Scribble Ninjas

Nobody bothered to question me about the child I held in my lap, they were all much too weary for it. I looked around, noticing that I was the only male on the small lifeboat besides the crew member who was leading us through the dark waters, blowing on his whistle to search for survivors in the sea of bodies. The bloated corpses of the passengers floated in the water and we tried our best to avoid glancing at them.

When the ship first started to drop their lifeboats in the waters, I tried bribing one of the crew members to let me onboard a lifeboat. I was coldly rebuffed by the man who stated that they were only allowing women and children currently. Angered, I ran back into the crowd of people, struggling to find a way to save myself.

It was then when I noticed a child, barely a toddler, crying on deck for his mother who was nowhere to be found. Without thinking, I quickly scooped the child up into my arms, dashing to the other side of the ship where I heard they were releasing lifeboats as well.

“This is my son,” I lied. “I’m all he has left in this world, please! You’ve got to let me stay with him.” The man quickly allowed me into the boat. I watched as people still scurried around the ship like rats.

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I see him there, along with the others. Their hands are tied back, hair shaved, clothes tattered thin – but he stands out. I watch him, hoping to catch his eye, to tell him, but he isn’t looking at the rowdy crowd below. Instead he glares into the bright noon sun, his chin held high – in another life, he’d be a monarch of some kind.

A revolutionary grabs him by the shoulder, and shoves him onto his knees. Others hold him down, even though he isn’t struggling.

The blonde-haired woman gasps, but someone presses a riffle into her back – a reminder for her to get back in line. She stiffens, and reaches over to hold hands with the woman beside her.

Then without further word, the blade comes down and his head rolls off and the crowd erupts into cheers. When the blade re-emerges, it is dripping in red.

The head falls to my feet, and its eyes glaze up at me.

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Previous chapter.

Despite its ornate decorations and the sheer size of the institution’s entrance hallway, an important place of first impressions regarding The Society and its people, a feeling of claustrophobia never fails to cloud the air; perhaps it was the way the chandelier floated effortlessly above the members as they walked briskly and purposefully to their next destination, the way the large glass windows at each end seemed to open up to the horizons of the vast fields of sienna wastelands, or the way the unsettling eyes of The Society’s past presidents (whose portraits hung between the marble pillars) stares into the empty chasm between the two walls. Nevertheless, one never spends too much time in the entrance hallway.

From here, one had three choices of where to go – four if he includes the choice of walking out the front door back to where he came from. The first branching of the hallway on the left leads to the grand houses of the different classes, where the infamous mechanical induction room may be found, as well as the society member’s lodgings, cafeteria, classrooms and training grounds; the second and third branches leads further underground to areas of higher restricted access, reserved only for the class supervisors and directors.