Eight Hours

Chapter ONE

I have eight more hours to live.

I know most people say they can't remember the first time they were afraid. I do. I was a weird child growing up. My sister Dellia and I were watching TV on our small living room, when the door opened and the men strolled into the room without even asking. The door feel off its knobs, and the guns hurdle into the house. I grabbed my sister with both my hands, and quickly ran behind the couch. My mother walking down the steps, the wood creaking each time her shoes touch the wood. My father was at work. I couldn't see anything, but I heard the gunshot, and the footsteps of the men walking out of the front door.

"Stay" I softly whispered to my sister grabbing her small cold hand.

"Mia" Her green eyes stared into me, her big sister "who were those guys?"

"Population Control." I said, and saw the worry face on my sister soul "Everything is going to be okay." I assured her, but I was lying and I knew it.

I opened my hand and freed from my sister, walked out of the couch into the front door, where my mother laid on the ground wearing a black dress, and blood all over her chest. A pool of blood all over the place. The clock on her wrist stopped, not another second ticking. I have one of those, we all have. Those circular watches hanging on our wrist counting the seconds till we die.

"Mom." I screamed and a tear began falling from my eyes.

I grabbed a bed sheet from the closet, and put it on top of my mothers dead corpse. Laying the sheet on the floor, I put my fingers on my mothers velvet eyes and closed them. Her skin so cold as a freezer that my finger froze.

My sister still crawl behind the couch her whole body trembling, each time I look at her eyes I see a forest, but in that moments I saw a tropic storm. The water dripping the thunder storming down into the wood making flames and burning everything to the ground, ashes it all became ashes and dust. I put my hands around her, and with a strong hug told her. "Dellia, I am still here."

She lifted her head, and I felt her little fingers walking on my back. "Mommy?" Her whisper soft and medley.

"It was her time" I took my mothers watch out of my pocket, and strapped it on her left hand just behind her own clock which was still ticking. "As long as you keep this, she will always be with you."

I was only five years old, and already I seen the eyes of death.

The society only gave me twenty years to live. Since the moment I was born, as that timer was set on my wrist, they all knew it. My whole life has always been hanging on this same pedestal. Only waiting for the moment you are going to die. Fuck school, who is going to study when they only have twenty years to live. In the past people had tried running away from their paths, but they always find them. Population Control, those cold headed killers.

This morning I waked up with my sister on the other side of my bed. She stayed with me all night hugging me, now she is seventeen years old, but still I treat her like my little sister.

"Mia" - She said that morning with her arms still around me, and tears beginning to fall out of her eyes "Isn't there a way to stop this?"

"No!" I assured her, after all it happened before first mother and then my father who left us a year ago.

"You are the only family I have left"

"I love you, sis."

"I don't wanna go to the center."