"Hey! Wake up." I slowly opened my eyes. A man stood there with a shovel in his hand. My hands were cuffed. "You'd wake up finally." he burns a cigar and turns to his left. "Boss, the kid."
My heartbeat rises. I couldn't recall when this happened to me. I hear the footsteps. A man entered wearing a coat, in scorching sunlight. As he closed in and blocked the light, I looked up. It was my elder brother. The man who left me and mother to join an extremist environmentalist faction.
"How are you, kiddo?" he bends his knee and settles down.
"Why would you care, rebel hero? And why am I here?" I say in a cold voice.
"You are here because I won. I am sorry mother had to go through all this."
"What do you mean ---" I sense something in my left. It was huge bag shaped as if a human was kept in it. My eyes widen and my breath fails me. Tears surround my eyeball. Crushing my teeth, I yell at the top of my lungs, "What did you do?"
"It was a mistake. Our mother was kind and rational, but she worked for a company which wasn't. She was sacrificed for a great cause." He stood up. I looked at my surroundings. A pit was dug a few metres from me.
"Why? Why would you go that far? Just to prove to some egoist capitalist that they are destroying the environment." I sob. I could barely sit with all this pain in my heart.
"Our faction destroyed Bozon. The company is extinct now. We planned various bombings. And everything got executed perfectly. The building in which mother worked was the headquarters. I'm sorry but the egoists sitting up there are scared. And, the world can now be a better place. News people call us terrorists, but the locals call us the revolutionaries. This is greater than the French Revolution. Can't you feel it?" He is overjoyed yet he can't see me in the eye. He stands facing his back towards me. He knows that he isn't the absolute winner in this game.
"What you did to mother is not greater than our father?" I say, clean and harsh.
He turns towards me. His eyes red and his face stretched with impulse. He grabs me from my collar and his spit falls on my face, "You dare compare me with that piece of shit. All he could do was get drunk and beat mother and us. You compare me, the forefather of the Free Era with a damn scum who would take out his pent-up office anger on his family."
"He fell from a bridge and drowned in the river. Right? Or did he jump intentionally, because he felt guilty." I say staring back at him. "Will you able to live with the fact that you killed your very own mother whom you soared to protect?"
He eyes watered. His lips shivered as he bent down crying. His grip on my collar felt loose. I started sobbing as well. His took control of himself, took a deep breath, released my collar and stood up. He tilted towards his goon, "Bury her. Properly. And give me that fucking knife."
His goon nodded and handed him a Kukri. Then his goon grabbed his gun and locked into me from afar. My brother moved me forward before cutting the wire binding my hands. He said softly, "This is Paradise. There is nobody who knows you or nobody who knows me. People come here to forget their past sins and get a fresh start. You move through this barren land and in a kilometre or two, you will find the village. Marry. Make love. Do whatever you want, kiddo. Just be happy."
"What about you? Where will you go? You can have a new life too." I said.
"I can't. I'm the villain of this story. I'm the head of an organisation that is bringing peace to the world. This peace comes at a cost and I will have to pay it." My wires are cut. His goon points his gun straight to me. I see mother for one last time and start moving. If the goon wasn't present, I would've beaten my brother to a pulp.
But the tragedy is done. The world is supposedly a better place. And I am in Paradise.
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