...And An Ending

[Sh4dE]

To answer the most important question concerning Program Version 44: Yes, Ulrich Stanley Astley did manage to recover his glasses. He had returned to the Church where he had previously bravely defended his honour against Derrick Thomson who had viciously attacked him back then. Stan’s expensive glasses were dirtied, but not broken, so he put them back onto his nose satisfied with the feeling of visual clarity he lacked for way too many hours and left the house of God with the feeling of soon finding non-physical clarity as well.

With that mystery unveiled, let’s move on to what happened after that. Stan wandered around the island, bloodied, tired and angry. He was angrier than ever, angrier than anybody else, he was Stangry. That anger suddenly died down as he saw the most scurille thing happening: Helicopters flying above him in the skies. Carefully, he hid himself from these unknown flying objects to observe the situations.

Despite him having hidden behind thick thicket, Stan could feel the wind blowing against his face caused by the rotators of the helicopters as they landed. Out of these emerged armed men. What was happening?

They opened their mouths and the most unexpecting thing had happened:

They couldn’t speak English. Instead they had butchered every word, pronounced every vowel incredibly wrong and had a melody in their voices that made him mad. Stanley wanted to puke. From afar Stanley sniffed the sickening, repulsive smell of what he thought was how Britons stenched.

But what was more shocking was that people he knew were going to them.

How could his classmates be so naive? How could they? - Although, it made sense considering not everyone in his class was gifted an incredible amount of intelligence by God unlike Stan. Desperate Fools.

His classmates probably were dreaming of them being their rescuers with benign intentions. Romanticising the Brits after all the things they had done to their America. Stan retched out loud.

This drew the attention of the soldiers who spotted him and walked to him in an surprisingly peacefully way, without making him feel threatened. One of them had opened their mouth and something from his mouth came out that sounded like a variation of a greeting. Stan could not believe how one can pronounce “Hey” utterly wrong. It was amazing. After raising his eyebrows, he replied with a “Salutations.”

The second soldier pointed with the thumb at the chopper behind him and opened with mouth. For a short moment Stan had hopes of the person in front of him being able to speak like a human, but instead he babbled gibberish Stan tried his hardest to decode. Stan had no idea what exactly they had said, they could’ve talked about their mother being a goat for Christ’s sake, he wouldn’t know, but from the gesture alone it was extremely clear they had invited him to a trip with their helicopter just like they had with the others. Sadly, Stanley had to decline their offer like every sane person would do.

“I have absolutely no interest in going with you.”

Stan would not go with them. No way. He would not be abducted by British scumbags to be sent to their scientists where they will make twisted experiments involving genetically modified tea or whatever kind of pervert plans they had in their crooked minds. Abducting young, healthy teenagers from The Program for their own entertainment. What a sick joke.

Stanley turned his back to the child abductors and moved away from the place the helicopter had landed.

For minutes he felt proud about himself of doing the only right thing, but as he had heard gunshots in the distance, he could not breathe anymore. His palms were sweaty, his legs were shaking. He ducked and walked back. Stanley’s fingers slid through his hair that used to look like topiary perfection when he was at home but now was just a messy mess. Stroking through his hair managed to calm him down a bit. He stepped forward, and tranquilly made himself noticeable for his enemies.

“Hey, don’t forget me!”

Stan ignored the remarks of the familiar soldiers he could not understand either way.

They dragged him inside the helicopter, where he sat down. He had never been touched by British people and sitting close to real Brits made him feel quite uncomfortable. Adjacent to Stanley there were other students he used to go to school with. He could not recognise them exactly but without knowing their names he recognised all of them exhausted former Program-participants looking worse than two days ago at Announcement Day. Especially that ugly fella, who now looked even more ugly and stupid. God, Stan hated his class filled with idiots and freaks.

Speaking of freaks, the last soldiers came inside, talking inaudible gibberish to each other resulting in Stan’s heart rate increasing as he felt that the helicopter was slowly about to take off. If there was a last time to act, it was now.

It was time to hijack this helicopter.

They were younger than the soldiers, they were weaker than the soldiers, they were exhausted. But they will manage to overcome them.

They were Americans.

Stan shouted, no, almost sang with his deep, masculine voice to his classmates. No, to his fellow Americans: “Geeeet ‘eeeeem!”

He fixated on a quiet, quite young soldier with blond hair. Stan jumped on him, and grabbed the gun the soldier had on his belt. Stan could feel the gun in his hand - it was so close. But after briefly having brushed against the gun of the soldier with his hand and before he could point the gun at any of those British bastards, he felt how he lost the control of body as he had been subdued by the owner of the gun.

Bollocks.

The villainous soldier exclaimed something angrily at Stan while he tried to free himself with his sweaty fingers from the grip of the soldier, struggling to wrench himself out. He looked around the room and saw the cunts that were his classmates, who were not participating in his revolt against the British. Oh, the irony.

Stan saw into the eye of the soldier who was talking to him and could feel how he released his grip after Stan stopped to fight against it, though he was still visibly pissed. Ulrich Stanley Astley used this opportunity to suddenly wrench himself out and ran directly at the open space of the helicopter and dived out with an attempt of a jump resembling a flying kick.

He fell.

His eyes processed the fact that the helicopter already had elevated higher than he anticipated but before his brain could calculate what was happening he had already crashed through the roof and second floor of a two-storey building in the Northern Dwellings.

Stan Astley - Governated