Divided Attention

Chapter 2: Sudden Silence

            Even though the halls of the prison stank with orc perfume, they were surprisingly empty.

            Some rats scuttled across the floors, squeaked in alarm and bolted. The people in the cells that we passed didn’t move. I quickly learned to not look at them though. As I passed one, I glanced at the corpse of a person who might’ve been young, but it was impossible to tell. Skin gave way to pearly white bones that, if I didn’t know better, might’ve been pretty enough to work as jewelry.

            The last time I looked into a cell I saw a little girl, freshly dead. She looked like she had been starved, and she laid in the arms of a skeleton, who might’ve been a parent or guardian. But there were no eyes. There were maggots eating them, but not completely through them.

            I soon realized that, after passing enough cells and wanting to physically take off my nose, that the smells that I had smelt in my own cell were not that of an orc, but that of all of the dead bodies. There were a lot of people in the prison complex, yet no one seemed to be alive. There were skeletons, half rotten bodies, and freshly dead bodies.

How long have these people been here? All of these lives were wasted because of something that the king did. How much of this was happening to the other kingdoms. That’s when I realized that I didn’t actually know what was happening in my kingdom, much less the other ones. I had just been in the farms, trying to save my family as best as I could.

            I decided to, like I did with the inside of the kingdom walls, to breathe through my mouth and cut off the smells to my nose. Kitty, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have the same idea. She looked like she was going to hurl, as well as looking absolutely devastated. Her face couldn’t seem to settle on a constant emotion. It kept going from disgust, anguish, fury, and terror, then repeated the cycle. I thought I even caught a bit of envy in her eyes.

            “Who would do this kind of thing?” she choked out.

            “Really corrupted people,” I answered, trying to ignore the sounds of rats feeding on my right.

            Kitty gave a small sob, then kept walking

Then, up ahead, the straight, long hall turned to the right. My eyes narrowed, looking at the turn cautiously. But when I slowed down and quieted my steps to look around it, there was no one, just a door and some stairs about twenty feet away

“Why is there no one here? We haven’t seen anyone but the dead.”

“I don’t know,” Kitty admitted. “But I don’t like it.”

            Maki growled at my side. I don’t like it either.

            I looked down at him. “What are you sensing?”

            Not sense. Smell.

            “What are you smelling?”

            No humans.

            Kitty knitted her eyebrows. “How far away can he smell?”

            “Depends on the environment.”

            And for this environment, I should be able to smell a long ways away. Even with all of the dead bodies, sometimes I can pick out individual smells. But up ahead, even when we’re in the Human Kingdom, I smell no humans.

            I gulped. It’s always handy knowing that you’re in a place that should be stinking of humans, but isn’t. I was feeling really assured right then. But, no matter how I felt, I knew that we needed to get out of here, or we would probably end up like the others. So, with Kitty and Maki behind me, we stalked our way up the stairs and to the door.