Redemption

Chapter 2: The Overseer

Chapter 2: The Overseer

      John Cramer woke up with a dull aching in his chest as his head swam with confusion. The faint scent of industrious, tarnished steel and blood awakened his senses as the smell became all too overbearing.  John drunkenly swayed his head side to side as his body tried to catch up with his mind.     

      "Where...where am I?" he asked, blood slowly pooling just under his tongue.

    "Same place we've been all our lives....in a cage," an unseen feminine voice answered. Before John could look up to see where the voice had come from, his eyes met something around his neck: an ungodly mechanism infused into his very flesh. John grasped at the contraption with both hands in an attempt to remove it but felt the metallic jagged edges of it pierce his skin. John gave it a hard tug, but the collar only sunk its metallic talons farther into his flesh to prevent its removal. He cried out in pain as the collar tightened its grip around his throat and latched itself onto his clavicle with an unimaginable amount of strength.

     "I wouldn't mess with that if I were you," the voice warned. John looked up to see another inmate from the asylum sitting a few seats over from him, staring at him as if he were an idiotic infant. He noticed she had on a collar too and her brown and white inmate uniform was bloodied from her attempts to take her collar off as well.

    "Why not?" John asked, angrily.

    "It's a bomb collar," another voice answered, the voice shaking with fear. Yet another inmate sat directly across from John and was breathing rather heavily as if he had just run twenty miles straight without rest.

    "Class A electromagnetic remote detonation collars, to be precise," the female inmate added. "Our little friend here awoke before I did and went a little overboard on trying to get his off," she stated as she pointed over to man. The male inmate leaned forward just far enough to show off his battle scars at the base of his neck where he had thrashed and ripped his flesh apart to get at the collar.

    "Doesn't bother me one bit," the man said as he reclined back in his chair with a smug look spread across his face. That's when something occurred to John...none of them were chained down to their seats. John raised up his arms to satisfy this observation and rested them back at his sides.

    "We're not strapped in!" he blurted out. "So, that means we can escape...." Before he could stand a terrible pain in his back flooded forth. It was as if barbed wire had clasped itself onto his spinal cord and ripped through his back tissue up into his brain.

    "No standing while the vehicle is in motion, prisoner!" a guard yelled from somewhere in the front cabin of the vehicle they were traversing in.

     "What...What's happening?" John stammered as he fought off the pain.

    "What you just felt in your back or where are we going?" the woman asked.

     "Both" the male inmate stated, a stern look of concentration spreading across his face.

    "Electric Proximity Prods are attached to the back of the seats. If you remove your back from the seat at any given time you'll be electrocuted, simple as that. And to answer your little question on where are we going I haven't the slightest clue," the woman said, looking around at the dark shadows that filled the back of the vehicle they were being transported in. 

    "You needn't worry too much about that," a chillingly, monotone voice echoed. The voice came from the last three seats that were closest to the front of the vehicle and just far enough away from the inmates so that his face was blurred in shadows. The only visible parts of the man's face were the reflective rims of his glasses and the cleanly cut stubble on his chin.