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Dream On

Book Two In The WJA Series 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

YOU NEVER CAN TELL what will happen to you. Some people think of themselves as untouchable or above the rules. I wasn’t one of those people. On the other hand, I had believed that one day it might happen, or that if something terrible did, I would be ready for it.

However, nothing could have prepared me for this. This place, and the feeling of finality and judgment.

Mind numbing darkness crept all around me with a stench that hit my senses like a freight train. At first, I thought I was buried alive in someone else’s grave and the smell was the decomposing body with which I shared the box. Then after a few days or weeks, I can’t say which for sure, I figured out that the stench was I.

I was the terrible taste in the stale air that I tried to breathe. I was trapped in a wooden box that gave me about a foot below my feet and above my head. I felt around and touched the lid only to find that my fingers could barely fit between my nose and the top of my tomb.

I’m dying. The thought made me want to scream and struggle, kicking and thrashing with everything in me to free myself and drink in the sweet morning air that used to swim through my lungs. I did in fact do just that, for so long that I passed out with exhaustion and woke up in the same dark place. Only this time my head ached with a pounding that not just one aspirin would cure.

I would have believed I was already dead but the pain shooting through my body told me otherwise. I understand that you don’t know me and that I’ll never see you or know your name, but I need to tell someone what happened, and how I would end up dead.

My name is Mark Appleton—I know, not too flashy or in your face, hero kind of a name. But I’m no different than you or the stock broker working his eighty plus hours a week, or the guy standing on a highway holding a stop sign in a construction zone. I am your everyday, ordinary, run of the mill American guy, and I’m in a casket. My casket. I was buried alive and from what I can tell, I won’t be escaping anytime soon.

So why would someone do that to me you might ask?

Well, I have a job that involves a little different approach then your average mail carrier; you might say my job is to deliver messages to those in this world who think they can commit any evil they dream up without repercussion. I come into contact with people who would love to see me dead, hanged by the neck and swinging in the breeze.

That is where I come in. I am their repercussion!

I’m an assassin who is what some might call a vigilante or a mercenary of sorts. I know, I know, but laying here in a cramped box talking to myself, I cannot help wondering how I ended up doing what I do and how I ended up in a pine box underneath a ton of dirt.

The voice recorder in my watch is the only way you’ll ever know my story, so here goes…