The Death-Watch

5

The streets were running with blood.

The violence of rebellion was evident everywhere. Bullet casings left where they fell, scorches marring the paintwork, buildings half collapsed and the corpses. Oh god, the corpses.

It used to be that seeing a corpse was a rarity. It used to be that the Death Watch would swoop in seconds after a culling and remove the body so that most of the time no one saw it. These days’ corpses were just piled up on street corners or left where they fell. Some were being strung up as warnings whilst others showed signs of having been looted.

We were being forced to work every day now and the trains had been suspended after several bombers had managed to derail one and wipe out an entire squadron of Death Watch veterans. Charlotte and I were forced to walk to work because of this with a group of about 30 or so. We were herded by 3 or 4 Death Watch soldiers, their black eyes leering out of the skull masks at us, constantly watching. We were told it was for our own protection but the way they keep looking at us made it seem more like we were being controlled and ‘managed’.

Even at when hard at work we couldn’t escape the stare of death. Soldiers stood at every entrance and in the higher levels Death Watch veterans had been assigned to watch our every movement. I had seen people, colleagues, whose eyes had flickered for just a moment in the wrong direction, seen the wrong picture, read an errant word and in return they had been dragged out screaming to be gunned down by firing squad at the back of the building. We could all here the firing squad going about their gruesome task almost constantly and we had all seen the scorched and bloody wall where they worked.

After the horror of work we again made the long trek through the wreckage and the death back to our houses, escorted as always by armed guards.

This night, like most nights, I went over to Charlotte’s house rather than my own. We both had come to realise how much we needed each other to survive through all of this devastation. It was only in the silence of each other’s company that either of us could find an iota of peace.

We huddled together in her living room, on the floor by the cold fireplace, staring together at the ash that lay within trying not to picture the death we saw daily but failing miserably. We often just stayed like this for hours, right up until a few minutes before curfew a few times. If it weren’t for the random checks and the newly enforced law that all citizens must sleep within their own homes we would have stayed together. As it was we were forced apart every night, unable to communicate due to damaged phone lines.

Charlotte began to shift beside me, pulling away and turning to look at me with a puzzled look in her eye.

“Why is there so much death in the world?” she asked me.

I sat dumbfounded by her question, unable to say anything other than “What do you mean?”

“We’re supposed to be a civilised people. We often pride ourselves on how far we’ve come since the dark ages. All the times we looked back at those people in those times and laughed at them for savages when we ourselves are no better than them. If anything I say we are worse for we have the knowledge and the skills we need to coexist peacefully yet we decide to kill, maim and butcher others. I want to know why? Why do we still feel a need to kill?”

Her introspection took me by surprise. She had never voiced such thoughts before although I knew she had them from the look she so often got in her eyes when we were forced to march by the desiccated corpses of entire families that just lay in the streets where they had fallen. I had often had similar thoughts but had never dared give voice to them for fear of punishment.

“I don’t know. Perhaps it is just human nature to always want more than those around us. Perhaps it is an agenda forced upon us by those in charge or by those leading this rebellion. It only takes one person to start a war but it would take every single human to agree to peace and for some reason we seem unable to do such a thing.”

She looked at me and I couldn’t help but feel as if I had passed some sort of unspoken test. The look she gave me just seemed to say that what I said was akin to what she was thinking and as her lips curled up slightly into a smile I knew I she was pleased with me.

“I suppose that’s true” She whispered, and then almost inaudibly “and someone needs to pay for the death and war.”

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This is somewhat of a short chapter compared to some of the previous one and the next chapter will be rather short also so im hoping to have it up and running shortly. This chapter is still only a first draft and ive not been over it to check for spelling or mistakes and such so if you see anything wrong just ignore it or mention it in the comments and ill look at getting it sorted out as soon as possible.