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Description
CHAPTER III

The smell of operational exhaust pipes and tantalizing eucalyptus smelling salts grazed Darren's nostrils. Instantly, his eyes opened to witness a new place, a new world to him, though his mind had a delay reaction and the first few seconds of vision were disorienting and inexpressible. Though what he heard was expressible, might to go as far as saying it was distinct, for once he heard that thick Texan accent, speaking in such a way that the sarcasm could be cut with a butter knife; he knew exactly who it was, despite his riotous appearance.
"C'mon sleeping beauty, wake up! I ain't got all day!" said the man.
Slowly and with ease, Darren attempted to blink several times, each endeavor made his vision marginally clearer. Once it became as clear as a crystal, he decided to look towards the stranger, who just minutes ago he knew him as his attacker. Minutes? How can he determine that it had been minutes after he had been hurled away in the truck? It could have been an hour, or several interloping hours as far as he knew. Though as far as his body felt, it had only been seconds, at the very most a minute.
"Ah good, at least I won't have to get the ol' Billy club. Now let me get your arms free and you can say 'hi' to the others." said the man. Others? Once again, a single word drifted and rebounded in Darren's open mind. There were others that were attacked? Are we held hostage? If so, who put them up to doing such a thing, and why? These questions spread into a large tree of many others, with each branch being a newly formed question and the starting seed being the word 'others'.
The man took a pocket sized, recently sharpened, knife blade and cut the bisque shaded thread of twine that bound Darren's wrists together. It was perplexing, all those fading seconds, minutes, hours, however long he had been held captive in the back of the roaring Renault Magnum and he had never felt the twine being tied to his wrists, let alone feel the irritating follicles collide with his bare skin. Then again, his entire body, especially his head, still felt an underlying feeling of numbness from the 2x4, so maybe that was the answer to his own question.
As Darren continued to contemplate and observe his new surroundings, he felt the man's thickset knuckles grip the neck of his cinereous shaded t-shirt and pull him closer.
"Now remember, be good." said the man. His voice now changed, it was higher pitched and strangely a sentence that was not alcohol scented. It was as if he was imitating a nervous single mother that was sending his little boy to school for the first time. To make it more obvious, the man pressed his tongue against his thumb, licked it, and tried to remove the creases he had made on his shirt seconds earlier.
Then the man gave Darren a push from his right shoulder and let him scramble forward. To Darren, the push was predictable, but in another sense it was unpredictable, in the way that he did not know how hard or how long the man will wait to execute it. Darren's constant ambling eventually came to an end when he rammed his chest into the forearm of someone new. The hit caused Darren to spring backward and have his the top side of his pack to meet the pavement below. The rest of the new faces circled around him and glared at him. To be exact, there were five of them, they were just like him, teenagers. He could estimate they were teenagers from the size of their bodies and what he saw of their facial features. The one he ran into was a girl, she had a slender body but Darren could not see her face due to the lack of light in this given perspective. The ten eyes continued to glare, not even considering the opportunity of blinking. Darren did his best to keep eye contact with the crowd that formed a cloud around him and he forced himself to smile. It was discernibly fake, though his crass facial expression gave him the hope that it knocked out the horrendous first impression; he hoped it knocked it out cold and spit in its eye to make it come back for more. He followed it up with the straightening and zipping of his fleece jacket, so that the independent, dark bondi shaded fibers of the jacket were consistent with his broad shoulders, and that the crowd did not have to see his creased undershirt. It was those types of actions that were rare and conventional actions when it came from a teenager like him. It was those types of actions that delivered a right hook to his sense of embarrassment. However, the eyes continued to stare at him, their irises remained to be locked on every move he made.
Darren made the new decision to swallow his current self-pity and stand up with the rest of them, and when he rose, he was surprised to see that everyone else decided to assemble as well, with one person's shoulders rubbing against the shoulders of another. This made Darren one part of a structured and meticulous single file line. While in this orderly fashion, Darren took the opportunity to observe at his surroundings a second time, and within a minute, the correct name leaped into his consciousness, like a rusty spring on a bedspread that had the nerve to be tangled in its own ringlets until this very moment.
It was then that he realized that he was in a subway station, and it was a subway station that looked inhospitable to say the least. Underneath the tracks, there were only a handful of pebbles or shreds of gravel, let alone any at all, which gave the appearance that only wisps of air stood in-between the individual track pieces. There were gears, notches and winches on the corners of the station that operated concealed machinery that only Darren's imagination could comprehend. Every few seconds, a small slit in the gears would let out a gust of umber shaded fog that was relatively unnoticeable. There were no random instances of graffiti or any indication of Northeast coast gang signs. In several places, including the place Darren had his russet shaded, zuriick leather shoes, the painted lines on the edge of the cement walkway was chipped. With that said, it appeared to be more modernized and much larger than any station he had ever seen. At least it was better than any he had seen back home. If this really was his home, Darren still had to contemplate on that. A sudden shout from the man in front of him stopped his curious examinations.
"All right, listen up! As much as I love you'se adoring company, I can't let you'se stay here for much longer. I took a fifteen hour shift trying to round all of you'se up and I don't get paid by the hour. Now then, let me tell why you'se are all here. Some of you'se might already know, but then again I don't have any gold stars to give out to you'se gifted types so I will announce it to everybody." said the man. The sarcasm in his voice was almost too much for Darren to handle.
"Whether it was your parent's decision, or you decided it for yourself, you were each assigned here to handle you'se…let's just say…to handle you'se little 'problem' that might not have been apparent until a week ago, or you might have had it since you'se were born. Yeah, I'll go with that, that sounds about right. Now, the good part, the tram will come any minute now, when it comes, you just sit yourself right down on one of those leather upholstery seats and let it do the rest. You'll be arriving at Dr. Lauburn's by sunrise, he'll take care of everything." said the man.
Dr. Lauburn? Sunrise? Darren could see that the others were confused as well, flipping their heads from side to side in a somewhat desperate attempt to obtain the answer. Darren would have done something like that, if he didn't make a fool of himself already. The boy next to him took a second of his time to look at Darren. The boy had bright, shamrock shaded irises that looked at Darren with a glimmering sense of optimism.
"I got nothing." said Darren. When he said those words, the boy's eyes seeped deeper into their slits and the majority of the glimmer was gone; with the exception being the exposure from the disc-shaped ceiling light that hung directly above his head. There was no hope in that shine. Darren looked directly upwards towards a multi-paned window and saw that the sun was making its descent into the hills across from the station. The curtain of the night was not too far behind it. Before he could look around any more, he heard the man chime in one more time.
"Oh, and seeing as though we will probably never meet each other again, I might as well tell you'se who I am." said the man. The man placed both of his arms behind his back, making them form a V shape. From that angle, when his arms were strained like that, it looked as if his arms were half muscle half corpulent eyesores.
"I'm Jenkinson, Dr. Lauburn's pot-bellied pig." said the man. At this point Darren actually formed the outlines of a smile, though he refused to force it upon himself again. He thought that the name Jenkinson fit the man harmoniously. His wall of attention was broken as he heard the reverberating noise of the screeching of the metal tracks ahead of them. Darren tilted his head outward, and could see the tram facing their direction and slowly expanding in size. He could see the wheels rotating against the tracks in a rotated and slightly defective manner, leading to crisp, golden sparks to shoot out the ends as it pulled to a ear blistering halt. The sound of two identical winches echoed throughout the room as the passenger doors opened. The tram remained still, as if it was a whining child pointing at a colorfully (and sometimes downright psychedelically) packaged toy that stood up on any of the four to five shelves or the bargain bin; making all eyes draw attention to them. It wouldn't leave without them.
"All aboard." said Jenkinson. Darren stared at the entire contraption starting with the backside and making his way up towards the front, but when he got there, he noticed that there was no driver, let alone any form of operating or steering the mechanism at all. What was in its place was a box shaped, arsenic shaded, computer panel of sorts with periodically lit bulbs on the side.
"The tram is operated through artificial intelligence, technology ladies and gentlemen, don't ya just love it?" said Jenkinson. When he spoke, he cocked his head forward and curved his left eyebrow slightly as the last sentence slipped through, making the individual hairs that formed it curl up and down. It looked as almost as if a fleet of people on the side of a sports stadium where coordinating to do 'the wave'. The group, including Darren, remained silent and immobile.
"It's not going to leave without at least one of you on, and believe me if one of you runs I'll put you on there myself." said Jenkinson. Slowly and steadily, the group shifted on to the tram, their varicolored eyes made several glances to one another, as if it was their form of a greeting to one another. Darren was the last one to get on, he was still trying to swallow everything that had been thrown at him. Though, within a minute he gracefully made one stroke with his finger towards his right hand pocket, where the kitten fabric had laid down to sleep in solitude, and started to make his feet move towards the door. Before he could get both of his shoes in the doorway, Jenkinson put his hand on his left shoulder, though from that angle he couldn't tell which one it was.
"Hey Dorothy." said Jenkinson. Darren turned his gaze towards Jenkinson, though both his posture and eyes were littered with speculation, considering to even giving him the time of day after that insult.
"I'm sure as hell know you're not in Kansas anymore." said Jenkinson. With that, he gave him a gentle pat on the back and let the sliding doors come back together as a whole, making a wall between Darren and the rest of the world.

Description
CHAPTER III

The smell of operational exhaust pipes and tantalizing eucalyptus smelling salts grazed Darren's nostrils. Instantly, his eyes opened to witness a new place, a new world to him, though his mind had a delay reaction and the first few seconds of vision were disorienting and inexpressible. Though what he heard was expressible, might to go as far as saying it was distinct, for once he heard that thick Texan accent, speaking in such a way that the sarcasm could be cut with a butter knife; he knew exactly who it was, despite his riotous appearance.
"C'mon sleeping beauty, wake up! I ain't got all day!" said the man.
Slowly and with ease, Darren attempted to blink several times, each endeavor made his vision marginally clearer. Once it became as clear as a crystal, he decided to look towards the stranger, who just minutes ago he knew him as his attacker. Minutes? How can he determine that it had been minutes after he had been hurled away in the truck? It could have been an hour, or several interloping hours as far as he knew. Though as far as his body felt, it had only been seconds, at the very most a minute.
"Ah good, at least I won't have to get the ol' Billy club. Now let me get your arms free and you can say 'hi' to the others." said the man. Others? Once again, a single word drifted and rebounded in Darren's open mind. There were others that were attacked? Are we held hostage? If so, who put them up to doing such a thing, and why? These questions spread into a large tree of many others, with each branch being a newly formed question and the starting seed being the word 'others'.
The man took a pocket sized, recently sharpened, knife blade and cut the bisque shaded thread of twine that bound Darren's wrists together. It was perplexing, all those fading seconds, minutes, hours, however long he had been held captive in the back of the roaring Renault Magnum and he had never felt the twine being tied to his wrists, let alone feel the irritating follicles collide with his bare skin. Then again, his entire body, especially his head, still felt an underlying feeling of numbness from the 2x4, so maybe that was the answer to his own question.
As Darren continued to contemplate and observe his new surroundings, he felt the man's thickset knuckles grip the neck of his cinereous shaded t-shirt and pull him closer.
"Now remember, be good." said the man. His voice now changed, it was higher pitched and strangely a sentence that was not alcohol scented. It was as if he was imitating a nervous single mother that was sending his little boy to school for the first time. To make it more obvious, the man pressed his tongue against his thumb, licked it, and tried to remove the creases he had made on his shirt seconds earlier.
Then the man gave Darren a push from his right shoulder and let him scramble forward. To Darren, the push was predictable, but in another sense it was unpredictable, in the way that he did not know how hard or how long the man will wait to execute it. Darren's constant ambling eventually came to an end when he rammed his chest into the forearm of someone new. The hit caused Darren to spring backward and have his the top side of his pack to meet the pavement below. The rest of the new faces circled around him and glared at him. To be exact, there were five of them, they were just like him, teenagers. He could estimate they were teenagers from the size of their bodies and what he saw of their facial features. The one he ran into was a girl, she had a slender body but Darren could not see her face due to the lack of light in this given perspective. The ten eyes continued to glare, not even considering the opportunity of blinking. Darren did his best to keep eye contact with the crowd that formed a cloud around him and he forced himself to smile. It was discernibly fake, though his crass facial expression gave him the hope that it knocked out the horrendous first impression; he hoped it knocked it out cold and spit in its eye to make it come back for more. He followed it up with the straightening and zipping of his fleece jacket, so that the independent, dark bondi shaded fibers of the jacket were consistent with his broad shoulders, and that the crowd did not have to see his creased undershirt. It was those types of actions that were rare and conventional actions when it came from a teenager like him. It was those types of actions that delivered a right hook to his sense of embarrassment. However, the eyes continued to stare at him, their irises remained to be locked on every move he made.
Darren made the new decision to swallow his current self-pity and stand up with the rest of them, and when he rose, he was surprised to see that everyone else decided to assemble as well, with one person's shoulders rubbing against the shoulders of another. This made Darren one part of a structured and meticulous single file line. While in this orderly fashion, Darren took the opportunity to observe at his surroundings a second time, and within a minute, the correct name leaped into his consciousness, like a rusty spring on a bedspread that had the nerve to be tangled in its own ringlets until this very moment.
It was then that he realized that he was in a subway station, and it was a subway station that looked inhospitable to say the least. Underneath the tracks, there were only a handful of pebbles or shreds of gravel, let alone any at all, which gave the appearance that only wisps of air stood in-between the individual track pieces. There were gears, notches and winches on the corners of the station that operated concealed machinery that only Darren's imagination could comprehend. Every few seconds, a small slit in the gears would let out a gust of umber shaded fog that was relatively unnoticeable. There were no random instances of graffiti or any indication of Northeast coast gang signs. In several places, including the place Darren had his russet shaded, zuriick leather shoes, the painted lines on the edge of the cement walkway was chipped. With that said, it appeared to be more modernized and much larger than any station he had ever seen. At least it was better than any he had seen back home. If this really was his home, Darren still had to contemplate on that. A sudden shout from the man in front of him stopped his curious examinations.
"All right, listen up! As much as I love you'se adoring company, I can't let you'se stay here for much longer. I took a fifteen hour shift trying to round all of you'se up and I don't get paid by the hour. Now then, let me tell why you'se are all here. Some of you'se might already know, but then again I don't have any gold stars to give out to you'se gifted types so I will announce it to everybody." said the man. The sarcasm in his voice was almost too much for Darren to handle.
"Whether it was your parent's decision, or you decided it for yourself, you were each assigned here to handle you'se…let's just say…to handle you'se little 'problem' that might not have been apparent until a week ago, or you might have had it since you'se were born. Yeah, I'll go with that, that sounds about right. Now, the good part, the tram will come any minute now, when it comes, you just sit yourself right down on one of those leather upholstery seats and let it do the rest. You'll be arriving at Dr. Lauburn's by sunrise, he'll take care of everything." said the man.
Dr. Lauburn? Sunrise? Darren could see that the others were confused as well, flipping their heads from side to side in a somewhat desperate attempt to obtain the answer. Darren would have done something like that, if he didn't make a fool of himself already. The boy next to him took a second of his time to look at Darren. The boy had bright, shamrock shaded irises that looked at Darren with a glimmering sense of optimism.
"I got nothing." said Darren. When he said those words, the boy's eyes seeped deeper into their slits and the majority of the glimmer was gone; with the exception being the exposure from the disc-shaped ceiling light that hung directly above his head. There was no hope in that shine. Darren looked directly upwards towards a multi-paned window and saw that the sun was making its descent into the hills across from the station. The curtain of the night was not too far behind it. Before he could look around any more, he heard the man chime in one more time.
"Oh, and seeing as though we will probably never meet each other again, I might as well tell you'se who I am." said the man. The man placed both of his arms behind his back, making them form a V shape. From that angle, when his arms were strained like that, it looked as if his arms were half muscle half corpulent eyesores.
"I'm Jenkinson, Dr. Lauburn's pot-bellied pig." said the man. At this point Darren actually formed the outlines of a smile, though he refused to force it upon himself again. He thought that the name Jenkinson fit the man harmoniously. His wall of attention was broken as he heard the reverberating noise of the screeching of the metal tracks ahead of them. Darren tilted his head outward, and could see the tram facing their direction and slowly expanding in size. He could see the wheels rotating against the tracks in a rotated and slightly defective manner, leading to crisp, golden sparks to shoot out the ends as it pulled to a ear blistering halt. The sound of two identical winches echoed throughout the room as the passenger doors opened. The tram remained still, as if it was a whining child pointing at a colorfully (and sometimes downright psychedelically) packaged toy that stood up on any of the four to five shelves or the bargain bin; making all eyes draw attention to them. It wouldn't leave without them.
"All aboard." said Jenkinson. Darren stared at the entire contraption starting with the backside and making his way up towards the front, but when he got there, he noticed that there was no driver, let alone any form of operating or steering the mechanism at all. What was in its place was a box shaped, arsenic shaded, computer panel of sorts with periodically lit bulbs on the side.
"The tram is operated through artificial intelligence, technology ladies and gentlemen, don't ya just love it?" said Jenkinson. When he spoke, he cocked his head forward and curved his left eyebrow slightly as the last sentence slipped through, making the individual hairs that formed it curl up and down. It looked as almost as if a fleet of people on the side of a sports stadium where coordinating to do 'the wave'. The group, including Darren, remained silent and immobile.
"It's not going to leave without at least one of you on, and believe me if one of you runs I'll put you on there myself." said Jenkinson. Slowly and steadily, the group shifted on to the tram, their varicolored eyes made several glances to one another, as if it was their form of a greeting to one another. Darren was the last one to get on, he was still trying to swallow everything that had been thrown at him. Though, within a minute he gracefully made one stroke with his finger towards his right hand pocket, where the kitten fabric had laid down to sleep in solitude, and started to make his feet move towards the door. Before he could get both of his shoes in the doorway, Jenkinson put his hand on his left shoulder, though from that angle he couldn't tell which one it was.
"Hey Dorothy." said Jenkinson. Darren turned his gaze towards Jenkinson, though both his posture and eyes were littered with speculation, considering to even giving him the time of day after that insult.
"I'm sure as hell know you're not in Kansas anymore." said Jenkinson. With that, he gave him a gentle pat on the back and let the sliding doors come back together as a whole, making a wall between Darren and the rest of the world.