#118.sector2

Death was something that Kelvin had never been good at facing, purely due to the fact that he never had to face it until now.

He never knew his grandparents, they had died long before he was born, so there hadn’t been any deaths in his family for ages. Even Intel, the family cat, was about twenty years old and healthier than any animal he had ever seen.

Death was not something Kelvin Greengrass knew how to handle, but now he was forced to handle it.

Walking in to the gym, his finger was still running its way along the bracelet on his wrist. He could barely take his hands off of it, afraid that if he did it would crumble to dust on the floor below him. He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings, was focusing more on Orion’s blood on his pants and Maeve’s blood on his shirt and the feeling that everything was going horribly, horribly wrong, so when the ball first hit him in the stomach, it took him by surprise.

His head snapped up, taking in the gym. It was then he looked at his arm and remembered reading about the dodgeballs. This was not a place he wanted to be in, but as he turned around to leave, he stared right in the eyes of the guardian mutt, letting him know that leaving was not an option.

Kelvin wanted to desperately step past it, leave this stupid place and hide away and catch his breath for a moment, but he had dealt with death enough in the past thirty minutes, and facing his own was something he didn’t think he could handle.

So, he turned around, walked back in to the gym, and lied down on the floor just as a computerized voice spoke.

“Five pushups.”

This was easy, Kelvin thought, and he flipped over onto his stomach, easily following the instructions and completing the task asked of him.

“Ten sit-ups.”

No break, Kelvin thought to himself with a sigh, but easily flipped over and began to complete the next task asked of him, digging his toes in to the gymnasium floor to keep himself grounded as he did them.

This went on for a while, the tasks remaining at a similar level of difficulty, until something in the computer voice switched, making it sound sterner and more serious and more dangerous.

“Three hundred sit-ups.”

Kelvin’s attention shifted to the ceiling. “Seriously?” he asked out loud, unclear if this was supposed to be some sort of joke.

The mutt standing by the door growled at him, as if to tell him that it wasn’t a joke, that this was mandatory, and that if he did not comply, there would be a bigger punishment waiting for him.

He sighed, rolled on to his back and closed his eyes, trying his hardest to focus on the task at hand as he began, counting out loud and under his breath.

One. Orion’s home.

Two. The number of people he had killed in the last hour.

Three. Maeve’s home.

It took all of his self-control to refrain from crying.

Four.

Five.