Teaser Tuesday

Of the Untitled variety. I wrote this last week, sort of out of the blue. I've got no world, no plot, nothing definitive. Just ideas. We'll let it percolate awhile, shall we?

Declan stared at his dirt-encrusted boots as he shuffled forward in line. There was nothing particularly interesting about his boots that morning: they were the same pair issued to every other boy in the camp. And yet the way Declan fixed his eyes on the scuffed leather and fraying laces, a casual observer might have thought those boots were the most interesting objects in the entire territory.

Declan tensed his shoulders. He didn't want anyone to notice him. He just wanted to be Detainee 84117 today. Needed to be. Today of all days he didn't want to stand out in any way.

With a toss of his head, calculated to be casual he briefly scanned the yard. Everything seemed to be business as usual. The guards patrolled the long, slow-moving lines which snaked out from the Medical Hut. The Hawks were perched in their towers around the East Perimeter, rifles crossed over their chests in military unison. The other lags stood in line like himself, all dressed in variations of camp-issued cargo pants and jackets, most staring straight ahead with the look of abstraction that came every morning when the effects of the previous day's dosage had worn off.

Declan had felt that way every morning for he didn't even know how long. The initial moment of confusion when the camp siren blared out in the early morning darkness. "Where am I? Why am I here?" Those were the easy questions. The hard ones cropped up while you were getting dressed. "Who am I?" The number came first, always. 84117. 84117. And if, by chance, he forgot there it was tattooed on the inside of his left wrist.

But there was always something deeper. Something lower down in his gut, like a voice screaming out from inside a padded cell but you couldn't quite make out what it was saying. And right about the time he got to the font of the line inside the Medical Hut, the voice came into focus. "What's your name? You have a name!"

And then there was a pill in his mouth. A pill he would swallow. The voice would fade, pulled back to the depths of the forgotten.

Until this morning, when he found a note in his jacket pocket while he was getting dressed. As he read the short message--just four words scrawled in pencil on a piece of torn napkin from the Mess Hut--that questioning voice deep inside him stirred.

He grasped the note again in his pocket, caressing its rough surface lovingly, those four words repeating and repeating inside his head, reminding him of what he was about to do. This was it. Everything was about to change.

Don't take the pill.