(I'm still experimenting with style, so I'd especially appreciate any comments in that regard. Otherwise, this is Shiny, the novel that interrupted my NaNo and won't let me sleep at night. I hope you like it!)
***
He wakes to gunshots. Shouts of something not English. Pain pulsing in his left leg. Head pounding. More shots, more shouts. He tenses and he tries to remember. He can’t.
Louder shouts. Shots. Screams.
He opens his eyes and turns his head. Squints against the sun and closes his eyes again. He moves his fingers against the surface beneath him. He’s on his back—it’s grass. Long grass. Must be early, it’s wet and cold.
Then something hard presses into his chest. He opens his eyes. The snout of something heavy and automatic focuses at his forehead. Holding it, framed by the sun and a sapphire sky, is a girl with dirt on her face. It’s her booted foot on his ribcage.
She’s shouting at him, but he doesn’t understand. She shouts again.
He stares back.
She shouts into the distance and shifts the gun onto her shoulder. The aim shifts to between his eyes. She says something to him again, something incomprehensible. Her finger moves to the trigger.
He’s going to die. He tries to pull away, but pain explodes in his leg and her foot has him pinned.
“Please,” he tries to say, mouth dry. “Please don’t.”
Her gaze darkens.
He closes his eyes and waits.
More shouting. More things he doesn’t understand. More pain and fear clouding everything. But no bullets. No eruption in his skull. No splattered brains.
Just footsteps. More shouts right over his head. And before he can open his eyes, something sharp in his arm, ice in his skin, blackness.
This time, it’s quiet, dark, cool. The pain in his leg is dull but present and his head dizzy. He’s on his back again, on something plush. He moves his fingers against it. Ridged fabric, but there's cold metal against his wrist, and there are voices off somewhere.
He opens his eyes but can't see anything. He moves his right wrist slowly against the metal, then tries it with his left. But that's also restrained. He tries to sit up but meets resistance. He now has two questions: What happened? and Where am I?
He blinks and his sight adjusts slowly. The voices grow less distant, but he still can't understand anything. He looks in that direction and can make out two people, or at least two shadows. They’re coming toward him.
Light fills the room. He cringes as pain splinters through the fog in his head.. He opens his eyes again, very slowly, and standing over him are two girls. One’s the same girl from before, without the dirt and without the gun. The other is red-haired, tall and lanky.
They're staring at him and in the meantime, the details are filtering back into his head. He'd been running out of the house and onto the lawn, and then--well, the next thing he knew, the girl now standing over him had been standing partly on top of him.
His heart starts to pound as his looks at them. He'd been running when he saw the ships come in, hadn't he? “Who the fuck are you?” he asks quickly, shrinking back. "And where am I? And--"
They stare at him blankly.
She hadn't responded before, he remembers. She'd just stood there, all of sixteen if not younger, and had almost blown his brains out.
And now they start talking, but it’s nothing that makes sense either. They’re talking at him, talking to each other, back forth back forth. His heart starts pounding harder and harder.
"I don't understand you!" he shouts. The pressure builds in his head, his leg. Their voices, slick but sharp, dart around each other and within a second he knows he has to get away.
He looks around. He’s on a couch. A couch? And beyond the two girls are windows, but outside is blackness, inside is carpet, a television, another couch, distant beeping. He jerks his head to look up at the ceiling and the pain lances through again.
Cold fingers touch his shoulder. He flinches and opens one eye. The girl from before is inches from his face. Her eyes are dark blue, green in the center, and she starts speaking slowly, slowly, even kindly, but there's not a word he knows.
Eventually, the two leave and walk off. The light turns out, and he fades back into sleep.
When he opens his eyes next there’s someone sitting in his vision, studying at him. He blinks a few times and sees it’s another girl. She’s thin, with brown hair in a ponytail, dressed in green, and one side of her face swollen up red like a bladder. More importantly, there’s a pistol on her thigh pointed right at him.
What the hell, he thinks slowly. He swallows but his mouth his rough and dry. Despite that, he asks the most pressing question he now has, “Are you going to shoot me?”
Of course, though, she doesn’t answer, and he remembers how the other two didn’t either, and how he couldn’t understand them, and so if they’re as crazy as the guns they’ve gotten from somewhere, he’s as good as screwed.
The first girl comes in with the redhead. Both start talking in their not-English and the ponytail girl sits staring at him as the two jabber on either side of her.
He tests his restraints again, wondering if they’ve loosened or gone away, but they haven’t and he’s as good as stuck there. Wherever there was.
“Look,” he croaks out against the thirst. “I know you don’t understand, but I don’t know—”
The ponytail girl holds up her hand. He stops talking. The other two girls stop talking too. She mutters and First Girl leaves his realm of sight. She comes back after a minute of the other two staring quietly at him. She has a glass of water in her hand, and she holds it out to him with a blank face.
He eyes it. Figures they would have killed him already if they wanted to, and now that the water’s there and visible he wants it even more than he wants away from them. But as he reaches out and tries to take it, his wrist hits the metal. He looks and realizes his hand is cuffed to his side.
Why are you giving me water if I can’t even drink it?
The girl with the ponytail says something. He looks at her and almost asks her that question, but she’s half-smirking. She says something again. He stares back. She points at the glass of water still held out to him, and then back to him. Says something again, smirks, shrugs nonchalantly.
“What the fuck?”
She shakes her head and says something again.
He stares.
She does it again.
The panic pulls on him like an anchor on his heart. You’re caught by a munch of mad chicks, he imagines his friend Cody saying, to calm himself down, but then he remembers why he’d been running out of the house. He’d run in to tell Cody they had to leave, and he’d found Cody dead.
“Oh God oh God oh God,” he mutters. Tears start to burn at the corner of his eyes. He looks between his three captors and doesn’t even know what to think.
First Girl with the water glass rolls her eyes, points at him with her free hand, and then says something to the redhead. The redhead laughs and then starts talking. Then they all start talking at each other and the room is full of it.
The girl with the ponytail stands up from her chair and begins yelling. The other two start yelling. First Girl moves away from him and toward Ponytail and Redhead, and suddenly Redhead grabs his glass of water and chucks it at the window. It shatters.
Oh God help me, he thinks. His heart is beyond pounding now, and with the bizarre idea that he has to go now while they’re distracted, he lunges against his restraints. He gets nothing except a sudden burst of fire in his injured leg.
Ponytail punches Redhead in the eye. Redhead slaps her back on the bruise on her face. Ponytail screams then and spins away, which might be the first thing he’s understood.
Then Redhead starts pointing at him, and the yelling intensifies. Redhead pulls out a knife and starts walking toward him, and he suddenly knows they’re fighting over him. Strapped to the couch, he starts to swear as the knife comes at him.
She doesn’t get three feet before there’s a bang. He jumps against his restraints. Red liquid explodes against the glass window and wall, and strikes his face. The redheaded girl, blood gurgling out of her mouth, collapses to the floor.
He stares for a second and passes out again to the sound of screams.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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Original Text:
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Hey, I like this! My only complaint is that there should be longer sentences in some places, just to keep the story going and the transitions right. As in the beginning, you don't need to have all the sentences short and choppy to get the feeling of panic.
Anyway, the other two said a lot of what needed to be said. However, you don't need to really know the main character's name. Sometimes in stories author's don't even say their character's name at all. I once went through three quarters of a book to eventually find out the main character's name was Jared and that he had blond hair. But that's their way of portraying things.
Good luck with this story!
Hi Rachael!
I like this, especially as a beginning, as it opens up a lot of questions, yet answers some of the most immediate ones. ^__^ Unlike Rosey, I liked the style. Normally short jerky sentences annoy me like crazy, but here they didn't; I felt they worked very well.
However. Personally speaking, I didn't like your narrative voice. It was very detached, very much on the outside, and so in a story where I don't even know your MC's first name, I'd have liked a closer link between narrative and character.
Also, your MC seems a bit dopey. Like here:
One moment he's panicking, thinking desperately that he's got to get away. Next minute he's asleep.
And at the end. He's almost died, covered in gore, lots of screaming going on, and his solution is to pass out. It doesn't feel right. He didn't seem that fazed about the gun at first, and before you say he knows he has to escape and that seems really forceful, like he really knows what he's doing. It made me think that maybe he was a soldier or cop or something. Then he passes out and it's like, dude, what?
That said, I did enjoy this, and I did think it very well written.
-twit
This was edited between when you got to it and Rosey got to it... thankfully for you!
But... thank you so much for the response! I guess I'm still deciding on the distance/intimacy for the narrative and trying to figure out whether the drugs or the pain or the panic or the confusion has dominance. I think the main solution is to write onward!
Thank you!
To be honest: I found this insufferably annoying.
Repetition. Cat fights (looking designated). Broken up sentences like I just wrote for, what, two pages? The style was beginning to get on my nerves bad, and there was no reason for the style after scene one I could see. Short sentences equal something that gives a feeling of panic, rushed pace, of desperation.
The character is calm. That is my main thing with this whole thing. Maybe he's so tired that he's calm by default? I have no idea, but I certainly was getting tired of that style at the end. Was it the anaesthetic? Just. Please. A reason for the panic and the style in general before I get so much of these pointless short sentences that we can't get anything about the character, the situation. Don't forget that, despite this style, you still have to put in all the lovely things that make a story flow along nicely. I like to feel like I'm in the water, not watching the whole thing happen from a helicopter.
And the cat fights. I skipped that whole section because it screamed "set up". They know he doesn't speak their language. They probably put the restraints on him. I thought they'd have finally brought in a translator so we could put an end to this static situation and repetitive actions. Three scenes with an identical end, for an identical reason. They execute the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I get the point how it illustrates miscommunications are nasty. But for those of us who deal with annoying miscommunication every day... this was a bit much.
Summarize this stuff so we don't live through pointless short sentences and the same action over and over and over. Cut the cat fights, especially when the person offering the water should already know he's restrained (it just makes the group look heartless and flat. He's already bashing them for not speaking his language, and how dense these characters are makes them look completely idiotic).
Just. Please. I could see this whole thing as one scene (the first one. That was fine) and the rest as a summary until something can actually happen. You'd get the same effect.
Hope this helps. Drop me a line if you have any questions/comments.
~Rosey
<333333
You're awesome