A Faint Echo

John stopped walking, thrusting his arm out to block me from moving forward, his head raised slightly. “What was that?” he asked me in a hushed tone.

I stopped moving and listened to the air around me. The morning air was lightly soaring through the path between two sections of flats. A bird sang in the distance. The occasional person’s voice was muffled through the walls of a nearby shelter—nothing out of the ordinary. I turned so I was facing John.

“Hear what?” I questioned.

He raised his hand, his index finger pointing up. His eyes scanned the horizon of the path, searching for a visible extension of the sound that he thought he had heard. “Wait for it,” he instructed.

I waited and listened, all the while thinking that the gate was about ten minutes away and that we were going to be late because John’s sixth sense told him a cat was nearby mewing for milk or something foolhardy like that.

wham

John whipped his head toward me. “That! Did you hear that?” he whispered, as if whatever made the sound would fly away if it heard him.

I nodded. “It sounds like someone hitting a hammer against a sheet of loose metal. So what?”

John tilted his head, giving me a you-should-know-better expression. “Metal being worked on outside of the Factory?”

John was right. Metal is rarely allowed off the Factory grounds, let alone to be worked on without the proper tools and supervision. There was something odd about this. I pointed toward one of the turnoffs the path was offering. “It sounded like it came from this way.”

The path that I was pointing toward eventually led out into the market square and the houses that survived the war. Only the rich could afford to pay the town the amount of money required to live in that type of house. Squinting down the way, trying to see if I could see what was going on, I searched for reasons why someone would be beating on a piece of metal outside of the Factory grounds. Perhaps one of the shops needed a new wall, and some workers were repairing it. But the Factory hadn’t started up yet, so there wouldn’t be anyone working.

“Should we go see?” I asked my friend.

John chewed lightly on his lower lip, thinking over the options. With a nod, he said, “I’ll go. You get to work. No reason why we should both get into trouble.”

John took a deep breath and started trudging down the side path toward the strange sound and away from the Factory. I stood where I was, watching John grow smaller and smaller at each step, trying to work myself out of the moral dilemma that I was facing. Should I actually leave John to figure it out and go to work or join up with him and risk being late? With a sharp exhale, realizing that this was probably a really stupid idea, I started after him.

After two quick turns, we were deep onto the trail and walking along a path that we had never traveled before. The flats grew in height as we walked, covering the path in deep morning shadows that occasionally blocked out the sun entirely from where we stood. John looked around and noticed that I was walking behind him. John nodded toward me, showing a hint of relief at seeing that I had decided to join up with him.

I raised my head toward the noise. John motioned that he heard it too. The noise was getting louder, so we were obviously getting closer. It was a man’s voice that came after the pounding of metal. The strange voice sounded like it was uttered through a cloth, mumbled and sore. John, slowly and cautiously, started walking forward again, stepping over his feet in a sidestep scissor motion, positioning his back against the wall of a nearby shelter as he moved.

Wham!

Both of our heads jerked up at the sound. The man that we heard gave out a wail of pain, followed by an eerie silence. John went into a sprint toward the sound, gravel kicking up from under his boots. I barely had time to react to John before he disappeared around a corner. Scrambling feet turned into a run in order to try to catch up to John, who was now a good length ahead of me. John was always a bit better at physical stuff, so it became a chore to keep him in sight as we weaved through the alleyway.

We could hear the scuffle more easily as we got closer. There were three distinct voices that I could separate from the echoes of noise—all male. One was gruff and obviously enjoying the torment that was ensuing. The second was higher pitched, egging on the turmoil. The third was older and easily identifiable as the victim. By this time, John was an entire length ahead of me, kicking wide so that he wouldn’t lose his momentum as he rounded the corners. It was all that I could do to catch a glimpse of the end of his shirt as he flew around the corner ahead of me. As I turned around the second corner, John was gone.

My breath was pumping out of my body hard; the blood was pounding inside my temples. It felt like my heart was a caged beast, banging against its prison for release. I could barely breathe in, taking the musty air into my lungs before forcing it out again in rhythm to my steps. My feet clumped unceremoniously on the ground now, leaving deep impressions in the dirt, reluctant to be yanked back into the air by my legs. Half collapsing against a back wall of a shelter, I turned the final corner at a slower pace and took a moment to take in what was happening.

The area was an old market hutch where grocers would sell food and baskets, which was usually found inside the business sector of town. Shelters surrounded the hutch, creating a mock arena, complete with alleyway entrances at each point of the compass. The arena was around forty or fifty feet across, giving plenty of room for the action occurring in the middle. By the looks of the walls on the shelters and the materials that they were made out of, we were just entering the rich section of town.

Two women were huddled in a corner; the older woman was trying to protect a younger girl, who was fighting against the older woman while attempting to enter the fray. A man who looked to be in his fifties was lying on the ground; his shirt and pants torn, and there was blood trickling out of his mouth. The man on the ground was struggling frantically to get to the two women in the corner. Three men were in the middle of the area standing over where the victim was scrambling, and that’s where I found John. John was wrestling with the biggest one, firmly entangling himself on the guy’s back. John raised his free hand into the air and would bring it down hard over and over again onto the head of the guy he was getting a piggyback ride from. The two other guys were trying to get a grip on John, desperately trying to pry him off of the big guy. The big guy was yelling at his cohorts: “Get this freak off of me!”

I recognized all of them. The first of the two goons was named Leon. He always went out of his way to treat everyone else like they were somehow inferior to him. Tall and skinny in frame, he made up for his stature with his mouth and wits. The second guy in the pack was named Ralph. He was the opposite of Leon—small, stout, and stupid. Thinking with his fists, Ralph grew up on the streets and became a force to be reckoned with. The two bruisers alone were enough of a reason to walk the other way, but it was the third, the one whom John was wrestling with, that made my blood run cold.