Pariah: A Tale of Lost Love, Corruption and Escapism DAVID OXFORD YEAR 11
I should be in agony. My bruised knuckles bleed as my exhausted legs continue to push on through the soaked city streets and claustrophobic corridors. The grimy pigs continue to chase me as I jump fences and dart from side-to-side dodging bullets like fireworks blazing past. My body of sixty should be burning in pain like the flames of Hell, but as the thunderous rain wash-es over me like an unholy baptism, I am a man twenty years younger, forty years younger. I am reborn anew. Bright red and blue lights and blaring sirens from Police Spinners wail like a newborn through-out the icy-cold November night in New York. The lieutenant with his raised brow and stretched skin furiously barks orders like a dog to the dirty pigs chasing me. The pigs are different now, ever since they were allowed to use unhindered amounts of force due to the 2049 Weapons Declaration Act, trigger-happy divisions now light up alleyways, street corners and homes with the cutting sound of high-round ammunition and blinding lights of muzzle flashes, the same sounds that took her away. But this information, this file will undo all of this and maybe give this damned society what it needs – freedom, justice, hope. As I continue to run I can hear their slimy voices, calling me by the name this society has as-signed me, Detective #21195. That isn’t my name, I don’t even remember my birth given name anymore. This repulsive society relishes the idea of deconstructing your personality until you’re a mindless number, a drone walking the void that is the city’s streets. But they couldn’t tear her down, not through their usual methods, not without the help of a division armed to the teeth with assault rifles and 100 rounds at least. I remember coming back to our apartment on the 13th floor, ripped apart by bullet holes like an open-heart surgery or at least that’s what my mind tells me. I don’t even know my own past anymore, none of it – except for her. I’m at a dead end. I hear the suffocating sirens and feel as if the walls are closing in until... a ladder! Like the hand of God, an oxidised and rusted ladder reaches down from the rustic roof-tops above the streets to a stranger in the dark. I reach the roof and stop for a moment to glance at the almost Lovecraftian moon. All those nights spent with my love staring at this space rock and yet I never appreciated its glistening beauty until now, until she was gone.
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