Gears//Original Short

Gears

It came both abruptly and expected. Troops bust through the door with their guns loaded, in hand, ready to fire at the slightest movement. Fear was struck in my mother and father's shrunken in pupils. They kept their arms up in the air, knowing that incompliance meant death.

"On your knees!" The squad captain, I presumed, barked at the two.

Slowly, they made their way down to their knees, anxiety written on their faces, squeezed their eyes shut tight. Quiet sobs made their way out of Mother's mouth; two stray tears escaped Father's eyes. Father never cried. He raises his head and open his eyes.

Hands raised to the sky and with a shaky breath started, " Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy-"

Bang...

Only a soft whimper is hear-

Bang...

Then it was done. Small silence fell upon the squad while the leader oversaw the scene, then he turned around and signaled for the rest of his subordinates to follow like. Some seem proud, others seem distressed by the situation, and others of them just look emotionless, like seeing two innocent people drop dead in front of them isn't at all something to be phased about. I peeked out of the closet and I caught the eye of one of the troops. He looked younger than the rest, it seemed: more malleable. His faced showed little feeling, but his eyes gave away what he was thinking; they were sympathetic, scared for me even. I shrunk back into the closet, waiting for that troop to signal that there was one of them left. That signal never came. I had been left on my own that day, due to the brutal murder of my parents cast upon me by the government. I had been eleven at the time.

For years, I had to run from the government, keeping my head low, slumming it in different cities just to get by. Trust isn't easy to come by for my kind these days. It's gotten harder and harder to tell who is the predator and who is the prey. I spent 6 months on the street in Chicago before the Liberty group had taken me in as their own and raised me along with any other orphans whose parents had been slaughtered by the government, and when I spent time there, those numbers were high.

The group had enrolled me into a system of private charter schools, where I would have a higher chance of staying hidden. Even with missing a year and a half of schooling, I passed all my classes with flying colors, as well as the rest of us from Liberty. High comprehension abilities are something we're born with; we were destined to do to great things. Maybe that's the reason we're the threats.

Even though I was smarter and had a higher comprehension ability than anyone else in my class, teachers despised me. "Look me in the eye," they'd say, or, "Stop looking at your feet. It's disrespectful." I'd always want to say, sorry I'd rather not see how long you have have to live, you old geezer. Would you really want your student to be in pain due to your future death? If I were to look those people in the eye, not only would I see their life span, if I looked to long, I'd feel their end as well. Not very pleasant, I realize.

Graduating a semester early, I left what few friends I had in Chicago and fled out to Boston to study medicine at Harvard. A Master's degree took four and a half years to complete, due to working off debts. Barely getting by is not the way to live, but that lifestyle had to do until graduation. When I had graduated, I was set on one place: New York. With my good luck, I had been accepted for an internship at the New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, one of the best in New York. A little over a year later, I had been able to begin working in the hospital for wage, using all the knowledge I had gained from college, what I was destined to do when I had chosen this path. What made me go into the field of medicine is still unknown to me. Death is around every corner, there's no way out of it. I see it, feel it, sense it. It's like being hardened when you're around death so much. Death has always been something familiar, being able to see and understand it. There was no reasoning behind my medical practices, it just felt like I had to. The feeling wasn't the instinct to run, such as what I had felt before, no. This feeling was – is even – a sense of duty, an intuition brought to you by the unconscious mind.