THE GUARDSMAN: Book 2: Blood Debts – Chapters 56

Welcome to the adventure!

Your newest SciFi, Mystery, Thriller started YESTERDAY AFTERNOON!  If you missed it, please feel free to click back to the beginning, or read on and see if you like what you’ve found & loop back later! 😉

This page is for those who wish to READ the full Guardsman book series here for free.

If you would like to listen to the author-narrated version OR own your copy please click HERE…

Enjoy!

The Guardsman, Book 2: Blood Debts:

Chapter 56)

The light pressure and soft whispered voice spoke again, “Jonas? Are you awake?”

Jonas groaned at the light pressure on his back as he turned his head to face the hushed female voice in the darkened dormitory hall of the creche that had been his home for as long as he could remember. “Melina? What are you doing out of your bunk’s quarter?” The sleepy croak was little more than a rasp as the slight female in his year grouping prodded his legs and chest silently instructing him that he was to move backward in his bunk.

She sounded smugly satisfied, “So, you’re awake now, good.”

Irritated with her games, Jonas groused, “Well, yeah, now I’m awake, no thanks to you. What time is it?”

Her dark regulation cut shoulder length short hair fell forward as she slipped noiselessly into the vacated half of his bunk, “Two AM, and a little change. The hall monitor just completed his rounds and went back to his vid screen for another hour or so.”

Groggy he mumbled, “Melina, that doesn’t answer why you are in the boy’s quarter. What are you doing here? Are you trying to get us demerits?” He could see the full roll of her head that encompassed the sarcastic and shadowed roll of her eyes, while her huff of disdain caused more noise than he would have liked. She caused much more noise with her silly huff than anything he had said so far.

The grumbling of his upper bunkmate followed by the squeak of his wire-frame mattress under the weight of his roll startled and unnerved Jonas, “Melina! Get out of here! You’ll have us both in the kitchens for a month if we get caught.” His whispered rebuke came out much sharper than he intended, with a sigh he pulled his thin blanket tight around his shoulders, and rolled away from where she was reclined next to him stealing half his pillow, before he whispered, in conclusion, “Good night, Melina.”

He wanted to say more but feared the kitchens and rejection more than his self-confidence was sure of his desire to say it. Extra duty was nearly crippling in its additional burden, the pans for the thousands of classmates and fellows of all year groups stacked up until the administrators and educational ‘jailers’ could meter out enough demerits to get the mounds of burnt and dried foodstuffs off the industrial size pans.

They all knew their adult minders were too lazy to do it themselves!

Jonas suspected that the staff shepherded demerits in order to produce a steady stream of labor to chip the crust off the pans. When the troublesome classmates actually behaved, the dispersion of demerits became almost haphazard and gratuitous.

They were hardly fed enough to do more than attend their classes, physical maintenance activities, cleaning their living areas, the required sporting competitions, and homework in the creche. There were no fat kids in the creche and few large muscular ones. Those types were only fictional characters on vid shows.

Jonas was typical of the males in their sixteen-year-old age group still suffering from the tail end of growth spurts that made him slightly clumsy, while rangy and wiry. He was tough like everyone else but not strong enough to take on one of the ‘meats’ that patrolled the corridors with truncheons and their swaggers. Melina on the other hand was not typical of one set of females in the creche; she was definitely not of the wiry and combative set. She was of the shorter curvier side of their female population, the part that instead of picking out females to attack, she used her brains and personality to develop alliances with the boys and some of the subsets of the girls.

Four years prior, when they were twelve, and the girls were physically maturing faster than the boys was the last time he had seen her throw a punch. She had broken the other older girl’s nose flat across her face when she had tried to steal from Melina’s lunch tray. The shouting gladiatorial pit that had formed around the two before the ‘meats’ could arrive and break it up included Jonas who was swept into the mix just because the action started behind where he was eating.

Things had fallen horribly out of hand when the fifteen-year-old lunch thief and her two companions started going back after Melina. The bleeding aggressor hung back nursing her nose and swearing revenge while the other two girls closed. The first to close the distance was not expecting Melina’s elbow or the broken cheekbone that followed the hollow crunch under her eye.

The twelve-year-olds closed in around their classmates against the triplet fifteen-year-olds and the ‘olders’, as they called them, who had waded in later, and the melee quickly turned into a massive brawl. The fifteen-year-olds had spent two weeks each in the infirmary followed by manual labor extra duty. The latecomers to the brawl earned between a week and a month at ‘make-work’ extra duty. Since Jonas was pulling the third aggressor back and someone else took a potshot at her in her gut just as the meats arrived, he was immediately tackled and put down hard. Melina was never one to let things like that slide and decided it would be a good idea to rip the eyes out of the girl with the broken nose. She thumped into the floor next to him but whacked her head on one of the benches on the way down, under the tackling meat. She was in and out of consciousness while they were both dragged to the disciplinary board and slapped with two months of kitchen duty, the worst duty available, and assigned together.

He still hated the duty, but he loved the time with Melina.

Now he just wished she would go away instead of pirating his pillow.

Jonas could smell her, and it was driving him crazy that she was so close. She used the same soap as everyone else in this corner of hell, but he could smell ‘her’ too.

Her huff at being ignored, for however long he lay with his eyes pressed as tightly closed as he could manage on his side, preceded her two little rat claw taps on his shoulder. “Did you mean what you said today in class?”

Involuntarily he rolled to his back and felt her short shoulder-length hair brush his nose as he turned and settled onto his back. It was an entirely unnerving experience having her on his bunk and that close, “What? Is that what you are here for? To ask if I meant what I said?” The only thing that was keeping him sane was his blanket firmly pulled up around him and between the two of them.

She whispered, her warm presence very unnerving, “Yes. Did you mean it?”

Now that he was on his back she flopped down from her elbow and stared at the side of his face with her nose almost touching his ear. Jonas’ right palm pushed his nose down and sealed his mouth, while his thumb and index pinched the base of his eyes. “Yes, Melina,” he whispered to the shadow of the bunk above as his hand dropped back to the blanket over his chest, “I meant what I said today in class.”

Extremely pleased, she asked softly, “You really think I’m pretty?”

Honestly and as quietly as he could manage while still being heard, Jonas answered, “Yes, I really think you are pretty. You’re very attractive and smart too.”

Jonas could feel the metal of the thin mattress support shifting in time with her happily wagging left knee and foot. “Really? You said I was the prettiest girl in our age group. Were you serious?”

When his head rolled left on the pillow his forehead smacked her nose by accident causing her to pull back with a dissatisfied groaning grunt. When he whispered his apology, he could see that it was accepted by the wisp of light falling across her smile, from a window high on the wall and far down the row, as she fluffed her half of his pillow over her wrist. “Yes, I was serious. Even with all the jerks you keep hovering all over you, and fawning on you, and drooling after your every step, I still think you are hot.”

She smiled radiantly in the light, lighting up his world, as she purred, “Thank you, Jonas…” The back of her left hand and pinky ghosted over the side of his face from nowhere as he wondered if she had said something in the silence under her breath that he didn’t quite hear. The flirty devil she used on everyone else crept into her voice, “I had to ask you now so that I could sneak away from my hovering jerks.”

By the time her hand slipped under his jaw, her fingertips tickled his neck, and he opened his eyes from the shiver that passed through him she was sneaking silently back down the corridor between the bunks. She was so nice to watch even in the standard issue plain gray sleep shorts and tee-shirt they all wore. Jonas felt his breath catch as he watched every step she took, every step falling silently and precisely in line in front of the other, setting her hips into motion. When she disappeared around the corner of the bunks several long rows away another shiver passed through him to his core.

The morning bell and lights clapped on one after another. Jonas didn’t even remember closing his eyes after watching Melina disappear, but the morning was upon him again. His bunkmate slipped his dirty feet over the edge above Jonas’ head and chest, while he stretched seated on the upper bunk.

Sitting up in his own bunk, stinky feet fell into his face.

Jonas repeated his morning ritual, “Get your dirty dogs out of my face,” as he pushed the hanging feet out of his way and stood from his bunk. They had fifteen minutes to get all four hundred bunks made, use the restroom, and dress for class before they were marched out of the dormitory for another breakfast of burnt oatmeal, instant eggs slime, rice, and beans.

The bunk bed behind him was suffering the same morning problems Jonas was, the top bunk dangling dirty feet in the bottom bunk. Their respective head-to-head bunks made their ‘square’ of eight. There were ten rows of bunks, and their section of bunks was five wide. The girls were on the other side of the open bay dormitory room; their four hundred had a larger bathroom. The only extra duty that was reserved beyond the kitchens was cleaning both bathrooms, but that assignment really screwed up the system if a male was assigned to it, so Jonas had dodged that bullet so far. It mostly fell to the females who misbehaved.

Jonas slipped his feet into his plastic shower shoes. His bunkmate racked his footlocker across his stinky foot and followed with a profound battery of curses, while Jonas pulled his own out from under the bunk. He pocketed his thumb-length toothbrush, broke off, and pocketed a capsule of toothpaste from the remains of the flat month sheet he received a few weeks earlier, tossed his clothes over his shoulder, closed and locked his locker, before dropping the key chain back around his neck.

He popped the hospital corner of his bunk, pulled the sheets snug again, and stood the pillow against the divider between himself and the side bunkmate, before relaying the cover sheet and blanket. His upper bunk mate stepped up onto their foot lockers and started making his own bunk, walking quickly across the footlockers, while the other three top bunkers did the same thing with their own bunks. They had been doing it that way together for years, since no one ever left the creche except when they were killed or were of the age of majority and kicked out, squares spent years together. When one of their numbers did occasionally die, they were quickly replaced by some new fish the square had to train.

They knew the routine and keeping the footlockers out as steps until the top bunkers were done saved them all time. That way the top bunkers didn’t need to stand on the made bottom bunks or get in the way while the bottoms were being made.

He was on the way to the bathroom when the top bunkers started pushing the footlockers back under the bunks. He got the bathroom first in the morning but in the evening, top bunkers got the showers first.

No one showed any sign that they had heard his early morning conversation. But that was the only thing he had in his head and could think of nothing else until he was shoved out of the way for the sink and he realized he was falling behind his sink group and was wasting time into the next line’s turn.

He pulled on his gray class uniform and pants before leaving the bathroom. Jonas shoved his shorts into his laundry bag at the foot of his bunk and was glad that it was Friday, and he could change out his stinking nasty sleep shorts. His footlocker provided a seat for tying his shoes, while his mind wandered to how wonderful Melina smelled last night, and he cringed at how rank and spoiled his clothing was when he stuffed it into his bag. Jonas hoped that she hadn’t smelled his stench. “Yeah, like she held her breath the whole time,” his mumbling drew the looks from those around him before he finished his shoes and stood to push the locker back into place.

The lock was facing out, per regulations, and his shower shoes were tucked neatly into place next to it, as they should be. Jonas stood and checked the area for loose trash before the morning inspection. He looked up just in time to see Melina smiling slightly as she walked down the aisle in his direction several squares over.

The ‘meats’ bellowed call for morning inspection ripped his eye from her form when he looked back, she was gone.

He stood at the head of his bunk next to his bunk headmate while the inspection dragged on. The eleven inspectors marched down the aisles noting failures, issuing demerits for imagined infractions, before ordering everyone to retrieve their laundry bags and file out for morning meal. The laundry disappeared down the chute before entering the dining room.

The intermediate and upper-class crèche school was tied into half a dozen other versions of the free orphan school system just like this one. The other schools included a gifted school, a remedial school, and three other ‘normal’ schools like Jonas. Students kept different color uniforms based on the school they were assigned. Since each school maintained classes from age eight to eighteen, there were ten grades the same size as Jonas in each school. The laundry room accepted dirty uniforms from two grades from each of the six schools, in their block of the building, every day. Keeping that many uniforms clean and returned to the correct student was a marvel of engineering he had never even considered.

Jonas spent his day in a haze thanks to the bizarre encounter the night prior. He had the answers in class as usual. Melina was swamped by jerks as usual, who ate out of her hand as usual and wouldn’t let anyone else near her as usual.

While drifting past the athletic arena, down a quiet corridor before practice, a body collided with his. Before he could push away, punch, or realize that the body was smaller, softer, and lighter than an attacker, an arm scooped his left arm, “Hi there handsome, how was your day?”

Melina was practically skipping while she smiled tucked into his arm. Jonas stopped, confused, and looked up and down the corridor and didn’t see any of her jerks charging to pummel him into the concrete floor for touching her. All he could ask dumbly was “Where’s your jerks?”

She impishly quipped, “I ditched ’em! Come on, I want to show you something.”

He complained, “But I have to get ready for practice!”

She made that weird girl “Uuaaah!” sound. Her odd choking/strangled sound put a halt to his protest, “You and Speedball! You are good enough that you can be late for one practice!”

Frustrated with her, Jonas reminded her, “I’m good because I don’t miss any practices, and am rarely late except when class runs over!”

She chirped extra cheerfully to annoy him, “Good today you can be on a rare day.” She pushed open the arena door and held it with her foot while pulling him into the arena that was only lit by ‘resting’ lights, little more than single light bulbs at the apex of each damped lighting unit. Instead of the typical practice lighting and full game lighting the place was positively dim under the ‘rest’ lighting. “Come on,” as she pulled the back divider of the arena seating forward, it swung freely from the wall, exposing the struts and cross beams under the bleachers.

Hesitating and objecting, he resisted, “Are you crazy?” Jonas’ head rocked to the left, then right in rapid succession before locking back onto her. “We can’t go in there! We’ll get in trouble!”

Her exasperated sigh and insistent tugging at his left arm broke his protest and immobility. “Come on. Have a seat with me.” She led by example and settled on a horizontal strut just a hair too high to be comfortable for her shorter legs. When he finally let the broken panel slide back into place, she pulled him next to herself. “See that wasn’t so hard now was it?”

Jonas agreed reluctantly, “No, I guess not. But I really need to get to practice, we have a game tomorrow night, or didn’t you remember?”

She snapped angrily, “Ugh! You and stupid Speedball, I hate that game!”

Confused, Jonas asked, “What do you mean you hate Speedball? You are at all of our games. You love Speedball, I see you cheering us on all the time.”

When she shook her head tossing her hair everywhere Jonas was even more confused. She made some frustrated growling sound in her throat, and demanded, “You really don’t get it do you?”

Confusion and honesty poured out, “Get what? I don’t even know what you’re talking about?! I’m so confused right now my head is spinning. Last night you crawled into bed with me. Today you ignore me. Now you pull me into this dirty falling apart mess and you go on to confuse me.”

Her left hand pressed her face and eyes in very much the same way that he had pressed his face the night before. “Just shut up and stop talking okay, Jonas?”

While he fretted about time, she happily chattered about everything and everyone. While she kept his left arm tucked into her right, her knees wagged happily side to side while she talked about this and that.

The coach was going to be really upset that he was late. But Melina, pressing lightly into his side, every time her legs changed direction was a pleasant distraction. Jonas stole a glance at the clock on the far wall and realized he only had forty-five minutes left before practice started. He was going to miss his warm-up and strength routine already. There was hardly going to be enough time to get his equipment on.

The sudden sound of a door opening at the opposite end of the arena startled them both. The arena lights popped on an instant later causing both to gasp and jerk down slightly, into a defensive posture. Her clenched hands over his left arm drew his eyes to look down at her, while she huddled. The adult voices sounded important.

Melina whispered into his ear, as they both crouched to see through a crack between the bleacher steps, “Jonas, that’s our school and class administrator, and the other man, is their boss. I remember him from graduation the last few years.”

Each of her breathy words tickled his ear and stood every hair up and down his neck and spine on end!

Curious, he asked, “Who are the other four? The two men and women, I have never seen any of them before.”

The school administrator gestured around the arena as he spoke, sounding officious, “And this over here is our Speedball arena, My Lady.”

His boss stepped into the gap between his speaking underling and the man holding the camera and gestured across over the heads of the two hidden students. “Not only is this one of my six schools performing well within the Empire’s academic standards but as you can clearly see, we have amassed quite a few Speedball trophies over the last several years.”

The school principal jostled slightly with his boss and chimed into his monologue for the camera, the woman with the long black hair with her back to the hidden students, remained silent as she scratched the back of her head with one finger. The cameraman slipped to the right, artfully capturing both administrators so they didn’t look like they were actively trying to stomp on each other for camera time while the class administrator smiled in the background. The female reporter asked, “Is that your mascot? I … What is that, I’m having a hard time making that out, is that a turtle in boxing gloves?”

Jonas bristled in a whisper, “Armadillo! We’re the ‘Fighting Armadillos’ you dummy!” Melina’s elbow lightly pressed into his ribs to shut him up. They both went back to spying on the adults.

The cameraman shuffled slightly to his right again and took a smooth step to his rear while changing angles. His new shot encompassed the administrators along with the dilapidated and long faded mural above the scoreboard.

The second man drifted aimlessly behind the assembled administrators and two women. He turned slowly around the vastness of the arena and seemed to sniff the air like a wolf on the hunt.

The adults were too far away to see every detail of their faces, but Jonas could tell the man in the back with the long coat was some sort of security guard. He seemed strong like the meats, with their truncheons, but somehow very different and much more alert.

While the administrators explained to the reporter what the mural was supposed to represent, the woman who was not asking questions, the one with the long black hair, scratched her head again with one finger as she turned to the hidden students and spoke to the guard. He drifted to her side as she spoke, all three administrators watched her, while they were stumbling through their answers for the reporter.

The cameraman glided between the adults like he was made of air, all the while keeping the interviewees and his reporter either in the shot or in position to narrate whatever he was looking at with the camera.

The man in the long coat shrugged noncommittally, and the woman visibly exhaled, shaking her head as she poked him in the shoulder with a single finger on her left hand, pushing him away, while she laughed quietly. The administrators smiled at the reporter and camera again.

Jonas wondered into Melina’s ear, “What is going on?”

She shrugged slightly, “I have no idea,” which felt absurdly nice against his side, “I think the reporter is that April Nightingale woman who does all the humanitarian news pieces after entertainment segment on the vids the girls watch.”

Jonas scoffed and rolled his eyes at the mention of the dross that their year group’s girls liked to watch during free hours. Melina pulled his arm again to silence him since the adults had started talking again.

The administrators were talking to the reporter about the Speedball season, while the guard was next to the long black-haired woman. The students could see the profiles of both adults as they talked. They were shoulder to shoulder facing in opposite directions; the administrators couldn’t hear or see what he was saying quietly as she remained silent and scratched her nose while nodding in the affirmative.

Melina wondered out loud, “What’s he saying?” She was a little too loud. The guard jerked away from the woman and his right hand fell to his hip, inside his coat. He looked like a predator ready to strike, as the woman slipped behind him.

It took a moment for Jonas to realize she hadn’t moved on her own, he had dragged her behind himself with his left hand and was holding her there. The interview stopped while he searched the arena with his eyes. His thumb played along his belt level inside the shadows of his overcoat as his head moved seeking some unseen target.

The hidden woman asked, “What’s the matter, Samson?”

With a grunt, he pulled his hand from his belt, “Sorry, I thought I heard someone in here with us. It must have been someone outside in the halls.”

One of their pompous administrators corrected, “Nonsense! There is no one in the halls and these doors are fireproof. We carefully follow all health and safety regulations here! There is no way you could have heard anything out there.”

The guard turned and stepped to the side and forward again to face the administrators. The small woman with the long black hair landed a hand on the crook of his elbow and forearm as he stepped past her. The smiles had faded from the administrators as they took their half steps back. She shook her head, and he stepped back as his fist relaxed.

The woman spoke for him, “When you are with me you will understand that when this man says he heard something, he did. We trust him implicitly and so should you, is that perfectly clear to you all?”

As the administrators grunted their ‘yeses’ and shuffled their chastened feet, Melina leaned in to whisper with a smile on her face, “Wow, she shut them up fast. I wonder who she is.”

Jonas agreed and added, “She is really pretty too.”

Melina pushed him away from her side violently against the vertical leg of the bleachers to his right. While he was looking for what made the metal-on-metal clinking sound, she laid into him, causing him to look back up. She unleashed a ferocious but whispered tirade, “Jonas Travis Bellicose, you are such a jerk! I never want to talk to you again! I can’t believe we are sitting here having this nice conversation and you are so pig-headed that you are thinking some lady stranger is pretty.”

She used his full name.

It always took Jonas a moment to remember his own middle name, it was used so infrequently, but Melina just used it, in a sentence with the rest of his name.

That had never happened before in his whole life that he could remember.

Just as he was getting ready to reply, the support strut that they were sitting on broke on his side, dumping him on the ground and her on top of him.

The clatter and clang of metal drew all eyes in the room. The students scrambled across the dirty floor under the bleachers, to the broken side barrier. Jonas pushed her through the gap and looked left in time to see the guard shaking his head and replacing his hip and shoulder-holstered pistols.

The woman with long hair was covering her mouth laughing.

The administrators were furious. They were furious from embarrassment. They were furious at the end of the interview. They were furious at the noisy dispatch of their equipment. They were mostly furious that they looked bad as two of their students scrambled out from under a bleacher on camera.

They were almost as furious as Melina.

It got worse when she made it to the door when the bleacher creaked and groaned under its own weight. Jonas looked back just in time to hear several bolts pop and bounce around the metal innards of the bleachers. The guard had the woman moving out the door at the opposite end of the arena, the camera and reporter were following. The camera was still looking at them while that group retreated.

The bleachers settled with a crash, onto the back of Jonas’ leg. The side barrier slipped up over its missing bolt hole leaving just enough space for his leg.

By the time he pulled it out of the crack with little damage, Melina was trembling behind the door, still angry but now frightened, and the administrators were on their comms to security. When he was up and moving, they were out the door and gone before the fat, stupid, overweight adult administrators could close the distance. Jonas grasped her shoulder in the palm of his hand, before she could pull away and tell him to ‘not touch her’ he spoke, “Go, I don’t think they saw your face, go to study hall. I’m going to get to practice and hope they didn’t recognize me. Don’t get caught, they look pissed.”

Too scared to fight and too angry to talk to him, she nodded and said, “Okay,” and ran in the direction he pointed her.

Jonas made it to practice on time, without his warm-ups, or daily strength work but he was on the field with the team. It wasn’t until the end of the practice that blue-clad security officers entered from every door of the practice field and closed around the team.

When they singled him out, things only got worse.

He was tackled, trussed, tied, and carried off. When he told them he could walk he felt a hand leave his side followed by the thump of a baton on the back of his head.

He must not have been unconscious for long, because when his eyes opened, they were only a few floors higher in the building, back up to the level of the main arena but the walking time was not very long. Jonas was seeing double from the blow and everything was cloudy, but when he closed one eye by accident, he could make out a bunch of people on scaffolds painting over the awful mural above the scoreboard, through the open doors. He must have been dreaming.

He groaned something unintelligible even to himself. The immediate reply from one of the security men was, “Would someone shut him up please?” The second blow to the back of his head knocked his lights out.

When he opened his eyes next, Jonas was still trussed in the full body immobilization suit with carry handles along the side, but there was now a chain passed between the two loops on the front over his forearms and between loops on both knees, so not only could he not walk but he was secured firmly to a chair so he couldn’t even fall out onto the floor if he wanted to. Falling onto the grubby floor from the chipped plastic benches was definitely not something he wanted to do. He would be better off falling on the floor face first in the creche bathrooms; at least there he knew when it was cleaned last. This place looked like it had never been cleaned; there were stains and sticky patches of sickly overlapping colors. One molted patch worked a mass of dark dirt faded gray.

The dozen other men in the room were in various states of captivity from the drunk passed out on one corner of a bench, held in place by gravity, two walls, the bench and cuff, and ending with Jonas’ full body cocoon and chains.

All he could think about was how upset Melina had been when they left.

She had to hate him.

It ripped his soul out that she told him she never wanted to talk to him again. That thought alone made him want to die. When he leaned forward hoping he could fall off the bench to smash his face to pieces on the floor his pain was interrupted by the humiliating clink of the chain that fastened him to the bench from behind.

His malaise got worse as the hours ticked into days, the days into years in the stench-filled detention block.

When his thoughts wandered back down the dark and dreary path beset by Melina’s rejection he moaned near tears. The whip-crack of the supervising detention officer’s voice snapped him out of it, “Shut up you! I’ll come in there and crack your skull for you! None of your blathering, so cut the noise!”

Since his hands were snugly tucked into his armpits and the binding suit around his arms and legs restricted every movement, he couldn’t prop his head up on his hands to sulk. Instead, he learned that the overly tight chest, arms, and maladjusted neckline allowed him to prop his chin on the collar while slumped forward suspended by the chain in his back that connected him to the bench.

Now that he wasn’t constantly fighting to maintain posture, and the Melina malaise was only a desperate ache of loss fatigue from practice, the trauma of the head wound and the crash from the excitement from the captivity overtook him and as his head throbbed from the baton blows his eyes drooped closed.

When the foot kicked him in the leg, the voice barked, “Wake up you!” Jonas jerked awake. The headache that seized him was worse than anything he had ever experienced. It was bad enough that he wanted to vomit on himself. It felt like his eyes were being squeezed out the backs of his sockets into his brains while they exploded out onto the floor. Jonas didn’t feel it, but a long line of slobber drooled from his mouth while his mouth hung open and over his knees. The pain in his head was so bad he didn’t even realize his mouth was open. “Quit messin’ up the floor you!” The same guard who kicked him awake shoved his hand into Jonas’ face and knocked him back against the bench. “If’n I slip on this floor so help me I will beat you so bad you’s look like a dropped ‘n trampled on burger meat when I’m done wit’ ya!”

A new voice entered the room that issued a high-pitched drone into the air that Jonas could only hear between the heartbeats that pounded and echoed through his head. “Alright criminals … I’m Pu-Legal Officer of this facility’s night shift. I have your charge sheets here in alphabetical order, when you hear your name speak up so I can provide them to you for your own legal knowledge and understanding. Our first winner for the night is ‘Billyacasii’.”

No one else spoke up and it was close enough to his own name that when he corrected, “Bellicose.”

The reply was sudden, “Don’t correct the legal officer, maggot!” The angry blue uniform guard who had kicked him moments before was back in his face from seemingly nowhere. “Speak up like yous got a pair o’ swinging testicles ‘tween yous legs, ‘n when you do you says ‘here’ like you was told to.”

The charge sheet landed in his lap. The text was either too small, or the paper was moving, or he was on a boat, or someone was playing a nasty trick on him because while his left eye attempted to focus on a letter it felt like his right was pulling off to that side, trying to jump out of the socket and tick away to look at the wall on that side.

The round-robin of names ended after an eternity of the swimming paper.

The officer kicked him again, knocking his feet to the side and his head off balance again, “Hey you, smart ass! Yous hears the officer speakin’ to ya’?”

Jonas answered truthfully, “No Sir, I didn’t hear a thing. What was the question?”

One of the officers snapped, “Stupi’t turd! ‘e asked you if you read ‘n agrees with the charges.”

Still lost in his own physical and mental pain, Jonas answered, “Sure. You’re the officers. If you say I did it, I must have done it. Whatever you say, I guess I did it.” His defeated sigh was lost on both officers, as they stared at each other in shock. They were about to make their month’s bonuses on this confession and pending conviction.

The man next to him leaned over and whispered, “Kid, don’t give these jerks nothin’, they’ll just take ya for what your worth, ‘n sell ya to indentured services.”

Jonas had no idea what that meant. Through the pounding headache that wanted to squeeze his eyes out of his skull and the emotional tangle, he couldn’t parse the message anyway. The seedling thoughts that had struggled to take root in his fogged mind were blown away by the officer barking across his face at the other man, “Shu’d-up you! No talkin’ ta other prisoners in the charges room!”

Jonas was rocked by rough hands pulling him back and whipping pain into his neck and eyes. The unsteady shifts of vision showed the officer to the front violently stabbing the man who had spoken in the stomach with the blunt end of his baton. While his victim struggled to breathe again the officer seized the binding chain that hung down Jonas’ mid-line and pulled him forward while his fellows held him back. Jonas felt his head pound to explode with every pump of his heart.

Once the rattling of chains in the front ended, the jangling of keys passed his right ear and he was slapped forward by the hands on his back that tugged the chains on his back, whiplashing his head again. The chain released and he was hauled vertically and dumped to his left side by the officers, using the handles on the flanks of his thick canvas suit.

Jonas’ left shoulder smashed into the head of the man who had spoken to him as one of the guards on his left, barked, “Move scum!” to the man who was bound to the bench in cuffs, leg irons and chained in place front and back. He could no more have moved out of the way than Jonas could have avoided being hauled out by the three guards.

Jonas felt a tug at his hips and thigh, followed immediately by a solid thump on his foot where it was pulled into the man’s face hard enough for Jonas to feel the bones in his knee flex on the impact. The guard laughed, “Oops, sorry about that guy, I didn’t see you there.” His companions chuckled as they cleared the thick iron door to the holding cells before it clanged shut.

The guard at his feet started talking sports and talk shows with the officer who had terrorized him from the front and now carried his right side. Half-conscious Jonas mumbled, “I play speedball too.”

The hand at his left shoulder left briefly and he dipped slightly forward, before the back-hand slap to his neck and head landed, “Shad-up you! We wasn’ talkin’ to ya!” When he was jerked back horizontally his head lolled left and right as he faded out of consciousness.

The guards continued to chat while they twisted into the depths of the holding area past screaming malcontents and protests of innocence. The officer on his feet asked, “So wha’d this little beggar do boss?”

The nasty chuckle from his right side preceded another sharp turn and the slamming of another thick door. “This little wretch is charged with everything from vandalism to destruction of property and all the way up to murder.”

One guard gleefully chirped, “No shit? How’d we get ’em on it?”

The guard on his right shook him violently, and agreed, “Lil’ bastard confessed ta’ everythin’.” In his limp semiconscious state, he only flopped from side to side and didn’t protest, which irritated the guard, so he snapped Jonas flat again. “He confessed ta’ a dozen ‘n a half counts of this-‘n-that. O’r bonuses gonna be flush this month boys. He’s young ‘n gonna be spending years ‘n years on some hell hole indentured to the corp. At all them years this one’s accumulated the indenture corp is going to pay rich for his hide. ‘n that recorded confession makes it locked iron ‘n fast-tracked.”

The one at his left shoulder grinned, and cheerfully agreed, “Nice Sarge! We’ll see that in next month’s check.”

The guard at his feet laughed while the head guard on his right side shouted, “All right sweet prince, ‘eres yous ‘ac-com-mod-ations’ fer yer short stay wit’ us.

The guards started sounding like petty upper-class bullies, as one of them started, “On three boys.” They all chuckled at their inside joke, “‘Three’.” Jonas’ most basic rooting and grasping instincts took hold as he was suddenly weightless and falling. The back-brain instincts that are embedded in his body took over and ripped him out of unconsciousness. His eyes focused just in time for his face to smack the floor and knock him into the black of unconsciousness again.

Thank You!

Thank you for reading this chapter!

Your next chapter is HERE.

If you liked what you read and you are interested in the full book the links are HERE on the Blood Debts book page…

However, if you are more interested in the narrated version, you can catch the start of your author-narrated series HERE:

Enjoy!