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"I don't want to die!"
Dan O'Connor's desperate cry echoed throughout the cold and plain hallways that he was being forcefully led down by two men who gripped his shoulders with a tight and painful grip, the two being the prison guards that were assigned to take him from his cell and to his death.
"Please, I don't want to die!"
The guards didn't seem to hear his pleas, his exclamations of innocence, continuing to manhandle him down the hallway, curious eyes watching them from the cells that lined the walls.
There was a sign on the wall at the end of the hallway up ahead, rapidly approaching.
'Execution Chambers, right.'
'Exit, left.'
The guards turned him to the right, away from the large door to the left that gave him a glimpse of sunlight and the distant vibrant green of grass and trees, instead turning his gaze to a door that was set at the end of a dim hallway, lit only by a naked and flickering sickly yellow lightbulb.
"No, no!" He wailed, his feet dragging against the floor as he tossed his shoulders fruitlessly against the crushing grip of the emotionless guards, "I didn't do it!"
He was innocent! They didn't understand!
He was going to die for something he didn't do, for a crime committed by the hand of another.
And there was nothing he could do to stop it.
It was supposed to be a test, a fabrication to prove the inadequacies of the legal system - the inadequacies that Dan O'Connor now knew all too well. He had been hired by Gordon Harrington, a lawyer who then implicated Dan O'Connor in the faked death of poor Harry Phillip - who was truly just hiding on a yacht. It had all been going to plan, until Phillip turned up actually dead, but not at the hands of Dan. But it had been too late, he had already confessed - and his fate was now set in stone. He would take the fall for another's crime.
He was to die.
He was to die, in the electric chair.
He had been confident at the beginning of his time in prison, holding his head high behind the bars of his cell and prepared to strut his way to the exit, to the left, when the trickery was revealed. But instead it had all went wrong, and he had went to the right, to his execution.
They pushed open the door and pulled him through it, and then he saw it.
The chair stood in the middle of the room, rising up from the cool concrete as a horrific sight. Straps dangled from multiple spots across its surface, ready to restrain his body when it uncontrollably flinched and writhed from the electric current that would soon course through him. Wires snaked around in, ready to carry the electricity that would spell his end.
He was marched towards the chair.
"God, God, please save me, don't let me die!"
He cried up to God, down to Satan, out to any deity that may have its ear turned in his direction - but none responded.
The room wasn't miraculously filled with a commanding voice or a power that forced the guards to stop their handling of him. No force came to his aid, no force came to spirit him away from the horror that was about to occur.
"Mother! Please, don't let them do this!" He sobbed and gasped, his lungs desperately fighting for oxygen as his desperation and terror overwhelmed him, "Mommy..."
He was only a boy, crying out to his mother in fear.
She had never failed him in the past, for every scraped knee and failed relationship - she was always there, with a comforting smile and the perfect words of advice for the situation.
She wasn't there today.
He was forced into the chair, his trembling arms held still as the straps were tied around his wrists, at the crooks of his elbows, across his heaving chest, his waist and legs. his struggles slowly ceased in their violence as he was restrained to the chair that would be his final place of life.
They placed a cloth over his head, a slight gap allowing his nose to poke through.
It was a white cloth. The blood that would soon pour from his nose would make a macabre sight in contrast to the innocent and pure white cloth. His last view was of an unemotional crowd, obviously every person in the room assumed him guilty.
The last thing he saw before a guard pulled the cloth down over his eyes was a guard, his lips pressed into a thin line, his eyes dull and uncaring, settling a gloved hand on the switch, the switch with the wires, the wires that trailed down and across the floor, and up into the chair that he was settled upon.
The switch that would kill him.
A sponge, soaked with something cold that dripped across his face - mixing with sweat and tears - and down his neck, was secured against his forehead. Something, he assumed electrodes, were attached to his legs.
"Dan O'Connor," A voice spoke, and Dan whimpered in fear. "In a few moments, electricity will course through your body until you are dead, as punishment for the crimes you have been found guilty of under the law. Do you have any last words?"
"I'm innocent, please!" He begged, but heard the disbelieving scoffs of the gathered audience, "You don't understand! It wasn't supposed to happen like this!"
"We may commence with the execution."
The injustice and inevitability of it all settled over him, like a thick blanket of horribly chilling acceptance.
How many others had sat in this same chair, had cried out the same words as he, had sobbed out the same desperate pleas?
How many other innocents had been incorrectly and irreversibly put to death in this very room?
"Please..."
Tears streamed down his cheek, his chest heaving and the meal that he had consumed only a few mere hours ago - his last - beginning to worm it's way up his throat as his vision blurred and darkened around the edges.
"Please, please..."
And the switch creaked as it began to turn, a hum building as thousands of volts of electricity delightfully prepared to course through his trembling body, his heart racing faster than a cheetah as he prepared to die-
"WAIT!"