Killer Empire

Chapter 02

Once they were sure that no one else was out there listening in on their conversation, all four bodies simultaneously relaxed.

"Travis, please, no," the girl pleaded, anguish clear in her voice.

"You're going to get us into trouble again, Travis," a new voice piped up, another that was too young for such suffering.

"Better than being a coward," the boy, Travis, spat out in reply.

He shook off two pairs of hands that kept hold of him, wiggling his way out of their grip and away from the shadows. When the light from the outside hit the high points of his face, Devora could begin to make out his features even in the subtle light. He looked no more than 16-years-old, true to her original assumption based on his voice alone. A little on the scrawnier side, he looked like he had seen some rough days for his face was decorated with scratches and bruises that came in more than one color. Those eyes of his had definitely known fear; they were laced with them. However, those weak emotions disappeared as quickly as they came.

"I don't know where we are, exactly. My guess, however, would be somewhere near the border. I'm Travis," he introduced, placing a hand against his chest as he offered his name. "These are my sisters, Leah and Tammy."

A pause followed his words followed by a click of Travis's tongue. He reached back into the dark, tugging at two slim wrists to reveal his younger sisters. Two girls slipped out from the shadows, one maybe fourteen or fifteen-years-old at best and the other most certainly not a day past six-years-old. The three siblings were young and Devora had no doubt that everyone in the room at that moment wasn't too far off in age. They were all still children that were stolen off the streets and brought here unwillingly.

The older girl pulled her hands out of Travis's grip, rubbing at her wrists in frustration. Under the dim light, Devora still caught a faint hint of red. The boy's grip wasn't strong, as far as Devora could tell. Despite that, the young pre-teen's skin still bruised, red as an apple.

"That hurt," she hissed, scowling at her older brother venomously.

It was only then had her brother noticed her scarlet wrist. He bit on his bottom lip sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his head. "Sorry, Leah," he apologized.

Huffing, Leah neither rejected nor accepted Travis's apology. She turned back to glance at Devora, her body slanting away, eyes never focused on the older girl for more than a second at a time.

"They grabbed us off the streets. We were waiting for our parents," she muttered under her breath. She gestured for the youngest of the three siblings to come over, opening her arms to receive the little girl before holding her tightly in her embrace.

'If the older one was Leah, the younger sister must be Tammy,' Devora thought to herself.

"They came out of nowhere. Knocked us all unconscious and brought us here. We weren't the first children to be brought here, though. There were already a few others when we came to," Travis finished, holding onto Tammy's outreached hand.

At his words, a few of the other captives ventured out of the dark. Devora caught sight of faces both battered and bruised, some even bloodied. There were children of all ages, the youngest maybe around four or five-years-old, the oldest sixteen or seventeen, just like herself. With each person she counted, Devora's breath grew more and more ragged. The walls of their cage seemed to be closing in on her, coming closer and closer as the numbers grew from under ten children to over twenty. She stopped counting after that, mainly because all she could see were glowing eyes that stared back at her from within the shadows, like beasts waiting for the right time to pounce on injured prey.