𝐋𝐚𝐰 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 (𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐙)

23

Retreating the room, I couldn't help but think what were his intentions? Why was I suddenly assigned a therapist? Was it because of my record?

Or did they already assume me as mentally ill?

Is everyone at Cell 081 all mentally ill?

These were the questions pestering me when exiting the door, exposing myself underneath the glaring radiation that melts my goosebumps.

There was a commotion towards my left. A mumbled choir of cohesive shouts that cracked my ears.

As if in a trance, one step at a time, I got closer and closer.

There was a wall, a wall where its bricks shuddered and stretched. A black barricade was all I saw and the noises were getting louder and louder. Words were muffled by barbaric hollers; faces were barely recognizable from the constant motion that would condemn any protest organizer into hopelessness. It was more like a collective revolt.

Then I something I only heard in horror movies till then. The cry of a victim. Shrill, an ear-piercing cry of agony that most definitely belonged to San.

Steps were muddled by running. My head was a jumble of audible mania from all the shouting shrouded along with the most nonsensical thoughts but I still kept running, to silence them and from sinister chills.

Diving deep into the black ocean, bundled under a blanket of humidity, I screamed San's name at the top of my lungs while the violent shoves and pulls. All I could see were heads of black, backs of black as my nose engulfed the nasty odor of sweat.

Constricted among drenched bodies, I desperately rummaged my way into the mundane arena to relieve from the coolness, and to find my comradery.

I wished San cut his hair. It was appalling at how every stand was so easily tangible to the grimy claws of one of the drug dealers from Euphoria, who was yanking the shit out of his hair.

The rest of the small crowd, about five or six were trampling their feet against the flesh freshly cut with blood leaking out, ruthlessly kicking the life out of him, aiming for his throat, ribs, even face with tightly clenched fists with wicked grins and even more wicked glints in their eyes.

"STOP! STOP! PLEASE-"

Friction between moving backs pushed me into the wolf's den, covering San's face from a nasty punch, which ended up on my back.

"This motherfucking prick did not just fucking ruin this shit."

My hair was yanked to force my neck to crane to the serene cloudless sky but was quickly darkened by a burlesque looking boy.

Beady little eyes bore though me with the malicious intent of a gremlin,

"Isn't he the one put in solitary confinement?"

"That's a fucked up retarded fag right there," another sneered.

"Of course, he's allied with this little shit!" I rubbed my eyes because of the spewed spit.

Without any consideration of the effects given, I was dragged mercilessly by the collar all the way to the abandoned storage room where it had a halo of darkness even from the face of the front door. Unwanted thoughts ended me as the landscape of stimulated darkness gave me a sense of confinement with little space for motion inside a room all too familiar.

After a few bursts of a mental diaspora; profusely sweating, crying, and shivering from the sudden heat for what seemed like years. In reality of my senses were blind to time as I couldn't see the color of the sky.

Thank god I stole the paperclip Wooyoung pickpocketed from Seonghwa. I knew I summoned all the bad luck in the world when I realized there were locks. I then must've summoned all the bad luck in the universe when my group sent Mingi out all able-minded men to help me. Yunho must have conceived a grudge against me.

A few misunderstandings and rants later I cracked the lock open and we escaped under the stars in urgency.

When Mingi described the shape of one of the locks, a simple padlock laced between twin circular doorknobs, he said it had the engraved signal KHJ, I had to rush back into my hidden locker.

These fuckers had swindled my own lock, the lock securing the small box beneath one of the tiles on the restroom's floor and which that small wooden box with a single lock held all the money I had stored. 

The policemen and an angry chief standing behind me told me I was dead meat.

Pedants of the prison bureaucracy slapped me across the cheek, revoked every licensee on my belt, and punished my cellmates for no reason, sentencing us for a month's worth of volunteer service. Hurray for free child labor.

They beat us with their words and those nasty iron clubs while degrading us with pushups and forcing us on our knees as we chanted sorry. It was more like screaming as we lost our voices, and mobility, the next day.  We were treated like slaves, deprived of our human rights by the absence of dinner but instead raising our arms in a perfect perpendicular angle upon the downpour of a stormy night. My lips trembled from the millions of raindrops and flinched from the thundering roars of thunder.

I saw a shadow of someone, the tall well-built shoulder of a warlord. Over a coat of heavy and thick lashes, I squinted my eyes to recognize this familiar scarred face under the black canopy of an umbrella. After furiously blinking I figured out the sneer over his lip. 

It was from Jake Lee.

He was behind, protected from the guards above us. Hah, how ignorant I was to realize it that late. It was quite obvious, that these law enforcers were not pedants of the bureaucracy, in fact, they were bureaucrats themselves but were pedants under the magnetic influence of Jake Lee's.

It was nighttime, well past curfew I definitely knew that. He was standing in the middle of pouring rain. How did he get his hands into an umbrella? The convivence store never sold umbrellas, only raincoats.

Either it was his black uniform, or he hid under a black umbrella, but the police never found him.