Page 76 of Redemption
Chapter Thirty
Jax
The loud, obnoxious sound of an alarm blaring from across the room is enough to startle me upright. Vulgar curses bellow from my mouth as my groggy brain floods with questions it’s simply too early to comprehend.
Why is there an alarm going off? Who set it? It’s the end of the fucking world, for crying out loud. Why would there be a mandatory wake-up time? It’s not as if I’m about to go off to work, meet up with clients, or some other such bullshit. Why? Why won’t it just... fucking... stop!
Hoping to break the offending piece of machinery and allow myself to get a few more hours of sleep, I take the pillow I was using and chuck it across the room.
It does nothing but miss my intended target and therefore piss me off further.
The earsplitting sound forces me to extract myself from the comfortable bed, go in search of the wailing bastard, and chuck the godforsaken thing out the damn window. Unfortunately, the dark shadows of the room do nothing to assist my quest in finding it, reminding me that it’s not even fucking daylight out yet!
If the rooster’s not crowing, it’s too damn early for humans to be awake.
I fumble in the dark, my hands grasping at anything in front of me, leading me closer and closer to the offending sound. And then... finally, I find the fucker.
A little, battery-operated banshee from Hell. I don’t waste any time pushing the snooze or off button; whoever set this thing will just do it again tomorrow. So, instead, I march my groggy ass right over to the window, open it, and give the little piece of plastic an abrupt lesson in flying. It also learns how to go splat against the house next to us, breaking into thousands of little pieces upon impact.
There.
Finally, some peace and quiet.
I turn, intending to crawl back into the sanctuary the soft comforter provides, when suddenly, an annoyingly familiar sound calls in the distance.
Cock-a-doodle-dooooooooo
Son of a bitch.
I grumble and groan at the rooster’s call, my body angled towards the bed, aching to return to its warm, comfortable embrace, but I pause as I’m alerted to another presence in the room.
“Good morning, sunshine,” a dark, gruff voice sounds just behind me. Distracted by the wailing banshee, I didn’t hear the door open or his steps to enter the room, but that doesn’t discount the fact that there’s a menacing presence only a few feet from where I stand.
One, two... Pause... One, two.
Calming air fills my lungs as I take a deep breath and then turn to find the man who locked me in here last night.
I try to keep the sneer off my face, but I’m sure I fail when I reply, “Tank.”
“Good to see you remember,” he says in return with a sinister smile, crossing his arms over his chest as he assesses me in the brightening light of the new day. I take the chance to do the same.
While I know I’m no slouch and have a muscular physique to prove it, he’s... enormous. You know the type: raised on a farm from a young age, fed hefty meals from dawn until dusk. As a literal walking, talking brick shithouse, he stands at what must be close to seven feet. I’m tall, but even I have to crane my neck back to get a good look at him. The guy is massive.
After spending two nights in a darkened cell deep within the town’s underbelly, completely secured and under full guard, Tank took over my twenty-four-hour probationary watch. Forge, another guy from the medical facility, handed me over to him like I was a child witnessing a custody exchange between parents. I was then escorted to this room, where I was fed and then left in silence until further instruction.
Well... silence until that fucking alarm clock started screaming.
I know you’re probably wondering why I haven’t simply leaped out of the window and gained my freedom. The answer is that not only is this semi-truck of a fuck keeping watch from the inside, but he also has guys of a relative size running round-the-clock security outside. Did I mention they’re all armed as well? Oh yeah, every single one of the motherfuckers has a gun of some sort. It’s like I’ve been turned into an inmateand transferred to a fucking replica of Alcatraz or Shawshank Penitentiary.
Only Andy Dufrain isn’t here to help me escape.
“Time to pay the piper, newbie.” Tank turns, offering the door to me. “You get issued a name yet?”
It was one of the first things I noticed about this place beyond the fact that it’s absolutely fucked. No one has a proper name.
For example, this one’s name isTank.
My custody was transferred to him via another guy namedForge.
