Drago: Into The Fire

ONE

1/5

Sitting in a hospital room all alone, eleven year old Ben, closed his eyes. He could still see it all vividly. The bunkhouse on fire. Hear the screams. He'd been lucky to make it to the exit. He crawled through the hallways until he was able to get out. Some others were not so fortunate. He squeezed his eyelids until they hurt.
He would not cry.
If being in a work camp taught him anything, it was to never show weakness. Breathing was still a little itchy in his throat. That's why he was in the hospital. He had inhaled smoke and couldn't breathe well when he arrived. His lungs had cleared a while back but he faked coughing to extend his stay a little longer. He didn't want to go back just yet. His caretakers, a man and woman posing as caring parents in the waiting room, were his bosses Mister and Misses Glass.
They were guarding their workers. No doubt they were discussing which of their child workers were fit to come back with them. Ben rolled over to look out the window, something he rarely got to do while in the work compound. He noticed how the green tree leaves looked like gold when the sun reflected off them after a good rainfall. He could only fake to be sick for so long. Soon, he would have to go back.
He must have drifted to sleep, because when he woke up, it was dark. The lights in the room had been switched off. The hallways were dim. The fake parents that had been waiting were gone. Ben slid out of bed with his day clothes and shoes on. He grabbed a bag he'd placed under the bed earlier and went to the window. He opened it and climbed out onto the roof. This was much harder than it had seemed when he planned it in his mind. The ledge was more narrow and the tree he'd planned to climb was actually covered in a slick moss making it difficult to get a good grip. Somehow he managed to climb to the roof he'd been watching from his room window.
Ben walked around the cold hard roof a second time not finding a way down. The only thing he could do would be to go back inside and take the stairs, risking being stopped by the hospital staff.
A stroke of luck came when a nurse stepped out from the roof stairwell to take a smoke break. Ben hid behind a large air venting box watching. She propped the stairwell door open with a brick, and then went to the edge of the roof to smoke.
Ben tiptoed to the stairwell door. When he slipped in, he accidentally knocked the brick away. The door slammed shut.

Ben hurried down to a lower floor where he had seen a parking garage roof with a ladder. He rushed out and climbed down the ladder. Once his shoes hit the pavement, he realized that he was free.
The boy walked alone down to the middle of the city. He sat down at a fountain thinking about what he should do next.
His mind went to his brothers and sisters. Those other kids he'd grown up with that burned in the fire. He didn't know how many or even which ones. He had been taken to the hospital with some of them. A few closed bags had accompanied them to the hospital. A closed bag meant they were dead.

He opened up his bag and found a paper crumbled in the bottom. It was a message he'd scribbled with a broken pencil. It was addressed to a pretty well known interstellar lawyer named Drago Zayne. Ben saw the information for Drago's practice advertised on the side of a hover-bus when he arrived at the hospital.
"Are you alright, son?" A police officer asked standing on a hover platform. Ben nodded yes. "Would you like a ride home?" The officer asked.
"No," Ben got up and backed away. "I know my way." He ran, ducking into a shop to try to lose the cop. The shop happened to be a messaging service. Two men stood at the front desk arguing over prices and services.
With the attention locked in the verbal battle in the front, Ben was able to slip in unnoticed. He looked at all the various messaging displays on a wall. An array of devices. All shapes and sizes from a tiny thumbnail sized chip to a large globe turning slowly with maps to different pars of the known star systems.

They were different types of communication systems for a huge variety of worlds that could be contacted. Having no money of his own, Ben had to try to find one that had already been paid but the message failed to send. A lot of times the sender would leave before the dialog box sprung up, leaving it open for another attempt. He went over and began to touch the different screens. Some were in strange symbols. His fingertips barely grazed the surfaces when they popped to life with voices beckoning him to run a credit disc to begin.
Only one sprung up with a "message unsent" in the dialog box. The last customer had abandoned the message before it went through. Ben looked back. The two men arguing in the front were preoccupied. He pulled out the paper with his message. He was careful to back out of the dialogue box but not exit the system. He entered the code for his message and the send-code for Drago Zayne's law firm. He waited as the system sent the message over the distance of space. Finally it came back with a pop up, "Message sent" in green. Ben smiled. Soon the best attorney in the universe would see Ben's message, or so he hoped. Then the screen went to the first page of the system beckoning him to pay for a new message.
Satisfied, Ben turned back to the door to leave. The cop from earlier was staring straight at him.
"Boy, age ten, blonde hair, brown eyes, escaped from medical institution," The cop said. Ben took off running down the isle of the shop. He found an unlocked back door and threw it open, running out into the night.
The cop called in backup as he chased Ben through the streets. Soon cops on flying riders were everywhere. Their haunting sirens and flashing blue lights filled the sky. He continued running until he reached a dead end alley. Knowing this was the end, he turned to the cops closing in. He knew his freedom was over for now, but not forever.
He stood there as the cops descended on him.
"I'm eleven," He said as the cop cuffed his hands and yanked him to the waiting transporter.