Have you ever been terrified and in pain?

Have you ever felt the agony of watching your family slaughtered in front of you?

Have you ever just given up?

Have you ever just wanted to curl up in your own filth and die?

That was how I felt. That was how I always felt in this hell.

There were children all around me, either dead or half way there. We were locked in cages. Shackles and chains clamped to our wrists kept us all together, but nobody tried to escape.

There was no hope for us in the slightest.

The door to my cage opened and a new child was thrown in.

His body was beaten and bruised and he just laid there, face first on the floor of the cage.

The other children in the cage looked to me expectantly.

I was the oldest and they new it, even though I looked like a child. I was fifteen- no, sixteen maybe, perhaps older, I didn't know anymore; but as the eldest it became my job to take care of the little ones that were brought in.

Could they not see that I too just wanted to curl up and die?

I did not say such words, though, and shuffled forwards on blood caked and weak limbs to get to the child. The only sound in the cage was my chains clinking and my labored breathing.

Even a small task such as moving was making it hard to breathe.

Finally, I made it to the child and took note of his navy blue hair before turning him over and pulling him into my embrace. He looked to be around ten years old.

"Hey..." I whispered hoarsely, my tongue swollen and dry in my mouth.

I brushed some of the boy's bangs aside and he stirred before cracking one blue eye open.

"Where...?" He began to ask, then the memories seemed to come back to him as his eyes shot open and he began to struggle and panic, shouting about his mother and father and some other boy.

"Shhh..." I whispered, brushing his hair back with a nearly skeletal and shaking hand. "Your family isn't here... Don't speak of them in this place... You will only make the other children sad..."

The boy looked up at me with a shine in his eyes that had long since faded from my dull brown ones.

"I-I'm... Ciel." He murmured quiely, seeming to understand now that there were other humans around. "What's your name?"

Typical of children, wanting to cling to others as much as possible.

"Rachel..." I replied.

Ciel's eyes widened. "That's mother's name!"

I nodded thoughtfully, filthy orange hair spilling over my bony shoulders.

After a moment, Ciel seemed to calm down and I pushed him off of my lap.

"Go sit with the other children on the left side of the cage..." I ordered, already crawling back to the darkened right side.

"Why can't I sit with you!" The boy exclaimed, his voice holding a scared sort of longing tone.

"It's too dark..." A child on the left side piped up. "Rachel doesn't want us to hurt ourselves."

"Yeah," began another. "The right side is completely full too. Rachel says there's no more room for anyone else and that the children on that side are sick."

Ciel took the information in with wide eyes before nodding to me and going to sit with the other children.

I dipped my head and moved back to my spot in the complete dark of the right side of the cage.

I was glad that it was so dark. That way the children wouldn't know that there was nothing but rotting corpses on this side.

I tried to protect them from the truth of it, creating the lie that the smell of decaying flesh was just what happened when children didn't bathe in months.

Honestly, I was surprised that after so long of sitting with corpses I had not started to decay myself.

Oh, but perhaps I had.

I could feel my soul slowly die inside and all I wanted was to let it kill me.

But there was no room in heaven or in hell for someone who commits suicide, and the children needed me.

So alive I stayed. If this agony and tourture was what you could call being alive.

The door to our cage was opened once more followed by a bowl of slop these men who kept us called food and a jug of water.

"Dinner time, filth!" The man roared in laughter and slammed the cage shut once more.

It was my turn to move again.

Ciel tried to dart for the food, but was held back by another child.

"Rachel divides up the food evenly. She is good to us." The child spoke, but I had already taken up the bowl of slop and the water jug.

The children held out their hands like bowls and I divided up the slop evenly between all thirteen of them, Ciel included.

Then it was time for the water. "Only a sip each until it's gone..." I reminded them and they complied.

All too soon the water was gone and I sat back to rest for a moment before going back to the corpses.

Ah, but that Ciel was sharp.

"Rachel, you didn't take any food."

"I'm not hungry..."

"You didn't have any water!"

"I'm not thirsty... You all need it more than I do."

I could tell that my answers annoyed the navy haired child, but he said nothing more about it.

I shuffled back slowly to my spot, wheezing and breathing very little as I did so. I had exerted my extremely malnurished body far too much for the day.

Looking down at my torn rag of a dress, I could clearly see every one of my ribs poking out, as well as my all too prominent hip bones. My starved stomach was begining to swell unnaturally and I assumed that by now my body had begun devouring itself.

I sighed and laid my head back against the bars.

Perhaps today would be the day I would go to sleep and never wake up...

I did eventually fall asleep, but unfortunately I also woke up.

The cage door had been slammed open and now two large, healthy men were dragging out the children, Ciel included.

"RACHEL!" They all screamed my name and reached out with dirty fingers as a third man came in with a lantern.

The darkness of the right side of the cage vanished and I watched as the childrens' faces contorted in horror at the sight of the twenty or so bodies all decaying around me. I'd imagine I myself looked like one of the skeletons.

Some children cried, some began to retch, but Ciel just stared at me as if he understood why I did what I had done, but was too horrified to say anything.

I reached out weakly towards the children, but my body would no longer allow me to move.

They were carried off screaming.

Then the cage was shut once more and locked.

"Just leave that one." I heard one man say. "She'll be dead by morning."

The screaming and footsteps faded and when they were no more I looked around the cage once again.

There was nobody for me to look after anymore; nothing tying me to this earth.

The third man had left his lantern and its soft yellow light bounced off the corpses around me and cast a rosy glow along the walls.

A red night.

A perfect time to go.

My family was gone, the children were gone, I was gone. Nobody would miss me.

So, I shifted my body ever so slightly and dove my hand into a pile of rotting flesh, searching for the body of that one child who had broken his leg and died of infection.

I found him soon enough and pulled away the sharp, shattered femur from the decaying flesh of his leg.

I pressed the sharp tip against my throat and said a silent prayer to god.

It didn't matter if I wouldn't go to heaven anymore. I just couldn't live like this any longer. I was taking the coward's way out.

I took a deep breath- my last one on this earth- and plunged the bone into my neck.

At first there was pain, but then there was silence.

The beautiful silence.