Read Online The War Game by Crystal Black - Free Book Online Page B

spot, by the games where people could toss rings onto the tops of bottles and win stuffed animals. I don’t quite understand why people would want stuffed animals. Animals are for eating. I don’t care to have a toy that looked like a potato, why would I want one of a rabbit?
                  I had to sit and catch my breath. I had never run so hard in my life, but John was fine. He wasn’t gasping or choking for air like I was.
                  I really wanted some water but I had to tell John first. “I think...that they’re...cannibals.”
                  John didn’t seem to have taken it all in, so I told him about what my book said and the connections I made.
                  Then he started freaking out. “Who the hell eats their own kind? I’ve gone for days without much water, longer without food. I’ve been aboard buses filled with sweaty morons and puking children but I would never kill anyone who’s innocent!”
                  “John, I’m so scared! What if they come back for us?”
                  “I won’t let them.” John started walking around, trying to think of what to do. I was doing the same. Although, I wasn’t thinking of a plan. I was trying to go through the alphabet in my head. One thing I remember from school. “A” would be for “apple”, “b” would be for “ball”, and so on. But when I got to “C” and “D”, the only words that came to mind were “cannibal” and “death.”
                  “We need to get to higher ground. Did you see how weak those people are? Three of them together couldn’t lift up a box of that food without taking a break every ten feet. They may not be able to run after us, but we can’t take chances when we’re sleeping. They could have guns or some weapons on them. Let’s go pack up some of those Pop-ups, fill some bottles with water, and climb to that stuck cart on top of Something Wicked. Then we can”
                  “Hold up!” I screamed. He stopped talking. “What? Climb to top of Something Wicked?” I asked. That couldn’t possibly be what he said.
                  “Yeah, it’s high enough,” he shrugged, like it was a normal thing to do.
                  I was mortified, he couldn’t be serious. This had better be a bad joke.
     
    ~~~
     
                  There we were, it was now dark. I was in front of him and he was behind me. He said he would break my fall if I were to, you know, fall.
                  Hand over hand. Don’t look down, he told me. But I did. Several times. And each time I felt like I was going to faint. I told him so and he said he would give me a moment to “gather my strength” like it was just right out in front of me, waiting to be grabbed.
                  The actual climbing probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t dark and if we weren’t carrying extra pounds of stuff like food, water, and so on.
                  “I don’t think we thought this through enough,” I said, a bit too late. “For example, where are we going to pee? How long can we actually stay up here? What do we do when we run out of water?”
                  “Don’t worry about that. I can always climb back down to get us some more.”
                  We finally made it to the car, although he had to pull me in because I had no discernible muscles in my arms, despite what my book tried to tell me. Now that I was up, I didn’t know if I was capable of going back down.
                  We sat in the front two seats and deposited our stuff in the back of the lime-green car. There were three cars attached to ours with four seats in each of them, so that made a total of sixteen seats for our living space. I guessed I had lived in places smaller than that.
                  I sat down and almost