Where would we be without books?

The screams tear themselves from my throat. It's agonizing, as the drug burns away my blood, drains me dry. I am dying slowly and painfully, like they wanted me to, but this didn't need to happen. You could of stopped this.

I don't have long left, and before my death will come 3 hours of delirium and insanity. Already my vision blurs, impossible sights form, and my senses are scuttling away from me like spiders on long spindly legs. I need to plead to you now.

You have to read. I am your future, and look at how much you messed up by not reading enough, not encouraging your children. Books will give you freedom, knowledge, friends, wisdom, pick-up lines, understanding and if you can't read for that, read for me.

Because I can't quite reach the part of my mind that yells that the demons aren't real, and just as I'm able to touch it I begin to convulse, sharp jerks that make me feel like a wooden puppet being played with by a rough child. My bones snap, my skin tears and pours its blood onto the hard platform. I feel my ragged breathing stop but I continue to writhe anyway, struggling away from the death and uncertainty I thought I wasn't scared of. I vaguely feel arms dragging me off the platform before that weightless feeling comes.

Then my head smacks against the edge of a step so hard that everything goes white and quiet and I don't know what to do. I'm dead now, surely, as blissfully nothing hurts any more, but where are my parents? Suddenly I notice two specks in the distance. Its them, but I don't know how long it will take for me to reach where they are. I've struggled enough, surely? But I begin to walk towards the pair of specks and my plea to you is the one thought that runs through my head, over and over again.

Please don't let me happen like this.