Death's Bitter Embrace (#Wattys2015)

Act II, Chapter III: Branding

The team of six—including me—gathers into the room where I had first met The Boss a day ago, all very different from the next though we all have one thing in common;

    We work for Him.

    Cain, one of the six assembled has a small canon attached to his left arm—well what was left of his arm anyway. We all would demonstrate our weapons soon enough. Cain's canon shot ten rounds of shotgun shells, capable of tracking enemies and exploding the shell into clusters. He obliterated the target at the end of the room on impact, that was the end of target practice.

    The Boss signaled his guards to come forth, they had metallic black gloves on and some of them had large iron bars. Branding bars? What are they doing with them? Are they going to brand us like cattle? I question and presumably the others do the same. The pattern of the branding iron was grotesque, it was the shape of an 'X' with the letters MOTD in cursive script at the bottom.

    Although it was quite a small branding iron—the size of the palm of your hand—it held a lot of terror and pain within it. First up;

Alex, the only girl worthy enough of ending up in the team, her features represented just how insane she had become over the years.

    Her fiery ginger hair engulfing anything and anyone who stood in her way, her ocean blue eyes with bright yellow sun spots hinting of her insanity, flickering to green then back to blue. Her face, her face was different, it didn't show insanity or scars, it shone with sadness, with sorrow.

    She didn't talk much, she was the type of person to sit down, shut up and get the job done. But she was bottling her emotions up, something, or, someone had made her like this. Her weapon, or weapons rather, were pathetic, two foot long metal poles, that's it, two metal bars. They were pathetic indeed, that was, until she demonstrated them.

    She sat down on the branding bench and held out her left hand, the nurses pressed the bar against her forearm—she didn't make a sound, didn't cry or squeal, she was completely silent, as if she had been branded once before. "They're branding us! They are branding us like cattle! But why though? Part of me wanted to scream at The Boss and another part wanted to get it over and done with.

    Then it was time for the rest of us to go and get branded, one by one we strode up to the nurses to get branded. It was my turn. As I walk up to the nurses the anxious wait for it to be all over had begun. She pressed the metal bar against my forearm—which ironically was the weakest part of my body when dealing with pain—the bar seared my flesh and a bolt of sheer pain shot through my arm.

    She kept pressing the branding iron with full force to my arm like she wanted to hurt me, like she wanted to inflict pain upon me. I pull my arm away from the searing pain, it was too much. It was over in a matter of seconds, yet, it felt like it would never end. My forearm had been branded, stained forever.

    He owned us now, with one simple mark He had taken away our freedom, our lives gone, replaced with the sole purpose, to kill, to obey His orders.