I felt it coming, but didn’t expect it to be this bad. But there it was, a terrifically powerful and instant downpour of foul, smelly rain that I was usually delighted to see that night at what was probably about eleven. After all, a storm like this was usually followed by a multicolored striped streak of light across the sky. It was the perfect setting for what was about to come, a downpour of diminished dreams. What we had been hiding from had traced us. Of course, death was what we had feared all of our short new lives, and that is what kept us close to the rest of the world. It wasn’t avoidable though, to hide from death at this point, we had to fight death away as our closely related enemies had come for what would be a battle of the societies we had created.
We were now like the societies we had escaped from. We were fighting over our principles. Each of us believed in a similar path to utopia, but seeing no way to reach that without demolishing those who disagreed, we had come to a war over the land, and they were striking first.
One thing was for sure our homes were beautiful. The hills of green grass were littered with huts and agriculture, and the trees were terrific weeping willows that bent over in joy, not misery. On this rainy day, the hills still looked awesome, or what you could see of them through the mist.
The two groups of us were fairly evenly matched at about twenty-three persons to a people. They attacked one hut with a fire at what is probably about two in the morning. I had been in the hut they torched, but was awake laying in fear as I was listening to hear if the footsteps I swore I heard were that of our night watchman or someone else. I sensed the feelings of a nearby source of fire and immediately jumped from the tent to see one of the Greens face to face.
I swung at him and missed as he punched me in the stomach. I hunched over clutching my body at the blow to my abdomen, and he kneed me in the face. As I was being carried away I saw my fellow bunkmates yelling as they ran from their enflamed sleeping quarters. The whole camp had been awakened and knew I had been taken; they didn’t know what was to come of me.
Lydia let her emotions take over like I knew she would and came screaming after me.
I don’t know what happened between then and now as I passed out, or was knocked unconscious. It’s surprising and sad that the Greens had built “cages” for whomever they caught as a hostage; they clearly hoped for this feud much more than we did, or just saw it coming and prepared. I could have sworn cages were why we had left civilization to create our own society, but then I guess that’s why our two tribes had separated, at a clashing of views.
I was placed in a shoddy cage type structures that went into the ground. My beloved torpid girl had yet to awaken. I looked around, having not yet seen much of our enemies’ home I was surprised by some of the differences, but not so much the similarities. The similarities, like what their homes looked like, were just the way they were because of what we had at our hands to build with, but the differences represented the dissimilarities between the two communities. There was a much more visible hierarchy in their settlement. One of the main reasons we were at war was the ever-nearing closeness of the Greens to the structure we had abandoned.
Lydia woke up. At first, she was in somewhat of a daze, as she came to. She looked around, with comparable reactions to mine: startled when she saw the confinement she had been placed in, curious as to how our close enemy lived, and a myriad of feelings when she saw me next to her in the same situation as she.
“Oh, darling, are you alright?” she asked sympathetically as she reached up and gently felt my face with her right hand.
“I’m fine, dear. What happened to you?”
“Jonathan used some sort of pressure point and I was painlessly knocked out.” It was strange that we used to know some of those we were fighting on a somewhat personal level and could refer to them in person.