Blackout by Dawson Mark

Author:Dawson, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unputdownable
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

50

MILTON AWOKE. It felt as if he had been drugged. He could hear the sound of voices, but they were a distance away from him and he was too groggy to understand them. He waited until he came around a little more. The voices were speaking in Filipino. Raucous laughter punctuated the conversations. He couldn’t understand a word of what was being said.

He was lying on a hard surface. No bedroll this time. His body ached and his head throbbed. He opened his eyes and wished that he hadn’t. It seemed to trigger a fresh wave of pain, a surge that pulsed from his head and all the way up and down his body. He felt nauseous and weak.

He was in a cell. It wasn’t the one that he had shared with Isko. There was no natural light and, as he tilted his head as far as he could without intensifying the pounding in his skull, he confirmed that there were no windows. The walls, floor and ceiling were all fashioned from slabs of bare concrete. The only way in and out of the cell was a metal door with a blocked-off slit at head height. The light was from a single fixture overhead. Milton would have preferred it to be dark, but it was not; the light was bright and merciless.

He was in solitary confinement. That, at least, was what he had banked upon. He remembered de Lacey’s four stooges ready to haul him out of the prison yard so that Tiny could beat him again. He knew that he had hurt three of them; it was possible that he might even have killed the man he had slashed across the throat. The guards had subdued him, beaten him until he was unconscious and then brought him here.

That was good. It was what he had wanted. He had been battered yet again, but he hoped that it would be more difficult for de Lacey to reach him here.

He tried to work out what time it was, but that was impossible. He usually had an instinctive feel for day or night, but not now. He would make it a priority to find out the time. He had been kept in solitary before, and having a rough idea of the time was a crucial part of hanging onto sanity. The passing of hours and days was a constant around which he could balance out the loss of his liberty.

He heard the sound of footsteps. He gingerly rolled over and tried to sit. His muscles had locked up, and the effort of raising himself up was excruciating. He pushed himself to a sitting position as the slot in the door scraped open.

“You are awake,” a man’s voice said.

“What time is it?”

“That is unimportant. You will stay here now.”

“Where am I?”

The man didn’t answer. “You killed another inmate. Killed one and badly hurt two others. You will be kept here for your own safety until you can be tried. After that…” The man let the words peter out.

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