Chapter 2:

- The Chosen -

2300 Hours - May 5, 2545

Zulu Training Ground - Arizona Desert

"Oh…" Samuel King moaned as he slowly awoke from his sedative-induced slumber. He was sixteen years old, and had been kidnapped from his home in southern Kentucky. Because he struggled, one of his captors had shot him with some kind of powerful sedative, and, unbeknown to him, he'd been driven all the way to Arizona, unconscious.

Now, however, Samuel wasn't in the back of some government-issued van. Instead, he found himself lying on the top bunk of a small, military-style bed. He sat up to look around, but his head throbbed from the sedative, and he lied back down and closed his eyes immediately.

"Oh…" he moaned again, turning his head to one side on his pillow. He really felt like he was going to die on that bed. Man, he thought to himself, that stuff really packs a punch. He opened one eye, and nearly rolled out of his bed.

There, to his one side, were eleven more bunk-beds and one single bed, with twenty-three young kids, around his age, lying unconscious in them. He saw that, while the kids were all in at least decent physical shape, they came in all shapes and sizes. Some were big, like he was (standing almost six feet tall, Samuel was better than "average" size himself), some were shorter. There were both boys and girls, though Samuel only counted five girls in total. He poked his head over the edge of his bed, and saw there was a boy beneath him as well.

This one was slender. He was a few inches shorter than Samuel, and he was fairly skinny. The boy wasn't to the point that he was "bone," so to speak, but he wasn't very big either. The side of his bunk was engraved, Ezekiel Veron.

"Ezekiel," Samuel mumbled the name to himself. He came from a very religious family, and immediately tied it to Biblical terms, meaning "strength of God." That's a rare name, Samuel thought, if not necessarily the easiest to spell or-

"Yes?" the boy beneath him asked calmly. Samuel drew his head back in shock, and smacked it against the wooden railing next to his pillow.

"What?" He asked, rubbing his scalp.

"You said my name." The boy said sharply. "Was there a reason…" he paused as he looked at the side of Samuel's bunk, "Samuel?"

"No," he answered, "I was just thinking about how rare a name that is." The boy looked puzzled.

"The name 'Samuel' isn't exactly main-stream either." He joked, and then turned his head to the rest of the kids. "There are twenty-five of us." He said sharply.

Samuel nodded.

"Call me Zeke, by the way." Ezekiel said. Samuel nodded again, thinking of all the teens lying around him.

This is unbelievable, he thought, what are we all doing here?

Zeke must've seen the look on his face, because he suddenly sat up in his bed and looked at a door at the far end of the room, a good twelve-feet past the farthest bed. "I think I heard one of the guys who grabbed me say that we're to be soldiers." He said, his face suddenly stern.

Samuel felt his headache coming back. "What?" He said. "I'm sixteen, I'm not exactly 'of age' for the military just yet."

"Yeah," Zeke said with no emotion in his voice, "I'm only fifteen. But on the way here, I heard the word 'Spartan,' a lot."

Samuel nearly fell out of his bunk. "Spartan" was the name of the program initiated several years beforehand that "recruited" several hundred kids. In the program, kids were taken against their wills from their homes and placed in what was essentially the most difficult "Boot Camp" in history until they were among the best of tacticians and fighters. When they were deemed "ready," they were genetically augmented and became what the human race knew as the "Spartans."

Spartans, Samuel wondered as he looked around the room, no way.

Fifteen-year-old Blaine Everson could hear the two boys talking a few beds away from him. Being somewhat of a history "buff" on the Human v. Covenant War, the moment the heard the word "Spartan," he wanted to jump out of his bed and ask this "Ezekiel" kid about what he'd heard.

Unfortunately, he too had had to be sedated, and the pain in his head when he tried to move was deafening. So instead, he was forced to lie there, on the bottom bunk of the fifth bed, and listen to everything that was said.

"You think we're actually going to be Spartans?" The boy in the top bunk asked.

Samuel? Blaine thought to himself, recalling the name.

"I have no idea." Ezekiel answered. "For all we know, we could all be the victims of a bunch of particularly efficient kidnappers." There was more than just a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Blaine watched as Samuel shook his head. "No," he said, "there's too many of us, and it's all too coordinated. And look around. These bunks are military-style." He glanced around the room, and his eyes met Blaine's. Zeke glanced over too.

"You awake over there?" he asked. Blaine nodded, and the pain in his head flared up again.

"I'm Blaine Everson." He introduced himself calmly, making no indication that the very thought of speaking was enough to cause a searing pain to penetrate his skull.

"Nice to meet you," Samuel said, "I'm –

"Samuel," Blaine said, ignoring the pain, "I know."

"And I'm Zeke." Ezekiel said quickly, not giving Blaine the chance to interrupt him. He struck Blaine as a very sharp, perhaps arrogant, human being.

"Yes," Blaine said, his headache ever-present, "I knew that too."

"Well," another voice came out from behind him, and it sent shockwaves through his already-pulsating skull, "I'm Chris." Blaine turned to look, and found the boy who the voice belonged to was sitting up two beds down from him, in the top bunk. "Actually," the boy said, clearing his throat, "I'm Christopher Strykes."

"Good to meet you." Blaine struggled to maintain a calm smile as his head felt like it would simply explode. He heard Samuel and Zeke mumble in agreement from behind him. The newcomer started to talk again, but Blaine had had enough. He was ready to either sleep or kill the source of the noise that seemed to be ripping his head open from the inside. Without a word, he lied back down in his bed and was almost instantly unconscious.

"Where are you from?" The boy in the bottom bunk asked Chris.

"New York City," Chris answered, pronouncing the boy's name in his head. Ezekiel, he thought, or I could just call him Zeke. He smiled, "Yeah, I'm from the Big Apple." Ezekiel shook his head.

"I'd never make it out there. Too many freaks; not enough circuses." He said. Samuel laughed.

"You're not much for people, are you, Zeke?" He asked. Chris could see it was a rhetorical question, but Zeke sighed and shook his head all the same.

"So," he said, "do either of you know why we're here?" Both Samuel and Zeke shook their heads, almost in unison.

"I heard a guy in the van say the word 'Spartan' a lot," Zeke said, his voice sharp and cynical, "but if that's why we're here, to be trained as Spartans, then I'd say mankind's hope must be running low."

Chris was shocked. Spartans! We could be the next ones to take the fight to the Covenant. We could be next in line! He closed his eyes and thought about all the stories he'd heard about the Spartans, including the ones of his second-cousin who had, himself, been recruited at an early age.

Then he opened his eyes, and noticed Ezekiel's glare. But it wasn't aimed at him; the boy was looking right past him, almost through him. Samuel was silently staring too.

"What guys," Chris started as he turned to see what they were looking at, "what are we all-"

"Enough talking!" a tall, solidly-built man yelled just as his eyes fixed on the door. Up until that point, Chris had considered himself lucky that his head felt okay, despite being sedated before being kidnapped. And then, in a second, the voice's echo through the room caused him to see spots. Within a few seconds, the pain was blinding.

"Or what?" another voice, a teenager's, asked a few away. Chris could hear loud footsteps from the door getting closer, until the noise of the man's steps were in the same area as the voice had come from. Suddenly, the same voice from a moment before was yelling and screaming in agony.

Chris forced himself to look, and was immediately terrified. The boy who had spoken was considerably under six-feet tall, and the man who had entered, dressed entirely in black, was holding him by his hair, a full foot off the ground.

A half-dozen young voices rang out around the room, yelling for the boy to be put down. "That's enough! Put him down now!" A voice yelled above the rest. Chris recognized the voice as being Samuel's and started to yell too.

Suddenly, the boy kicked his left leg back and caught the man right above the groin. It wasn't enough to disable him, but it did cause him to let go of the teen's hair, after which he fell to the floor, unable to stand on his own legs. A second later, the man was picking him back up, and he threw the boy back into his bed.

"That's what." The man said calmly, making no indication that the kick had done anything more than annoy him. The boy was silent, except for a long, quiet moaning sound he made as he held his head between his palms. The man looked around at all the faces staring at him. When his gaze caught Chris's, he stopped for a moment, as if waiting for Chris to look away. When he didn't, the man's eyes moved on.

As soon as the guy who had grabbed him left the room, Landon Brooks could feel the eyes of every other teenager focus in on his body, now shaking on his bed, his head feeling as if it would explode. It wasn't bad enough he'd been taken from his home-sweet-home in Malibu and sedated. No, now he was being tossed around by his shoulder-length locks of brown hair.

"Name's Landon," he said loudly. His headache was so bad now that he no longer cared if that psycho outside the room heard him. All he cared about was the pain in his skull, how tight he could hold his eyes and ears shut in his hands, and how long it would take some kid a few beds down from him to please shut her mouth.

When no one answered, and even the girl was quiet, he sighed and let his hands fall away from his head in an attempt at sleep.

Zeke first looked up at Samuel and then glanced a few beds down the line at a now-conscious Blaine. "Tomorrow," he snapped bitterly, "when the sedative wears off, we're gonna make some real trouble for these guys."

Samuel nodded slowly, anger still gripping his features. Blaine only cracked his knuckles.