Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution by Marko Kloos

Author:Marko Kloos
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Frostbite Publishing
Published: 2013-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Lazarus

Jackson wakes up and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

There’s a bright light above her head that’s hurting her eyes, and she is thirsty, thirstier than she has ever been in her life. She turns her head sideways to avoid the painful glare of the light above. She’s in a room with unwashed floors and unpainted walls, dirty concrete. The merciless glare from the light fixture on the ceiling makes the place look inhospitable, pointing out every pockmark in the walls and mold spot on the ceiling as it does.

Her right arm is bandaged from fingertips to elbow. There’s a dull ache throbbing underneath the antiseptic gauze, but when she tries to flex her fingers, they obey. She uses her left hand to check the right side of her body. More bandages, taped to her skin, worse aching underneath. She feels like absolute shit, like she just woke up with the world’s worst hangover.

The room is small, just the overhead light, a toilet, and the bed in it. Her bedroom back home in Atlanta was smaller still, but not by much. Jackson checks the bed and sees that it’s bolted to the concrete floor in typical welfare housing fashion. She throws aside the thin blanket covering her and sees that she’s in a set of military issue underwear that aren’t the ones she put on when she left for this fucked-up drop. Both her ankles are tied together with polyplast restraints, and there’s a strand of it connecting her shackles to the bed frame. At the far end of the room, there’s a steel door, but Jackson doesn’t even have to try to know that her tether is just long enough for her to use the toilet, but too short to let her reach that door.

She sits up, ignoring the pain that shoots up her side, and clears her throat. There’s nothing in the room she can use as a weapon, and without a good knife, she can’t get rid of the plastic shackles that keep her feet together.

She clears her throat again. Her mouth is so dry that it feels like she’s gargling with wood splinters.

“Hey,” she shouts toward the door. Then again, louder. “Hey!”

She doesn’t have to wait long. On the other side of the steel door, there’s shuffling, someone getting out of a chair maybe. Then the door opens, and a surly civvie in combat fatigues looks at her without expression. He doesn’t say anything, just studies her for a moment. Then he closes the door again.

Jackson sits and waits.

Two minutes later, the door opens again, and someone else walks in.

The man who steps into the room is tall and lean. His skin is almost as brown as Jackson’s. He wears his hair in a military cut, shorn close to the skull on the sides and left just a little longer on top. From his bearing, the economy of his movements, Jackson knows that this man is a combat trooper.

“Good evening, Corporal,” he says to her, and it’s

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