[ WP ] Ugly protagonist

I lay on the hard bed looking up at the pattern the setting sun threw onto the ceiling. 
 
 With my cleft palate and unsymmetrical forehead I'd always been a weird-looking kid. Weird-acting too, but who is n't, round here? Maybe if I had been more normal my parents might have kept me. I wondered what they looked like. 
 
 Anyway, there I was, lying in the detention cell after another scuffle with one of the other orphans, and wondering why the nuns never listened to my side of the story. And that's why I was one of the last to realise, when *they* came. 
 
 It started with a distant sound of running, and shouting, and a chain of deep muffled *booms*. I do n't know how long I listened to the pattering, scraping, shrieking, groaning and slamming sounds that seemed to pass around me, sometimes far and sometimes near. But it was the sporadic bursts of gunfire that eventually got my attention. The small window was too high up for me to reach, and the smooth plastered wall offered no purchase to climb. I began to pace the room in an ecstasy of terror and curiosity. 
 
 Turning to the door, I gave it a hard kick, like they do in the stories. I kicked again and again, but the solid wood refused to budge. I began to cry out in frustration, which turned into sobs of desperation. 
 
 Suddenly, the door cracked open. It was not my doing, for in the doorway stood a sight that made my previous terror seem like nothing. 
 
 A dark hulking shape, clad in the filthy rags of a military uniform. In his hands was a shotgun that looked like it had seen heavy use. His boots were stained with what looked like fresh blood, and my imagination immediately began to dream up what nightmare uses the items at his belt might find. 
 
 With the quickness of one who had lived for so long among the bullies and theives of this orphanage, I darted through the door, crouching between the doorframe and his leg. Not looking back, I sprinted with a ferocious energy through the once-familiar hallway and out into the street. And what I saw there stopped me in my tracks. 
 
 The street was in ruins. Some unknown force had ripped chunks out of some of the buildings, and the grey sky was partially obscured by oily black smoke. The ground was littered with the bodies of the newly dead. Some I recognised. They seemed to have been fleeing in groups from the orphanage. 
 
 Suddenly a bone-chilling cry spun my head around, and I was face-to-face for the first time with one of *them*. 
 
 With another mad burst of speed I dashed into a side-alley, along it and across the next street. It must have seen me, but I dared not look back. Turning sharply, I ran into the next building through the gaping doors, into a back room, and hid in a metal locker. 
 
 It might have been a minute I crouched there, or a hundred years, as my gasping breath condensed onto the cold wall of my refuge and my mind was bombarded with streams of confusion. Where had *they* come from? What was happening? What could I do? 
 
 There came a sound in the room outside. I froze. Through the chink in the locker door I saw it. The same one as before? Who knew? 
 
 It saw me. 
 
 Turned towards me. 
 
 I closed my eyes and braced myself for death. 
 
 The crack of a single shot resounded in the room. 
 
 I opened my eyes. there stood the man who had broken open the door of my cell. At his feet lay my would-be assailant. His misshapen face bore a gentle smile as he reached a hand towards me. Dumbly, I let him help me to my feet. 
 
 The old man's firm hand on my back, he moved me from the room and with cautious haste to the door out onto the street. His beady eyes swept left and right, then he led me at a jog to a building across the street. With a grace that seemed out of proportion with his ungainly body, we moved with a soldier's stealth from building to building. I had not choice but to follow, ducking down when he did, and allowing him to keep us out of sight. 
 
 By the time we got to the outskirts of the city, my face was a grimace from the exhaustion in my legs. The only sign of effort he showed was the perspiration that trickled down the grey stubble of his sagging jowls. 
 
 As the last light of the sun died away, he beckoned me down into a grassy hollow outside the city. With practiced ease, he drew a biuble from his pack and put up a battered old khaki tent. We would be safe here for the night, he promised. *They* would be busy hunting in the city. We ate a can of corned beef in the darkness as the screams from the city grew further and further apart. 
 
 And I woke to my first day of freedom.
