Tunnel Walls

Chapter Eight

Artie leads me into an empty and dusty room, I sneeze as she flings me around again and tells me Puck’s the only one who uses it. Soon enough Puck herself arrives. The wall is completely stripped of whatever paper or plaster that had once been there, all I can see is old red brick. Before I can ask her what exactly the room is for, I notice a plastic table in my peripheral vision. It’s covered in weapons. Real ones; a stunning variety of real ones.

They’re terrifying, menacing, dangerous. Everything in my head tells me to run but at the same time my heart anchors me to the ground. It tells me to stare, to take a good look at what I want to bring the world to. What I want the next generation to grow up in.

I reach out and take the one that looks the safest, the most sturdy. It has a basic wooden block as a handle which was lovingly covered in leather and had somebody’s handprint worn into it. The blade itself is a simple shape, seemingly dull at the edges but obviously sharp at the tip. It feels alien and wrong in my hand, my stomach twists at the thought of using it. It twists even more when I realise that I could be using it against a person.

I place it back on the table and look back over to Puck where I can hear the sound of feet shuffling along the floor. She’d been busy. A soft wood board, nearly as high as the ceiling had been dragged from apparently nowhere,

“Pass me that can,” Puck says to me from the other side of the room. I look over to my right and see what she’s talking about so I pick it up and throw it over to her. It slips out of my hand slightly just before I throw it so it misses Puck’s hands by about a metre and hits the floor with a loud bang. 

“Maybe Puck should teach you how to throw.” Artie says with a grin.

“Sorry.” I say quickly and then lean against the wall.

She begins to repaint certain circles, crosses and patterns on it with a battered can of red spray paint. I notice the way she does it is different to how I’ve seen Artie do it who moves with the words and patterns, trying to fit her body around them. Puck just had to spray the paint and her body would automatically find the simplest path. Both Artie and I watch silently as she does this.

When Puck gets to the table she picks up a large knife and turns towards the large wooden board at the end of the room, she throws it. It spins through the air, the long blade reflecting the dull light spilling from the half-broken bulb above my head. It goes right into the centre of the board, shaking as it pierces the wooden surface where there’s no marking at all. It was obvious that was exactly where she intended it to hit. She then picks up the knife I was holding earlier and I don’t fail to notice that the grip fits perfectly into her hand, the print on the leather must be hers. She looks at me and cocks her eyebrow, goading me, and demonstrates throwing the knife. “You ready?” she asks me. I nod in reply. 

“So,” I say as the knife rams into the softwood board against the wall. “When did you learn to throw knives?”

“When I came,” Her’s hits right in the centre of the board and the handle shakes with the force, “Zed taught me.” She throws another one, harder than before and it misses the red cross in the top left corner by about two inches. “Damn it.” She says angrily. I’m a little bit surprised that she actually replied to my question, up until now we’ve been in almost complete silence.

She pulls another knife off the table, this one is much older and more battered than the rest. She bends her wrist back slightly and lets the knife slip from her hand at the right angle so it hurtles towards the target, spinning in quick circles until it hits the wood and makes a splintering sound. She gestures me to throw.

I pull one up from the table. I feel its weight in my hand. The cool handle sits nicely in my palm and I copy the motion that Puck did; I bend my wrist back towards my forearm and push my weight back onto my right foot then swing my arm as I move my weight, letting it go only when my arm is straight out in front of me. I watch it as it spins towards the target and hits the board right next to Puck’s last knife. I grin, that was my best throw yet. She walks over to the board and yanks out the knives then give me back the one I threw. “Keep hold of this, it might be useful someday.” I nod, she’s probably right.