Invisible Forces

Invisible Forces

The rain came fast, heavy drops hitting the windowpanes like tiny birds.  He half expected to see a dozen sparrows below the windowsill, heads contorted, necks broken from a force invisible to them.  No, no pile of martyred avians.  Just the constant thumping of rainfall from the heavens, mirroring his mood, dour and defeated. Kevin Bishop had never been an overly religious man, honestly not even a semi-religious one.  Invisible forces.  Even as a kid, he had trouble with the idea.  He was supposed to believe in a powerful being who created the entire world in seven days.  Without proof.  Just stories from the past.  Every week he would read of famine in a foreign country, war somewhere on the globe, mass shootings, and on and on.  Free will.  That was the standard answer towards his non-belief.  We were our own worst enemy.  Like those sparrows, six billion people who lived in different circumstances, believed in different customs, different religions, just kept smashing their heads into windowpanes breaking their necks in an endless cycle of death, destruction, intolerance, and ambiguity. This cycle just kept playing at forty-five revolutions per minute on the turntable of fate, around and around in this vicious whirlpool, for centuries, millennia even. 

Recently, though, it seemed as if an invisible hand had switched that same turntable up to seventy-eight revolutions per minute.  Global warming, multiple pandemics, long standing democracies fallen to civil unrest and now ruled with the iron fist of military might.  Internment camps were set up within weeks of the successful coup attempt.   The weak, infirm, and damaged were considered useless.  The executions started and eventually became routine.  The discarded remains thrown into an ever-growing heap, no longer looked human.  Cordwood.  Stacked for the winter.  That was the thought coming to him now.  Every body added to this mortal cornucopia meant more food for him, winter was coming, resources were scarce.  Every mouth subtracted meant one more day of survival for him.  God had no place here.  Only the evil of man was evident.  

That was when it happened.  The moment that would change his life forever.  The voice.  It was a sweltering day in August.  Heatstroke.  Has to be.  Or mental illness.  Schizophrenia. It did run in his bloodlines. 

  It spoke clearly.  Kevin.  A booming voice resounded in his head. Silence.  Then once more. Kevin.  He looked around, foolishly expecting a guard with a megaphone.  Nope.  Just the decomposing stench of the discarded.  The last few weeks, pits were dug to dispose of the corpses.  Disease had run rampant throughout the camp.  Measures were taken to protect the remaining prisoners.  A healthy labor force, enslaved or not, was essential to the occupiers' future plans for America.  No longer the land of the free, home of the brave.  Kevin Bishop.  Once more, in a voice so loud he thought his skull would crack wide open like an egg, brains spilling out onto the dirt.  No more Kevin.  He almost wished for it.  The sweet release of death.  

“What!” he barked in too loud a voice.  

The carbon fiber baton to the back of his cranium was his answer.  His world went dizzy for a few minutes.  

“Prisoner 247559!  Who said you could speak!”  The guard was a bear of a man.  Six foot four, three hundred and twenty pounds of rage and ignorance.  

Why would he think any of them knew his name?  Names were irrelevant here.  Names did not exist.  Names were dangerous.  They meant attachment to the world of the past.  The world which no longer existed.  Each prisoner had been labeled with a number.  It held no meaning besides a basic accounting of manpower.  It was best to forget the world he remembered.  Memories held dangerous ideas of freedom, rights, human decency.  None of those existed here.  In the present.  In this place of pain, sorrow, and toil.  

Just then, an excruciatingly sharp pain, a dagger stabbed behind his right eye, dropped him further to the soil.  I'm having a stroke.  This is it.  It is over.  Only it wasn’t.  

A vision populated his brain.  The ground shaking violently.  Trees and buildings engulfed into an expanding chasm, swallowed whole.  This camp, its buildings, its people, swallowed like Jonah by the whale.  Kevin shook his head and the vision dissipated.  

“Get up prisoner or this can be your final resting place!  Doesn’t matter to me”, the guard hollered.

Kevin rose quickly and silently, putting his arms up in a protective posture, awaiting another blow from the baton.  

“Get back in line!  I hear another peep out of you, I’ll cut your vocal cords.  Make sure you never utter disrespect ever again!”  

That was three months to the day.  Not that he knew what day it was.  Calendars and clocks were obsolete here.  There was a tower set in the middle of the camp.  At the top of this wooden structure, was their lone measure of time.  A large brass bell.  Probably stolen from a church.  Not like those existed anymore.  Religion was forbidden.  It tolled twice a day.  Once for the start of the workday, once for the end.  Kevin marked time with a fingernail scratched in rows of ones on the pine slats to his bunk.  He made sure it was faint and on the underneath portion of the slat.  If they wanted to crawl their fat asses under there to catch him have at it.  Catching himself before chuckling at the thought of Gigantuar squeezing his lard ass under his bunk.  One of the benefits of a forced labor camp.  He had no trouble fitting into small spaces now.  There were no love handles, no spare tire, no few pounds he should lose according to his doctor. Pretty sure he was safe; no guard was going anywhere near the bug infested mattresses in the barracks.  Bedbugs and lice ran rampant.  Bathing was a weekly event.  Prisoners lined up for the bath house, a cursory two minutes per prisoner, under the watchful eye of the guards.  No soap.  Barely enough water to maintain any semblance of cleanliness.  The smell was unpleasant but low on the scale of olfactory trauma of this death factory. 

  He had no idea where they had taken him.  In the initial herding, after several failed rebellions, prisoners were loaded into the trailers of eighteen wheelers. Then the chattel was transported long distances to camps across the country.  Most, he assumed, would be in remote locations, far from cities.  Control was the name of the game.  Distractions were limited.  Cities provided too many distractions.  They were hard to police. Large buildings provided cover for rebel forces.  He had heard that most of the big cities had been carpet bombed to oblivion. There were no trees here, at least not ones taller than the camp fences.  If he had to guess, based on the climate, they were somewhere in the Southwest.  The area formerly known as New Mexico or Arizona.  Desert.  Sand as far as the eye could see.  Maybe a cactus or two.  Easily policed.  A death sentence to anyone who tried to escape.  Triple digit heat.  No protection from the elements.  Better to endure the prison you knew.  

Rain was a welcome visitor.  This kind of rain was rare.  Seasonal, he thought.  Maybe, annual.  He wasn't sure. A native of New England, Kevin was used to four seasons.  Cold, wet, rainy Spring.  Warm, occasionally hot Summer but nothing like this.   Autumn, cool nights and the changing of leaves.  Winter, chilling temperatures, snow measured in feet, not inches.  Oh, how he wished for snow now.  He would even take below freezing temperatures.  Better than being slow roasted on a daily basis.  

Another rarity was the opposite sex, females to be exact.  There was only one in the entire camp.  No, not a prisoner, or even a guard.  The lone female in Camp Desolation, as he called it, was the warden. She was also the only person allowed the privilege of a name.  Warden Deirdre Abaddon.  Or as we called her, Abandon hope all ye who enter here.  She made Nazis look like Boy Scouts.  There was no end to the sickness that was her imagination.  She seemed to revel in coming up with new spins on old tortures.  Everything old is new again.  Deirdre loved history, especially the morbid and gruesome history of punishment through the ages.  The Viking form of torture known as the Blood Eagle where the punished were flayed open, ribcages broken and displayed into its namesake. Deirdre always loved the imagery of the Blood Eagle, the transformation of the bodies of the accused into a work of art, bringing them closer to the heavens.  She could picture in her mind their bodies taking flight as the light in their eyes dimmed.  

"Now, where were we"… she said in her high-pitched nasal voice.  Kevin’s record keeping had been found.  It was punishable by death.  Punishments were a spectacle for the entire camp to witness.  Dierdre’s one woman show.  Kevin watched as his bunkmate; Todd bound crucifixion style to the wooden base of the belltower listened to her words.  Before Kevin could take ownership of the scratches, the keeping of time in a never-ending nightmare, Todd had accepted blame.  He was ten years older than Kevin and physically not well.  As the guards gathered him up, Todd had whispered in Kevin’s ear.  “It’s ok, please let me do this for you.  You need to escape.  You will find a way for the rest of them.  I believe in you.” 

Holding a ten-inch Bowie knife, Dierdre started slicing Todd’s skin.  

“Why were you marking the days?”  

Slice.  

A trail of blood trickling from the wound across his bare chest.  

No response.  

“Prisoner, why were you marking time?”

A little louder now. 

Slice.  

A deeper one.  Down the inner thigh.  A large pool of blood forming on the ground.  A scream muffled into a groan.  

“I can do this all day, prisoner.  

You know that.  

I can end your suffering quickly or it can go on for days.  

Your choice.”  

Deirdre’s version of death by a thousand cuts had her trademark horrific spin to it.  Death by a thousand poisoned cuts.  The wounds would not heal properly, remaining open, bleeding more.  Worse than that was if she didn’t get a proper answer, the prisoner remained outside in the elements.  The extreme heat, the burning sun, the carrion pecking slowly away bit by bit of the damned.  Warden Abaddon turned to the assembled crowd and addressed them.  

“I do not take pleasure in this”, she lied.  

“I only ask that you follow the rules.  

It is a simple request.  

Yet, human nature being what it is, someone always breaks them.  

Like misbehaving children!” 

Turning back to Todd, Prisoner 50069, she spoke softly.  

“Are you planning something?  

Are you the ringleader of some kind of rebellion, prisoner?”  

No response.  

"Prisoner 50069, will be left to ponder his decision not to speak!"  

The guards knew this was the signal to round up everyone.  Purposefully, lining them up and parading them in front of the tortured before heading back to the barracks.  Kevin wept a lone tear as he passed his martyred bunkmate, dehydration or desensitization, he wasn’t sure.