School Assignment

School, being school assigned a simple assignment to write a scene that built suspense. It needed to be between 200 - 600 words. it need to use whatever methods of dialogue, narrative, and description to exemplify the need to escape a person, place or thing. 

Here is what I cam up with. 

“It burns,” Shel said. Her voice was far away as if she was just awoken from sleep. This was in contrast to the look on her face. Eyes wide in terror, red rings encircled the dark blue of her iris. Her skin white and shallow like the tide gone out from the shore. Mouth agape exposing dried gums crusted with blood inking the white of her teeth

            “That is its purpose child, to burn away the wandering thoughts of a godless actions of heathens such as you,” answered the tin tone voice in the speaker above Shel’s head.

            Shel tried again to turn her head to find the voice. At times it seemed like it was everywhere at once. It always followed the pain marching behind it in parade fashion. A ripping feeling above her eyes, then the warm burst of blood, then the burning, and finally the voice telling her to be still and it would all be okay.

            Shel sat tense for a moment listening; the voice from the speaker said nothing else the burning slowed then stopped. Shel was alone in her room again strapped to cold metallic table. She was still alive but her time was short. If they could not get her to admit she believed in the father they would turn the torches on. Fire would erupt from every corner of the room and she would burn writhing in agony-licked head to toe by cleansing flames. The image of her blackened body smoking as the cleaning crew entered the room to remove her body made Shel vomit bile into the back of her throat. 

           

“Quite your fear girl, see only the river were you float, not the falls ahead,” said the memory of Xavier. Shel recalled the intensity on his face as he spoke to her of fear and the destructive power it had.

           

“Okay, you old son of a vapor thief, what am I am I to do then?” asked Shel to her memory. She thought hard and did as she was trained, She breathed out the fear and took in air in that moment alone. Her mind cleared the fog of pain as called her muscles into action.

           

A camera set high in the celling rotated at a rate of 1 millimeter an second. In a total of 15 seconds it would move from one side of the room to the other. Moving now from right to leave the camera caught a subtle tremor in Shel’s right arm as it passed. On its return trip from left to right the camera caught a similar tremor in Shel’s left arm. In the 72-hour period the camera had been focused on Shel it had passed over her 17,280 times. Each time until now has captured a lifeless form lying on a surgical table. The female was bare and prone on her back. The camera, which was not aware of, was defined life or death could only detect movement. A job it had not needed to do till now.

            A buzzing, pulsating alarm rung out like a rooster calling to the dawn from the speaker above Shel’s head. She kept calm forming her muscles to twitch harder and faster.  Her arm only needed a pace fast enough to breach the molecular bonds of the straps. She pushed harder against the panic building within her, she knew what would come following the alarm.

            Shel stopped only long enough to catch the ever so faint sound of gas being pumped into the room. The next thing she heard was the click, click, click of an electric igniter.