Holes (open)

[madisonm]

What do you do when you're in a hole? You stop digging.

Or you keep on going, looking deeper and deeper for what it is you're after. In my case, it was time to dig deeper. This pit had been widening and deepening for several weeks - carefully cordoned off into sections, only about half a metre deep and four metres wide in total, it was the first site I'd personally chosen to excavate, and I was doing so very carefully.

Oh, there were the usual precautions, for sure - checking to see that the Peacekeepers didn't spot me leaving the District, walking in a stream to keep from leaving tracks or scents for the non-human predators, setting up a decent alibi for the human ones back in Six. Leaving the District without express permission was bad enough, but here I was, digging for evidence of the Rebellion, the leftover artefacts from the Dark Days. This site was likely a battleground during the Dark Days, and if the written evidence I'd found in the form of a journal had some truth to it, it wasn't a battle the Capitol had won. This was evidence of a past the Capitol would far rather we forget, a time when the Districts dared to defy their iron grip.

Sure, it was gutsy to go digging around for such history. But this was well away from the stifling confines of the District - a good five kilometres. And of course, I wasn't about to arm the District and run out to cause public trouble - this was simply a case of curiosity killing the cat. It wasn't as much about the defiance as the simple honesty of this act, the unearthing of unedited evidence, the retelling of an almost-forgotten story. After all, those who forget their past will never have a future. Or something like that - the exact quote and its authour, ironically, are forgotten, at least in my little corner of District Six.

There was no human activity in the woods today. Barely anyone slipped over the wall and into the wilderness, let alone delving this far. Birds sang quietly - evidence that nothing large was immediately near for the moment. The brook that I followed to get here babbled. It was frigging picturesque, such a nice break from the somewhat rundown neighbourhood that I called home.

I hopped into the pit. It was time to get going. Picking up the shovel I'd left in the pit, I started turning the earth slowly. It would have been better to have a pickaxe, to grate the earth before I took a shovel to it, but where the hell would I get one of those? It would be at least suspicious for a medic in training, like myself, to buy one. Definitely would have raised questions, in fact. Even the shovel had made the clerk ask what I needed it for, no doubt to be friendly, and I replied, "Gardening." Which was a joke, considering that the closest thing I owned to a garden was a wilted geranium inside my family's apartment. And it wasn't like people tried to beautify District Six.

The ground was tough today, probably from the warmth of the sun, nor was it wielding any great results. So far, after weeks of a dig, we'd found maybe a bullet. Period. That was it. And I say maybe a bullet because it was an old rusted piece of metal and would take some testing - which my father would have to sneak in the lab he worked in - to tell if it was the right kind of metal. Perhaps it was my imagination or hope or whatever running off with me, telling me "Bullet!" when it was a piece of junk. Besides, one bullet does not a battle make. It indicates a murder at most, and likely just some careless poacher. I groaned in frusteration. Maybe it was time to go back to the drawing board, review the evidence, find another dig site, and start over there.

Anyways, I'd come here to finish off the rest of this layer, the top metre or so that usually held recent history, or at least relatively recent history. I should be seeing all the crap left here from the last sixty or seventy years, which apparently wasn't much. I kept on digging, the simple repetition numbing my brain. It was almost relaxing, the noise of earth in the shovel, the motion over and over... I wiped my forehead. Okay, it was definitely hot for this time of year. Stepping out of the pit, I went for my water bottle - and a bush moved.

No, no, no, I told myself. That was a bird. Nobody would be out here. Why would they? It was nothing but my overactive imagination again. Last time, what I'd thought was a person had turned out to be a racoon. I took a long swig from my water bottle, turning away from the oh-so-suspicious bush.

I would have sworn I hard somehting. It was totally paranoia... But what was that noise?