Hello again! I actually finished the second chapter in a day! I don't promise that every update will be this quick because I'm still in school, but I'll try my best. Enjoy! :)
"I've never seen anything like this before!"
"What do you think it is, a mutant?"
"Don't be ridiculous! They're probably fake, like they sewed them on to their body or something."
"I don't know...I didn't see any stitches."
My head is ringing and I can hear a couple of different voices around me. I start to wake up, and I feel around for my blanket, but I can't find it, nor my pillow. I can feel the ground shaking around me so I slowly begin to open my eyes. In front of me I see several men, I think three, each in uniform and holding large guns, sitting in front of me talking to each other. I notice that I'm in a cage, not my regular one, but a smaller yet stronger one. It seems that the men don't notice that I'm awake as they make conversation with each other, so I take the time to look around. I'm in a pretty small room and I can see another man farther ahead looking through a window and turning a wheel. I think I'm in a car, something I've never been in before.
As I was focused in my thoughts, it seems that the men have turned around and begun staring at me.
"Look at that!", one of them hollers, "It's awake."
"You think it knows what we're saying?", another one asks. The third man, who seems to have an interesting shade of white hair and red eyes, puts on an annoyed express as he glares at the others.
"Why don't you stop talking about 'it' and ask him yourselves?", he scolds. I can hear a strange accent in his voice, like someone who's not from Canada. He turns to face me and I feel a little uncomfortable. I've never talked to anyone in my whole life besides the Professor and Alfred, and now here I am surrounded by others. "So tell me Birdie," he directs towards me with a much kinder look in his eyes, "What's your name?"
I don't trust these people. I've never talked to them before and they're holding weapons while keeping me in a cage, so I don't really have a reason to. As they continue to just stare at me I start to feel anxious. I begin to breath heavily and I dart my eyes back and forth at them as I try to scoot back as far away from them as I can. I hit the back of my cage and I feel a sharp pain from one of the spots the Professor hit me. That's when I notice the bandages. I calm down and examine them, lifting my arms in front of me and feeling at my face. Someone had put them on my face and arms where I was cut with glass.
"So you see my awesome medical work," the red-eyed man says as he gives me a smirk, "you were hurt pretty bad when we found you, so I fixed you up. Although, I did notice that you had a lot of former scars all over your body." At that, his smirk fades and he gives me a sympathetic look. Realization soon hits as I find that the last thing I remember was being beat and suddenly waking up here.
"Where am I?",I reluctantly manage to mutter out in a quiet voice.
"Wow! He talks!" I ignore the comment from one of the other men and keep focused on the kind man.
"Well, we are the police", he explains, "and we had been given off comments about screams being heard around your area for a long time now by people who pass by." I think I've heard of police before, and they're supposed to be good guys from what I recall. I take this in as he continues. "Since you live in the woods, no one was able to pinpoint where exactly the screams were coming from, but yesterday we were examining around the vicinity based off of the tips we got when we heard what I suppose was you yelling. Us and the other group of officers that were with us, including the chief, ran over and we came to help. When we found you beaten in the basement we arrested the old man that was there and took you out.
"But I have to say," he declared, "I've never seen a winged man before, and neither had anyone else." The other officers nodded in definite agreement. "The chief came and saw you and didn't know what you were, and that basement you were in looked like some kind of sci-fi movie with all the tubes and chemicals, so he ordered that we take you to the station to examine you."
I took a minute to absorb all of this. Was I finally released from that hell that I lived in? Would I never have to see the Professor again?
"What's going to happen to me?" I asked. All of the officers stared at me with pity. None of them answered, and that worried me. I was going to ask again when the car slowed down and stopped. I sat up straighter as the officers stood up, opened some side doors, and walked out of the car. I heard them walking around when the back doors were opened to reveal them standing in front of me.
"We gotta take you out of the van," one of them says to me. He reaches out and unlocks the cage to let me out. I stand up slowly and step towards them. I am aching everywhere and it pains me to walk, but they grab on to my arms and escort me away from the van and towards a building. I look around me in fascination. I've only been let outside by the Professor a few times to fly around, and that was during the night when it was dark. He would put a shock collar on me to keep me from flying away. I've never experienced this much of the outside world before, and the raw sunlight is extremely new to me. It's incredibly bright and my eyes can't handle it, so I squeeze them shut and keep walking along.
Soon we make it inside where I can open my eyes a little better. I am taken down a bunch of hallways while being surrounded by not only the three officers that were with me in the car, but many others who are forming a tight wall around me. I don't know if they think I'm dangerous or just too inhuman. After a while of walking I am put into an enclosed room. One of the men around me who I can only guess is the chief I've heard of addresses the group.
"I'll need someone to stay in the room with it while I have some discussions." I find it kind of demeaning being called "it" over and over again. I'm just like any other man, only with a pair of wings.
"I'll stay," offers the red-eyed man. He walks up to the front of the crowd and leads me into the room where the door is closed and the group walks away in an excited shamble. The room is much larger than the car and there is a table with chairs in the middle. I decide to sit in the chair and try to relax. I finally have the chance to spread out my wings in this open space, and I start to fix up my disheveled feathers. The man sits in the chair opposite me and watches me fix my wings.
"That's awesome," he declared as he examines my black feathers. I am surprised at this statement and I turn to him. He looks me in the eye and gives me a big smile. He places his gun on the table and sits back in the chair. "So now I can introduce myself. My name is Gilbert Beilschmidt." He extends his hand over to me from across the table. "You never told me what your name was."
I smile for the first time in a long time and put my hand in his.
"I'm Matthew Williams."
Author's Note
I hope this chapter wasn't too boring, I just wanted to set some things up. I'm very happy that people are already following this story and reading it. This is the first time I've posted my writing on the internet, and I feel really motivated now. Goodbye and have a great day!
