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Page 11.
Chapter 4. Amela To The Airfield
 It was still night as Amela rose, just before dawn. Her sleep was disturbed by her own anxiety, and by the sound of wild wolvines howling their broken-souled chorus on a ridge line just outside of camp.
Bring us your dead, a dozen or more animals seemed to croon, bring us your weak and sick if you have no dead. This is our world. We belong here. You don't. Our ancestors have hunted here since your mothers were monkeys, and we are hungry…
The howling broke into Amela's deep sleep.It brought her to a dismal twilight. Something was different today from every other day. She made a fist, and felt something in her hand. Her first instinct was to raise her hand into the gray light for a look. Her second instinct was to be cautious, to not attract attention from the night watch. There were always capors lurking, just waiting to earn a bonus point, maybe an extra mouthful of meat, for spotting an infraction.
A matron trundled through the barracks, whacking each metal bunk with a heavy ring of jingling keys. "Up! Fall in! Mess hour! Work detail! Fall out or miss the mess. Go hungry all day. Drop dead in the sun. Your choice, bitches."
The barracks exploded with desperate women who rushed to the central aisle for head count.
Amela swung out of bed, moving from sleep into muzzy wakefulness as she did so. Still wearing her padded work clothes, she stood at the edge of her bed. She glanced down at her hand, and saw that someone had looped a fine leather thong around her wrist like a bracelet. Tied to it by a simple knot was a tiny flutter of rag, like a tiny bow tie.
Four ghostly figures hurried through the fog.
"Hurry, bitches, hurry!" two women in Sekurita uniforms shrieked. They harried a pair of she-capors in drab blue, who struggled to check faces with wireframe IDs on their hand pads.
"All accounted for," said the senior capor when the four reached the door to the main corridor.
"Fall in line for chow," bellowed the Sekurita sergeant-major. "No talking, no eyeballs, no attitude, or I'll have you flogged to within a minich of your lives."
As Amela joined the silent file of yawning, stretching women, she combed her stringy hair back with her fingers, and wondered if the conversation with Vikri had been a dream.
No, she remembered he night's dreams clearly, though they would evaporate when she was fully awake. Her dreams had taken her back to Belair. She was younger, and rode her bicycle up and down a leafy path on her parents' street. A frog chirruped at her from a rain drain. Wind ruffled a brownish puddle in which the frog's green face was reflected. Amela stopped pedaling and straddled her bike as she regarded frog, leaves, and puddle. How interesting everything in the world was. Her dreams were often vivid, and definitively shut out the grim realities of this Aerag.
No, Vikri had been a real event, here in this arctic gloom and cold. Amela shuffled down the corridor in line with the others. Their broken, patched boots made sliding sounds on dull wooden floor boards. The women had little to say to each other. Each looked forward to hot cafir and their one full meal of the day, which was designed to fill them with energy for a back-breaking labor detail. The idea was that you worked your behind off, weakening in the process through the day. You had no energy left for mischief, and collapsed in your bunk for an exhausted sleep. That was the daily routine.
Today was different for Amela. Her heart pounded with hope and terror. The line moved slowly from window to window. Each window threw a wild shape of moonlight across the dark corridor. The air was filled with cooking smells and the busy shouting of harried cooks and servers.
For a moment under a ceiling light, Amela lifted her wrist. The rag had writing on it. Neatly blocked letters in black, Standard Humansh alphabet in a nice hand, but she could not afford to open it to read. A capor might spot her and ruin everything. She stuck her hand in her pocket to protect this night gift.
The line took her through the service area just outside the kitchen. Amid intense yelling, bowed servers slopped together a formula meal consisting of a mug of hot cafir, a bowl of tolerable stew, and a chunk of good, fresh bread. The Kaarrk meant to keep the women alive, because they were worthless if dead.
Amela took her ceramic tray to one of a hundred long metal tables bolted to the concrete floor. The trays were designed to crumble if used as a weapon. Everything had been considered. No utensils, so you ate with your hands. Shutting out the din around her, Amela savored every bit of the hot meal. The stew was, as usual, either broken bits of greasy, aging fish that stank bad, or gristly pellets of processed meat. These proteins floated in a salty vegetable broth infused with chemicals—and drugs including upsies—to get them going.
Most of the women took a lengthy potty break on one of a row of open toilets set in a wet, slithery trough the length of the barracks. Usually, the solids just eaten stuck to your gut like a barbed brish seed the size of your fist. The liquid went through quickly, leaving nutrients to sustain you during a long, hard day. Sitting on the stinking john, Amela cautiously undid the tiny knot. The cloth was faded baby-blue, and read: AF 45 early.
Amela read it a hundred times before tying it back on its thong. Why save it? It might be the most precious document of her life. But what if she were caught with it? Thinking of the harrowing interrogation and torture, she tore it off and swallowed it. Not a moment too soon.
Already another POW was shouting at her to finish so she could do her business. Amela told her to stick her head down a shitter and go through the lips, since she already had her fat mouth open. Afraid, the woman backed off to wait her turn.
Each shitter flushed regularly, once every three minutes, adding panic and urgency amid the shouting and jostling. Each bowl had a bag of krum shavings and sand beside it for left-handed cleaning. You got to wash your hands at a broken concrete waterfall, and dry them in more sand, on the way out to the parade field for the morning's second head count. Sand worked wonders if it wasn’t frozen.
Amela looked about more carefully than ever. If anything were to go wrong, today was it. She might be betrayed, put in solitary, questioned, beaten. Maybe Vikri was on the level, or maybe not. If she was, then today was her ticket out of this place.
Major Texel marched up and down with a cadre of Sekurita women, while capor women flurried among the massed platoons and companies and battalions of the barracks work details with digital pads. There wasn't a human traitor among them. All were humanian or humanoid, and a few carried majority alien genes. None had any love for humans, who lorded it over the entire Dominion.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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