Chapter 24: How it all began and ended

                                    

                                          
Alli's POV:

                          
Crack! The tip of the lash slices her little brother's back one more time. His back just dripping in his blood. His screams sending chills down everyone's back in the town square.
                          
He screams one more time. 
                          
'Serves you right for not carrying out my orders.' Says Ma-Ma. 'Lucky you didn't get an execution'
                          
He screams again as the lash slices him open. The blood now landing in his dip-dyed hair. Tears staining his ocean blue eyes.
                          
I know it's coming and my muscles tense as much as they can. The knowing doesn't soften the blow. The whip is flown hard as it cuts through the air, spraying the fragments of his back everywhere, tipped with a drop of his blood I hear his  bone split into an untold number of fragments as I see his mind become inoperable. The pain takes him not far away, but deep inside himself to some primitive place that knows how to cope with the kind of pain that precedes death. His vision is blotched with violent colours that move and merge without pattern or design. The wall of pain still cripples .

                          
Daniel is in so much pain, his complexion is ashen. His creamy skin, sunken in tone to something so lifeless and cold that it scares me. His eyes close and he sucks himself in and into a deeper place to cope every time that whip claws at its back, as it draws another line on his skin, soon coloured in with his blood, scars that can never be erased. From time to time, his empty lifeless eyes look up from his encasement and I'm the first thing he sees. Even though the emptiness clouds his eyes, I can see the internal screams they contain.
                          
I've been in his dark place before. I felt more pain than I know a human body can handle and it breaks me to see him being hurt the same way.
                          
His eyes are almost frozen over like the surface of a winter puddle, robbing them of their warmth. It pains me knowing that really, there's an innocent man behind them, trying to look for a way out. Exhausted from the pain that his body holds and doesn't let go.
                          
He looks like he took a huge step back from life. I want to reach out and cover the scars that tell a different story. I want to rekindle the flame in his eyes that he once kept burning, but in an instant, those flames are fanned out by his uncried tears. 
                          
13 knew that the killer's youngest brother always kept a pain hidden inside, but now for the first time ever, it's visible on his face and I wish it would go away.
                          
The pain-it just arrives like a gift you never wanted.
                          
His pain-like an ocean of unknowable, unpredictable depths, swift currents with lurking beasts that hide underneath.
                          
How I just want to run to him and wrap my arms around the man and protect him from the torturous reality created by his sister.
                          
How can his older brother, Daryl I think, not do anything to help his own family?
                          
'I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!' He cries.
                          
'I know' She says as she orders the man whipping him to stop.
                          
A single tear escapes from my eye as I see the man in front of me crying in pain. With no-one to help him. No-one to save him.
                          
She giggles as she walks over to him.
                          
'Wow...that was a great show. Thanks for entertaining us' Her clan cackles as her brother looks up from the chained wrists and inhuman brutality.
                          
She walks on over back to her truck and speaks into her radio.
                          
'Troops. Prepare for the games.' The games are held again this year. But that's not what's troubling me right now.