Struggles of The End

Chapter 3

"Who's this?"

The security guards who on their usual shifts use to just roam around the campus with beedi in their hand and at breaks used to sit together playing cards understood that that day was going to be a tough day for them.

Infront of them was a boy, bleeding all throughout his face, half unconscious muttering something.

Swapan was the one who discovered the boy and he rang his whistle to alert all the other guards.

"How did this happen? Is he alive?" - said another guard.

Swapan looked at him and said "He is breathing, he is muttering something, can't you see? Why are you saying such things, if he dies when we are in duty, I don't know what would happen of him but we sure would be in a huge problem, find out who this boy is."

All the guards were confused and were looking at each other when Chandu, the youngest of them spoke out, "I may have seen him, he was in the arts section, I saw him a couple times outside the staffroom. A few days before I saw him in the washroom. I went there and I heard sobbing noises, this boy was crying there, I even asked him what had happened but he suddenly opened the door and ran away. After that I forgot about it."

Swapan took a look at the boy and said "These boys nowadays, I don't know what has gotten into them, I am damn sure that this is something related to a girl. The girl must have left him to be with someone else, he must have gone to the new boy trying to be a hero and got thrashed this badly."

Chandu was the only sensible person there who was not interested in the gossiping, he moved aside the other guards to pick the boy up and he took him to the guard's quarter to at least give him some first aid.

He walked the entire path carrying him.

The guard's quarter was a building which if not informed to anyone, people would have thought it to be an abandoned haunted building.

The door was green and full of cracks. Basically the door had no relevance being there. But anyways it was called the Guard's Quarter but the guards did not live there. Everyday after their shift they went back home, they just came to the quarter to take rests when they had their breaks. So it was not like without the door, anything important or expensive could be stolen from that building. Maybe that is the reason the authorities also did not care to renovate it properly.

Chandu opened the door and he switched on the lights. He rested the boy on the couch in the hall.

The ground floor of the quarter had a huge hall just beside the doorway. There were 2 other rooms, a kitchen and a washroom.

The paint from the walls had loosened over the years and were peeling off.

Chandu went to one of the rooms and brought with him an old and rusty box. He looked at the boy and he asked himself, " What could have happened? He was more or less in-front of the staff room, usually if students are that frequent to staff room, they are trouble makers, but this one, this one did not seem so. Trouble makers don't cry their hearts out in washrooms."

He took out some cotton stack and an ointment, he did not even know if the ointment was expired, he tried to check that but he could not find a date over that. He still slowly applied that to the wounds on the boys face.

He took out his phone to call an ambulance but he just kept staring at his phone. He was not allowed to call the police or the ambulance without informing the authorities or without prior permission from the chief security who was Swapan. He knew that Swapan would not let him call the ambulance because previously too there was a fight between two security guards at night, it was a drunken brawl and Swapan did not let anyone do anything since if anyone was involved, he was questioned as he was the chief of security and he did not like that very much.

Chandu thought that it was better to directly ask the authorities than to ask Swapan about this.

The boy was still muttering something. Chandu snooped a little towards the boys mouth so that he would be able to hear what he was saying.

At first, he was not able to understand anything what he was saying but then the sentence started to make sense.

"I...I....I....I...my.....my.....my...name is Shu..shu..shubham, call my mother....call my mother....it was not my fault...its...its not my fault..."

He got his name, Shubham but he could not understand what wasn't his fault.

"What isn't your fault?"- Chandu asked the boy

He did not respond to the question but his muttering also stopped. He was now silent.

Tears slowly started to drop from his eyes.