Breaking Command

Chapter Four

I hear a paint ball gun be reloaded aggressively. I turn to the sound of somebody shoving in paint balls, and cursing when one doesn’t fit in the ball slot.

“Mother – ”

“Ben?” I say, coming out from the corner I was recently sitting behind. It was the day after I talked to Jason behind Ben’s back, and I felt sad about it. I don’t know why, but I feel like I want to talk to Jason again. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I go over what happened in my head, smiling when I see his tall, lean figure, his bright green eyes, his soft, mid-length hair…

“What?” I snap out of my day dream as Ben wears his full black and blue paintballing outfit. He looks at me gravely, addressing me. His eyebrows shot up to his forehead, expectantly.

“I- uh… what are you doing? Why are you in full war uniform? There isn’t an attack today, is there?” I say, approaching the desk where all his weapons are laid out. A sparkling object catches my attention, but Ben moves his hand toward it and places it delicately in his back pocket.

“You ask too many questions,” he says, moving past me towards the ammo closet. His loud footsteps on the hardwood floors make a thud-thud-thud sound. He seems to be filling up his secondary gun with blue paint balls.

“Well I was just wondering…” I trail off, knowing that his conversation is going nowhere. I back out of the room and search for Brooke. I look in the other weapons room, around back, and in the stock pile where we keep our food and drinks. Of course, she’s nowhere to be found. I head out back again towards the headquarters where the nerd – Andy – is typing away on his laptop.

“Hey,” I say as I stalk in the vast room. The only other person in the room was Matt, Andy’s “wingman” as he calls himself. Matt was on another computer, surveying something. I ignored Andy’s returned greeting as I walk towards Matt and his computer. I come up behind him, but he shuts his computer closed. “Hey…what was that? And why can’t you show me?” I ask, anger boiling inside of me.

“Sorry, but Ben’s orders were strictly to not–”

“Screw what Ben’s orders were, I’m the sister, so I get to see it too.” I reply sternly. Matt glances towards Andy, looking for confirmation. When Andy just simply shrugs his shoulders, Matt gingerly opens up his laptop, revealing four separated screens, each holding a different site. Some look familiar, others don’t, but the one’s that do look familiar worry me.

“Hey, wait a minute… isn’t that one a…” I catch myself before I say anything else. I can’t compromise the fact that what I’m seeing is the Red team’s campground, because these nerds will figure out that I’ve been there. Thankfully, they didn’t notice.

          “Yeah, the Red team’s camp ground. It’s not as bad as you may think; its strategy, if that makes you feel any better,” Matt states, as he returns typing and clicking. I straighten up and go out the back door, confusion and anger eating away at me. This wasn’t fair to any of the other teams, so I’m going to tell Ben about it. But before I can even fully step out of the room, Troy, our team sniper, barges in.  

“Ready up, there’s been another attack!” He says, pulling out his sniper rifle and loading it with ammo. “But this time, we started it.” He goes over  to the small hole in the wall and prepares his sniper for shooting.

“This was planned? Since when?” I ask, my anger slowly rising.

“Since this morning, Ben told everybody about it. Didn’t he tell you?” Troy replies, crouching down to look into his lens.

“My ass he told me,” I mutter, as I stalk out of the room, dashing to the part of the field where Ben has the whole team assembled