Embers

I ran and I ran and I ran.

The problem with being chased through a forest is that you can trip, which is not a terrible problem, though it is a terrible problem when your pursuers are armed with knives. It is quite easy to understand the basic situation here from a reader's standpoint so I don't need to waste a sentence explaining that I was being chased by angry men with knives through a forest. Oops.

I have seen better days. I have a bullet bleeding my arm and a pack of angry men chasing me with blades that will bleed me in worse ways. But, to be fair, I had a good breakfast, so my day isn't all bad.

The crunch of leaves, the whistle of wind, the "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU" of men; it all blended together in a medley of unimportance because I was running for my life. Oh, and now a zing of a knife passing my ear and hitting a tree. I turned around to see more knives coming and everything slowed down for awhile.

It was easy to tell because time moved so much more slowly: there were three knives in the air from three different men. One was close; it was going to hit my head. The second was going to hit my foot. The third was going to miss. Because time had slowed, I could observe many other things, like the quiet color of the trees, or the birds chirping innocently, or the painted sky. There was also smoke next to me from a fire that had been put out recently, and the embers were still hot. There were many more things to observe but I was interrupted.

A knife hit me in the foot.

I screamed. Like a little girl.

It's difficult to describe the pain. The best way I can describe it is having a knife thrown into your foot. The pain prevented me from standing anymore and I fell to the ground. The men had caught up, and they began kicking my body around like a ragdoll on the ground and laughing. To anyone watching, they'd say, "Ow, that'd hurt!" They would be more than right. The pain wasn't as bad as having the wind knocked out of you and not being able to breathe.

Luckily only one man had a knife so I could only be stabbed in one place at a time. But I was still going to die. He brought the knife, ceremoniously, over his head. I tried to roll out of the way but there was one man controlling each of my limbs to make sure that I didn't move.

Except one of the men stood on those hot embers I mentioned five paragraphs ago and it burned through whatever footwear he was or wasn't wearing and it burned his foot, loosening his grip on my left arm, and time slowed again.

I moved my free arm up and batted at the knife's blade, but I did it slowly because time had slowed. I would hit the knife, I was sure. But what would I do afterwards? Probably get a job. I'm young. This was the wrong thing to be thinking about so I decided to think about what to do immediately after I hit the knife out of the man's hand.

I would probably grab the knife instead and stab the man on my right arm, and then use my two free arms to stab the two other men.

I did.

And then I passed out, the only corpse left alive.