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Writer
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: ohio
Gender: Male
Posts: 40
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Veracity: Part 1
Chapter 1
To best describe it, the pain was indescribable. The feeling of the tape over my bloody was almost as painful as the tight rope holding together my swollen wrists. It was as if I were losing my mind. I was hungry, my fingers were swollen, my heart beat uncontrollably, and my chest ached. Sounds of leaves rustling in the trees along with the sound of chirping birds rushed around in my pounding ears. The sunlight beaming down in-between branches and on to my numb body gave me a comforting feeling of relief. Maybe I was dead, or at least dying.
Either way, I was alone. And after realizing I had only woken from unconsciousness, I accepted the fact that I was, indeed, alive. I was in a forest somewhere. But where exactly, and how did I get here? I must have taken a blow to the head, because I couldn’t remember a thing. Two things were certain to me, however; Somebody had done this to me, and I wasn’t supposed to be dead. How did I know this? Well, the dirty slip of paper lying next to my head summed it all up.
The paper read “Don’t bother” in big, sloppy letters. I could see the letters “Ca” written diagonally underneath, but could not read the rest of the word due to the fact that the paper had been split in half. But right there, pinning down the sheet was my ticket out of the tape and ropes I was in.
I attempted to grab the knife with my tied-together hands, but could not manage to pull my body far enough. My legs were tied together as well. Nothing was free at the time.
Not giving up, I came up with the idea to use my mouth. After lowering my head to a nearby log, I slowly began to saw away at the tape, praying that my lips would not slash. Finally, I’d managed to cut a clip, and opened my mouth, enduring…well, how should I put this? Imagine pouring salt into a gunshot wound at the kneecap. Basically, this feeling of pain was a thousand times worse.
Stretching my neck to it’s limits, I reached for the knife and gripped it in my mouth. Step one had been conquered. Next, I curled my knees up to my head and, sitting up, I sawed through the rope, using the knife I was holding tight in my mouth. Relief overcame me. Maybe I was going to survive. Anyway, step two was done. I stood up feeling like a god, and walked over to a branch of a nearby tree. It was harder to break the rope on my hands, but through some miracle step three was complete.
I threw my hands up to my ears as they began to pound. The ringing seemed to be getting louder and louder, and I couldn’t help but let out a scream; No answer. Kneeling down to stretch my body, I let out a few yelps in pain. It was clear that there was something seriously wrong with my chest.
Taking my shirt off in the blazing heat was the first thing that had felt good in a while. But there was nothing under my shirt, it appeared. I kept looking, and eventually I found what seemed to be stitches on my stomach. Where the hell did they come from? What the hell was going on? Desperately trying to think back, I remembered what I could.
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Throwing on my backpack, I slammed my locker door shut and walked towards the exit of my high school. Mr. Blacus, my eleventh grade science teacher, yelled at me from behind, screaming “Roy! Roy!” at me from behind. In a bad mood, I kept stomping out and crossed the street, ignoring the crossing guard. Mr Blacus had still been following me, and he was still on the other side of the street. My plans to keep walking away had done for when I heard him yell something else.
“I doubt the last thing she’ll want to see is you failing!” he yelled at me. Not even fully believing that he had the nerve to say what he had just said, I turned around and ran towards him. Running back into the street, I felt so infuriated that I didn’t care what I would do to him when got to him.
Without warning, something slammed into me from the side…and that was all I could remember.
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I had been running for nearly a half hour now, and it seemed hopeless, so I stopped and caught my breath. It was then that a pleasant thought came to mind. What if I had something to eat in my pocket. I was starving, and I most always carried a cereal bar or something around with me.
I sighed when I felt nothing in my right pocket. However, in my left pocket was something that I thought at first couldn’t be real. I took it out, gazed at it in disbelief, and squeezed it in my hand. It was a mobile phone. My mobile phone. I WAS SAVED!
I opened the gadget and was reassured it worked when I saw my good old background of my sister.
It hurt to dial nine-one one because my index fingers were broken. It was as if all of this was supposed to be difficult for me.
My happy streak ended when I found out there was no service. Man, how obvious that should have been. I now knew what the paper reading "Don't bother" was supposed to imply. I felt stupid, but tried again a few times, but no luck. I shut the phone, but just as I was about to throw it in anger, I noticed the date on the top left corner, and knew immediately why I was supposed to have the cell phone.
“Holy shit…” I said and dropped the device.
I kept running. Could the date on the phone really be correct? No…no, no it couldn’t have been. It was a mistake. Something must have happened to it, it must have been messed with. Suddenly, nothing mattered to me anymore. In my mind, I was dead. I was lost, banged up, had no food, no supplies, nothing. I was a goner. Somehow running seemed appropriate once again.
This time, I ran straight, faster than I had ever ran in my life. Scarcely avoiding trees and branches, I swept past birds and squirrels as a panic ran through my body. The shiver in my spine began to get cooler and cooler, and suddenly, I couldn’t run anymore. Falling down to the ground, I felt it coming. Boy, did I. The vomit kept coming out. Spewing everywhere on the leaves, I moaned and gave up. Falling asleep had never been so easy.
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My mother laid on the hospital bed, pale and faint. She looked terrible, worse than ever. Perhaps the doctors had estimated her remaining time wrong, because she was a ticking time bomb, it seemed. I sat beside, resting my head in my hands, asking God in my mind to spare her. I would miss her a lot. I could not tell her this for the thousandth time now, because she was asleep and who was I to wake her.
Standing up with my crutches, I walked towards the door. While turning the knob to leave, I heard a voice behind me.
“Roy…” she had said.
“Mom.”
I limped towards her and knelt down beside her head.
“Feeling better?” she said in a weak voice.
“No, but it was my fault. I shouldn’t have ran across the street like that. The car…”
“Roy…”
She began to cough.
“Mom, are you alright?”
My question was unpleasantly answered when I saw here hacking and heard the sound of her heavy breathing come to a sudden end. As her head fell back into her pillow, I screamed as loud as I could for help, and just before the doctors rushed in, the continuous beep began. My mother had died.
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Opening my eyes, I had believed for a second that it was all a dream. Night had fallen, and it was dark enough to mistake my surroundings for my room. But once my eyes adjusted, I was snapped back into the hideous reality. Well, not quite. What confused me was the shoe next to my head. Wait, this wasn’t a just a shoe! I attempted to back up my head to look at whoever was standing there, but it was too dark. Surprisingly, I didn’t think of this as a chance of rescue. I thought it wasn’t real. I truly believed that it wasn’t real, and I was not about to have my hopes crushed again. The figure backed up, turned around, and began to walk away. He or she disappeared into the darkness.
Now, I was not afraid of the dark at this point, no, no. I thought of it as a chance that maybe, just maybe, something would happen to me, and end my misery sooner. A tear ran down my cheek as I asked myself “What have I done?”
Shutting my eyes, lowering my head, and thinking of the best and worst moments of my life, I prepared myself for my final escape from this hell on earth.
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“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” screamed my sister, Casey, and my Mother, Jules. I smiled as I blew out the candles. A birthday cake seemed a little immature for me, but nobody was around, so I didn’t mind. At least I wasn’t wearing a cheap birthday hat. Me and my family lived in Virginia, in a small house in a nice neighborhood. Me and my sister were good friends and my mother…well, my mother was a nice person.
“Happy fourteenth birthday!” exclaimed my mother.
Not much of a celebration to me, really. I mean, it’s not like I could drive, or drink, or anything at all. All I had to look forward to really was entering eighth grade…how fun. I happily cut a slice of the chocolate cake and began to dig in. My mother just stood by the wall watching me, but was interrupted by a phone ringing. She walked into the kitchen to pick it up. Sitting in the dining room with Casey, it didn’t take me very long to figure out that something was seriously wrong. The look on my mom’s face was as if the world were at an end. She hung up the telephone and turned to my father, who had been watching her in fear. He knew something was wrong as well.
My mother turned to him and, under her breath, said “They found something in my head.”
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The sun was back now. Hotter than ever. Not a good thing, necessarily, because I was thirstier than ever. I sat up wondering if what had happened the night before was a dream or not.
This was getting out of hand. Who ends up in a situation where they want to be die but can’t seem to pull it off? It was like a sick joke.
Well, turns out the man had been real. And he meant me no harm, obviously, because he left me a kit on a log right next to where I had been sleeping. Ecstatic, I crawled over to it, and slowly opened it, trying to save my fingers some intense pain. It felt like one of those cartoons where someone opens a chest and the golden light shimmers out, marking that whatever is inside is very, very, important.
Turns out what was in this box wasn’t food, it wasn’t bottled water…it was something else. A sheet of paper. To be exact, a half sheet of paper. It read “sy” on it. A vivid picture of the paper I had saw the day before popped into my head, and suddenly, I felt very, very, worried. “Ca-sy. Casy!” Well, my confusion was over...somewhat. What would my sister have to do with all this?
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I sat on the steps outside my school, nearly a half an hour after release. It had been a little over a week since the funeral, and I was feeling more depressed than ever. I stared angrily at the cement in front of me wondering how the hell something like this could happen. What had she done? What had I done?
I shook my head and attempted to stand up, when I felt a sharp pain in my left thigh. This had been happening a lot, and whenever it happened, it would remind me of my mother. Sick and tired of this constant pain and frustration, I ignored the cramp, stood up, and chucked one my crutches as far as I could.
It didn’t take long to realize what I had done what I heard the loud thump of the crutch hitting the car. The minivan came to a sudden stop and A man with black hair and eyeliner stepped out and slammed the door.
“WHAT THE HELL?” he scowled.
I was a bit petrified with fear at the time. This man was scary, and it seemed that he wanted nothing more than to kill me at the moment. I thought to myself, “How am I going to explain this to my parents?” Then the thought came to me and I corrected myself. “How am I going to explain this to my dad?”
Al l that came out was, “I’m sorry…”
Apology obviously wasn’t enough for him. He came closer to me, red-faced and angry looking.
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I looked up into the sky and screamed. No words came out; just a loud, disturbing scream. My situation seemed hopeless. It would be OK to me if the situation was my me dying. But now my sister was in trouble. I wanted to collapse on the ground and pound the dirt. Never did I think that the answer to my problems would lie in a row on the muddy ground next to my feet.
As I lowered my head, I could see footprints. Up until now I had thought the man I’d seen the night before was just part of a dream. Now I was assured that he was real. The footprints led into the trees. I began to follow, in sort of a power walk mode. I wasn’t running, I was stomping as fast as I could. I was done running. In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a stick, about the length of baseball bat, with a sharp edge. As if it had been waiting there for me, I grabbed and clenched it tight in my right hand, so tight that I thought my palm would begin bleeding. Worried and infuriated, I stomped away into the tree-crowded area of the forest, ready to follow the footprints as far as they would go. I needed answers. I needed to know if my sister was still alive.
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My father punched me for the fifth time, this time in the face instead of the usual stomach.
"Two-hundred dollars!" he yelled in my face. I felt loads of spit splatter all over me.
He punched me again, and then slammed his fist into the wall behind me. Finally he'd had enough. He turned around and threw the empty beer bottle he had been holding down on the dirty floor. It shattered and the glass pieces scattered in each direction.
I hated my father. Ever since my mother died he was a worthless drunk. I tried to stay out of his way as much as possible. Me and Casey both knew that he would rather us be dead and not mom.
Apparently the loud sound of the bottle breaking attracted Casey. She kicked open the locked door and yelled at my father to leave me alone. This kind of thing had been happening a lot lately.
It wasn't until now that he had hit Casey. Never before had he assaulted her. I was always the child of choice. But right there, two feet away from me, he slapped her straight across the face. For a moment I thought the sound of the slapping may have been louder than the beer bottle breaking.
At the moment I was on my stomach down by his feet. My legs were still weak from the accident, and I my stomach ached from the punches my father had thrown at me.
He continued to wrestle with Casey, struggling to grab her arms as if she were the one out of control.
"YOU'RE DRUNK!" she kept screaming. "DAD, YOU'RE DRUNK, STOP IT!"
He had crossed the line. I stood up, ran towards him, and tackled as hard as I could. I was so incredibly steamed that I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. I just kept pushing him further and further.
Suddenly I blacked out. When I awoke, I had no idea where I was or what I had been doing. Lying on the floor, I saw was a cloudy sky in front of me. I could feel shattered glass under my arms and hands.
In disbelief of what I had done, I turned my head away from the broken window to look at Casey. Her mouth was wide open and tears filled her eyes. Her chin and hands shaking uncontrollably, I could tell she was trying to speak, but couldn't.
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