The Long Walk [boyxboy]

prologue

'Are you ready to die?'

Was the question my 11th Grade Teacher had asked the small class of adolescent teenagers in front of her. Shocked faces stared back at her, pencils dropping to the table in a chorus of clatters, a small gasp echoing from the corner of the white room. Others still bore into the screens of mobile phones, whilst others sat contemplating the question. A sense of uneasiness has settled over the class as soon as the question had been uttered from her lips. But it had been so unexpected, so out of nature for her. Where had it come from? Those five simple words had the power to strip us bare of our fabricated confidence and left us raw and bare.

Was I ready to die?

Her eye's scanned knowingly over our confused faces, our brains trying to scramble together an answer, or some explanation at this early hour of the morning.

"It's a simple question." She said slowly, her gentle voice added some warmth into the bitter cold question. "If you were to stand at St. Peters gate and your God himself was stood in front of you, placing out his hand to take you to the afterlife; would you be ready?"

"But don't we have a choice?" Spoke a girl from the back of the class. Heads turned towards the petite girl who broke the silence, her eyes wary and cautious as our eyes lingered on her small frame. Her freckles painted across her face like a thousand islands in the Pacific. "Say, if we weren't ready to die... couldn't we refuse. Come back to earth in the form of something else? Reincarnation, perhaps?"

"Well, Miss. Hampshire, technically speaking, we do have a choice. You always have a choice, even if we don't realise it. Some people believe that, If you were to cast God aside, you'd find yourself back on the plain of existence but not the existence you have come to know. You'd be plagued spending the rest of eternity wandering, alone. But you wouldn't be in human form..." She spoke softly, sitting on the edge of her oak desk. The morning sunlight straying through the windows over her dress blouse. "Religions the world over, believe in reincarnation in some form. Whether it be reincarnation as an animal, in human form or something much worse. For those that find themselves at hells doors..." She paused briefly, as if the words weighed heavy on her tongue, "It's believed they come back at something much worse. Demons. The thing of nightmares that have plagued mankind for as long as there has been humans. Some believe death is but a door, leading into the next chapter of our existence, others believe that once dead, that is it, no rising from the grave, no reincarnation, and you simply seize to exist to the realm of time and space. But we do not know what beholds us when our time comes, that is the mystery of death. Is it the end? Or but the start of a new chapter?"

His teeth grinded against the brittle wood of his number 2 pencil as hid hand brushed through the thick locks of his untamed hair, trying to contemplate the words that had been spilling from his teachers lips. Was there life after death? Well there couldn't be, he had thought to himself, raising his eyes brows with a small grunt, death was death. The end, termination, that was it. Wasn't that what death meant? The end of a life? There had been no scientific evidence of a continuation of ourselves after the timer was up, so why were people so hung up on this idea of somehow coming back from the dead? It was something out of science fiction novel, completely and utterly impossible.

But in this world of ours, we should have learnt that the impossible always found a way of becoming possible.

And sometimes, the consequences of such scenario's may just be the end of us.