Day 19: Write in Someone Else’s Voice

The Coward

The boy’s voice awakened the man.  He found shelter in the abandoned school, in what was once, his school, his office.  Eleven, twelve, and thirteen year old students once ran down those halls, hurrying to their classes, hurrying to his English class. Now since the incident, no children survived that massacre.  That thought made the man shake with fear until he drifted off to sleep.  So when the man heard the boy’s voice screaming “Help Me!, Please Help Me!”  it shook the man from his sleep.  The man laid still.  His heart pounded as he waited to hear boy again.  “Help me! Please Somebody!” The man heard the boy loud and clear.  He could not pretend it was some animal or dream.  He knew it was a boy. And it paralyzed him.  The man clutched his knees to his chest and tucked his chin.  He took slow deep breaths, silent breaths, hoping the boy would believe he was on his own, alone.  The man hated his fear, hated what he had become. Hated what the incident forced him to see in himself.  That he become a coward.  

The man hadn’t always been so fearful, so unmanly.  He was once someone’s teacher, someone’s coach, a brother, a father, a husband.  You would have shaken his hand at church or asked him for directions.  He was helpful, nice, a gentlemen.  But since the incident, he witnessed heroes devours, people killing one another just to stay alive.  The world was not made for nice men anymore.  The boy could have been a child he would’ve helped in the hallway.  Now the boy was human bait.  The man could the boy shuffling his little feet down the hall, passed him in his protected office.  The man was relieved.  Until he heard another voice, an old man’s cracked dry gurgling voice.

“No one can heard you boy!” The man snapped.  “No one except for me!”

The boy was not alone.  The man could heard the old man walking in slow cadence down the hall.  He was dragging something metal, as it scraped and scratched the concrete floor.  The boy stopped pleading for help. The man thought to himself, “the boy must be safe now. The old man can not find him.”

“You can’t hide from me, you little bast…(cough, cough, cough)” The old man spat and coughed and cursed at the boy.  The man could hear doorknobs turning and doors opening, one after the other.

“Only a matter time, boy,” the old man reasoned.

The man’s cowardly heart mocked him.  “I can’t get involved.  I can’t God. Don’t make me go out there. You can’t make me go!” The man prayed.  There was a crash of a broken window that sounded down the hall.  The boy must have made a move to escape.

“You little bastard! I will eat you while you scream!!” The old man’s feet moved faster down the hall.  The metal object screeched as he drug it down the hall with him. 

“Well, I’ll be!!” The griped at God. “You won’t let me go, will you?”  The man knew what had to be done.  He rose to his feet and made his way down the dark hall toward the old man and scared little boy.