Friday, July 15, 2011

The Last Empty Measure

An idea forming that I'm working through in my head...This one should be pretty good if I ever decide to sit down and work on it.



Prologue

Amanda was still trying to calm her four year old daughter’s tears when she heard her husband crawling across the dirt floor towards her once again. The smell of damp dirt and human waste filled her nose, and the growling of her stomach echoed in her ears, mixing with the sounds of Faith’s crying. Their family had been in many hopeless situations, but she’d always managed to, despite all, cling to the last shred of hope that they would make it out okay. No matter how insane it was. Now she didn’t dare to hope. “Any luck?” she whispered.
He shook his head, then realized there was no way she’d be able to see him in this thick, inky blackness. “No,” he whispered back, taking his daughter into his arms and cradling her feverish forehead on his shoulder. He settled down next to Amanda and held her hand tightly as he rocked Faith back and forth in his lap, trying to succeed a bit more in what his wife could not. “It’s okay,” he tried to reassure them, though to him it seemed so obvious that his tone was devoid of any hope. “We’ll get out of here.”
“Yeah right,” a voice said sarcastically from a few feet away. Amanda and Brett’s heads turned to search for their teenage daughter sitting somewhere, but they couldn’t find her; they could only guess where she was by the sound of her voice. “There’s no way we’re going to make it out of this hell alive,” she said, her voice tinged with anger and bitterness. It was also quite obvious she had been doing some crying herself. “Let’s face it,” she said, no longer trying to hide the anger. “It’s over. We’re through. I tried to tell you this insane ‘God-given mission’ would get us all killed someday.”
“Shut up, Erin,” said her older brother sitting next to her. “You’re not helping.”
“What’s to help?” she demanded. “It’s hopeless. You know it just like I do, Derrick.”
“Shut up, Erin!” he said again, this time more angrily.
“Hey, guys!” Brett said, trying to calm them down. “Fighting and arguing is not going to get us anywhere.” He squeezed his wife’s hand. “We will get out of this alive. I just don’t know how yet.”
“We don’t even know where we are!” Erin cried, her tears becoming more obvious in her voice. “All we know is that we were thrown into underground into some sort of tiny, cramped cell with dirt floor and rats, and the ceiling’s so low, I can’t even sit up straight. We can’t see anything, we can’t hear anything, we haven’t eaten or drunk anything in over twenty-four hours, and it’s getting harder to breathe.” Her voice fell down to a whisper. “Just accept reality.” She took a deep breath and let it out again. It came out wavy and filled with anguish. “We’re all going to die down here.”
Derrick groped in the darkness for her, found her knee, and gave it a squeeze. She curled up to his touch, and he wrapped her arms around her as she silently cried on his shoulder while he shed tears of his own.
Brett and Amanda just sat silently, listening to Erin’s last haunting words still echoing in the darkness.

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