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CHAPTER ONE
🦂⛓🎻🔪
I do not know whether to clutch the remaining dagger in my hand or to drop it to the ground.
My fingers, tremorring, make the decision for me. Slick with blood on the hilt, the blade slips through them. I am expecting the familiar clatter of metal on concrete, like in the training rooms under my old school.
Instead, the sound is wet. It falls into a flurry of sludge and any noise it would have made is drowned out by a horrible sound.
The boy before me crumples to the ground, a high whining noise emitting from between chapped, scab covered lips. It's involuntary - a dying noise. The spectrum of which I have recently become well-acquainted with.
His eyes are blank by the time he lays by my feet, pupils wide and unseeing but somehow fixed directly onto me.
My chest heaves. My stomach churns. My teeth chatter so violently I am surprised they are not chipping away beneath my gums.
The final canon sounds, and I can't look any longer. I double over, turn away from him. Retch and heave onto the once snow-covered ground beneath a pine tree. It, and me, and the ground under my feet are splattered with blood, already half-frozen in the cold. Crimson droplets beginning to shine with quickly consuming frost.
Nothing comes up — my stomach has been almost empty for the best part of four days. It's what spurred on this final battle - hunger. The urge to feed. It's animalistic when it comes down to it - I think I understand why some mothers feed on their young. They are exhausted and have experienced trauma and it's just an all consuming hunger.
So I did it ...
Let them take each other down until it was just me and him. It was cowardice in the end, I waited until he wasn't expecting it, and then I struck.
Calling it a battle is generous, in all honesty. Two exhausted kids clumsily swinging for one another. But I had the upper hand in that I was at the very least prepared for it as much as possible and then —
Well, I guess it would be fair to call it a mercy killing. For him, or me, or perhaps us both? That's the easiest thing to tell myself for now, as his blood freezes my eyelashes together. As I try to be horrified by what I have done but only find myself able to concentrate on the fact that I can no longer feel my fingertips or my nose.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," A voice booms out and I cannot help the way that I jump at the shock of it. As if I haven't seen this play out on my TV screen for as long as I can remember. As if I didn't know it was coming.
