Purple | Cole Stewart -VERSION DISCONTINUED

Chapter 1: Danger

I hated my birthday. But not in the way most people did. It wasn't because I had no friends to celebrate with, or because It was on Christmas and I only got one set of presents. No. It was because my fourteenth birthday was the day my world ended.

I hate my birthday, I thought as I'm pushed forward into a line of mostly crying children. It's raining, and there are men in black tying zip ties around wrists. honestly, I didn't know what to think. Nothing makes sense until I see a sixth grader I used to tutor put his hand out towards the man trying to tie him. And then the man went flying into the nearest wall.

What the hell is happening?

Well, to put it as simply as possible, all of the kids that came to school today their hands tied behind their back, and are being loaded onto buses by men with guns. And of course I'm included in that category somehow. 

Some kids fight the men in black, nut eventually they all find themselves on a dirty school bus, three to a seat, and scared.

I watch silently as my science lab partner is hit in the face with the butt of a gun after she seems to shock the man securing her. Her blood hits the pavement just as the enormity of my current situation hits me.

I am in danger.

I don't say a word as one of the men secures my hands. I try to keep my breathing even as  I make sure to look only at the floor. I can feel my thoughts spiraling as I start towards the line of buses. I give up trying to keep calm when the man stops me from moving. And I feel myself snap as he starts to speak. "Aren't you a pretty little thing," he says as he fingers a strand of my hair. "Wonder what color you'll be."

In that moment, I feel something in my stomach, and the next thing I know, his arm is on fire. I only remember the alarmed shouts of "Red! Red!" and a few panicked whispers from my classmates before there's a sharp pain in my skull and everything goes black.

*****

I groan as I regain consciousness, and only moments later am greeted with a sharp jab to the ribs. I'm on the bus now, In one of the seats closest to the back, next to a young girl I don't recognize, and a boy named Derrick.

I looked over at the girl, who was staring out the window at the empty fields passing by. I had never seen her before, which wasn't unusual. the unusual thing about her was that she was wearing pajamas, and she looked just a little too young to be in the sixth grade. I watched as a tear rolled down her cheek.

I had known Derrick since 3rd grade. we definitely weren't friends, but he knew my name and I knew his. Derrick is the sort of kid who's friends with a lot of people, but doesn't necessarily have any best friends. He's the type to be forgotten about during a conversation, and the one who didn't have a friend he looked to to pair up with during group projects.

I watched Derrick die that day.

And I watched many others die in the days after. It was something I would never be able to cleanse from my memory, and I knew that from the very beginning.

After that, we were separated by the X's that had been spray painted onto our backs. the kids without them were lead to a separate building, but that wasn't exactly a big concern of mine. Again, I was pushed into a line, but this time I tripped over the uneven ground and stumbled forward, bumping into the tall boy in front of me before falling to the ground. I twisted to the side as much as I could to stop myself from falling on my face. With my hands bound behind my back, it was a difficult task.

I was hauled back to my feet almost before I had finished falling. "Watch it," growled the boy I had run into. There was something odd about the way he spoke, but I couldn't quite place it.

"Sorry," I whispered, my voice rough and foreign in my own ears.

The boy turned around to fully face me, and when he gave me a wicked smile, I understood why his voice had sounded so weird. It was because his entire mouth was bloody, and he was missing teeth.

"Sorry," he said, still grinning, "Isn't good enough."

It was only then that I realized the full extent of the hell I had stumbled into.

Everything around me was on fire, but the real chaos started after that, with the shouting and the firing of automatic weapons.

I fell to my knees, shuffling forward as quickly as I could while panic rolled around in my stomach.

The boy I had fallen on was no longer focused on me. He really never had been, honestly. But that did make it much easier to escape to inferno.

outside what had become a circle of death, there were more guards who weren't shooting, but instead forcing kids back towards the building we had been headed towards before the latest disaster.

I wanted to run, to put as much distance as I could between myself and the Boy in the Flames, but I could only hobble, my shoulders swinging violently to make for the fact that my hands were bound.

I got closer and closer to the building, the adrenaline only began to recede once I was inside the building. There, the guards weren't panicked, so they were back to being rough and forceful. I still preferred it to the chaos outside.

I was back in a line with red X's, and new clothes were shoved into my hands before I was forced to change in front of the intense gazes of the guards. My name was replaced with a number, and just like that, I had become nothing more than a statistic.

A/N: 1024 words.