The unstoppable vengeance of Micheal Krux.

7. First Thirty Days

Chapter Seven. First Thirty Days

Michael Krux POV

Rest, that was all I needed to do, especially after all the emotional turmoil I’ve been through. 

I got it quiet alright, but just for a little while,  Day 2 began as early as 0330 with a metal baton banging on the bars.

Voss was already standing when my eyes snapped open.

He didn’t speak. Just jerked his head toward the door and I knew what it meant, I rolled off the bunk.

I had a very sound, yet short sleep, but still, my felt like broken glass grinding together, I didn’t make a sound.

We walked to the yard while the sky was still black and the stars looked close enough to cut your hand on.

Minus forty-eight degrees, with my breaths frozen into ice crystals the second it left my mouth.

Voss pointed at the frozen track that circled the exercise square. “Run.” He simply said 

I ran, no questions asked, I ran the first  lap and my lungs seized. I was ready to retreat when he repeated the same one word, “Run” again. 

So I ran, the second lap my legs turned to wood.

Third lap I puked yellow bile onto the snow, eyeing him to tell me to stop, but Voss didn’t stop me. He just stood there, arms folded, watching.

When I tried to slow down he said one word, “Again.”

I ran until the sky turned gray and the morning siren screamed. 

Twenty-three laps.

I counted every one because I thought I couldn’t do it, especially with broken ribs, but Voss kept saying, there’s no excuse whenever I told him I was tired and hurting. 

Breakfast was gray oatmeal that tasted like wallpaper paste would have been jealous of.

Voss traded two packs of cigarettes for an extra scoop and slid the tray in front of me, “Eat. Calories are weapons.”

I was greatful, I ate like a hungry dog who hasn’t eaten for a decade.

By the time we were done eating, it was time for hard labor. We marched out to the pit: a giant open crater where we swung pickaxes into frozen rock looking for rare-earth minerals.

For sixteen hours a day, we did just that. No breaks except thirty minutes for lunch (one frozen sandwich each).

The guards watched from heated towers with rifles loaded with rock-salt rounds.

Slow down, they shot the snow at your feet.

Stop, they shot you.

The first day lasted four hours before my hands blistered and split.

Blood froze on the pick handle.Voss worked two rows over.

He never slowed. Every swing was perfect.

Every breath is steady. When the guards weren’t looking he spoke without turning his head, “Pain is information, learn to  listen to it, don’t fight it.”

He was right, I listened and channeled my anger and pain at the work in front of me, so that by  day ten my palms were raw meat wrapped in rags.

By day fifteen the rags were permanent.By day twenty the blisters turned to calluses thick as leather.

Day twenty-three I swung the pick faster than the man beside me who’d been here eight years. He stared.

I stared back until he looked away. Night time was for our lessons, back in the block, lights dimmed, Voss sat on his bunk and made me sit on the floor.

Lesson one: how to kill a man with a toothbrush handle melted into a spike.

He showed me the angle, the twist, the exact spot under the jaw.Then he made me practice on a rolled-up mattress until my shoulders burned.

“Why do I have to learn how to do that?” I protested first, but Viss explained plainly that knowing some certain skills puts one at an advantage, whether we do use it or not. 

His logic made sense, so I listened to Lesson two: numbers. He recited strings of sixteen digit account numbers, routing codes, and private keys.

I repeated them back until my tongue bled. If I missed one digit he started the whole string again. 

Everything is numbers in the game, you have to train your mind to know your numbers” He had said. 

Lesson three: languages, “Don’t let them know you can speak other languages unless it is absolutely necessary, but learn, that way you can easily spy on them.” He said. 

“Who’s them?” I tried to pry to see if he was also planning his revenge against a particular person, but he was smart, he didn’t give it away. 

“The enemy.” He simply said. 

“Now back to languages, first you need to learn Russian,” he  said something in Russian and I repeated it.

Wrong accent, he slapped the back of my head, not hard, just enough to sting.

By day thirty I could curse fluently in Russian, place a food order, and threaten to gut someone, all without an accent.

Lesson four: the body. Push-ups on knuckles until they bled, pull-ups on the water pipe until my palms tore again, squats with a fifty-pound sack of rice Voss stole from the kitchen.

Every night he weighed me on the smuggling scale. On day i I was 192lbs, the skinny rich boy weight as he calls it. 

By day 10: 202 lbs.

By day  20: 212 lbs.

By day  30: 225 lbs and still climbing. The difference was really evident. 

.He broke my nose on day eighteen during sparring.Set it himself with his thumbs while I screamed into a towel.

Voss stood behind me one evening “Still pretty,” he said.

“But now you’re pretty in a way that makes men step aside.”He handed me a protein bar he’d traded a carton of cigarettes for.

“Eat, tomorrow we start on speed.” I tore the wrapper with my teeth.Thirty days.One month.I had stopped counting days until release. 

Now I counted reps, counted calories, I counted heartbeats. And every night before lights-out I whispered the same four words to the dark. “They will pay.”

 I said it everyday until Voss heard me once