But I figured I'd post it as I add on so I can get some criticism as I go along, and hopefully finish by some time tomorrow.
*edit* And I'm off to bed soon, I need a break *grumble*
Clink…clink. Clink. It could be a thousand sounds. A pin dropping off a table. Someone tapping a coin against the table. Someone placing their rings carelessly on top of the table. It was a small and delicate sound. In this case, it was the sound of a small, brass, .45 caliber casing striking the cold lifeless floor.
Mankind is a complex beast. It lives day by day in delusions, delusions we have crafted into our own bubble of sanity. It strives everyday in order to explain the unexplained. That which cannot be explained is ignored, or claimed not to exist.
This is the folly of man.
Calamity is rarely, despite what teen age slasher movies may have you believe, a social affair. Your car will run out of gas not when you and your friends are cruising down to the mall. You’ll run out while you’re alone in the middle of nowhere, in thick woods, just as night begins to settle in, and a cold breeze blows past rustling the leaves behind you. You won’t be mugged walking home with your entire frat house behind you, you’ll be pulled into an alley by a man who hasn’t washed in weeks, dampening your clothes in his own sweat, as he pulls you closer with his knife which glistens in the flickering streetlights, while he rifles through your pockets. And when you’re lost in the middle of nowhere, you won’t have a friendly nun passing by in her car, when you’re being mugged you won’t have a deadly weapon conveniently in range. Nature, fate, reality all have more important things to worry about than your comfort. Your individual torture, confusion, agony has no bearing at all on the larger scheme of things.
Danger comes not when you have a fighting chance, not when you have help. It preys on you at your most vulnerable point. And danger has no subtlety. It doesn’t sneak up on you, slowly tightening the noose. It shoots you twice in the knee caps, lets you flounder on the floor a little, while he toys with you, maybe a kick to the rips, or stepping on the back of your head, and then once it thinks you’re about to bleed to death, finishes you with a shot to the head.
And that’s on a good day.
Danger also has the habit of attacking easy prey. Those that are unprepared. Those that will fall. Paul was twenty-something, a young man. An engineer, he had spent the last few years of life doing something that he truly believed made the world a better place. Doctors may save the life of their patients, wildlife activists may save endangered species by the day. But Paul felt that every person who walked over one of his bridges, every car, every bus, each one of these lives that he saved through his own expertise. He was doing humanity a great deed.
Of course in some other part of the globe, a group of fifty or so young children have just died in a heartbeat, but hey, whatever helps him sleep at night.
Danger shoots you in the knee caps. It incapacitates you, lets you become even easier prey. Paul comes to. Opening his eyes, he sees central London. Hyde park specifically. His head is throbbing with the monotonous rhythm of a Swiss watch. Raising his hand to feel his forehead, he flinches, and looking down at his hand, he sees that his hand is covered in blood. He looks around himself. He sees his car, wrapped around a tree, barely recognizable, a pile of metallic rubble in the middle of an idyllic green haven. Slowly, he clambers to his feet, before flumping forward, falling face first into the field of jade that surrounded him as his legs gave way almost instantly. Looking down, he doesn’t see any blood, and they appeared to still be straight. Fatigue. He lay on his back, and decided to let his legs recover. He would have called for help, but he was completely physically exhausted. Just the act of trying to stand up left him out of breath, his chest heaving up and down, drawing in what little air he could desperately gather in his lungs. Slowly, as he recovered, his mind started doing over time, trying to make sense of the new world he found himself thrust into. For example, as it was quite the conundrum, what was his car doing wrapped around a tree in Hyde Park? Slowly, but surely, he pushed himself to his feet. He wobbled slightly, and for a second he was sure he was about to greet the ground on very personal circumstances again, but he shut his eyes, tried to push his world into a set position, opened them, and found himself much better off. Then it hit him again, and he went stumbling forward for a final time. However, this time, just before he hit the ground, he felt something pull at the back of his shirt, and suddenly he was upright again.
