Questions for Greg
Welcome to Wednesday and another Indies Unlimited flash fiction challenge. To catch any new readers up: on Saturdays Indies Unlimited gives out a picture and word prompt for a story. Participants have 250 words to create a story based on the prompts and until Tuesday to post it to the IU site. After going through a stringent process to ensure prompts meet the criteria, the votes are opened on Wednesdays for readers to say which story they like best.
In case you didn’t catch on with this process, the picture and the first portion of this story are the prompts. My portion of the story is roughly the last 250 words. And so that brings us to this week’s story. I could ramble on but the story is the important piece to check out.
Questions for Greg
Adrift on what felt like a sea of cotton, Greg was oblivious to everything around him. He could not move. He could not think.
photo by K. S. Brooks
He heard a soothing female voice speaking words that made no sense. His brain could not keep up.
With great effort, he mentally swam upward to the surface – toward a light. He opened his eyes. Everything was blurry.
He could see the doctor looming over him. Then he remembered it wasn’t a doctor. The pain came again. The pleasant female voice spoke once more, “Where is the microchip, Greg?”…
It took everything he had to keep his mouth shut. But he knew and his resolve to keep it secret and safe slipped away with every jolt of the battery cables. The metal barbs had been jammed into the flesh of his forearms.
“I’ve grown tired of this.” A new voice, masculine and cool, the man stood behind Greg’s torturer, in the shadows. “Finish him off.”
The words closed the lid on his coffin. “I’ll talk,” he said. “I know where the micro chip is buried.”
Before he could say another word the cable fell onto the battery terminal. Searing fire ripped through Greg’s body. “Oops, the cable must have slipped.” She giggled as she pulled it away again.
“Let the man talk, Cheery,” the man said.
Greg fought for breath as his nerves jerked back to normalcy his mind raced for a good enough story to turn this around. “She never told you about that night did she?”
Cheery reached out to drop the wire on the terminal again, but this time the man grabbed her wrist and held her back. “What night?”
“I gave it to Cheery a week ago,” Greg said. “She’s been hiding it from you all this time.”
“You bastard,” she said. She dropped the wire on the terminal as she jammed her elbow into the man’s abdomen. In her rush to the door she didn’t see the .38 the man pulled from shoulder holster. The bullet that ripped through her shoulder stopped her cold.
***