He wasn’t wrong. When the door was fully open, four commandos in dark grey uniforms holding AK-47s rushed into the hold. “Get out! Get out!”
Tom was caught up in the mass of bodies as they were herded out of the plane. A few men moved too slow and were prodded none too gently with the nose of a machine gun.
Part of his mind yelled that they should turn around and fight. They outnumbered these guys. They could take them. But the rest of his mind just told his feet to move faster.
Once outside, Tom scrambled up a ramp into the back of a truck. He had barely turned around when the tailgate of the truck slammed shut and it pulled away. His face crashed into the wooden beams that lined the truck bed. Blood from his nose trickled down to his lip. He pressed chest-out against the beams to keep from being flung to the ground and trampled on.
Panting, he pushed his way back into a standing position. He struggled to control his breathing, but his racing heart was making that all but impossible.
Around him were the endless fields he’d seen from the sky, rimmed by an incredible mountain range in the far distance. If it weren’t all so surreal, he would have thought it was beautiful.
He craned his neck, trying to find any sort of landmark. For the longest time there was nothing. Just more land. But then, in the foreground, he began to make out the outline of a structure.
“What the hell is that?” someone asked.
No one answered. Disbelief flowed through him. It was a walled enclosure, lined with barbed wire, and boasting two guard towers. It looked like a prison.
No, he thought. I did my time. I’ve been doing everything right. This can’t be happening.
As they drew nearer, he noticed there were no paved roads, just a single dirt road leading to the entryway. And the wall wasn’t made of cinderblocks. It was wood, and huge. He couldn’t actually see the end of the wall when they pulled up in front of the entrance, which looked like an enormous castle gate. Whatever this thing was, it was not a prison.
Tom caught sight of a smaller structure outside the walled enclosure.
“Oh, this is not good,” he mumbled.
The cage was made of chain link with barbed wire running through it. The top was also covered in barbed wire. A small tarp had been thrown over it to serve as a roof, although it covered little more than half of it. About a hundred men slept inside the cage, crammed together on bedrolls, spread across the ground.
Two armed guards in the same grey uniforms as the commandos played cards at a makeshift table in front of the only entrance to the cage. They glanced up for a moment when the truck pulled in and, uninterested, went back to their game.
A bear of a man decked out in head-to-toe grey camouflage strode from the entrance of the enclosure to the truck. The commandos from the plane fell in step behind him. Obviously, this was the guy in charge.
The man reached the truck and, without warning, shot off a volley of automatic gun fire above their heads. Tom dove for the ground, his head crashing into the man next to him, who’d had the same impulse.
“Out,” the man bellowed.
His head throbbing, Tom scrambled out of the truck with the rest of the men. Most fell a few times, their bound hands leaving them off-balance. They lined up in front of the camouflaged man in a sloppy version of military formation.
He glared at them. Tom straightened his posture in response, noticing most of the other men with him doing the same.
“I am Commander Gregory. I am in charge of this facility. You have been deemed unfit for society due to your own actions. You now work for us. Food, shelter, sleep are all at my discretion. If you work, you will be treated well. If you do not, you will not be treated well. Any questions?”
A hugely muscled man standing two down from Tom stepped forward. “Yeah. How the hell are you going to make me?”
Tom watched the commander inspect the man like a bug under a microscope. He cringed. Oh, you idiot. Shut up and get back in line.
The commander walked over to the man and stood directly in front of him. His face was calm, but violence radiated from him.
The man met Gregory’s look with a belligerent glare. Tom knew what was coming and tensed.
Without changing his expression, Gregory kicked the man in the groin. The man crashed onto his knees with a moan. Gregory pulled out his sidearm and shot the man in the side of the head. The man crumbled to the ground, not moving.
Gregory returned his sidearm to its holster, and turned back to the group with a smile. “Any other questions?”
CHAPTER 8
Dewitt, NY
Drew's dead.
The words crashed through Laney’s mind over and over again. He was gone. She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, a sharp sting in her eyes. She was cried out. There were simply no tears left.