"What the fuck do you mean, am I allowed to be using this? Am I a child to you?"
The teenager waved the rifle at her aggressively, which was actually quite frightening in the secluded rainforest. It suddenly occurred to Jasmine that there were more important questions to be asking, such as why are you saving me? Or, why am I even here in the first place?
"What happened? What is this place?"
"Shut up! They could be around here somewhere!"
"Th-"
Jasmine was reminded to shut up by the pressing pain in her leg and stomach, as she very slowly clambered to her feet. There was an awkward silence between the two of them, amplified in the pitch-black night.
"We should go. I'll tell you what I know on the way."
Jasmine agreed with that wholeheartedly. So they started walking, slowly, through the rainforest, Jasmine closely following in the teen's footsteps.
"Around the same time you showed up, we intercepted a mind control van being driven to central base. I was in charge of surveillance, this time, and while I was trying to intercept recovery units for the truck, I found you."
Words could not describe the quiet expression of shock of Jasmine's face at that statement.
"You were intercepting a what?"
"A mind control van. It's exactly what it is."
"And what was I..."
"You're not very smart, are you?"
The crudeness of the insult and the lack of sympathy shocked Jasmine out of her stupor pretty much immediately, and she suddenly remembered what had led up to the gap in her memories.
"Shit! SH-! My boyfriend! I remember getting into a limo with my boyfriend, and that's it! Does that mean he is in the rainforest somewhere?!"
"Maybe."
She didn't want the question avoided, she wanted a fucking answer. Just any answer other than maybe, just a single word...
"We need to find him!"
"We will try our best. But we need to get to base first. Okay?"
"..."
She wanted to throttle this teen, but her sense of self-preservation, and fear of absolutely everything the island had to offer, was stronger. For a couple of minutes, tears welling up in her eyes, she walked behind her rescuer. Then she broke the silence.
"It's okay. Thank-you for rescuing me, I suppose. What's your name?"
The teen looked at her in the darkness, blue eyes glowing in the darkness.
"My name's Sandy. Are you...alright?"
Jasmine didn't want to come across as a pussy in front of the much younger woman, truth be damned.
"It's just something in my eye. I'll be okay."
-- -- --
"Brownie." The woman smiled, and waved as her best friend entered her own room, dressed in what effectively amounted to low quality camouflage gear.
"What are you doing on my bed Dusty, ya dipshit!?! Or did you feel like waiting for me?"
The other woman smiled, sat down on her mattress, and pinched her best friends cheek.
"Of course I felt like waiting for you. You're my best...friend..."
Something about that statement made Brownie wince. Of course the only person on this island that wasn't brainwashed and shared her sense of humour was straighter than an arrow.
"Yeah, well you're my best...friend...too! Anything interesting happen?"
"Well, you will never believe this, Michael nearly got himself killed in the raid again, but he did finally manage to get another kill!"
"I don't believe it. Did he rescue any captives?"
"Well, of course not. But Sandy, on the other hand..."
This didn't sound like a joke. Nobody made jokes about Sandy. Which was weird, because if it was big, it was really BIG.
"You CANNOT be serious. That's our second one!?!?!"
"..."
"You're serious."
"And it's a chick too."
"Oh my Gooooooooooood!! When do we meet?!?" Brownie looked like she was going to explode from excitement. And she had good reason to. That was five deaths on the enemy team two rescues, and another excuse to get drunk, in what, six months? It was also exactly the response Dusty wanted to hear.
"We're meeting tonight."
-- -- --
So the island was run by a shadowy cabal of hypnotists to obtain blank obedient slaves and make a fortune on the black market. That seemed a little hard to grasp for Jasmine, but she supposed she didn't really have a choice in whether she accepted it or not. As for how they survived, apparently they just did, surviving by hiding their weaponry and technology in a cave and flawlessly pretending to be genuine tourists when they were in the open, instead of revolutionaries. Nobody had come after them in months, because they weren't effective enough to halt the literal hypnosis machine.
"I'm just supposed, to believe, that me, and my boyfriend were being brainwashed into being blank...obedient...slaves?"
She didn't mean to stumble over those words, she was just weary, that was all. And she felt unwell, too, stupefied at what to do in the situation she found herself in. Sandy had abandoned her to do leadership things, but there were some more people willing to help her at least. There was Dusty, with light brown hair in a messy ponytail, and combined with Sandy and her light blonde hair, she figured out how Brownie got a name like that pretty fast.
"Well you don't have to. But you're not the only one who's escaped being brainwashed. There's Priya, she's a computing genius who escaped mid-brainwashing before, and she can apparently help you...remember the, you know, the hypnosis process. She asked you to come specifically, didn't she?"
"I'm still sceptical."
"Okay then, maybe we should ask the questions. Whatcha going to do about your boyfriend?"
"I'm going to get a gun, and then I'm going to shoot people until I find my boyfriend, or the leader of this whole thing. He's going to pay."
Laughter. Jasmine didn't mind though, she just let it fuel her anger and quiet resentment.
"We are cynical, lemme tell you that much. Best to just do as Sandy says, and live on the island at the expense of the hypnotised victims. We hack their bank account, because they ain't going to use them, only the lunatics at the top. And they can't tell us apart from the normies. The non-hypnotised ones."
"And if I don't?'
Dusty mimicked a gun firing. Then she started to whisper.
"Sandy isn't known for being nice. And that's coming from a group of paranoid refugee orphans. Bless her soul. You either do what she says, or you are a hypnotised threat to our security. And then..."
Well, this was shaping up to be her worst holiday yet.
