Free Story: "Hostage"

Here's another addition of what Chris found while cleaning up some files. I wrote this flash fiction piece in 2008. Enjoy!

"Hostage"

In an isolated cellar chamber, the man in black told me, “You can either have the photograph or the handgun.”  Before me lay those two items on a table, two guards by the only door, and an undersized wooden chair that I was once strapped to.

            “Either way I’m dead, right?” I asked. 

            “That depends.  A gun seems the most useful.  The picture can only hurt you more.”

            I remembered the suffering I faced the minute I snapped a photograph of the man’s trade.  He was smuggling illegal weaponry to average citizens in an abandoned factory. 

            “Or, it can hurt you,” I muttered.  The gun’s probably empty, too, I thought to myself.

            “Don’t count on it,” the man in black replied.  “You’ll never make it out of here alive.”

            “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  I mocked the man with my tone.

            “But a gun is worth complete silence.  Choose.”

            Blankly, I stared at the two choices before me for several moments.  If I had gone with my instincts, I would have snagged the photograph and ran for my life.  However, I knew that killing the guards was my only way out of the cellar chamber. 

            As the man in black glared at me, I began to shake and sweat.  My palms were moist with trepidation, and I further feared, that when I went for the gun, it would slip right out of my hand.  Then where would I have been?  Dead. 

            I came to a decision.  Faster than a blink, I reached out and snagged the photograph.  As preconceived, I sprinted for the only door out; meanwhile, the man in black used the gun to fire wild rounds at me. 

            Most of the bullets missed me as I neared the guards.  One shot, though, grazed my right shoulder, which I favored with my left hand.  I kept the photograph near my chest.

            Click, click.  The man in black’s handgun ran out of bullets. 

            My immediate sense of relief blew away with the sound of the guards arming themselves with their own pistols.  At their first fires, I ducked.

            Somehow, I managed to survive.  Yet, I still felt like a dead man.  Knowing that I would never make it out unscathed, I decided to act like a hero.  Swerving around the guard on the left side of the door, I was able throw my good shoulder down into his knee. 

            Echoing as the metal smacked the ground, I saw the pistol fall just before the guard.  Quickly, I reached for the gun, and so did he.

            Underneath the spray of bullets from the other guard and between the grasp of the guard on the ground, I struggled to maintain possession of the gun.  Once I felt secure enough to do so, I hopped up to my feet and began to fire at both of the guards, who fell to ground after a few misfires.

            I had no intention of killing them.  They were just hired muscle, but I had escape in order to turn in the photograph.

            As I started to feel confident, something struck me in the neck.


***

February was bitter cold; snow buried most of the land.  Angry and in a neck brace, I watched as a man in blue walked up a stage and approached the lectern.  A plaque was placed in his hands by a chief officer for turning in evidence of an illegal gun trade.

            At that moment I began to appreciate the power of knowledge.  There was a time when artillery solved problems and was synonymous with power.  Now a time had come where intelligence and technology proved superior. 

            While the determinants of supremacy had changed throughout time, man had not.  At least, that’s what I thought as I watched my ex-partner take the glory of my efforts on stage.

  

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