UNEDITED

This place is hot, smelly, and dirty. They might try to clean it, but if they do it does not show. Compartment 4 is not the best place to live, but it's where most of us end up anyways. It's 'Middle Class.'

But there are some good things about it, you don't have rich or poor people problems, you normally have enough money, and you almost always have food on the table. I was luckier than most, my father is originally from 'Higher Class' compartments. But he married down for my mom.

I walked into the door, shutting it quietly. Please don't wake up, please don't wake up. I stepped up the creaky staircase and into my room. If my parents found out where I was, I would be dead meat. My room was my only safe place, my parents knew I didn't want them in there, so they almost never came in.

My family was slowly losing money due to higher food prices. So I went to find the highest paying job and applied. That just happened to be a spy, for the rebels. So that's where I went tonight.

I knew that if my parents, especially my dad, ever found out I would be dead before you could say "Wait, no." My family are big supporters of the head city or "highest class." Unfortunately my door swung open and in marched my father.

"Haven! Where have you been? Your mother and I have been worried sick! Do you know how much trouble you're in?"

"Dad!" I sighed "You know I don't like you in my room." I rolled over in bed, hoping he would leave. Unfortunately that did not happen.

"Where were you? You can't keep hiding things from us, we're your family." His tone was calm, but it was like ice was slowly moving up my spine, and if I said something wrong, I'd freeze. I knew a punishment was coming.

"If you tell us where you were, the punishment won't be half as bad..." He persuaded.

I sighed and tried to make up an elaborate lie. That was tough due to the fact that I had never lied to them before.

"I was at Viper and Theo's house, we were messing around and lost track of time." I said after a few minutes.

My dad sighed, not quite content with the answer, but willing to leave me alone for now. He gave me another stern look, and warned against sneaking out again, before leaving my room.

I was restless that night, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. My parents could find out, I could get the job but get killed on a mission, or I could not get the job. The list goes on and on, a never ending thought that kept me awake till dawn.

I walked into the kitchen like a zombie, and absent-mindedly greeted my parents. I ate a bagel then went to watch the news. There were four break-in attempts on the mayor's house, and the president was retiring soon. After a few more minutes, I turned the TV off with a click and went to clean the kitchen.

I walked to the park later that day. My friends were meeting me there. They said they had something to tell me, and I was excited to find out what. "Hey Haven! Over here!" Viper yelled. I ran over to them, and looked at them expectantly.

"What did you want to tell me?" I asked when I drew near. They shuffled closer to me and made me swear not to tell anyone.

Theo leaned close to my ear and whispered, "We found a job that you might like."

I looked at them with a confused expression - how did they know I needed a job? When I voiced my question, they laughed and said, "You talk in your sleep!" After their laughing fit ended, they finally told me what the job was. As weird as it may sound, it was the job I had just applied for. Viper seemed very happy that I had applied already, because she had too. Theo was not into spying, but he had signed up for a programmer position also for the rebels.

We walked around the park just talking and having fun, being normal teenagers. At one point, we saw a teacher of ours. Her name was Ms. Chase, and she was a Chemistry teacher of ours. When the war started, she was recruited to build nuclear weapons for the head city. "I heard she's trying to get out of her job," Theo said.

"No way! She's really good at building weapons," Viper said.

"Nuh-uh!" Theo said, like a child.

I watched the twins fight for what felt like hours. Then the curfew bell rang.

BANG! Once

BANG! Twice

BANG! Three times.

"Guys, we've got to go!" I yelled, and we all started sprinting home.

In no time, I was back home, in my bed, asleep.

The next morning I woke up to a shove, and rolled off the bed. I looked up to see who it was and there was my mom.

"Hurry! We've got chores. Up, now!" she yelled, then ran out of the room.

I did as told, and started cleaning. After only twenty minutes, I heard the phone ring. "I'll get it!" I yelled to my mom. I picked up the phone and said, "Hello?"

"Haven Reed?"

"Speaking," I replied.

"You got the job." The caller said.

"Really?" I said, astonished, but he had already hung up.

I quickly dialed Viper's number and hoped she'd answer.

"Hello?" she said on the other end of the line, sounding tired.

"Viper! I got it! I got the job!" I yelled excitedly.

"Good for you! I haven't gotten a call yet." she said, but was interrupted by a phone ringing in the background. "I gotta go," she said, and hung up.

For the rest of the day I was in a good mood, and helped my mom clean the house top to bottom. It only seemed like a little bit of time, though, before I got a call from Viper.

"Hello?" I said.

"Haven! I got the job, and so did Theo!" Viper yelled.

"Yes!" I yelled back. We talked for a short amount of time about what we thought would happen, then I realized that I still had work to do on the house so I told her I had to go.

Soon enough my first day at work came, and I was getting ready in my room for the first time. I was excited, and yelled a quick goodbye to my parents before leaving the house with an apple.

I walked down the silent streets staring at every nook and cranny. The person on the phone from before had called again and told us to be on guard. Since it was my first day going to work, I was a bit nervous and scared. What did he mean when he said be on guard? Who was watching?

I never in my dreams imagined that I would be a spy for the rebels. As long as I kept everything a secret, I would be paid. This would give my parents enough money to survive. If I somehow got found out though, I would lose my job, and probably get killed.

I walked over to Viper and Theo's house and waited for them to come out. I started thinking again about how things could go wrong and about how this was my last chance to get out. But I was determined to do this. I jumped a bit when Theo came out, looking around frantically. "Are you ready?" he asked me.
"Of course," I said.

We waited for Viper to come out. When she did, we started walking down the barren streets, keeping our eyes peeled for any unwanted attention. When we finally got to work, we saw a young man waiting for us at the door. He was probably sixteen, with light orange hair and hazel eyes. He was wearing a dull grey tee shirt and black jeans. I looked at Viper and Theo and decided that I should do the talking since she was looking nervous and Theo wasn't very impressive vocally. I walked up to the guy with the two reluctant twins following me.

"Hi. We're new. What should we do?" I asked him. He waved us through the open door without making a sound.

We walked through and saw the building for the first time. It was huge. It had polished black walls with a steely ceiling and floors. After what felt like only ten seconds, we were led into another room. Inside, there was a man at the head of a table, surrounded by a bunch of officials. I looked nervously at Viper and Theo. Viper was looking pale and sweaty. Theo had a blank face. I probably didn't look much better than Viper, either.

Everyone at the table studied us, as if we were their next meal. I straightened up and tried to calm down. The men at the table remained silent for a long time, so long I almost thought they were statues. Finally the one in charge walked up to us and 'welcomed us in.'

A guide came in and led us to our offices. I was across the hall from Viper, but Theo was in a whole different wing of the building. The room I was in was pretty standard, with soft carpet and pale yellow walls. I assumed all of them looked the same so I didn't bother to look at Viper's.

I was given some paperwork to do just to make sure I could prove that I had what it took. Apparently, I passed every task they gave me with flying colors.

The next few months were difficult hiding my new job from my parents. I also had to go to school at the same time. Every day I woke up early and went to work. Pretty soon, I was going to be given a mission to do.

Missions work like well-oiled machines around here. Everything was assigned and given to you. The only thing you had to do was the task at hand. I felt like that if I was soon to be assigned one, then Viper and Theo were probably close too. I hoped that we would be assigned a mission together.

One day I arrived at work, and 'the boss' was waiting for me in my office. This alarmed me because I had either done something really good or really bad. I wasn't sure which. He looked at my expression which was probably a mixture of panic and horror. He laughed and told me I was in no trouble. I had instead been chosen to revive the opportunity to join my first mission.

I instantly took the chance, and gladly accepted. After a few minutes he begun explaining what would be going on, and what my place and job would be.

My mission was to go scout around a new compartment the head city had made. There were rumors of some un-human-like things there. I was supposed to figure out what they were, and see if they were a threat. And if so, destroy them.

The best part about the mission was that I got to pick two other agents to go with me. Of course I picked Viper and Theo. We were told to pack up immediately. We would tell our parents we were doing a sleep away camp for school, and they provided us with all sorts of forms to make it look like official school business. We were due to leave the next day.

My parents did not take the news well, thinking that the school would give us more time to pack and get ready. I assured them that I would be safe and well taken care of, and they seemed to calm down. They signed the fake slips of paper and I was on my way. I met Viper and Theo at their door, and we started toward work.

We were ushered immediately to a hangar we had never been to before. It was full of planes and helicopters. We loaded onto a small plane that was controlled by computers, so obviously there was no pilot. Probably to cut back on witnesses.

We took off almost immediately after we were seated, and only knew that the compartment was about five hours away. During most of that time, we talked about how exciting the mission was, and they thanked me multiple times for choosing them.

We also talked about what trainings we had to go through and how good we were in our classes and exercises. Theo was ranked at the top of his class in programming, and was ready to go on a mission. Viper was second, me being ranked first, in her classes, and she was also ready to go on a mission.

We slept for the remaining two hours to keep our energy up, and got there at nine o'clock. We landed on a hill far away from the compartment. As soon as we were unloaded, the plane took off again, speeding away in the other direction.

We walked for about an hour before we got our first view of the compartment. It had very high chain link fence, and there was no grass, it was all rocks. We crept closer to the fence and saw nothing in the compartment. There were houses around, but no one seemed to be out.

We climbed over the fence and quickly ran to shelter near some bigger rocks. We waited there for what seemed like hours before something exciting finally happened.

Something that was definitely not human came out of a house. It had dull green skin and one hand sprouting out of the right side of it's body. It had tentacles instead of legs, and on the left side of it's body, it had three sharp-looking spikes instead of an arm. I wanted to throw up, but I knew that I had to keep my cool and stay under cover.

Theo wasn't so lucky though. He started gagging, and Viper had to throw her hand over his mouth to keep the sound muffled.
The thing looked around outside of it's house for about three minutes. It finally started walking towards a rock mound in the back yard.

Suddenly each house had the same activity - an alien creature emerged, stood and then moved to a rock mound in the yard. We waited and watched. They all moved into the center of the rock mound. After a minute of waiting in silence, we crept away back to the fence and climbed over. We ran back to where our stuff was, only to find it gone.

We didn't know what to do, but it seemed that fate had decided that for us. In a nearby rock mound that we hadn't noticed before, the alien creatures emerged one by one, lining up in front of us. We slowly started backing away, grabbing for the only weapons we had on us - Theo had a small dagger in his pocket, I had a small pistol on my belt, and so did Viper. She also had a dagger. For each step we moved back, they all stepped forward in unison, as if hypnotized.

We were losing ground. With a pile of rocks behind us, we were trapped. I thought that this was probably a good time to start the second part of the mission - to destroy them. I whispered my plan to Theo and Viper, and they nodded in approval.

We started taking steps forward, but the creatures did not move back. Soon we were face to face, watching each other. Chaos ensued when Theo moved his dagger forward. The creatures started making an ear-piercing sound, and ran at us with their dagger-arms forward.

Viper and I lept into action, having experienced something like this in our training. We both ran to the side and around behind the creatures. Theo wasn't so lucky. He almost got trampled, but Viper was able to grab his hand at the last moment and pull him through.

The creature-things clearly weren't fooled by our trick for long, and turned around almost immediately. We ran up a larger hill, hoping that their tentacles wouldn't be able to follow us. We were right, and they were unable to get up the hill.

Viper and I started shooting them down with our pistols, but we were barely able to make a dent in their numbers. Meanwhile, Theo was looking around and found what appeared to be a walkie-talkie that looked like it had been dropped by mistake. He tried to turn it on, but the batteries were dead. He started looking around frantically, and seemed to find what he was looking for. His programming skills performed some kind of magic trick on the walkie-talkie and it came to life.

Theo gave the key phrase that meant 'danger' and told the walkie to come as quickly as possible to the new compartment. The walkie squawked back a strange-sounding word to Viper and me, but Theo sighed with relief.

Viper and I were still shooting down the creatures, but they were starting to have success in climbing the rocky hillside. We now had to shoot the closest ones instead of just randomly firing. The high-pitched screaming continued, and seemed to be getting louder as their numbers fell.

We were looking around the skies wildly, hoping that our plane would return quickly so that we could get out of the situation. What we got was better than our plane returning though.

A whole squad of fighter jets emerged from the sky, tearing out of the north. They dropped bombs that took out three creatures at a time, and slowly but surely, their numbers were decreasing. After about twenty minutes, they were all gone.

We went home on a jet and realized that we had been gone much longer than we had thought. In fact, it had been close to an entire day since we left, much longer than the average school day. Our parents had called the school and knew that we hadn't been on a school trip at all. We found this out on the jet so we would not be surprised when we saw our parents at work.

When we got there, Theo and Viper ran up to their parents, who seemed very proud of them. I was more reluctant to reunite with the angry faces of my parents. I approached them slowly as if they were wild dogs, possibly who wanted to strike out at me. When I got to them, they both looked furious.

"What's going on, Haven!" My dad yelled.

"Tell us it isn't true!" My mom whispered.

I shook my head and told them the truth. At first they seemed very disappointed, my dad, rubbing the sides of his head, and my mom looking down at her feet. But they looked up, and I saw my dad had tears in his eyes.

"We are very proud of you," he said.

I looked at them in shock and I asked them why they suddenly had a change of heart. They said that they had been wrong to support the head city, because they had been doing things that were oppressive.

They took me home that day and I was more happy than any other time in my life. We had a nice family dinner and I went to bed full and happy.

When I first started this job, I thought that I could never be happy when my parents didn't know and that if I told them, they wouldn't accept it. But tonight changed all of that, and for the first time in a long while, I went to bed easily.

A/N Thanks guys for reading! I would like you all to keep in mind that this is a story I entered in a competition. And that competition was 4 years ago. So I think my writing has improved since then. But I just wanted to put this out there because my dear friend said I should write an original book and not fanfiction, so why not!

I know it's really not great, and that the grammar mistakes could actually kill, but in truth I'm too lazy to go and fix it all, so we're stuck with this. So only minor changes to the format and punctuation were made.

Also I know I've published part of this before, so if the first part seems familiar then thanks for having read this short story before! 😂

So that's it! Sorry I've been inactive, I'll work on that, and also have a great day! Bye!