...shook my head to get the sand out of my eyes & hair. from my vantage i could see he was tied to a massive wooden pole -- must have been twenty, thirty, forty feet tall. he was strapped to the thing by yards and yards of roughspun rope about the chest & arms and the thighs, leaving his naked midriff exposed. the others -- the ones who had caught and subdued us -- milled about some distance away, their lank-haired apparent leader gesturing about something.
slowly
slowly
s..l...o.....w.......e............r...
it had become laughably sexual. the leader sauntered toward me. tied as i was to a similar pole i couldn't move away. my thoughts flitted about, wondering where the girls had gone (been taken to?). he was next to me, speaking to me, his voice a buzzing in my ear. i couldn't understand his language. his fingers cupped my chin and gently turned my head toward the other. i could now see the tableau unfold.
a member of the group, the gang, had donned a black metal helmet and stood some distance away from my companion. before i could make sense of what was happening, the helmeted man ran, head down, toward my bound friend. it could be called running only in the sense that his legs propelled him; the speed with which he moved was beyond anything i'd ever experienced. his metal helmet impacted my friend's unprotected midsection with sickening force. he turned his head toward me; his eyes held nausea and confusion & something far, far worse than the realization of pain.
this was something they did to those they found. to those who couldn't resist.
my scream tore the sky. i felt my tears run down my face, melting my flesh away, rivulets of regret... who i was... i felt it blurring away, melting into something else... guilt, rage, self-hatred & recrimination, how had it come to this? shifting shadows of a person... who was i? who am i?
(slightly modified from a prior version)
