Finlay F

The blows were coming from nowhere. If I hadn’t lacerated my opponent a while ago, I would already be dead. I screamed in pain as my arm was cut off. My world slowly evaporated…

I woke up in a cold sweat remembering the last moments of my nightmare. I checked around my bedroom for my sword. Good, it was still there. I had been fascinated by it when I saw it in the museum. It had a marble pommel with a giant pearl on the end. The blade had a small diamond set into it. It was all I owned in my family's small suburban house in New York.

I quickly chucked on some clothes and dashed downstairs to grab my school bag. But it wasn’t there, it was the holidays!

“Mum! Dad! It’s the holidays!” I dashed into the room where they slept, to find them gone.

I dashed upstairs to my twin’s room but he was gone too. A small pile of sand was at the foot of his bed. Huh that's weird I thought, that was when I blacked out.

I woke. I was lying in a very scary pool of blood. I was surrounded by thick bars of iron and lying on cold hard cobble stained red with my blood. I felt my body and found a blade sized gash in my upper arm. I studied my surroundings, there was someone in the cell with me. “You really should be more careful, cuts could cause infections,” a voice wound its way through the prison, ”especially in this dump.” I shivered as a young teenager my age, with piercing blue eyes, stepped out of the shadows.

“Better watch your back in the arena, they’re putting in some gladiators this time.”

I processed the words; some instinct told me that gladiators hadn’t been around for at least a thousand years.

“What’s the year?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable request but she shivered as if some shadow had passed over her. I heard her mutter something about five years and parents, but she finally emerged from her thoughts with the answer 1497. This time, I really knew what was going on. My surroundings made sense.

“I’m in a gladiator arena, aren’t I?”

At that point, a pair of stocky guards barged into the room knocking her to the side as the door swung into her.

“Hey leave her alone!” I yelled at them but the female guard sniggered at me and slapped me with the side of her short blade.

“Come on, you worthless bunch of criminal flesh, into the arena with you!”

“Wait, I need to get my sword!” I yelled but they just picked it up and tossed it into my hands cutting them badly.

The arena was massive. It stretched a good square kilometre, ending with huge walls on either side. To the left a small stream trickled down the arena ending in a pond. A mountain (probably just a pile of boulders) lay to the right. About fifty young men and women were grouped around a central podium holding a giant gong. I knew that as soon as the emperor rang the gong everyone would dash. There were no gladiators. I breathed a sigh of relief. I felt my back for my sword and found it lying above my bruised shoulder. When the emperor rang the gong, I tripped and I was cursing myself when I saw the dagger falling.

It stopped just in front of my face and the wielder slumped to the ground, a bright red mark on his face where the girls shield had hit him. I looked at her but didn’t recognise the crazed fire in her golden eyes.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Stalemate!” But her shield continued its inevitable arc down.

“Duck!” a female voice from behind yelled. I followed the command and a dagger flew over my head and landed with a sickening thwack in her temple.

Two dead in less than an hour, I thought. The crowd must be loving it. “Wait… Don’t shoot!” I whipped around expecting to see a dagger flying through the air towards me, but instead I saw the girl from my cell, sharpening her other knives on a beautiful platinum shield.

“What’s your name?” She asked me.

“My names Augustus,” I answered, returning the question.

“My name’s Katee.”

Katee kicked the dead body of the girl, “and this was Brunhild, winner of the last fight but she went crazy when her father was executed in front of her.”

I gasped as the words sank in.

“So, if you win, they kill your parents?”

“Yep, just so that you either get killed by someone or have nothing to live for.”

“That's brutal,” I thought, ”but… but, why?”

”Because if you win five times, you become the Emperor,” she explained, like that summed it up. And I’m a victor she thought trying to conceal the pain that the arenas polished walls held but her face portrayed her pain.

“Are you a victor?” I asked.

“Yes” she choked out burying her face in her arms, her dignity snapped in a matter of seconds. I wanted to hug her, console her and tell her how bad her childhood was. But then, her eyes flashed: fear.

“Aaaand we're dead,” she quickly announced, turning her attention to the enemies closing in on us. I cursed myself, I should have been more aware. Twenty-five or so men had crept into a circle around us. We only had a sword, shield, a small amount of armour, food and a net. They had swords, nets, water, food, tridents, daggers, throwing knives, bows and arrows, and pretty much every weapon you could think of. There was also the small matter of a ten to one advantage. Katee launched herself at them. Time slowed down. She yelled something about no one loving her. That's when a boulder flattened them.

“What just happened?” I asked Katee, but she seemed just as surprised as me, until she finally spotted the small dusty boy grinning at us. He shoved another boulder intent on having an easy win but before the boulder landed I grabbed Katee’s arm and leaped to the side.

The boulder landed with a ground shaking thud, and disappeared. It had opened a rift that was now the centre of gravity in the stadium. Trees, boulders, even people were swept into the rift. There they seemed to separate down different corridors of swirling pulsing green light. A gong sounded to signal that the gladiators were now pouring into the arena. That's when I was sucked in and consumed in swirls.

The fog was clearing. I was lying in a bed of degrading leaves and grass. The trees above me seemed so lush and green. I felt drowsy. That's when I heard the growl. I jumped to my feet expecting to see a puma or tiger but instead Katee was prowling in the bushes ten metres to my left, knife in hand. If I looked closely, I could see a small chameleon unaware of the knife speeding towards

“I never knew chameleon tasted like chicken” I exclaimed. While Katee cleaned the meat, I watched her and started to realise how beautiful she looked. She fashioned a spit from a branch whilst I went hunting and after dinner we took turns on watch in case any big predators came. Once, in Katee’s shift, she woke me for a fight between a giant rodent and a jaguar. The jaguar won but had its neck slit by my sword. We would eat well tomorrow. I skinned the jaguar and turned it into rug. When we finished our shift, we curled up under the growing pile of furs. We even managed to make a meal out of a caiman that wandered too far from the water. It seemed like we would survive, until the army of ants arrived.

The first sign was that the birds and monkeys erupted into warning calls. Then a stampede of animals charged through the bushes avoiding our camp. Then the sea of tiny orange bodies. We wrapped our meat up in animal furs and climbed the nearest tree hanging our meat from a snakeskin. Then, the ants were on us. They destroyed everything. They trampled the bushes and swiftly stole the life of another giant rodent that wandered out of river at the wrong moment. I thought we should have gone in the water until I saw the wall of water. The wave crest loomed over us like a giant bat, blocking out the sun. I could see the piranhas and caimans thrashing in the wave just adding to the danger. As the water hit us I was sure I would die.

“Where am I?” I coughed as I came round. “Aaaaugh get off get off!” Horrible spiders. Why am I here? I lifted my head up from the undergrowth that had buried me. I… I’m in a jungle. I lift my arm up for inspection but the scarred red flesh that greets me cannot be mine. It hit me, a girl… there was a girl with me. I coughed blood all over my tattered shirt. What was her name? Katee, that's it. Where is she? My muscles screamed in protest as I lifted my body, from the foliage and scanned my surrounding. A red tuft of hair was stuck out of the mulch ten or so feet away. I staggered over, numb with pain, as I bled myself dry.

When I reached the body, I gently rolled Katee over. I screamed. Her face was oozing blood in a slow river making her broken nose red. Her arms were marked with bug bites. I wanted to run away and console myself in the jungle but the slow rise and fall of her chest told me she was still alive. Slowly I dragged her down to the lake and gently washed the blood of her face and pulled the stings out of her bites.

When she was clean, I started searching for our belongings leaving her on the hammock that had held our food but now bared no trace. I found my sword a little downstream near a caiman munching on our ruined, dirt covered meat. I killed a monkey on the way back and while Katee slowly recovered I fed her small mouthfuls of the tender meat. And as if the rainforest was forgiving us I found a small grove of wild herbs. Later that evening we were munching on capybara meat (for I had discovered that that was the sound of their call) which exploded in my mouth with flavour as the herbs danced around our tongue. As we were fashioning a tent out of sticks leaves and mud I caught a glimpse of someone in the lake: wild, unkempt hair; scarred, burnt and stung flesh; hollow, staring eyes. I looked like I was on drugs. I made an effort to wash myself so that I could look vaguely human. When that was done Katee had finished the tent, and was lying on the ground under the ample protection of the tent.

When morning returned, I ate a rationed breakfast and set out jogging upstream to where I had found a recently abandoned beehive. It was lying on the ground in halves and honey was pouring out the side. I quickly gathered it up, not wanting any to spill. Honey was a rare delicacy for the jungle and it would help improve the dull taste of the meat. When dinner came, we gorged ourselves on honey, monkey meat and herbs.

Even though we were living relatively well, in my heart of hearts, I knew one day I would have to return. So, each day I would venture further and further from camp. It broke my heart knowing that Katee would not want to return with me for surely she would hate. One day I came across another river, but this one seemed infested by bachuda fish. One day I reached what seemed to be an ocean but in the distance the jungle continued. I thought this was a small bay until the cruise ship. Its sign read amazon jungle adventure. I wasn’t sure what to do until someone yelled, “phantom hutan!”

Rainforest Phantom? I thought he was calling me that until I turned around and saw it. A huge primate was charging towards me, arms outstretched as if to strangle me but before it reached me, it fell forward. The wild lights in its eyes fading to a dull yellow. Katee appeared knife still in hand.

“There are more, RUN!” she yelled at me, and without thinking, we jumped into the river. As soon as my toes touched the water, something slimy brushed past my feet. I shivered wondering what unimaginable monsters were lurking beneath my feet. A giant croc leaped out at me. Out of nowhere, Katee did something unexpected. She tackled the crock, and as she did, she disappeared. It was that quick. One moment she was there, the next she was not.

As the people on the boat pulled me up, I went feral; kicking, punching and fighting to get to Katee. But even as I'm struggling, I saw the water turning red. “Katee! Katee!” I screamed. A small voice interrupted me.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She’s there, right there.

“Bu...but how?” I asked, but she said: “don’t question it, it might not be real.”

She burst out crying and dug her head deep into my saturated chest. I whispered into her strawberry hair.

“There will always be someone who loves you. Me.”

Some time later…

At the airport back in New York, I knew that my time with Katee was coming to an end. “Katee, I know a… “ I couldn’t say it. But Katee tackled me into a hug, bringing me to the ground.

“I’m coming with you!”

My face split into a grin.