T.H.A.N.K.S.

What happened....Where am I....No no no no...

Were the first words I thought when I woke up. This was the worst experience I had ever encountered. How was this possible? My head ached dreadfully and I felt like I had just gone through a mauling.

I tried to stand up and all of a sudden, all my senses came back to me. AHHHHH. Pure agony, blinding red lights,  an uncontrolled high pitched beeping piercing through my ears and a horrible taste of blood from crushed teeth. Throbbing hands and feet with a faint smell of iron and sweat. And then nothing. I heard faint, indistinct murmurs. My eyes opened like a small breach in  the ground, depicting these bright lights arranged in an orderly fashion in... letters. T.H.A.N.K.S.

Oh no I had to get out of there. Now! This was a life and death situation! T.H.A.N.K.S. was  a notorious and well known horrible association : Tough Hitmen to Achieve Nasty Killings... Silently! Someone wanted me dead!? Why?! How?! I needed help right now. I couldn't die! I haven't  been to London yet, and I need to go there to finally meet my biological mother, the one that my father kept away for so long.  This was bad, very bad!

AHHHHH! A pure torturous sound. They had started the S.O.S. Screams Of Suffering. Strangely I felt nothing. I didn't do anything. The sound was coming from the other room. The fact that I had heard the scream meant that either the walls were very thin or they were just hurting that person very badly, so badly that their screams were too loud to be contained by thick walls.

I then heard another scream followed by "No No No... Please don't do this... I'm begging you..."then a full twenty minutes of screaming, beating, gasping, choking, crying. And one final sound that hit me in the throat. Those raspy sounds that just make you turn away and think about something else and then, nothing. That person was dead.

I started releasing some tension and for some reason and I might have tried to doze off. At least  until I felt a thin cold finger on my throat, not a finger, a blade! A soft: "...Sorry... I don't want to do this..." I turned to see a slender woman in her late twenties standing and holding the blade firmly and sobbing quietly.

"You don't have to do this!" I told her whispering

"I do! If I don't he will kill me!" she answered whispering too.

"Who? Why?"

"My dad. He is a very powerful man and he kills everyone who is opposed to him. I uncovered his secret, the one he hid from me my whole life, he wanted to protect his reputation by making sure that no one knew. He wanted to end me silently. The only way I can survive is to join T.H.A.N.K.S. so they will protect me from him but the initiation is to kill someone in front of three official members."

So that's why. I was just a random person T.H.A.N.K.S. chose for the initiation.

And then it hit me. What I was about to do was abominable, gruesome, revolting, outrageous but I wanted to live at least until I saw London and my mother  with my own two eyes and I said it:                                                  

"Excuse me!" I started, lisping from my broken teeth "But it seems this young lady doesn't want to kill me!"

"-Well we'll kill you ourselves." said the strongest hitman, in a firm russian accent

"-No no no... I mean... she can't pass her initiation but I'll gladly do it for her. I'll kill her in exchange for my freedom and life, I won't join but I won't tell anyone. Deal?"

The girl was looking at me with pain, fear and hatred in her eyes and funnily enough I didn't feel anything about what I was accepting to do. She stammered and sputtered trying to find something to say while they were detaching me from that cold metal platform and placed her twisting and turning all over the place saying she wanted to prove herself and that she was capable of killing me. They didn't listen. They gave me the butcher knife. It weighed a ton and it was all silver except for a thin layer of fresh blood on the surface. I was going to kill her. I didn't think twice when the time had come to end her. Slash. Her head rolling down the platform onto my feet, her lifeless blue eyes locking into mine, her dark auburn hair covered in crimson blood, her face going pale, the warm blood trickling and cooling down my naked feet. I let the knife fall onto the platform thinking about the next person to dare defy their father. I knew why my father hated me now.

And I left the room to go wash the blood off, go to the dentist and buy a ticket to London. Then, once I saw what worried my father about my mother, I could die in peace.