Chapter 4: Reporting to Dagger Eyes

Wednesday, Oct 22 7:00am

The next morning I’m up with the Sun. My head and arm are still bothering me some, but I slept surprisingly deep through the night, which I’m thankful for. I give an apple to Angeles before we go and eat one myself while riding along.

The rest of the journey passes without incident. I don’t see anything or hear anything threatening. Of course, the part of me that isn’t still emotionally checked out can’t help but be a little paranoid. After all, the Hopper that attacked me came out of nowhere, and the two I didn’t kill disappeared without my noticing. I had always laughed in training when a veteran or trainer claimed that Hoppers can teleport. I had arrogantly assumed they just weren’t being observant enough. I guess I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. 

7:15 pm

I’m finally in view of Awmutto Outpost! It’s off to my far left. I’ve gone slightly too far east, but not enough to miss the Outpost.

As I stroll into the Outpost, the locals all stare. They don’t exactly get a lot of visitors, and by now the smell of my Hopper heads is probably about as noticeable as the heads themselves. I lock eyes with an old woman resting on a rock and ask her where the troupes are staying. I head in the direction she points and it’s not long before I spot a friend of mine from training. I flag him down and we chat. As he’s giving me the low down on the troupes here, a woman walks by with what can only be interpreted as a “don’t even try to talk to me” face. My friend, Iven, explains that she’s a troupe chief…and not a very friendly one. Great. Glad I’m being thrown into such a happy environment.

But there are two separate troupes here and my troupe chief is a different person anyway. I’ll be meeting him tomorrow morning at seven. Then we’ll all mount up and go look for signs of recent Mud Hopper activity in the Outskirts and Outlands of the East.

8:00pm

After asking around in the troupe camp I finally locate my new roommate, Keisha Green, sitting outside of our hut. She’s a few inches taller than me, a few years older than me, and more than a few shades darker than me. I have a bad feeling that it won’t be easy to win her admiration.

She looks up at me from under the brim of a dusty brown hat. She doesn’t look impressed, even though I’m purposely standing beside my Hopper heads so as not to block them from view.

“You the new girl?”

“Yeah.”

“I was usin’ the second cot in there to put my things. Ain’t a lot of space in there, but you can just put them on the floor.”

I can tell I’m not going to convince her to do it herself, but I don’t want to let her feel like she can walk over me, so I throw it all in a messy pile on her cot. I hang my head bag from the bit of the roof that hangs out outside and take Angeles to the camp stable. She’s still outside when I get back, smoking with a couple of troupemates. I don’t feel like socializing yet. Besides, my head still hurts. I go in, change, and fall asleep within minutes.

Thursday, Oct 23, 7:15am

Pounding on the outside of the hut rouses me from a deep, comfortable sleep. I stumble my way out of bed thinking it must be the middle of the night and pull back the door rug to see Iven standing there.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s time to go.”

“What?” At first I assume that he’s kidding, but I look out at the sky and realize that he must be right. “Oh no! Are they waiting for me? Are they mad?”

“No, it’s fine…just get ready and get out there asap.”

7:30am

I power walk through the camp with my bag of heads in one hand and my official orders in the other. I head straight to Iven’s troupe, which I had been told would also be mine. Self-conscious and flustered, I hand my orders to a man with an authoritative-looking clip board before making sure he’s the man I had been instructed to report to.

He isn’t.

However, as he tells me with a smirk under his grizzly beard, the other guy was killed in action only a matter of days ago and he’s the replacement. BUT….I won’t be on his troupe anyway. They’re troupe seven and they’ve decided to put myself and another new woman on troupe six. Mixing things around to fill in gaps left by recent…losses. He hands back my orders and points me to the dagger-eyes lady from yesterday.

Well, what a great start.

I march over to troupe six. I may be late, but I see everyone’s eyes at least glancing at my bag. After taking my orders, Dagger Eyes acknowledges the bag with a nod and, “Those from the way here?”

“Yes ma’am.” I offer them to her with a slight bow, as is customary.

“Good. Maybe you’ll be of some use, unlike the rest of these f***ers.”

She walks off to store them in the ice box in the official’s hut, and I get the chance to introduce myself to my new troupe before we all mount up.

There’s a girl named Brenna who can’t be more than 18, is also starting today, and looks about as miserable as I feel. The assignment’s official psychologist/councilor is also on our troupe. He’s a man in his mid-twenties named Leo with glasses sandwiched between a messy fro and a long beard, which he seems to unconsciously stroke when analyzing someone or something. There’s a social butterfly named Jeni, one of the only other light skins in the group. And there’s about a dozen others…all who seem young and relatively inexperienced. I don’t think anyone other than our troupe leader is even above thirty. 

And of course there’s Keisha, smirking at me from under her hat, knowing she got one point ahead of me by not waking me up when it was time to go.

I stare back at her from under my own hat, but with a frown. We lock eyes long enough to seal an agreement that our being roommates will not entail our being friends.   

Chapter 3: Here Comes the Reaper

As I watch myself struggle to breathe, I dig my nails into the skin of its neck. Hopper skin is thin and it isn’t long before thick, orange-brown blood is oozing out of its neck. It hisses and gurgles in pain but doesn’t let any weight off of my body. It isn’t much bigger than me, if I could only get it to loosen up….

I finally inhale a large breath of air. And dust. I cough into its face, and with a shriek it blinks spastically and pulls its head back. The eyes are the most sensitive part of a Hopper’s body. If only I could do more! But I don’t dare take a hand off its throat.

It glares back down and hisses. I take another deep breath and spit into its eye.

It pulls up with another horrible, gurgling shriek. The instant I feel it lift off my legs I pull them up as hard as I can and put all of my weight into rolling backwards. And the moment I’m on top of it, I jab my right elbow into its left eye.

I feel myself hit the bone behind its eye, which is strong enough to protect its brain. Its giant eye ball, however, is completely ruptured, and black goop bursts out onto the rest of its face.

I jump off and get away as quickly as I can. It kicks and convulses and wails. I reach for my gun. It isn’t there. It must have fallen out of the holster when I fell off of Angeles.

As I frantically search the ground around me, the Hopper struggles back to its feet. It waits for my eyes to return to it before it rears its head back and opens its jaws wide for the loudest shriek it can muster. Chills scurry over my shoulders and to the base of my back as my heart tries to beat itself right out of my chest. No time for the gun. I reach for my machete as the Hopper leaps at me, teeth bared and ready to feast…

It stops short with its face less than a foot away from mine. Its arms, which had been aiming for the ground behind me, drop on each side of me. Its head, which had been poised to sever mine, falls limp. And its body, which had been lunging forward to knock mine to the ground, sinks as dead weight into my machete. I look down in disbelief as Hopper blood oozes onto my glove and inside the sleeve of my coat. I let go of the machete and step back.

I pulled it in front of me just in the nick of time. One second later-no, half a second later- and I would be dead.

My body tingles with energy. But not the energy of excitement or victory. No, this is something else. It’s the energy of…fear. Of terror. It pulses from my chest into every limb, through every vain. I stare at the dead Hopper to try and remind myself that I’m alive, that I’m the one who’s still standing, but it doesn’t help. I can’t stop lingering in that moment. That split second in which there was no hope.

Because now I understand what it is to know I’m about to die.

I experienced the moment before death. And death did not take me, but I felt its breath on my skin, in my blood. And there it lingers.  

Minutes pass before I remember the other Hoppers. They’ve disappeared. Angeles nudges my shoulder, and I realize that I have no idea what he was doing or how far he might have run while I was fighting. Had he gone too far on his own, he could have been killed and or lost and I would be stuck in this god-forsaken stretch of land with no ride or supplies.

My body is still tingling as I pull the machete out of the Hopper and saw off its head. Yet, something else in me-the rest of me, really-is numb. I throw the head in a netted bag which I tie onto my saddle. I look around for my gun. Once I find it, I shove it back in the holster and mount up. We go over to the other corpse. I collect my second trophy.

After a few swigs of water, we head again toward the northeast. I don’t bother to check how good my angle is. I don’t care. I feel too wretched to care about anything right now. As the adrenaline fades, pain grows in my arm and head. The blow of the Hopper’s body onto my blade was a heavy one, and my muscles are aching. My head begins to pound and throb and it’s almost unbearable. I must have gotten a concussion when I was knocked off of Angeles. And what’s worse…what, for some unfathomable reason, is bothering me the most…is how acutely aware I am of two bagged heads bumping against each other and Angeles’ side as he walks along.

We go on until the Sun is hidden and both Moons are well in the sky. We come to a grassy area with a few trees and settle down beneath one. Mud Hoppers have never attacked anyone carrying the remains of their kind. It’s believed that they may smell their dead from far off and know to stay away. And, to an extent, they seem to acknowledge grassy areas as our turf. An Outpost’s chances of survival increase tenfold once they get crops or even decent shrubbery to grow.

So I guess this will be a safe night’s sleep. As safe as it can be in the Outlands, anyway.

As I drift off, I still have a knot in my stomach. A knot of….ugh…I don’t know…of jumbled emotions. Negative emotions.

I’ve slayed two Hoppers. My new supervisors will no doubt take notice of me. This is what I wanted. Adventure. Victory. Glory. To eliminate the enemy. To be a true protector of my people. Of my planet.

And yet, I don’t feel victorious.

I had always thought that I would not fear death. That I would have little objection when it called, little difference toward the time or manner in which it came for me. But death was more frightening to face than I had thought it would be…and life was less satisfying to take.