Operation Red Herring (Countryhumans Alternate History)

Chapter 36

America was terribly bored, so bored that it was almost maddening.

During the first stretch of time in which America was in the room, she tried to preoccupy herself through any means possible.She had counted the number of cracks in the ceiling (fifty-seven) thirteen times, and the number of cracks in the floor (twenty-three) fifteen times. She walked the length of the room more times than she could count, pacing until she was dizzy. It took exactly ten steps to walk across the dark room, and sixteen going lengthwise. Sitting on the ground resulted in it feeling slightly less claustrophobic, and jumping resulting in America bashing her head into the low stone ceiling (she had learned this the hard way). She had recited every poem she could recall, sung every song she could think of, and even continued trying to break down the rusty metal door, her left-arm littered with bruises due to her repeatedly throwing herself against it.

She had found a small rock in the corner, it being charcoal in color and about the size of a golf-ball. Her first instinct had been to start marking down the days, but she had no way of telling where the day stopped and the night began. There were no windows in the concrete room, and thus no way to tell how much time had passed. It was just constant, damp, darkness that seemed to stretch out over all of eternity. America knew it had been morning when she had been drugged, but she had no way of knowing how long she was knocked-out before waking up, let alone how long she had been stuck here. Had it been a few days? Weeks? Oh God, what if it had been just hours? She had fallen asleep a few times, so it had most likely been at least a few days, but she honestly wasn't sure.

So, she instead resigned herself to etching random doodles and designs on the walls. America smeared the dark dust, drawing flowers and patterns . At first she set out to make a pretty design- uniform and about as aesthetically pleasing as concrete walls could be. But it eventually evolved into random doodles- shapes and scribbles that made no sense together. America drew people she missed- her siblings and friends and France. But then she stepped back, and saw their eyes all staring back at her. Piercing pitch black peering into her soul, the cold stone making them seem to have a sense of apathy- detached and unbothered by her situation. Afterall, she deserved it. She aided in mass murder, bombed cities and destroyed lives in the name of revenge. How selfish of her to be upset at her predicament after all she did to them-

America erased them, leaving huge dark smudges smeared where they used to be. She looked down at her hands, black grime coating them. How fitting- even in solitude she was still able to stain her hands with the remains of what she held dear.

She kept etching at the walls- like an animal scratching at the bars of its cage or an insect attempting to burrow its way through a rotting corpse- until there was nothing left of the charcoal but a thin, brittle nub. Having gone through her one outlet in a short amount of time (or at least, she thought it had been short. She couldn't really tell anymore), she sighed, a dull anger simmering under her skin at her situation. It grew until she threw the small nub against the wall, shattering it into a myriad of unusable pieces. America stared at the miniscule pieces of rock now scattered on the opposite side of the room.

They were unsalvageable now.

Then again, wasn't everything at this point?

She tried to swallow, her throat and mouth dry from dehydration. No one had come into the room since she had woken up, and there hadn't been any food or water inside to begin with. America wasn't a stranger to hunger nor thirst, but that didn't mean that she enjoyed it in the slightest. It was more something that she had to tolerate. Afterall, she didn't think she could really die from hunger. That was the funny thing about being a semi-immortal country- it took very specific circumstances to kill one permanently. As far as America knew, only another country or her own people could kill her. Anything else would just hurt like hell. So eventually her body would shut down without food, but she'd probably be able to bounce back eventually. Then again, if another country was the one starving her, then maybe it would be able to kill her. But that was a train of thought that America wasn't quite ready to get on. So she tried to shrug it off, inwardly joking to herself about how she had needed to lose weight anyways-