Rogue

1

~William~

The mine explodes about a hundred yards away from me. I hear the cries of about five of my comrades before they fall silent, save for the whimpering of a few. I can't make my way over to them, though. I'm pinned under a gigantic rock, from which I can just barely fire my gun with my dominant hand. I can feel the blood draining from my arm, my bone probably shattered, but that's the least of my worries right now. Right now, my focus is on all of the Sick that are heading right for me, intent on taking my head off at any time.

   One comes up from behind me, slamming the butt of its gun into my ribs. I feel the breath rushing out of my lungs, but I don't move. Maybe it's one of the older versions, one that doesn't have a life sensor on it. Maybe if I pretend to be dead, it'll go away.

   The gun butt finds its way into my side, near my stomach, and I know that it is probably aware of the fact that I am still alive. Trying as hard as I can to hold in my cries of pain, I bite my lip. If it rams me a few more times and then leaves, I'll shoot it. If it ever decides to flip the gun around and put its finger on the trigger, I'll just wait for the deafening roar, knowing that someone else will pick up my gun and carry it with them, trying to deactivate the Sick.

   After a few moments, I feel searing pain as the blade of a knife slices its way through my shirt and from my ribcage to my hip. I should've known this was coming. This is the best way for an old model to know if we're dead or alive. They always check to see if the remaining blood has oxygen still flowing through it.

   I flip over onto my back as quickly as I can, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. I'm still not concerned about it, just thanking my lucky stars that it didn't pop out of place. That is not a fun place to be.

   I slam the butt of the gun into the side of the Sick's face, watching it fall back. It gets up almost immediately, brushing off its tattered clothes and looking at me. It's a Caucasian male, about forty years old, with graying hair and a long beard, about twenty or thirty pounds overweight. Blood soaks its plaid shirt and tattered jeans. It begins moving towards me, preparing to stab me again, but then it gets knocked down by a huge rock. The rock goes into its skull over and over again, smearing clear liquid everywhere as well as a bit of brain matter. I look away, sickened to know that the brain matter belonged to a living person at one point.

   Elliot, my comrade and closest friend, emerges from behind the rock. His tan face is smeared with blood, some of it matting into his sandy hair. He's panting and hunched over, the last few tatters of his shirt about to come off of him. I can see his ribs from under his skin.

   The other guys are being greedy again.

   "Thanks, Elliot," I say quietly. He nods, not saying a word as he peers over me. I look, too, and the rock suddenly lifts.

    It's another one of the Sick, posing as a young woman with blood dripping from her hands. There are also many blood stains all over its shirt. It reeks of the stuff. I can tell by the way its mouth is slightly moving that it got a heart from one of my comrades. It's one of the more brutal ones, apparently.

   As soon as the weight is lifted from my shoulder, I try to scoot away. But the Sick robot is faster. It raises the rock above its head and slams it down as hard as it can onto my injured shoulder. Pain shoots throughout me as I try not to scream. Elliot grabs my one good arm and begins trying to pull me away from the robot, but he can't. He's too frail.

   So he picks up something from the ground. It's his infamous axe. Of all of us, Elliot was the one who found out that it is possible to hack their heads off if we try long enough. He's also the only one who uses this method. Everyone else just settles for bashing in their heads.

   I hear the hacking of the axe, but I close my eyes and turn away. When Elliot began dragging me, I lost my gun. I'm completely defenseless if something happens to me right now.

   I run my fingers along the place where I got slashed, my fingers getting stained with crimson. It stings to touch it, but I don't know of any other way to know how bad it is without looking at it. That would require sitting up straight, and I'd rather not have bits of my head scattered around the land today. I'd rather save that for later.

   It takes about fifty more hacks for Elliot to finish the robot off. I can hear it when he sighs, can hear it when he sets down the axe and begins dragging me to the main campsite.

   This is only the first attack. They've sent the stupid ones, all of the old versions to die first. They don't know that we know this. But the real fight will begin tomorrow. They'll send the new versions, the ones designed to kill in fascinatingly awful ways. Ways of torture, ways of blood. This battlefield is already sprinkled with red. Tomorrow, there will be a flood.

   This is offensive attack number two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-four. There have been this many attacks, and we are nowhere near our goal. Or what our general says is the goal, anyway. I personally think that they've given up now, that they're just sending us to kill and be killed because our last hope doesn't exist.

   "Hey, Elliot," I say, a little louder now that we're away from the main battle. He looks down at me, stopping to listen. "There's food in my backpack. Second zipper." I slowly flip over, feeling the stinging pain and the blood leaking out of my wound.

   "No, that's okay. I'm not taking your food, Will. You earned it."

   "I know that the others haven't been feeding you, haven't been helping you get your own food. I've eaten enough to last the next couple days. You can have the rest of it."

   "I promise I'm fine."

   "You know that they're actually supposed to put you first, right?" Elliot is thirteen, meaning that he's still a child. He's supposed to have the privileges of getting the first meal until he's sixteen and begins carrying his own long-range weapon. Since he's the youngest of all of us, as well as the scrawniest, I try to feed him more that I consume. No one else does. The general often forgets about him, so the rule isn't enforced.

   "I promise I'm fine, Will. I already had something last week."

   "Elliot, take the food. Take all of it. I might not be in battle tomorrow."

   "You're going to take the day because of your shoulder?" he asks. I nod.

   "Yeah." It's times like these that I'm glad Elliot is so innocent. He never needs to think like I do. He never needs to know that I don't sleep, that I always take almost all of the watches outside while the others sleep on the job. He doesn't need to know that there's always a good chance that I'm going to die sometime at night because I never turn the light on to see whether or not the person coming through is human, so I don't know until they're way too close. He doesn't need to know that taking care of him is one of the only things that keeps me going.

   If he dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.

   He unzips the pack and takes the food, and I hear him beginning to eat. He eats ravenously, and I know that it's probably been more than a week. Elliot's always been a good liar when he wants to be. I tell him that he needs to toughen up, that he doesn't need to be afraid to ask for the things that are going to keep him alive.

   I hear him rummaging through the rest of the backpack, trying to find the steak that I cooked with my free time last night. Suddenly, he stops, and I know what he's found. I feel the bit of pressure on my back as his finger traces the number that I have written in mud, changing it every single day as we try and fail to go towards what we're searching for.

   "Will," he says quietly, "do you think we'll ever find the Rogues? Do you think they're even real? Do you think that any of the robots survived and are on our side?"

   "Yeah," I say, lying through my teeth. "It's just a matter of time, like the generals said. We're going to find them, and they're going to kill the Sick. They're going to save us."

   But I know that this isn't true. We're going to die. There are no Rogues and there is no hope and we're all being killed, slaughtered like animals just for the heck of it, just so the others can hopefully believe the lie that we're going to be rescued by Rogues.

   But I will never tell that to him.