CHAPTER 7
Airborne over the United States
Tom Jeffries woke up slowly. Pain twisted through his stomach and his tongue felt like sandpaper. He lay on his side on a vibrating metal floor. It was loud. Really loud. Something soft collided with him, and his eyes flew open.
A man stared back, his face contorted with confusion and fear. Tom recoiled. With his hands bound, though, he only managed to put a few inches between them. His eyes darted around what appeared to be the hold of an old military plane. At least, that’s what he thought it looked like based on what he’d seen in the movies. He’d never actually been on a plane before.
Forty other men lay similarly bound around him. Some were still lying down, unconscious, while others had managed to sit up. Everybody was in rough shape. Stubble, rumpled clothes. Tom took in a breath and almost gagged. Damn.
He rolled onto his back to release the pressure on his left arm, which had fallen asleep. A sharp pain shot through his shoulders as he rolled onto his bound hands. He quickly flopped back onto his side and sucked in a deep breath as a wave of dizziness washed through him.
He managed to wiggle his way into a sitting position. His stomach gave another painful lurch. God, he was hungry. He glanced to his left and met the eyes of the man who’d rolled into him. He’d also managed to work his way to a sitting position.
Tom swallowed a few times, trying to get some moisture into his mouth before he spoke. “Where are we?” He was shocked by how weak his voice sounded.
The man shrugged nervously, his eyes wide. “No idea. Last thing I remember, I was on my way to visit my parole officer. Two guys jumped me and threw me into a van. Next thing I know, I’m waking up here.”
Tom struggled to think through the molasses of his thoughts. “I was leaving my P.O. and hurrying to catch my bus. And then this.”
He looked at the rest of the men that littered the cargo hold. They were different races and ages, but most were dressed like him: old jeans, t-shirt, a light jacket or sweater.
And they had one other thing in common: they’d all been in prison. He was sure of that. Some had tats that gave them away. Others just had that attitude. Once a guy had done time, there was something stamped on him that he could never shake.
Small windows rimmed the fuselage. Getting to his feet on shaky legs, he weaved his way through the mass of prone bodies until he reached one. My first time in a plane, he thought in disbelief.
Panic began to overwhelm the confusion in Tom’s mind. It’ll be okay. You’ll figure this out. The words sounded good, but they weren’t doing much to reduce the fear bubbling in his chest.
He stared out the window as if the answers to his current situation were somehow hidden behind the clouds. He remembered heading for the bus after leaving his P.O.’s office. He’d been worried he was going to be late for choir practice, and he’d really wanted to see Cleo. He’d picked up his pace so he wouldn’t miss the bus. And then what?
He struggled to recall. I walked down Jordan Street, cut down the alley behind the Civic Center, and then… His head jolted upright. And then some guy stepped from behind a dumpster wielding a knife.
He’d turned to run, only to find another man behind him. He’d felt a sharp pain and then everything went black.
He couldn’t remember much after that, but he knew he’d been conscious on and off. He’d been in a warehouse. He recalled being allowed to use the bathroom and then being stuck with a needle and forced back into the black. He recalled two other moments of brief lucidity as well. One was in a truck, and the other must have been at the airfield. He’d heard planes both times. He struggled to make sense of it. He could have been out for days. What the hell was going on?
An hour later, Tom was no closer to answering that question. He watched the clouds give way to a landscape of ice-capped mountaintops and green fields, followed by a plateau of flat barren land. He only saw one small town and a handful of houses. Wherever they were, there sure weren’t a lot of people.
Tom felt the plane jolt. The pilot must have lowered the landing gear. He strained to see farther out the window. He saw the same barren land broken up by fields of green. What he didn’t see, though, was anything even remotely resembling an airport. As far as he could tell, they were landing in the middle of nowhere.
As the descent became steep, he began to slide towards the front of the plane. On the other side of the plane, he saw a man turn around and grab a strap attached to the side of the plane that was used to secure cargo. Tom followed his example, as did the handful of men who had taken up positions at the other windows.
His shoulders ached, but he knew he got off lucky compared to the men in the middle of the hold. With nothing to hold onto, they crashed into one another as the plane bumped and bucked to a landing.
Almost as soon as the engine stopped, the giant cargo door at the back of the plane began to open. Tom stared at it with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He braced himself, knowing whatever came through those doors was not going to be friendly.
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?”