*This is the story i ended up writing for English, slightly edited.*
They were running again. Nico thought as he ran, ignoring the splitting pains in his sides and the tearing at his lungs as they gasped for more oxygen than he could provide. Next to him, he could hear Rupert panting desperately as he tried to keep up. He had never been as fast as they had. Ahead of him, Tom had Charlie slung over his shoulder, struggling to get his friend away from the Death Facility they were escaping from. Each one of them had something messed up about them, a reason for the government to target them during the annual purge of the imperfect. Nico thought of these imperfections, these differences that made them so dangerous. Anything to take his mind off the pain of the running, the bullet in Charlie's stomach, the murders he already witnessed.
Charlie was autistic. It was as simple as that. If you're born wrong, you're dead. Tom wasn't born wrong, but he was gay. That was worse than mental illnesses. That meant you could be shot on site. Rupert, who had slowly begun to run closer to Nico, had been born without an arm. And Nico himself had been orphaned at five. Ten years of his life spent on the run, pretending to be dead, all to wind up here. But right now, this wasn't about him. This was about Charlie, Tom and Rupert. To Nico, his life didn't matter anymore. He just wanted to get his friends away.
But as he watched Charlie slowly slip off Tom's shoulder, hitting the ground, seizing at the lack of blood, pools of it spilling from this hole in him. A deep red, darker than anything Nico had seen before. It may as well have been black, for it meant misery. It meant Charlie could run no longer, that they had to get Tom up and keep moving. It meant Charlie could live no longer.
YOU ARE READING
Short stories.
ActionI had to write a short dystopian story for an English assessment and I really liked it, so I thought maybe I could make a book out of it. Each of these stories will be unrelated and will not be finished.
