writing adventure 29- Silence (prologue)

     It started small, his attack against the regime. He hadn't even been thinking of taking it on, really. He had just been there, had just seen the Training Center for the first time, just needed to say something to make it more real in his confused and frightened mind.
     He and his classmates (he was only fifteen at the time, a boy in a time where men lived to be over a hundred) had just been paraded around the center of the city on a field trip no one cared about. Thinking himself safe, Abbot turned to one of the others cramped beside him and said, "I think they're training us to be sheep. Look, they're leading us to slaughter right now!"
     They were supposed to giggle quietly, like they usually did when he said something funny. Instead, the girl (he'll never remember her name, but that face is seared into his memory until he dies in the same place he said those first words) turned and opened her eyes as wide as possible. She was afraid. His smile quickly faded, and he immediately looked around at the Training Center guards.
     One already had him by the arm. "Abbot Preacher," the looming figure stated, the gravelly voice solidifying Abbot's fear, "you need to come with me." He complied and let the man take him behind the stage and away from the crowd.
     (This is the first moment Abbot believes whole-heartedly he is going to die for something he said.)
     The guard shoved roughly and told him, "You will never speak ill of your homeland again. Do you understand?"
     Abbot's fear increased exponentially, but he was a boy of fifteen and so he held his ground. "It was a joke. This country has survived worse."
     The guard's helmet came off then, and it revealed a scar on the left side of his face, running from the top of his head down to his chin. Abbot sobered once again. "You're right," the guard said. "And I've survived a lot more than some dumb kid trying to prove something."
     "I was just saying what I thought. You're telling me we can't even think for ourselves? How are we supposed to be human if we can't think for ourselves?" (Funny how his mind jumped to this argument, that they needed to be human, when seconds before his death he realizes that this meaning of the word doesn't exist anymore.)
     The guard smiled at him. Abbot subconsciously shied away from the giant and towards the wooden stage. Even as he looked frantically around him, he knew there was no one there to save him, and, even if there were, they wouldn't hesitate to run the opposite direction.
     "Oh, you can think whatever you like. Anarchy, violence, the world falling around you in the shadow of your iron fist. It's when you say it out loud, when you put those thoughts into someone else's head, that's when I'll hunt you down. Just say one more thing, and I'll hang you from that rope."
     Something glazed over in the boy's heart at that moment. (Something that could have kept him alive, something that could have given him years of happiness and life.) The guard knew this had happened as well, and added to his speech, "I have a feeling this won't be the last time you're here, so just wait and see. You can talk all you want, but you can't cover up the silence."
     (Maybe if Abbot had believed that guard, he would have lived, but fifteen year old boys don't believe anyone, and Abbot died at the hands of that same guard only ten years later.)