The Race

Chapter Two

I cracked my eyes open. I stood up to get a better look at where I was. I was alone in my cell. The walls covered in cracked grey paint, mildew and mould latching onto almost every available surface. The floor was cold rock with a layer of dirt trampled into every crevice. So, a lot like my collage dorm then.

It hit me. Or more appropriately, it shoved me down. I fell on my knees with a crash and immediately put a hand to my mouth, preventing myself from puking. Swallowing the vomit rising up in my throat, I felt even more nauseated but I suppressed it and blinked back the burning tears. It had become easier to control the reflex to gag, but it wasn't in any way pleasant.

The creeping pain began at my sinuses, the heat and the ache travelling its way to my brain and down my spine, paralyzing my entire body. Engulfing, drowning, burning me to the pit of my stomach.

With a grunt that pushed the remainder of what used to be my breakfast all the way down, I used the hand covering my mouth to brush away the hot tears as my other arm wound its way around my stomach, covering the figurative hole in my centre where a good part of the pain resided. There was no use in holding my head, because that never helped any, and it felt much too light and hot at the moment, as if a fire was burning away the remains of my brain.

This was transportation to The Race. Science has come so bloody far as to allow teleportation, portals and bombs that wipe out life, but God, they could defiantly refine it.

I let the hand drop and my head dropped with it. My brain felt like it was long shattered into pieces against the walls of my skull, but I couldn't let that thought go. And as I lay on my side, curled and withered with my jaw and my eyes clenched tight, I prayed that hopefully, maybe the knowledge of what was actually happening would somehow help me through this. Maybe.

In the midst of the pain, guilt filled some of the holes that thought has fled from.

I had told them where the bomb was. I could be responsible for the extinction of the human race.