This is officially my second installment in the Sharp saga although as some of you might have noticed this isn't chapter two okay. I decided that I'm not gonna upload these by chapter so don't get shitty with me if you see a page break and now for Ebony Rose's question. The italics were Enoch's thoughts. Kinda like fragmented flashbacks but I can't truly explain their importance without giving some plot away so that's al you get.
Enjoy
Maybe if he'd never replied to the message he would have lived. Maybe he would have gotten over the depression and insomnia. Maybe he would have gotten a degree in computer science and made a comfortable living. He'd get married around thirty, have two kids and watch them grow up. He'd send them off the college and then he would have retired and died of old age. It would have been a normal end to a normal life. But he'd replied. He'd taken the redpill. And now he would die an abnormal death.
Separate and hate
The steel entered with relatively little resistance, silently eating through the leather and then through the wool and then beautifully sliding into flesh. Enoch removed the knife from between his ribs and watch the dying man slide down the length of the tree and breathe no more.
"One."
He caught the man's expression as he died. It was calm. Relaxed. Maybe more than a little bit relieved. Enoch did not find this surprising. The life of a rebel, fighting for the valiant cause of Zion, was no life at all.
The young boy contemplated this while dealing with the others.
A blur of motion.
The man had probably been around fifteen. He would have been a nerd. A techie. Someone looked down upon and kicked around by society. Then one day one of the "recruiters" appeared out of thin air and would tell him that he was different. That he was special. That he mattered. So drunk on the assurances of truth and revolution that he'd launch himself face first in the "cause".
Disguise the blind
A strangled cry.
He would have been one of their devout zealots, seduced by the possibility that he could be special. The mere chance that he could possibly matter. A misguided teen would have been no match for their empty promises and he would have been fed into their soldier machine, used, and then discarded before he'd even realized that the truth wasn't worth knowing.
They fall quickly. One of them manages a shot off. It's wild and lances off into a nearby tree.
"Three."
Brittle against his fist. Yielding and suddenly incomplete.
"Four."
The joint hyper extends letting the bone tear through muscles and tendons in its mad exit from the flailing body.
"Five."
He never gets to five and six. The forest gets them before he can. With eyes torn and wide he observes the code as it spirals and unwinds, folding into itself over and over. The tendrils of information scream as little by little they are consumed by the world around them and then. It. Is. Quiet.
Then it hits him. Like a punch in the face, and the world is swimming before his eyes. With legs chained to the earth and lungs filled with kerosene he explodes out of the foliage and back into the jungle.
"HEY ASSHOLE!"
Startled, he whips his head to the side. An angry motorist is cussing him out while giving him both fingers. The headlights blinded him. Headlights. Enoch glanced at the sky. It was dark and all across the city the buildings lit up like a thousand dieing candles. He was standing in the middle of the road and apparently needed to vomit.
"GET OUT THE WAY!"
Groggy and nauseous he stumbles off the concrete river and heaves onto a mailbox. That's when he notices the severed head he's carrying.
"Holy shit."
It falls from Enoch's limp arms and bounces off the cement. The lids close over intense muddy orbs. Once, twice, three times. The wallet was still there, laying innocently on the pavement.
The wail of a police siren accompanied by and ambulance and possibly fire trucks produced a screeching melody, quickly wrenching him from his reverie and sending him running. He was about four blocks away from the subway entrance. He could make it. He hoped. Prayed. But praying makes it worse.
Submit the flock
From the perspective of the crow the world was tedious. Unimportant and fickle. It raced by beneath him, loud and obnoxious but never important. It was like a toddler demanding that you acknowledge it. Immature and destructive. The little ants swarmed beneath him in their iron box of twisted metal and concrete, going about their everyday nothing as usual. But a few ants were different. A few ants could avoid the becoming nothing because they understood that they were nothing. People are powerless and yet understand this gives you power.
Enoch felt like he could use some power at the moment. Someone was following him.
Don't run
So abandoning subtlety he opted for the more immediate choice. The pedestrians blurred by as he pumped his legs furiously. The wind blasted in his ears and his flip flops were abandoned. One more block. Just one more block.
The bullet punched a quarter inch hole in his left thigh. It didn't look like he'd be making it in time for the train.
The brick wall bit him hard.
WHAP!
His legs blitzed out from underneath him and folded. From his perspective the entrance to the alley had jus opened up before him, a great cavernous mouth extending back and past what he knew. And then sometime between the time the bullet hit him and after he slumped to the sidewalk his head had collided with the cement and mortar.
The impact was lost to him. He knew the instant before and the instant after. Yet the true moment when his skull met something unyielding escaped his consciousness. From the deep and intense explosion between his temples Enoch assumed he'd hit his head pretty hard. Although even that thought was proven insignificant when the following shots attempted to achieve the same end as their flesh-buried brother.
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