Dillon Grey felt the cold restraints on his wrists binding them together. They were of old make, steel shackles were on his ankles too. The inside of the van was cold. Dillon looked out of the window in front of him to see a desolate landscape of sun and white rock. The gravel road they traveled had caused a huge cloud of dust to chase them endlessly. They had been on this gravel road for what seemed like an hour. The van smelled like dried blood and old clothes to him. Dillon was studying the other passengers, wondering what they had done to land them in the same predicament. The man next to him was beaten down badly, his eye was swollen and bloodshot. There was dried blood all on his face and nose, which appeared broken, he wore a brown jumper with no undershirt, and it was unbuttoned hanging sloppily on his body.
The gentleman’s chest was bruised oddly as if he had been struck in the sternum by something hard. The only thing Dillon had seen him do was sleep since he got in the van. Dillon sighed, the air felt cold on him. He enjoyed it, the feeling of his head and ears being froze. The feeling of the cold steel against his wrists was not as welcoming though. He focused on the woman across from him. She too had been resting from the time they all got on the van. The woman had dirty blonde hair, and if he remembered right she had piercing blue eyes. He had seen them once before, though he couldn’t remember where. The girl looked tired, broken. You can tell when someone was in pain, and the people in this van all appeared to be at that point. “Do I look like that too?” he wondered.
They approached the tall sandstone and cream colored walls of a large encampment he knew from his research as Camp Leito. Dillon had studied the history of America and the changes of the government infrastructure had on the world that basically allowed them to commit atrocities on a global scale. If all major nations sanctioned the eradication of unwelcomed prisoners and charged them with crimes against humanity then who would oppose it? It would be seen as a success to cleanse the world from all these criminals. The sound of the chains constantly jarring from the bumpy ride brought his attention back to the moment at hand.
He had to figure a way to escape, this wasn’t the end for Dillon Grey. The bumpy ride had jarred some other prisoners awake and they silently opened their eyes slowly, rising from their first rest in what looked like a long time. The woman across from him was bent over with her head resting on her knees and her gorgeous hair covering her eyes. Dillon remembered he had seen them like blue lanterns piercing the otherwise colorless world he was in. He couldn’t for the life in him remember when though. The only life in his cold world right now was what he could see coming from her. “Where do I know her from?” he thought. She was staring blankly at the floor, her head bouncing up and down with every bump. He watched her sit up and stretch, cracking her neck as she did so.
Dillon took a deep breath. No one was going to talk to each other for fear of reprisal. He focused on the view from the window and saw the walls were growing in size as they approached, he could see what looked like a line of vans unloading prisoners in the distance. Out his own window, he could see a parking lot of mammoth proportions, filled with vehicles and construction equipment. “This might be my way out.” He thought to himself. They began to decelerate and everyone appeared to be bracing themselves in their own way for the next encounter with their captors. Until this point Dillon had been in the custody of the city’s jail. He assumed the other prisoners were either in the same boat or had been in the custody of some of America’s remaining prisons until this point. Though why half of them looked like they were beaten to death was beyond him at this moment. “Maybe they had offended some of the guards?” He thought to himself.
The vehicle slowly came to a halt and the familiar hum of the engine came to a stop. The van immediately became hotter and the small amount of enjoyment he got from being cold faded instantly. They were on alert, everyone was wide eyed and looking around for what was to happen next. Dillon however, was focusing on the next part of their encounter. He wasn’t paying attention for what seemed like just a moment and there was a dead body in the middle of the road ahead, where he had seen people lining up. Almost like you see something out of the corner of your eye, and when you check it’s gone. Except in this case, there was now a dead body still in the road.
“What are we getting ourselves into?” he thought in bewilderment. There was some talking from a well-dressed guard outside the door. He was talking to someone who Dillon recognized as a member of the government. The guard and the government employee approached the back of the van. Dillon took another breath preparing for what was to come next. Was this his time to escape? The doors opened. The government employee was standing off in a manner that made Dillon think he was suffering from a God Complex. He was watching the inside of the van intently as he raised his head. It appeared as if he was waiting for something to happen. Meanwhile, the guard started screaming for people to exit the van, and the first man closest to the door was attempting to move but his leg was clearly broken. The grotesque sight was cringe worthy, at the man’s knee it was bent at a 60 degree angle as his body was being pulled out by the guard. His leg restraint was caught on one of the floor seatbelt buckles.
The guard and the government employee tried pulling him harder by force as he tried to grab onto something with his hands, he reached for one of the guards and with a look of panic, accidentally grabbed him hard on the forearm. The Government employee stepped back quickly, withdrew a weapon from his coat and shot the prisoner in the face sending blood splatter throughout the cabin and a bullet zooming past Dillon’s head. He saw blood splash onto the girl across from ham’s face, and she flinched at this, shocked. “Out, out now! Everyone Get out!” They all rushed towards the door in a bent over, duck walk position shackled up. The rustle of the shackles was cloaking the rest of the guards yelling now. Dillon was still sitting down, he would be the last one out.
He was following behind the woman he recognized and saw what the guard and the government employee were doing. They would get you off the van, unshackle you, taking the metal restraints off as they placed the camp’s electromagnetic “Arc” wrist restraints on you. Dillon was all too familiar with these. This simple bracelet was impossible to take off and they were set to bind to each other as soon as they placed the second one on you, they held your hands together as if they were permanently stuck together.
As Dillon was getting off, the guard looked at him and didn’t help him on his way out. Dillon went to the ground. In full restraints catching yourself is a hard thing to do. Dillon was unable to catch himself and fell flat onto his face. “God damn it.” He grumbled to himself. He hurried onto his side, rolling himself onto his rear end and then standing up with haste as they took ahold of him. The guard and the government employee gave him a disgusted look. The guard took out two arc restraints snapped them onto his wrists, and removed the metal shackles. The government employee, or agent, pointed for him to join the others. The white hot ground beneath his feet now, had burned into his face when he hit the floor. Wishing his hands were free to wipe the dust off his face, he joined the group on the side of the road. They were sitting down facing the vans.
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Guards patrolled a distance off from the road with rifles, they were deterrents from anyone who wanted to run away. Dillon thought with these restraints being on it means there must be a power source nearby, and it was entirely possible that if he were to act up, he would discover that the power source was buried beneath this gravel road and he would be “Activated” and be stuck to the ground unable to run. Until he knew where the power source transmitting to these restraints was he couldn’t do anything.
The guard and the agent were talking near the van, and the agent was writing things down in what seemed like midair. This was commonplace, as paper and books had disappeared for the most part. Most things were virtual now, and the government employee had a “pen” he would write and the device on his wrist would display his “notes” in midair converting his mid-air writing into text for his document. Meanwhile, he could see his now projected notes progressing as he wrote. For accuracy he could write on any surface, as the movements would be more controlled. The typos were virtually unheard of as the software was incredibly used to its user after just a few calibrations were made. Dillon was looking around, squinting as the hot sun beat down on them. He was trying to count the vans. It took him a moment, “39 vans in front and behind of us in total.” He thought to himself further “39 vans, 6 prisoners each, our intake group right now is somewhere around 234 prisoners.
Astounding numbers. I wonder what is going on...” he made mental notes of this and continued looking for ways off of this adventure. Dillon was letting his vision meander to some of the guard towers, tall square structures with a pyramid shaped top. He could not see in, and wondered what secret munitions lay inside of them. As he was doing this he heard a loud tone emitting from the front of the road, closest to the prison. He squinted to see but was unable to make out exactly what was happening.
The government employee next to him and the guard were suddenly rushing in that direction, as was the other sets of guards and government employees from the line of vans. “I could take one of these vans right now...” Dillon thought to himself. He focused in on the situation and his “God Eye” zoomed in to focus, bringing the sight of the situation into his full field of vision, as if he was watching a movie in the theater. There was a group of civilians standing with their back to the gates, with a single leader in the front. He had a bible in his hand and he appeared to be preaching from it at the guards. Pointing and spit flying from his mouth as he spoke, they surrounded his group and started issuing orders. “What an odd situation.” Dillon said aloud, looking at those around him. Everyone refused to speak aside from him. Dillon was looking around and stopped to focus on one of the men who was in his group. He was crouching and sneaking over to the van they just were in.
Dillon spoke “Don’t!”... Dillon looked behind him, and noticed that the guards that were holding security with rifles were still there. The only guards who ran up to help the front gate were the government employees and the guards arriving with them. The man didn’t listen, he hopped in the van and immediately pulled a U-turn causing Dillon and his group to back up or be ran over, and this massive amount of movement drew attention to them. “GET ON THE GROUND, HALT!” The guards screamed immediately and were running towards their location.
Dillon hit the deck quickly, his face in the white hot gravel again, his eyes squinting from the sunlight. He used his God Eye to focus on the driver and he saw what he wanted to capture. The rounds shooting into the face of the panicked prisoner trying to escape were 8x40mm caseless rounds fired from a Methetu-Sabai corporation make Sabai SR-713 Pulse Rifle. Dillon was all too familiar with this weapon, he himself had used it in conjunction with his God’s Eye on missions across the globe. If he could get his hands on one he could cause some serious damage and possibly get out of here. The rounds were immediately recognizable to him, and he didn’t even have to use his optic to look at them. The sound they made rang a tune inside of his head that gave him an uncontrollable sense of exhilaration, it made him jealous and he longed to shoot his rifle again at the sound of the fire. The guards were not good shots though, it took them about 16 rounds between the three firing on the van to shoot the driver enough to incapacitate him. Dillon looked to the left and right as the van came to a sudden unexpected stop. He noticed even people not in his group had gotten down. Somehow, another person from his group had been shot in the ensuing chaos.
There was yet another body laying down bleeding out in the middle of the road. “He was still standing when the firing commenced” Dillon thought. Dillon tried to push himself up and regroup to the side of the road but as he predicted earlier, he looked at his wrists and they were in lock, and he was indeed stuck to the gravel floor. Meaning under the road was a power grid, probably for this exact type of situation. It would power the vans and weapons, anything electric, and also enable control to stop the vans or individuals directly. This same system was used in coffee shops to heat or warm your cups, to charge your cars at home with a power grid beneath your garage floor, etc.
The guards looked inside the van as it too locked in place and one of them slung his rifle behind his back. He approached Dillon’s group and hopped into the vehicle, “unlocking” it with his mere presence. The guard opened the door and pushed the dead body out, taking the place of the driver. He turned the van around and ran over the body in the process. The guard began driving the van towards the front gate, Dillon moved as far as he could trying to look behind himself. He saw the two guards with rifles watch the van head towards the gate. They backed off into their original distance from the group and one on the left waved his hand in the air, suddenly “unlocking” their wrists from the ground. “Fix yourselves! Do it quickly.” He shouted at the group of prisoners.
They all scrambled to the side of the road and sat back down, panicked and staring at the bodies once again before them. To Dillon it was nothing of note. He was not shocked by any amount of torture or death, but he was able to recognize that they had been at this prison for about ten minutes and three people from his group had already been shot to death. Clearly the guards here were under a different set of rules. They were truly at the disposal of the government in this moment, and any action could result in a bullet to the head. Dillon was watching the group of people by the front gate fall victim to restraints as the girl next to him was picking up gravel and letting it fall from her hands like sand. Dillon focused on her pretty solemn face, and felt a sense of exhilaration through him. He wanted to protect her, he wanted to talk to her and see where he knew her from. “Stop” Dillon spoke to her. She looked up at him with an empty stare and dark circles under her eyes, indicating at only some of the pain she had gone through in recent times.
She cocked her head at him, the only man seemingly not afraid to talk when surrounded by three bullet ridden bodies and blood flowing onto the gravel road. “The gravel in your hands.” He whispered. She looked at him oddly, with a confused and sickened look on her face “What?” she said as he frowned. Dillon replied, excited to hear her voice. “This road isn’t made of gravel.” He nodded in the direction of the dead bodies. She looked at him with interest from her fiery blue eyes, and caught his gaze as he spoke again. He dropped some gravel from his hand, letting it hit the ground “These are the bones of the people inside.” Her jaw opened and she turned to look at the dead bodies, and then looking down the road off into the distance in bewilderment.
