The walk to the new Herd the next morning was not as tiring as Logan had presumed it would be. The Walls seemed for far and so unapproachable from where they’d made camp the night before. But now, standing before the towering Walls covered in sweat and dirt and who knows what else, Logan was almost grateful to have a change. The Walls were different from the ones he’d grown up around.
From what he remembered of the Salina Herd, their Walls loomed over him like thick stone castle walls with guard towers too high for him to see the top of. The Walls guarding the Dodge Herd, on the other hand, were concrete and undecorated and became a constant reminder of the outside world and its dangers.
The Animas Herd Walls were nothing like either of these. The Animas Herd Walls loomed over him like black clouds covered on the outside with white and grey scratch marks that extended up about halfway up the Wall. Underneath the scratch marks, Logan could see dark red stains in various locations around the entrance. Logan gulped, not wanting to explore the ideas of where those stains might have come from further than he already had.
The heavy doors through the Walls opened slightly and a gruff tall man stepped out from inside, holding what appeared to be a machine gun of some sort.
“One at a time. Enter.” He ordered.
The group complied and each entered in a single file line, Logan keeping his head down and away from the man glaring down at him. He’d never felt so small beside someone in his life. Inside the Wall, the group was lined up side-by-side and ordered to extend one arm out for testing. As he had done countless times before, Logan extended his left arm in front of him and waited for the needle to stick into his arm to test for the Infection.
One by one, he heard the needle hiss out of its sheath, the hiss from the person whose blood they’d extracted, and a happy little tune sung by the detector. When it was his turn, he glared at the inside of his elbow, waiting for the needle stick. The needle slid into his vein quickly and he inhaled sharply.
But no happy tune sung out. Instead, Logan’s heart stuttered to a halt when he heard three angry beeps.
“Infection detected.”
The group seemed to freeze all at once and Logan turned to see their reactions. Alyssa looked horrified, Clay and Wesley both looked betrayed, Shawn looked slightly disgusted, and Martha didn’t appear to care, which struck him as odd, though he didn’t bond with her much over their two days spent traveling together.
Before he could explain himself, Logan had two arms wrapped tightly around his own and he was being dragged away from the rest of the group. He could vaguely hear Alyssa crying out after him over the blood flowing in his ears. By the time his brain finally caught up to his current situation, Logan struggled and fought against the hands, shouting out profanities and swearing there was some mistake with the detector as he wasn’t infected. The guards didn’t seem to care as they continued dragged him through the halls.
A door slid open behind him and Logan fought harder as they fastened his arms and legs to a chair in a small dank room and the guards left him alone. Logan, despite not having much upper body strength, pulled and tugged as hard as he could at the restraints binding him to the cold metal chair. He eventually gave up fighting against his bindings and opted to call out for help and to plead his innocence.
He didn’t have to wait long for someone to re-enter. Along with the two guards from before came another man who said nothing but brought in a metal tray with tools Logan couldn’t identify before his head was forced back against the chair and his forehead was bound too.
“Hello there. I do hope you’re comfortable, because this procedure will not be.” The doctor said all too happily.
“You’ve got it wrong, I’m not Infected. I just came from the Dodge Herd, I’m a scholar there, please you have to test me again.” Logan pleaded.
“Unfortunately our devices have never been wrong before, so you’re just going to have to deal with it, won’t you.” The doctor clicked his tongue once before finally coming into Logan’s line of sight, his deep brown eyes unfairly warm as they peered down at him. “Now, this procedure won’t take long, but you’ll have to bear with me unless you want to mess it up.”
The doctor disappeared from his sight and reappeared before Logan could ask what he meant. By the time he reappeared, he was carrying a tool that Logan recognized all too well and jerked away from as best he could.
“Now now, don’t be like that. If you jerk around, I might hit you in the eye and we wouldn’t want that.” The doctor gestured behind him at who Logan assumed to be the guards from before as he soon felt hands gripping around his head and chest. “You’re going to need all your devices when you join a Circle.”
And without much else said, the branding iron in the doctor’s hand pressed into Logan’s face, outlining around his left eye.
There was a faint sizzling sound and the smell of burnt flesh permeated his nostrils, an excruciating pain that emanated from his eye socket and after his shriek of pain, he felt nothing but the pressure of a hot ring encircling his eye. When the doctor pulled the stick away, the nerves that hadn’t been burnt out from the red-hot iron blazed to life. A pained moan wretched itself from Logan’s throat when the hands holding him down released him.
He felt a gooey liquid rubbed against his newly acquired scar and, in response, he jerked away from the cool substance, not getting very far due to his current bound predicament.
“There you go.” The doctor cooed, smearing the substance over his burn. “It’ll hurt for a few days but the Circles have things to help with that.”
As soon as the doctor mentioned the Circles, Logan felt the bindings around his arms, legs and head loosen and hands tightly gripping under his armpits to lift him to his feet. Logan felt utterly miserable, exhausted from the procedure, the shadows of pain flashing through his skull. His feet dragged against the concrete floors as he was hauled towards the entrance once more, the other Dodge survivors no longer lingering around the entryway.
“Don’t worry about trying to find a Circle. One will find you, but I would suggest running before you get shot.”
Logan felt his head smack against the ground before he even comprehended that he’d been tossed outside. His eye socket pounded against his skin, which pounded back in response upon the rough meeting with the dirt. The heat surrounded him like a clingy blanket and he groaned realizing he had to deal with it on his own. Logan remained on the ground curled up in a ball waiting to be pulled into unconsciousness.
Before he could pass out, Logan heard faint shouting, a yelled threat of killing heathens, and then was yanked to his feet again and ran with whoever was tugging on his arm on instinct. He was surrounded by people running and eventually blacked out, his last memory being the ground coming up to meet him again.
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