Democracy

Luke

**I am so sorry I took so long to update. I am on holiday at the moment but I promise you that I am going to shower you with new parts as soon as I return home. please remember to comment any opinions you have or changes I could make or what you liked/ didn't like. it's always great to hear from y'all**

Watching blood pour from his skull, I sit and eat my bread. Laughs sound from across the tunnel where guards drink; they aren't palace guards- they don't care. Some of the armoured men are probably too intoxicated to even have noticed the battle I fought with the man lying dead beside me. I take a bite from my bread.

Soon, I find myself imagining cracking one of their skulls open. A lovely noise would sound as their brain is revealed like an egg yolk. Flicking my knife around in my hand, I picture bleeding them dry and watching the warm scarlet potion pool around their writhing body. Then, I visualise beating one of them, my fists screaming, as their body turns a flowery purple. I take a bite from my bread.

Aware of my cadaverous body, I carefully pick myself up from the gravel upon which the man I just killed lies, I shiver. The product of a life of minimal food, I am all bones, not having had enough food to become fat or even a little muscular. Around me it is the same. All I can see are skeletal figures in this world where we slaughter each other for a slice of bread. But, I'm strong. Malnourishment is not going to kill me.

Exiting the smoky tunnel, I begin to trudge my way through the littered streets. Palace guards prowl the courtyard of a nobleman's house. They glare at the dying people in front of them, who suffer to lift their fatigued bodies to look innocent. One man, who has pulled his back taught into a straight line, watches me as I nibble at my bread. Passing him, I lift my shirt a little so he can see my perfectly crafted knife, He backs away mumbling an insult beneath his breath. If it weren't for the eyes glued like an x to my back, I would have laughed at the man's cowardice.

Outreaching the sights of the palace guards I move close to the edge of the street and set my eyes to the towers beside me. Each one is identical. Like all others, there is no staircase. I begin to climb the rungs that move up the side of the building, choosing to avoid the wooden surface that spirals the tower. A screen balances itself at the front of the tower, looking out into the city I see the same image projected- a picture of the president and his children standing over twenty tight lines of guards. Gritting my teeth, I climb further. Eventually, I reach an apartment that looks empty. I jump through the square gap that serves as a door. Easily finding the bedroom, it being the only room, I begin to ransack the beds. I tie a sheet around my waist and slip on a hole filled jumper. Under a pillow there is a box of matches. Celebrating my success, I grin. Behind me I recognise the sound of a footstep. Snarling at me is a woman. She is old- being in her late twenties or so. In a trembling hand, she grips a blunt looking knife. It is stained with the red of rust and blood. With one sharp flick, I throw my own knife toward her. Spinning in the air it hits her in the chest. She groans in pain. Pulling my other knife from my belt, I step toward her. Discarding her aged bit of scrap metal that she calls a weapon, I begin to carve into her skull. I relish in her screams and the blood the dribbles from her body poisoning the rotted carpet.

Tearing my palm from the wall where words once lay, which is now washed with white, I step back into the bustling stream of citizens marching from location to location. Nobody spares a glance to the towers that lean above us, crumbling from the weight of the desperate.

In my mind, a picture is formed of my sister coated in a sheet of dust. Her mouth hanging open, a mass of maggots writhing atop her deathly pale lips. Nobody spared a glance to her. Around me screams break out as sibling finds sibling, parent finds child, wife finds husband: each body being dug out by somebody's grubby fingers that red dances across taunting their futile efforts. Puddles form as salty tears crash atop the collapsed remains of a building. I paid no attention to the man beside me as he wailed and embraced the solitary head of his daughter. I'm the one who closes my sister's eyes. Now I can't remember her glittering green eyes that had already shifted into the sickly transparent white of the dead by the time I clawed her out of her rocky grave.