My first attempt at a short story, this is chapter 1.
Restlessness, impatience, short attention span. I read an old fiction book once where these were some of the symptoms of being a Greek Demi god. Shame the gods are dead.
Alongside the Greek and Roman gods with their statues smashed on the floor, the gods of the 20th century now lie. The crosses burnt and the symbols of the eastern world religions broken upon the dirt. I live in a world with no gods. Our life is our own and no one controls it. Sounds great right? That's what I thought initially.
In school we learnt of a great nation in the West that slowly and systematically, almost without anybody realising, taken over the continents of Asia and Africa. Eventually the entire globe except the continent of Europe was under their control. Then began the persecution. Twenty years it took for them to eliminate religion. Every church, mosque, any place of faith or religion was demolished. That is our history. Your future, these events occurred three hundred years ago. The date now is July the 4th 2412.
These are the times I live in; this is my story, my story of how I became a man.
I was nearly sixteen and as I remember it was just a normal day; old man Harbert had just finished teaching me and my class mates about the dark bringer. That's what they called the Europeans invention, their response to the western nation's aggressiveness. It plunged the majority of our world into darkness. It caused anything that ran off of electricity to stop working. No matter what had been done it couldn't be reversed. Next lesson we were going to learn about the world's civil war, where the whole planet erupted into violence.
We ran out into the sunshine out of the stuffiness of the classroom. Our village was pretty simple. Mud and brick huts with thatched roofs were organised around a solid wood and brick building that served as our community building. All of which was built next to a large river, vital for trade with other villages and for food. It was that river that we were running to. Some of the boys had gotten it into their heads that there was some sort of treasure in the river and they were going to dive in to get it.
I was one of the kids at the front running as fast as I could. Out of my class, Jaden, Sarah and I were the fastest; we were always a good minute ahead of the rest. The river was pretty fast in the middle but at certain times of the day it was slow enough to cross by swimming. Fortunately that time coincided with when we got out of class. We messed around in that river most evenings for a couple of hours and then we'd make our way back to our mothers for a telling off and a warm tea.
That evening Jaden beat me to the river's edge but I beat him in. While he was taking his shirt off I flipped off my sandals and jumped in fully clothed. We were best friends Jaden and I, always together we sat next to each other in class and played together outside of class and often spent the evenings round each other's homes. We played panicking preacher that day. We would all line up on one side of the river and elect one person to be the soldier; they would be in the middle of the river. When they said go we'd all try to swim to the other side without getting caught. If we were caught we became soldiers and helped in the catching. Predictably Sarah won. She was the only girl that played with us and she was the best swimmer. All the guys were pretty nervous of catching her because it would mean touching her in the water and that could get us in trouble with her father.
After the game I went back to Jaden's where we fantasised about being soldiers in the nation's army and being able to use the weapons of the past. Guns that could fire bullets as fast as you could imagine and machines that could roll over any barricade and fire cannons from their front.
After tea at Jaden's house I went back to my house to find my mother already asleep. Looking back I wish I'd woken her, just to talk for a brief few minutes, to tell her I loved her and hug her one last time. How was I to know that that was the last time I would see her?
They came in the early hours of the morning. There were trumpet blasts from our sentries but they were too late. Within a minute the riders were in our village, their horses thundering past the huts. I remember that I woke to the sound of a scream. It wasn't like any scream I'd ever heard before. Eventually I would become accustomed to it but there, lying in my cot, it was the most frightening sound I'd ever heard. A scream that no human could ever make unless one thing was happening, they were dying. At that point I got out of my cot and walked to the door of our hut.
The first thing I saw was the hut opposite mine on fire. There were men moving around that I'd never seen before. I scrambled out of my hut and hid under an over-turned wagon. I still wasn't sure what was going on, but the people that I could see were rugged looking men. Most had beards and scraggly hair. I looked around panicked. From where I was there was little I could see but something caught my eye. Somebody was exciting Jaden's hut. It was one of the strange me, the recognition of which instantly worried me. Behind him he dragged Jaden's mother out of the hut. He was pulling her by a fistful of her hair. She was screaming and crying but the man was just laughing. Her dress had been ripped open from the shoulder to the waist leaving her half naked. She sank to the ground, refusing to move any further. The man slapped her across the face before picking her up and slinging her over his shoulder. She was kicking and punching still but the man was unphased by it. The man walked straight past the wagon which I was hidden under causing me to cower into the shadows. Then, to my surprise, Jaden came running out of the hut clutching a fishing knife and yelling at the man. Hearing him yell, the man turned around. While using one hand to keep Jaden's mother on his shoulder he used the other to unsheathe a sword and fling it in Jaden's direction. Jaden was too close for me to see what had happened, but I heard his yell cut short. Then I saw the fishing knife fall to the ground next to me. And then he collapsed on the ground right in-front of the wagon I was cowering under. My best friend of fifteen years lay dying, a sword straight through his chest.
He turned to face me and his lips moved, but no words came from them. I remember his eyes; I'll never forget the way he looked at me, begging for help. Help I refused to give. I crawled backwards away from him and away from the man who was, as I moved out from the cover of the wagon, walking over to collect his sword from Jaden's body. I crawled until I was on the opposite side of the wagon. And then I got up and ran. I ran as fast as I could for the river. I remember thinking that if I could just cross the river I may be able to escape. I did look back, weirdly, that was my mistake. I saw the man bend over to retrieve his sword. I stopped. I didn't stop because I wanted to, I stopped because I'd run into something, well, someone. The man was another one of the strangers. But he was much bigger than the others. Furs were wrapped around his shoulders and he had pelt skin trousers on. Various knives hung from his waist and as he turned around I backed away in fear. He had a long grizzly scar running down the left hand side of his face. It crossed over his eye, an eye which was completely blank. He took a step towards me and I tripped over something. I fell to my knees tried to crawl away from this monster of a man. Then he grabbed me by the Jerkin and lifted me clean off the floor.
I think that was the most terrified I'd ever been in my life. He picked me up and turned me around setting me down in-front of him. Looking up at him I started begging for my life. It's not exactly a moment I'm proud of, but then I was only a boy at the time. He looked down at me with a disgusted look on his face and unslung a great big axe that had been on his back. At that point I fainted, again, not something I'm particularly proud of but I swore to recount my tale as it happened so there it is. I fled from my dying friend and then after begging for my life fainted in the face of death.
I woke to the sound of a donkey braying. It annoyed me and I sat up cursing, my head was throbbing and it took me awhile to remember the events of the night. It was with a start that I recognised my surroundings. I sat with three other youths from my village in a wooden cage being pulled on a wagon by two horses. Beside us was another wagon with a cage on it containing more people. Behind us trailed five more wagons with identical loads. And in-front of us walked about twenty men all in chains. In-front of them two by two rode what I estimated to be around 50 men all in the same garb as the man I had fainted in front of. Where we were headed I did not know but one thing was certain. I was no longer safe in my village, the storied of slavers and barbarians had caught up with me. I was a prisoner.