Penguin Manifesto

CHAPTER ONE

38

39

40

41 Penguins lie dead at the bottom of the trench. Next up was Arthur White, or as he was referred to for the last 8 months, 7842-A.

He saw Boris Slavinky (7841-A), his fellow bunkmate, worker, and friend fall down into the trench. While he was kneeling down, waiting for the black suited agent to deliver the bullet through his skull, he turned his head and grinned to John.

"See you soon" he said hoarsely and softly, so low that the agent could not hear it and yet Arthur could.

Another agent pushed Arthur forward and forced him onto his knees. He looked down into the trench filled with the ones he knew in the labor camp. They used to be lovers, teachers, sons and fathers, uncles and brothers. Now they have been dissolved.

After an eternity of torture, a world of trauma, after staring into the eyes of pure hate and malevolence Arthur refused his presumed fate.

In one rapid shift, in one fraction of a moment, Arthur triumphed over the Czar with his desperate plan.

Out of a link in his chains, he drew out a metal stake and thrusted it into the cranium of the first agent. For the second agent, he crashed his fist against his skull in a similar fashion a steam locomotive would crash through a thin plaster wall.

In the same second the divine act was done, Arthur was gone, waddling as fast as his two flippers could take him into the underbrush of the forest.

He waddled for hours through the snowy pine woods, but to him, it was one simultaneous moment. Arthur's whole universe crashed around him and he wasn't certain of anything. He had not planned what he would do after he escaped. He did not truly expect to flee the grasp of the omnipresent EPF Agency.

But he did, and now he's miles away from the death march and the labor camp.

He collapsed into a patch of snow and the all too familiar taste of blood formed in his mouth. Arthur closed his eyes for the night.