At first, the smart choice seemed to be comfort. But my mother had gone down that road, and look where it had gotten her. Dead in a back alley. I wouldn’t repeat her mistakes.

“I won’t quit.”

Potbelly, who was standing nearby, his hands on his hips, laughed. My uncle ignored him, saying, “Remember you said that. You’re going to need that fire going forward. Remember – you can quit anytime. But if you stay, you do exactly what these three tell you to do. Otherwise, they’re going to take it as quitting. Got it?”

I nodded.

He gave me a smile, which was not as reassuring as it probably should’ve been. Instead, I felt a shiver run up my spine. “Good luck,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. Then, he turned and walked away, leaving me with Potbelly, Stupid Hat, and Slim.

As soon as my uncle got into the vehicle and drove away, Stupid Hat’s voice rang out, “Alright! Let’s get this show on the road. A short run ought to get you warmed up. Let’s move!”

“Now, little girl!” screamed Slim as he pointed to the south along the beach. “Go!”

I jerked back to attention, and not wanting them to take my hesitation as me quitting, I took off at a jog. Of course, that wasn’t good enough, and Slim, who was following along behind me, kept yelling for me to speed up. I complied, though after only a mile, I was completely gassed. As we kept running, eventually turning around and heading back the way we’d come, I told myself that we were going to stop soon, that I was going to have an opportunity to catch my breath. But we didn’t. Not for three hours. And even when we did stop, it was only so I could drop to my belly and start doing push-ups. Once my arms turned to jelly, we started running again, repeating the process a couple of hours later. Over and over again until the sun started to set.

If I thought that was going to save me, though, I had another thing coming. We kept at it through the night, only stopping for ten or fifteen minutes here or there, during which I was expected to grab as much sleep as I could. Eventually, I shifted into a daze of putting one foot in front of the other, of doing one more push-up, of following whatever directions I was given. And all the while, one of my three new least-favorite people yelled at me to go faster, to do one more push-up, to give up so they could go home.

I didn’t give them the satisfaction.

Even after the sun rose again, I kept going forward. Even when they made me swim out into the bay, and I felt mud and muck all over my body, I continued on. Even when one day turned to two, and two turned to three, I refused to give them the satisfaction of quitting.

I don’t know if it was my attributes or my [Combat Focus] pushing me along. Maybe it was neither; perhaps I just had a strong will. Whatever the case, I didn’t quit. Not after three days, and not after two weeks.

From time to time, my uncle would show up. He never said anything, but I knew he was there. Watching. Waiting to see if I was worth his time.

For the first few days, I kept thinking about how much longer I had left. I even counted my steps, hoping to distract myself. It didn’t work, and eventually, I just lost track of everything that wasn’t pushing me forward into the next minute. The next hour. The next day.

As the days wore into weeks, I barely ate. What sleep I managed to get came in short spurts and was completely inadequate. We were attacked by monsters a few times, but the three men who had become my keepers shut them down in a heartbeat.

Once, a giant snake struck, and I was too tired to even react. Potbelly, who was running behind me at the time, darted forward so quickly that I didn’t even see him move, and before I knew what had happened, the snake’s head had been separated from its body. Potbelly, meanwhile, was wiping the blood from a wicked-looking machete. When he saw that I’d stopped, he said, “You’re not quitting are you? If not, get moving, little girl.”

I shuffled back to a run, the snake attack pushed to the back of my mind alongside everything else that wasn’t putting one foot in front of the other.

So it went for an entire month.

Never did I come close to quitting. Sure, more than once, I dropped from exhaustion, only to wake up some indeterminate time later to keep going, but I didn’t quit. I didn’t dare. Because as much as it hurt, as exhausted as I was, a powerless existence was so much worse.

Suddenly, I collided with something immovable. Predictably, with my wobbly and exhausted state being what it was, I soon found myself on the ground, and when I looked up, I saw my uncle standing over me, his fingers hooked on his belt.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You passed the test. You can stop, now.”

Those words hit me almost as hard as the wave of exhaustion that followed. It was as if my entire body had been waiting on permission to shut down, and Jeremiah’s statement had done just that. I collapsed back onto the sand, letting unconsciousness overtake me. I had done it. Now, I could rest.