Barrel

2

Eva undressed and washed her face quickly before falling into bed. On the bedside, she noticed a small box of chocolates wrapped with a ribbon and an attached note from her room attendant: May your dreams be as sweet as chocolate.

Aww, how nice. She pulled at the ribbon, but it wouldn’t untie from the knot. She sighed and tried to slide the plastic off the side. Didn’t work. Now, she really wanted a piece of chocolate just to spite the damn box.

She climbed from bed and dug in her bag for the Swiss army knife. With a s***h of the blade, the ribbon fell to the floor. She tucked the small knife into the zippered pocket of her pj’s and pulled the lid off the gift.

The smell of decadent cocoa filled her senses. Wow, this had to be expensive stuff. She popped one into her mouth and climbed back into bed. The chocolate melted on her tongue as the steady rocking of the boat on the water lulled her to sleep within minutes.

Light peeked into the room the next morning through opened curtains. Eva squinted as she shifted in the bed, her head throbbing like she had been slammed by a hammer. She tried to open her eyes, but it felt like there were tiny weights attached to the lids.

“What the f**k,” she muttered.

Eva tried to sit up in the bed, but the second she did, features in the room began to spin and blur. Instinctively she lay back, feeling her heart fluttering in her chest like an angry bird.

“It’s okay,” she said to herself. “One thing at a time.”

Eva’s mouth felt like someone had shoved thick pieces of cotton in it. She could barely gather enough saliva to wet her lips and soothe the strange dryness. She tried to swing her legs off the bed, but while one settled on the floor, the other remained at one of the corners.

Something was wrapped around her ankle, and it felt cool, even when it strained against her muscles and bones.

“f**k!” Eva cried out.

She returned her other leg to the bed and glanced downward at her restrained leg. Something metallic was glimmering in the faint morning light. As her sight adjusted, a reality sunk in that made her want to vomit.

She was chained to the bed.

Eva looked around the room, trying to regain her sight. Everything remained blurry, but the ceilings were higher, and the width and length of wherever she was were quite a bit larger than the cabin she had been assigned.

So she was chained to a bed in some strange person’s room?

Eva tried to sit up again, closing her eyes to avoid the sickening spins. She grabbed hold of the brace around her ankle and shook it, trying to find its weak spot. It seemed to be strapped on tight, though, and there was no wiggle room for her to possibly slither out of it.

She was starting to panic. She knew it deep in her heart. She tried to hide from the reality of the situation by proposing to her frantic mind that what was happening was indeed a dream. That was until a voice coming from the corner of the room jolted her back into the present.

BARREL

Sweat poured down the lean, strong back of Barrel O’Connor at the height of the sun’s rays. He was wielding an ax, and it fell with a splitting force against the torn-down forestry section of the Supermax Prison. Barrel could use a chainsaw, which would make it far easier, but he wanted the hard work. He wanted the pain.

After all, there wasn’t much else for him to do in a place that had biologically cut off his ability to shift. He always felt like he was on the edge of bursting open, that one final irritation would make his skin splinter apart, much like the wood he was destroying with brute strength.

But he knew that wasn’t possible. The implant had been placed in the base of his spinal cord lining with the brain stem, thus cutting the shifting abilities at the source. There was only one way to have it removed, and it wouldn’t work forcibly.

He had a lot to think about when he wasn’t in the comforting darkness of sleep. Sometimes even sleep was no comfort. Nightmares slithered in with their stealthy echoes.

Barrel could see his sister’s face in front of him as clear as day: young with so much promise ahead of her. His niece, his sister’s baby, smelled as fresh as grass. The images from their deaths plagued him every waking moment. It didn’t matter that many years had gone by. To him, it was like seconds.

He envisioned the wood that he was destroying as having the face of the man who had green-lit the hit on his beloved sister and niece: Sergie, President of Okar, where Barrel was born and raised. Sergie had evaded Barrel since those two beautiful lives had been cut short, but that didn’t mean Barrel didn’t want to grasp for his pound of flesh.

Barrel was an expert in combat and tracking when his sister and niece were killed. He channeled his rage into locating the members of the gang that Sergie had hired and made sure to kill them slowly. Sergie could not be found, but because he was the president, he easily had Barrel sentenced to the Supermax.

Barrel’s only reason for staying alive was revenge. Hate taught him how to think, how to breathe, how to eat, how to exist. And he managed to gain a position in the forestry section of the prison, where he could take out some of that anger on giant tree trunks.

That day was the same as it always was. The hot sun beat down on his bare, rippled chest, his dark hair pulled back off his shoulders as he was left alone with his thoughts and his pain.