The world is a churning metal box and a flashing red light.
Your body is limp and you feel your skull crack against several cold and hard surfaces. Your vision quakes and your head wobbles atop your flimsy neck.
Your skeleton vibrates and your senses are assaulted with high-pitched ringing and a demanding odor of exhaust fumes. Your lungs simply refuse to work. Your mouth opens and closes but oxygen fails to go in or out.
Once more your head slams against the malaphyriphic wall and your eyes close. They close but you blink. You open them wide but only darkness stretches in front of you. Your fingers shakily rise to your face and you prod your open eye. You don't see your hand.
The next thing to go are the sirens. They are quickly replaced by an incessant ringing. Still the smoke crawls up through your nostrils and scrapes the inside of your throat, raw. Your body is still seizing but all you can do is lay back and convulse.
Now the world is black and silent.
Your ears ring just so that your mind can register some kind of noise. Your mouth is filled with a warm, salty liquid and you let it dribble from between your slightly parted lips. You try to sit up, but without your sight, you can't be sure if you're actually moving at all.
The ground beneath you shifts with the deafening sound of metal scraping against itself. A shaft of light slaps you in the face and you raise your arms to your eyes in protest.
Your vision focuses on your arm. Your flesh is green.
You blink.
Your flesh is blue.
You try to gasp but only a wheeze escapes your lips once you part them. You crawl backwards on your hands and feet as if you could physically run away from what you just witnessed.
The metal shifts again and the light is gone. You're left alone in the engulfing darkness, gasping, clutching your hands to your chest.
At some point you must have passed out from lack of oxygen because you find yourself waking someplace cold and wet. There is just enough light to make out the silhouette of your hand in front of your face.
You are light headed and cannot bring yourself to stand up. A hollow groan escapes your chapped lips. A drop of water lands on the bridge of your nose and rolls down into your open eye. It burns like hell but you haven't got the motivation to blink.
And so you lay with your back on the ground, your clothes soaked through with the icy moisture that pools around your stationary frame, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling above you.
The scent of roasting flesh crawls into your nostrils and leaves behind a bad taste in the back of your throat.
You track the time with your breathing. Two seconds to inhale and two to let it out, shaky but reliable. Two minutes, five hours, eight days.
Or maybe just half an hour.
No matter how long its been, you still can't see a thing and you haven't moved an inch. Not even your thoughts go anywhere.
Its when you've finally decided to get up that a door opens and your entire body is smacked with the hand of light.
Heavy footsteps.
You're dragged to your feet and slammed against a wall while a buzzing razor flies around your head. You're released and you let your body crumple to the ground.
Heavy footsteps.
The door shuts and the light is gone.
You blink and then bring your hands to the top of your head. Your fingers graze the uneven stubble and patches of lengthy hair in hard to reach places, like behind your ears. You know that your scalp is bleeding because when you touch your fingertips to the tip of your tongue, you taste metal.
You lean back against the wall, plucking stray hairs. You wrestle your poor excuse for a shirt off of your frame and press the fabric to your shredded scalp. When you're finished, you feel the cloth with your fingers and determine that it is too wet to adorn any longer.
A few times, a light flickers on for a split second and your surroundings are flashed before your foggy eyes. Only one word registers:
Grey.
Chunks of hair clump together in the pools of blood to your left. You prod the sticky mixture with your finger. Occasionally, the hair brushes against your calf and makes your skin itch. You scrape your fingernails along your leg, lazily.
For lack of anything else productive to do, you stand, dragging your palms against the uneven wall to your side as you walk. There are four. Each of them stretch about ten feet long. There is a door carved into the one to your right.
Using your high-school-graduate knowledge, you figure that this room is about forty square feet. There is an empty bucket stationed in the center of the room. There is a nest of rats in the far left corner.
Notes to self:
Rats are easily agitated.
Sharp teeth.
Livid determination.
What gets to you isn't the solitude. You find solace in it. It isn't the lack of sight or the constant goosebumps that leave your skin sore.
It's the fact that if you sit there, perfectly still, perfectly silent, and you somehow manage to tune out the irregular beating of your heart, you can hear footsteps. You can hear screaming. But no one comes to your door.
And as much time as you wasted imagining and longing for the light, for a single lungful of air that doesn't taste of urine, when you're dragged by the back of your neck, out of your cell, all that you want is your solitude.
You're blind.
The light reaches into your eyes and rips them from their sockets. You stumble forward, being pulled onward to a new environment.
It smells of rotting meat and bleach. It's cold. It's cold and you wish that you had a shirt.
Eventually your body collapses to the hard tile and your tour guide has no choice but to literally pull you across the floor. You claw at the ground, desperately trying to go back to your planet of dark and stillness.
You hear the creaking of a door and you are thrown through a threshold. You hit the floor, back first, skidding a ways, causing the skin on your shoulder blades to be peeled off.
The door closes.
You peer through your fingers until the light no longer beckons moans from your lips.
You look to your right.
Moldy walls.
You look to your left.
More of the same.
You turn and look behind you.
A heavily bolted door.
Straight ahead: a dirty man folded in on himself, his face buried in his knees.
There are scars on the top of his naked head and a shawl clings to his frame. His skin is tan and wrinkled, like worn leather.
His back rises and falls in a steady rhythm, but not slow enough for him to be asleep.
Your own breathing is shallow and plagued with hiccups. Your eyes itch and your body surrenders to it's tremors.
Suddenly, your unsteady breaths are interrupted by a warm syrup climbing up your throat. You fall forward on your hands and knees and retch, your back arching as blood spills over your lips and pools onto the floor.
You cough and splutter until bile no longer dribbles from your mouth. You try to regain some composure, but choke on remnants still desperate to cut off your airways.
The man looks up from his arms to peer at you. He remains silent, watching you fight for air. You hold his frosty gaze as you heave and clutch at your burning chest.
Your coughing subsides and the two of you stare at one another, listening to your jagged breathing.
"Sam."
The word cuts trough the air like the bark of a dog and with the intensity of dwindling time. His upper lip is bordered by wiry facial hair that quivers when he exhales.
"I beg your pardon?" Your voice is weak and strained, having not been utilized in weeks, as far as you know.
"Sam." He says again.
"Bobby."
"Pleasure to meet you, Bobby." He nods in your direction, a gesture of respect.
"The pleasure is all mine."
He grunts.
You fumble for words to prolong the out-of-place pleasantries. How odd, how ORDINARY, to exchange these stiff words of greeting in such a place, such a prison!
"If you don't mind my asking, have you the foggiest as to where we might be?"
He stares at you, huffing and pressing one palm to your chest, the other occupied with holding you up. He wiggles his mustache at you and spits on the floor to his right.
"Yes, sir, I have." He says.
"And that is?"
"Hell."
He sits back against the wall and folds his arms loosely over his chest, comfortably. He never breaks eye contact with you and you haven't got the courage to rip your gaze from his.
He says no more for several minutes.
"Navy?" He asks.
"Air Force."
"Same here."
Silence.
"You crash?"
"Yeah," You say, "Did you?"
"Nah. They surrounded me with their own planes and gave me a choice: land, or they'd shoot me down."
"So you landed?"
"I'm here, ain't I?"
"Yes, sir."
"So I landed."
He takes a deep breath and lets it out through pursed lips.
You swipe the blood off your chin with the back of your hand. You lock eyes with the leathery man that doesn't fit his name. His eyes are the kind of grey that could be mistaken for blue if he were smiling.
But he isn't.
His eyes just add to the tension of the hard expression on his face--cold and steely.
His eyebrows are thick and bushy, strongly resembling his mustache. His forehead is creased in layers and his face has a strange, squarish shape. His lips are as thin as they are dark. Laugh lines streak his face, souvenirs from a happy life he left behind.
"Is this some kind of prison?" you ask, needing to fill the silence that has been pressing in on your chest.
"Prison?" He laughs, a short, sharp noise. "We aren't that lucky, kid."
He laughs again, this time louder.
"Then where are we?" You ask after he's finished.
"This," he gestures to the space around him, "is a concentration camp."
"We're going to die." It's a question, but it leaves your mouth as a statement, since you already know the answer.
"Yep."
"And you're okay with this?"
"Well panicking isn't going to do me any good, is it?"
"I suppose not, but--"
"But nothing, kid. There's not a thing we can do while we're cooped up in here."
"You have a plan for when they let us out, then."
"No."
You stare at him.
"You have any idea how many men are out there, Bobby?"
Silence.
"'Coarse not, they drug your ass in while you were still out, cold."
Silence.
"How many?" You ask.
"How many what?"
"How many men?"
He considers your question for a few moments, twitching his mustache.
"Ten Thousand."
"Ten thousand?"
"At least."
"Good God!"
"Is he really that good?"
You pause.
"Who?"
"God."
You say nothing.
"He's the one who got us where we are, ain't he? He put us right here in this camp. That doesn't sound very merciful to me."
Silence.
"I'm sure there are other people with greater needs--"
"What's the greatest need to you right now, Bobby?"
"To get the hell out of here."
"And do anyone else's needs concern you?"
"Not particularly, but--"
"Then your's is the greatest need to you." He blinks.
Silence.
"God, ain't coming to the rescue, kid."
Silence.
"You don't believe in God, do you?" you ask.
"Never have."
"Why?"
"Excuse me?"
"Why don't you believe in God?"
His expression hardens.
"That just ain't right, kid." He shakes his head. "Do people go around asking you why you DO believe in God?"
"No, I suppose they don't."
"Then what makes you think that its proper etiquette to ask me, a total stranger, why I don't?"
Silence.
"I don't believe I have the right, sir."
He grunts.
