Against Gravity

"You hear that?" Buddy whispered. Kendrick nodded mutely as loud voices approached from somewhere outside. They listened, hoping that whoever it was they were heading to some other hut.

Just then the door slammed open, warm air rushing into the moist atmosphere of the wooden building. Outside, crickets chirped loudly, the night filled with the sounds of tropical life. Several figures, reduced to silhouettes by the bright arc lights of the camp outside, stepped in among them, bulky in their camouflage gear, rifles slung over their shoulders. The soldiers seemed like phantoms from some other age – an age of hot water, clean blankets and edible food.

"McCowan, Juarez, Gallmon," one of the soldiers bellowed. "Stand."

A hushed silence fell across the hut, where perhaps thirty men were crammed into a tiny space, sleeping on their rough bunks in the unbearable heat. Kendrick thought enviously of all the others in the camp who must have heard the soldiers stamping their way across the scrubby soil, and their relief as it became clear that they weren't coming for them.

Kendrick lifted himself from his bunk and stood up uneasily, hunger and lack of sleep nearly making him stumble. McCowan and Buddy stood up simultaneously. Although thoughts of resistance and escape were always present, Kendrick had witnessed what happened to those refusing to cooperate. Their blood still stained the rough soil outside.

They were led out into the warm night air, the stars sparkling far above them, the jungle visible merely as a vague black mass beyond the arc lights. A thin beard clung to McCowan's hollow cheeks under eyes that were rheumy and sunken. Kendrick hadn't had much of a chance to get to know him yet, since he was only a recent arrival, although he'd brought with him some precious news of happenings in the outside world. He was apparently a Scotsman with "business co

Like Kendrick himself, he'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Every time a new prisoner arrived, more snippets of information were disseminated through the camp. Since Kendrick's own arrival, just after the LA Nuke, thousands more had been processed through the impromptu detention centres set up across the United States. Then they'd been incarcerated in this hell-hole.

The three prisoners were taken outside and made to stand in a ragged line. As Kendrick glanced down at Buddy Juarez's feet, he realized that the other man must have been lying in his bunk with his boots on.

Buddy caught his eye. "Always prepared," he whispered.

Sweat prickled on Kendrick's brow; for all the fragmented news about mass arrests still continuing back home, none of them had any idea where they were actually being held. The jungle and its temperatures suggested that they were somewhere in South America. Since there were no signs of civilization beyond the arc lights and the surrounding vegetation the nearest town might be miles away, maybe hundreds.

Something hard and metallic was poked harshly into the small of Kendrick's back so that he stumbled forward at the same time as the other two. They were then led away from the huts and through the wire fence that separated them from the rest of what seemed to be a military base hacked straight out of the raw jungle.

"Welcome to the Maze," said Stenzer.

There was food on a tray, fresh coffee in a pot brewing on a hotplate. Kendrick eyed a plate of doughnuts with sugar glazing. Small plastic pots of cream stood near the brewing coffee. The familiar smell of it all brought Kendrick to the edge of delirium. He was starving, had been starved for months.

"Where did you say?"

A smile flickered at the corner of Stenzer's mouth. A thin residue of hair clung to his scalp just above the ears.

"Our nickname for this facility," he explained. Stenzer's military cap lay by his elbow on the plastic-surfaced desk that separated them.

All three had been taken to a long, low building resembling a concrete bunker. Beyond it Kendrick had noticed an airstrip extending all the way to the edge of the jungle, and scattered around were other buildings, many surrounded by trucks. Kendrick guessed that this was the main barracks for their guards and the pilots who transported the prisoners.

Inside the building was a long row of elevators, each big enough to accommodate a truck. Their ride down had been long, the cage rattling and jerking continually as it descended. Several minutes later, its grille-gate slid open to reveal a long, grey corridor lined by metal doors. Kendrick had then been separated from the others and pushed into an empty cell lit with flickering strip lighting. There he had crouched on the bare concrete floor, waiting until the soldiers returned uncountable hours later to deliver him to this man Stenzer.

A calendar hung on the wall behind Stenzer's shoulder. Kendrick focused on it, noticing how days were ticked off in a loose, childlike scrawl. He saw that it was now the end of July.

His stare locking on Kendrick, Stenzer nodded in the direction of the doughnuts and coffee. "Would you like something to eat?"

"Yes," Kendrick choked, his stomach squirming painfully at the thought.

Stenzer's smile broadened just a touch. Not a smirk but a genuine smile, as if things were going just fine.

"Okay, then." Stenzer folded his hands together on his desk. "But I'd like you to answer some questions first."

At first, the routine was unvarying.

They kept Kendrick in the same empty, windowless subterranean cell he'd first been placed in. He had no pillow, no blankets. Daylight became a distant memory.

Any tenuous sources of information he had about the outside world were now cut off. One thing Kendrick realized for certain: nobody was coming to save him.

The last news he'd heard was that there had been some kind of rebellion among America's East Coast states, though he found this almost impossible to imagine. Supposedly, large sections of the United States armed forces had started fighting among themselves, with casualties in the thousands. Verifying the truth of this was impossible, of course. If such a rift really had occurred, it must have happened only a few weeks after his arrest.

Kendrick could imagine the causes, however. It would have started with the rot that had turned fertile wheat fields into millions of acres of sterile ruin, withering and dying under what was perceived as a biological and genetic attack by some invisible enemy. How easy it had been then to reduce America to a paranoid police state.

For a while he was tortured randomly. Guards would beat him with hoses if he fell asleep. Sometimes he let himself drop off anyway, enjoying a few blissful seconds of unconscious peace before the men in uniforms slammed the cell door open again.

At other times he would be asked repeated questions about people he did not know and had never heard of, about places he might have heard of but knew only from the pages of magazines.

Occasionally, as Kendrick was led down the long corridor for a session with Stenzer, he would see men in lab coats who looked like doctors or scientists walking past him. They spared him no glances: he was beneath them, he realized. Their faces told him that they considered him merely a traitor, and a criminal.

Kendrick faced Stenzer across the plastic desk for what seemed like the thousandth time, yet he couldn't even remember being taken out of his cell.