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Rated: 13+ · Short Story · Action/Adventure · #1451396
This is a short scene which came into my head one morning in which I tried focus on detail
        I hear a faint distant sound coming from somewhere around me. I try to focus on it, but it is a vague, uncertain sound. The effort is like trying to hear the breathing of the trees, yet I persist. Slowly, as I divert all of my senses, all of my awareness to that one sound, it rises in volume. The more I concentrate, the more I slip back into time from the depths of eternity. As the sound becomes more and more discrete, I begin to wonder what it is. In time it becomes clear that the sound I am hearing is the chattering of a crowd of people, and then that this crowd is all around me.
        Content in my deductions so far, I let the rest of my senses become fully aware. First of all I feel no breeze, yet the temperature is only warm, not hot. Second, though the light is shining in through my eyelids, I feel none of the warmth of sunlight on my skin. From this I conclude that I am probably inside. As I begin to turn my attention to the smells around me and the materials upon which I am laying, I hear a new sound. From off behind me comes a scuffling sound, accompanied by thudding and crunching sounds, as well as yelling and utterances characteristic of physical effort: the sounds of a fight. After several intense seconds of this, all is quiet except the sounds of a group of men breathing hard. The chatter of the crowd is gone.  Next, I hear the group of men start to walk towards me.  When they are getting close, maybe 3 or 4 meters away, they suddenly stop. One man then proceeds to creep softly and slowly towards me. I open my eyes. He swings something large towards my face, but I roll off whatever I have been laying on top of and on to the floor, ducking away from and looking up at the object he is swinging at me at the same time. My arm jabs upwards and into the path of it. I grab what I now recognize an old, beaten, wooden baseball bat and slam the thick end right into his face. Taking advantage of his bewilderment and pain, I wrench it from his grasp, wrapping my hands around the handle. I kick him in the chest, knocking him to the ground; and then force my right foot firmly into his throat as I step onto his chest with my left. His hands try to push my foot from his neck, failing miserably. He struggles frantically, his face changing from a red hue to a slightly purple one. Just as his struggles begin to become feeble I lift my foot and start walking towards the door I see at the far end of the room.  I  hear the man who attacked me coughing and gasping for breath behind me and feel the others staring unanimously at me.  Nobody moves but me and the man on the floor now far behind me.
        As I near the door, I come to a halt. I turn my head to a man maybe  two meters away from me and stare straight into his eyes. He looks weakly back at me. I continue to stare at him. His eyes dart back and forth from my eyes to the baseball bat. As my gaze remains insistent his eyes begin to dart to the people around him in a pleading manner. Beads  of sweat run down his forehead and into his eyes, causing him to blink. A tremor starts to run through his body, and he shakes like a man with a seizure. I ready my bat and began to walk slowly towards him. He runs off like a rabbit. They continue to stare at me. I turn my eyes to a man nearby. After a few short seconds he looks at the man standing beside of him and begins talking to him about something or other, most likely whatever they were talking about before this all happened. The man beside him alternates between looking at him like he is completely mad and looking concernedly at me. Then he realizes I am no longer looking at his friend and joins into the conversation quite earnestly. I turn away from them and return to my walk towards the door. The chattering of the crowd quickly returns as  everyone else takes the hint. I try to keep my smile from poking through the cold, steel visage that is my guise in this place and manage, with ability that comes from much experience, to succeed.
© Copyright 2008 James Taber (anomaly13 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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