Day: 6

Nasty smells, the bitterness all too familiar, travel inside my nose. An assault, or at the very least a violation of my human rights. What did I do to deserve this ungodly form of torture?

"Pan Flute and his stupid punishments destroying not only my soul but my sense of smell at the same time." I mutter, backing up.

Alex grabs a hold of me, preventing me from leaving. "Quit being such a drama queen. You just have to wash some clothes."

"Do you even have a sense of smell?" I yell back.

He glares at me, biting the inside of his lip, before gritting his teeth. "No, I do not."

I look back at him, silent. Of course he has no sense of smell. He probably doesn't have a sense of taste either, and I don't mean that in the sense of what he eats. I shrug out of his grip and walk further into the tent.

I sit on the ground and lean over top of a pile of clothing. I slowly pick up a pair of pants, pinching it between my two fingers. A new, fouler odour comes rushing out of the pile. I jump up, throwing away the pants and begin to gag.

"Calm down, it's literally a pair of pants." Alex chuckles.

"Do you have to be here?" I demand.

"No, I'm spending time with you just for fun." Alex's bitter voice attacks. "I'm responsible for making sure you don't leave. Trust me, I don't want to be here. I have more important things to do then to watch you struggle with laundry."

"I won't run." I say.

"Like how you didn't run away from the fight?" He asks.

I resist the urge to hit him in the face.

"Maybe if you all weren't so barbaric I wouldn't have run off."

"You're such a plunter," he says.

I walk away from him and begin pacing around the tent. This situation would be a thousand times better if I wasn't stuck with Alex. He makes me so angry, so very angry.

A boy walks in the tent, a humungous bucket of water in his hands. He has light brown hair and green eyes, and a giant frown stretched from cheek to cheek. I recognise him, but I'm not sure where from. Probably training, if he attacked me.

"Well aren't you cheery." I spit at the boy.

I really need to stop talking when I'm angry.

He looks at me and glares, but says nothing. He puts the bucket down and throws some clothing in it, before storming off out of the tent.

"Who is that?" I ask, turning to face Alex.

"That's Devin," he answers. "He's a plunter and stuck-up, you two will get along well if you stop being so rude to him."

I roll my eyes at Alex. "You're the biggest loser here. Worse than Kiki, if you ask me."

He sighs. "You are so incredibly naïve."

He storms out of the tent, which I take as another point for me.

Devin walks back in, another bucket in his hands. He drops in down in front of me and walks back over to the other bucket. He pulls up the bucket into his hands and walks out the tent door, still grumbling.

I pick up a pair of clothes, trying not to gag as I throw them into the bucket. They splash down into the water. I try to lift up the bucket to follow Devin, but it is very heavy. The bucket is about as wide as I am across, and goes up to my knees in height.

I lift it again, finally managing to get it off the ground, before dropping it again. How the hell did he lift this? He must be like the Hulk or something.

Funny, he looks to be on the scrawny side.

I exit the tent, looking around for anything to help me. Boys are bustling all around me, carrying wood and food, and hunting equipment. A group of boys on the edge of the clearing set off, probably to go kill something. I should be with them, I've earn my spot hunting that boar. I storm back inside.

I walk in and kick a pile of clothing. Instead of the clothes flying everywhere my foot his hard metal. I wince, picking up my foot and cradling it as I hope around.

I dig through the pile, quickly to avoid the smell, and pull out a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow. This is absurd; there's no way in hell I somehow missed a wheelbarrow hidden in this room. How did a wheelbarrow even get on this island?

I decide not to ask. I pull the wheelbarrow toward the bucket, taking out the clothes and dumping them in the wheelbarrow. Now that the bucket's lighter, I dump the water into the wheelbarrow. I pick it up, and push it out of the tent, unsure of where to go.

"Woah, where the hell did you get that?" A boy asks.

I know him, it's Robert, the assistant medic. "I just found it in the tent."

"Oh yeah, I heard you got clothing duty," he adds. "I didn't even realise that was hidden in there. It must've been there for a while?"

"Yeah," I add. "I'm not sure where to go with this."

"Here, I'll show you." He answers, smiling.

He walks me to the edge of a clearing.

"James," he yells at he points me down a path. "I'm going to go show Charlie where the ocean is. I'll be back soon."

A boy turns, James, I've met him before too. "No worries Robert. I'll cover for you."

Robert walks down the path, and I follow him.

"How's the boy doing?" Robert asks.

I pause. "Who?"

"The one who got healed by Pan's magic?"

"Max?" I ask.

"Yeah, Max. Cute kid, I haven't seen him around since Pan helped him." Robert pulls out a sword and cuts down a branch that's blocking the path.

"I haven't seen him, not for two days."

It's weird to admit. Last I saw him, he was sick in Pan's tent. I don't know if I even remember seeing him during training.

"Huh, well that's fair. This is the first day you've been allowed out of that tent since the accident, right?" He asks.

"Yeah, I slept essentially for the whole day yesterday."

But not during the night.

"You slept for most of today too then? It's nearly dinner already."

I'm confused. "That's impossible. Alex told me that it was nine when I woke up."

"How long have you been awake?"

"I don't know, twenty minutes." I shrug.

Robert chuckles. "Al lied to you then."

"He could've just been wrong." I suggest.

Robert laughs, a roar. "You News make me laugh sometimes."

"How long have you been here."

"Long enough," he says. "Not as long as Alex and Jared though, but I'm the oldest of the boomers, only a handful of the 3 came here before me."

"There are 36 people here?" I ask.

"If you include Pan and Felix there are, and nearly all of them have come since the boom." He tells me. "There's six who are pre-boom: Jared, Alex, Devin, Keaton, Felix, and Pan."

"Only them?" I ask.

"Yeah, I've been keeping track. I've been here for the whole boom, ten years. I was the first to come. Then next came James, and a few others slowly trickled in."

"Wait, so you know all about the death numbers?"

Robert stops walking and pulls me off the trail. "What kind of question is that?"

"The graveyard, has ten graves, but I heard a boy dies about every two years, which isn't possible if you've been here hundreds of years.

Robert sighs. "I can't tell you about before the boom, but since I've watched five people die since I came, and I came in 2001, so whatever year it is think of it in terms of that."

"Pan has let five people die in ten years?" I ask.

Robert shakes his head. "No, it's not his fault. It's been two accidents, a suicide, a murder and an execution."

"Execution?" I shout.

"A boy killed another, so Pan gave him a game, which he lost." He shrugs.

"What about the three boys in the hunt who disappeared?" I ask.

"They aren't dead. Just making their way back to camp." He walks back onto the path and walks forward.

I run back to my wheelbarrow and begin pushing it after him. "How do you know?"

"We would've had a funeral." Robert shrugs. "Besides, the first round is a no death round. It's impossible for them to have died. They'll probably be back tomorrow."

I decide not to say anything. Everyone here is too loyal to Pan Flute, too obsessed with him to say anything against him. Except for Alex, Alex seems to have a distaste for him to say the least. I know what I saw though. I saw ten graves, or there abouts. They had to have killed many boys. It can't simply be five boys in ten years.

We are finally on a beach. The beach where I was attacked too. Devin has left a pile of wet clothes by the shoreline. He's by the trees, hanging clothing up along a thin line.

Great, they don't even know I'm a girl and I've been assigned to the 'girl' jobs. God, this is ridiculous.

"I've got to be heading back. I'll see you later Charlie." Robert says, turning around and running.

Devin turns to me and stumbles backwards. "How the hell did you get that?"

"The wheelbarrow?" I ask.

He stares at me, waiting for an answer.

I sigh. "It was in the tent."

"No it wasn't."

There is a silence shared between us, the sound of the ocean roaring.

"It was underneath a pile of clothing."

Silence again.

"Whatever, it took you long enough to bring them down here, we aren't going to have time to clean them. So you'd better kart them back."

I simply stare at him. I turn around and head back through the forest, not in the mood to argue with him.

After ten minutes of walking through the forest I arrive back at the camp. Boys are already gathered around the table, stuffing their faces with whatever was scrambled together tonight. I guess I won't be eating tonight; if they are already at the table sitting, then the food is gone.

I push the wheelbarrow into the tent and slam it on the ground. I storm back out, and walk into the forest. I pull my dagger out from the inside of the cloak, and begin to hack at the tree in front of me. I'm a kettle that's been left too long, boiling over on to the stovetop.

"So you aren't as scared as you seem." The voice of my nightmares rings out from behind me.

I turn around. "Of course you're here, why wouldn't you be? And I thought my day couldn't get any worse."

"Well, you are one happy camper." Pan Flute says.

I glare at him. "I'm stuck on an island with a mass murderer. A crazy mass murderer who won't let me leave, for who knows what reason."

"I've never killed anyone." Pan Flute says.

I run up to him and shove him into a tree. His body slams against the trunk, and I move closer pinning him in place. I put the dagger up to his neck, the cold blade touching his skin. I bite my tongue as I pant, holding the dagger tighter and tighter to his neck. He doesn't flinch however, but as I move the blade closer I watch his skin move at the touch.

"You've kidnapped me. You've kidnapped Johnny. You've kidnapped Max, Lyle, Thomas, Marcus, and dozens more." I shout. "And as a direct result, people have died. That makes you a murderer."

He just looks at me, smiling. He bites his lip, before raising his eyebrows at me and chuckling. A dirty sound. Suddenly I realise what I am doing and I let go of him, stepping back. The dagger slips through my fingers and collides with the ground.

I held a boy at knife-point. I held a young boy, a boy my age, at knife-point. I threatened him, accused him of horrendous crimes without solid proof of anything. I degraded him.

I am Pan Flute; disgusting and vile, thriving in the pain of others. We are two people cut from the same cloth. Made from the same flesh and the same bone. We are the same.

I am just as sick as he is.

"Well done. I thought you didn't have any fire in you." He smirks. "And we all know I like fire."

I stumble back, tripping on a root. My hands scraping across fallen branches, filling my nails with dirt.

"Relax, you didn't hurt me." He smiles. "I'm fine, and you're fine. Isn't it fun?"

"No," My voice cracks, a sharp sound. "It's not fun. I don't want to hurt you."

"Really? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, you just held me with your dagger up against my neck. If that's not wanting to hurt me, I don't know what is."

I back up more, hitting a tree. He is suddenly in front of me, kneeling down over my body.

I take it back, he does frighten me. His vile smile and his cruel eyes don't make him all bark and no bite. He is a ticking time bomb. I am a ticking time bomb.

"It's alright Charlie." He assures me.

I continue to stare at him, flinching underneath him. He places his hand on my right arm, holding me firmly yet not forcefully. He's asking me to agree with him. Pan only asks questions rhetorically and only states facts when asking.

I get up off the ground, shrug out of his grip, and run.

~~~~~

So this is fun. I really do like this. Big step in Charlie's development as a character. Very big. Especially since she spent the first half complaining about how much of a murderer Pan is and then suddenly deciding she is toxic and awful too.

I really like it.

Anyway, I hope you liked it too. If you did or you didn't let me know.

As always, don't stop enjoying your life, and I'll see you Monday.