State of Terror

by John Brown

  13

  Welcome to Camp 6

  THERE WERE JUST A FEW OTHER PRISONERS in the expansive exercise yard. Haggard, feeble figures in bright orange jumpsuits wandered about, grateful to be free of their tiny cells for even a little while. The unseasonably cold spring rain soaked their clothes through to the skin, providing the only shower they would have that week. Sentries toting Remington Modular Sniper Rifles patrolled the catwalks over the yard. Whenever an inmate attempted any sort of communication with the others, a guard would react swiftly with a sharp thrust of his rifle butt into the prisoner’s ribs.

  Dressed in an oversized orange jumpsuit, the sleeves and pant legs rolled up to keep his hands and feet free, Benson had been forced to run around a gravel track several times already. He dropped to his knees, panting, although he wasn’t out of breath. He did not want to give them the impression that he could do this all day.

  A furious guard stormed over, driving a rifle butt into his side. He fell over onto the gravel, the sharp, stabbing pain paralyzing him.

  “Keep runnin’, maggot.” The guard stood over him, threatening to jab Benson with his rifle again. “Move your ass!”

  “I’m begging you,” Benson said between labored breaths, “let me rest a minute.”

  “Ya need your exercise! Move and don’ stop till I say! Are we clear?”

  Benson struggled to his feet, rubbing the pain away from his ribs.

  So these are the rules of engagement. I am at war, again. Survival is all that matters now.

  After exercise, Benson lied down on his bed and closed his eyes. All was silent for a long time, and then screeching music blared across the compound.

  “You could say I lost my faith in science and progress,”

  “You could say I lost my belief in the holy church,”

  “You could say I lost my sense of direction…”

  Benson lay on his cot, wrapping the pillow around his ears to muffle the noise.

  “But if I ever lose my faith in you-u-u,”

  “There’d be nothing left for me to do-o-o…”

  Like all soldiers, he’d been through SERE training — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape — but he was a younger man then. With enough discipline — and some luck — he could stay alive in extreme wilderness or hostile urban environments.

  For a time.

  Wearing a black hood shrouding his upper body, Benson balanced precariously on a stool. Attached to his hands and torso were electric cables. His arms were to be raised away from his body and held virtually motionless. They forced him to stand erect like this for what seemed like hours. In his military days, standing stiffly at attention was a drill he’d endured for long stretches. Some recruits would faint and crumple from the strain, especially in hot weather. The idea was to instill mental and physical discipline. He had heard that they no longer did this in the service.

  Losing his balance in the darkness, he triggered a vicious jolt, causing him to fall blindly off the stool and smack the cement floor with his shoulder. With each round on the stool his anxiety increased, making it ever more difficult for him to maintain his balance.

  Returned to his cell, Benson lied down gently on his bed. Beyond the physical pain and constant discomfort was the mental anguish. He was miserable in this wretched place and wracked with guilt.

  Even I didn’t know it was this bad. They brought it all home — and I helped make it happen.

  He rubbed his aching shoulder and winced.

  Politics makes you stupid.

  He heard screaming and crying from somewhere outside. He went to the door and put his ear to the mesh porthole.

  “Please — please, no-o-o-o!” a woman wailed, and then more howling and yelling. Sometimes it was frantic; some unimaginable punishment being dealt out, brutally administered, merciless. At other times, the crying from the corridor was more of a plaintive sobbing. There being nothing at all that he could do about it, it was highly distressing. The shrieking and bawling and whimpering seemed to be coming from somewhere to his right, then to his left, and then back again. It suddenly dawned on him that he must be listening to a recording.

  Faint sounds came from the corridor. Benson leapt off his cot and peered out the porthole. A guard was coming down the hall, his keys rattling on a large metal ring on his belt. The guard stopped in front of Benson’s cell and peered inside the porthole, taken aback to see Benson gaping back at him just inches away with an insane, raving expression. The guard snorted and bent down, grunting with the effort, and pushed a meal tray through the slot in the door.

  Benson paced in his cell. He regarded the dry, gray meat slice on stale white bread with disgust. Next to it sat a small bag of potato chips. Still, he forced himself to eat all of it, every last crumb; there wouldn’t be any more until the next meal — whenever that might be — and he wished to preserve his strength for as long as he could. He drifted off to sleep on his back with his knees bent, leaning them against the wall to help relieve the pressure on his lower back from the thin mattress and hard bed frame.

  And then the music blasted again.

  “We’ll be fighting in the streets,”

  “With our children at our feet,”

  “And the morals that they worship will be gone.”

  He put his fingers in his ears to hush the racket.

  “Pick up my guitar and play-y-y,”

  “Just like yesterday-y-y,”

  “Then I’ll get on my knees and pray-y-y…”

  “We don’t get fooled again! No, no! Don’t get fooled again!”

  At length, the piercing music stopped and he napped restlessly.

  A guard entered his cell and banged his rifle butt against the steel door, the loud clang jolting Benson from his torpor. They marched to the interrogation room and waited outside. The door burst open and a man emerged, pushed by a brute of a guard, causing the prisoner to nearly fall on his face. He looked to be in his late 50s. His sweaty prison uniform was torn at the chest. Except for his left eye, bruised and swollen shut, his face was drained of all color. He glanced fleetingly at Benson with his one good eye and disappeared down the corridor, his guard shoving him ahead.

  Benson entered the room. He faced new interrogators, wearing the same emblems and uniforms as the others.

  “How are you today, Mr. Benson?” said a slight female sporting short, strawberry-blond hair.

  She spoke in a high, adolescent voice. Her pleasant, girlish face oozed congeniality. Benson was reminded of the psychology students he had known in his college days. He pictured this wisp in a lab coat proudly playing the role of a serious researcher, perhaps dangling some cheese on a string for hungry rats running through mazes, carefully jotting down her scientific-sounding observations in neat handwriting for extra credit.

  “It’s strange, but I’m feeling tired and a little hard of hearing, Miss—”

  He leaned over to look at her name tag. He continued looking at her chest long after reading the tag. She shifted uneasily in her seat amid the strained silence and offensive gawking.

  “Miss Betty Bradley,” Benson said at length, still staring at her bosom. “Yes, of course. How charming.”

  “Well then, Mr. Benson,” broke in the other agent, “Elliott, Steve,” with a winning smile. “Feeling more cooperative today?”

  Benson cupped a hand to his ear.

  “My ears are ringing,” he said in a loud voice. “What did you say?”

  “I said,” the young man responded in an equally loud voice, “are you gonna cooperate?”

  “What’s that?” Benson shook his head. “What’d you say?”

  Agent Bradley cupped her hands around her mouth trying to amplify her normally whispery voice to something just beyond ordinary speaking volume.

  “Can — you — hear — me?” she said.

  “No, I don’t think orange is my best color.” Benson glanced down at his uniform. “It gives my complexion an unhealthy, sallow look, don’t you think?”


  The smile fading from her face, Betty Bradley was quickly losing her composure.

  “I said, can — you — hear — me?”

  Benson shook his head.

  “Write down your question.”

  Steve Elliott fished out a pen bearing the bear paw print logo, loudly tore paper off a pad with an exaggerated, peeved gesture — all the while giving Benson a dirty look — and hastily scribbled something on the sheet. He pushed the note at Benson across the table and sat back, moody and petulant. The subject was not responding to multiple environmental and social stimuli in carefully controlled settings as documented in the official field guide, Tactical PSYOP, Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations 13.26. The guide described the unequivocal success of similar experiments, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. After an unsettling period of deprivation and radical disorientation, subjects were so desperate for human interaction that they would naturally bond with the “interviewer.”

  A classified section of the Army Field Manual stated that coercive techniques would “induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.” Compared to the benchmarks of normal subjects in the database, they should have built a relationship with Benson by now, generated some trust. But maybe this particular subject wasn’t normal; he certainly wasn’t responding in the normal way. Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Antisocial Personality Disorder?

  Agent Elliott perspired and clenched his jaw. He had a spotless High Value Target interview record to this point, and eligible for further promotion if he passed the next exam.

  Benson had sat stock-still, examining Elliott with a cold, appraising eye. Churning inside, Elliott looked away. Benson picked up the note.

  Although it was just one line, Benson took his time reading Elliott’s message. Suddenly lunging over the table for the agent’s pen, he forced the startled Elliott to scramble back, his folding metal chair nearly collapsing beneath him. Elliott kept his balance only by gripping the table’s edge with both hands.

  In the ensuing silence, Benson inspected Steve Elliott as though he were an insect. He wrote his reply underneath Elliott’s question, pushing the note back at the agent and reclining in his chair, not taking his eyes off Elliott’s.

  Elliott broke away from Benson’s intense gaze to pick up the note. At the top of the page was his own question: “RUR to coperate?” Benson’s reply appeared just below.

  “PO UR SOL,” Benson had written.

  “What’s all this?” Elliott said, slamming the paper down on the table.

  “If my texting lingo is up to date,” explained Benson, “it means piss off, you are shit out of luck.”

  Hands clasped on top of his head, Benson was marched from the interrogation room, a guard with a rifle trained on him close behind. The guard pushed him along to a new block in a different wing located far from the one in which he had been housed. They stopped in front of an open door. With a jab of his rifle, the guard hustled him into his new cell. He stood inside the entrance and let his hands drop to his sides. This cell was pristine, almost sterile. Except for the toilet and wash basin, everything from floor to ceiling was freshly painted in dark gray. A heavy steel bed was bolted to the cement floor.

  “Welcome to Camp 6,” the guard said. “Enjoy your stay.”

  The guard booted the hefty door closed. Benson spun around to face him as the door clanged shut.

  He sat on his bed, listlessly watching a meal tray pass through the door slot. Except for a disembodied hand occasionally pushing a tray through the opening, he hadn’t seen or even heard another human being for weeks. The guards wore silent rubber shoes. White noise was constantly pumped into his cell. He heard nothing except the sound of his own voice. He had no sense at all of day or night, one hour being the same as the last.

  The meals here came in a pink foil bag adorned with an American flag, labeled “Humanitarian Daily Ration — Food Gift from the People of the United States of America.” They were always exceptionally bland, delivered at random times, but just once per day. Inside the bag were other foil bags, usually containing beans and rice, some kind of stew, an Oreo™ cookie, a Pop-Tart®, and perhaps a few crackers and Skippy® peanut butter. The portions were just small enough to keep him slightly hungry and lethargic. He took a bite of cracker and tossed the rest on the bed.

  He dropped to the floor and did a few rounds of pushups. In extreme conditions, he knew, only the mentally tough and physically fit pulled through. Prisoners of war, forced labor camp inmates, and concentration camp victims who survived such harsh conditions had extra reserves of inner strength upon which to draw. It was embedded in their constitutions, a mark of extraordinary character. The weak and the hopeless lost their will to live and slowly died.

  He hooked his feet under the bed and cranked out some situps, each repetition coming increasingly slower and tougher. My body may be a prisoner, he told himself, grinding out the repetitions, but not my spirit. I will not be controlled. I will not be ruled, commanded, dominated, or led. I am not afraid.

  He collapsed to the floor, utterly spent, his pulse throbbing in his temples, but nonetheless pleased that he could still do 50 situps without stopping. He knew that this would not last. Lying on the floor, he gazed at the tiny fisheye lens in the ceiling.

  In every vessel there is a leak.

  He panted, sweat pouring off his forehead.

  I will find it.

  He sang popular songs out loud and invented new lyrics to fit the melodies. Hearing something, anything, even his own voice, was somehow satisfying in the unchanging, hushed silence. He practiced over and over, trying to improve upon the original lines. Sometimes he would burst out laughing, giggling foolishly at outlandish songs he had dreamed up. He worried over this; perhaps it was a sign of impending insanity, but he dismissed these thoughts, just as he shrugged off periods of utter despair and abject depression. Man is a social animal, he reasoned — or so he hoped — with a full range of native, complex emotions. If he was removed from the social settings in which he could express those emotions, his brain would play tricks to get the stimulation it needed.

  Playing elaborate chess games using bits of toilet paper for the pieces, he worked out the moves with imaginary opponents, to whom he gave names to make it seem more real. He was able to stay engaged for hours at a stretch at this, there being nothing else to occupy his attention.

  He put his hands on the floor, kicked his legs up against the wall, and pressed himself up and down, grinding out a grueling set of handstand pushups. His strength was definitely fading. Crawling to the bed, he ate the remains of a stale shortbread cookie and lay back, exhausted.

  Closing his eyes, he dozed in the foggy languor between drowsiness and sleep, letting go of the anger and shame, his mind free and drifting. Dreamy classical music played gently in the background, the rhythms lush and stimulating. The soft scent of lavender and sandalwood candles perfumed the air. Jane reclined on the bed, her head turned away from him, her silky lingerie riding up and exposing her gorgeous long legs. A shoulder strap of her red satin slip was pulled down, baring her breast. He moved closer to the bed.

  At his approach, she turned to face him. She smelled of roses and warm vanilla. He looked down upon her, enthralled, his heart skipping. Looking into his eyes, she dipped a succulent, ripe strawberry in whipped cream and took a bite. The sweet red juice ran past her lips, down her chin, to her breast. She offered him the strawberry and licked her fingers, watching with heavy eyes while he ate the rest. She scooped some whipped cream with a finger and put it to his lips. He licked and nibbled her finger, then kissed his way down her throat, down the trail of strawberry juice.

  They kissed passionately, hungrily. His hands cradled her face, her warm breath panting in his ears, her tender lips wetly caressing his. The ceiling fan slowly circled round and round in a hypnotic rhythm, gently cooling their flushed skin. Her scent, her softness and warmth
, her sheer beauty flooded over him. Moaning with pleasure, her legs and arms tightly enfolded him, drawing him deeper, the raw intimacy fierce and consuming. He told her that he loved her beyond words and meant it with his very soul.

  A powerful hand clamped onto his shoulder, digging in painfully, ripping him away.

  The loneliness was crushing.

  His face buried in his pillow, he clawed it savagely with his fingers and dropped clumsily to the cell floor. Lying in pain, he massaged his temples and chewed his lower lip.

  A rat scurried by along the wall’s edge, stopping nearby. It stood up on its hind legs, twitching and sniffing the air.

  “Jane, is that you?”

  He stared at it, not believing his eyes.

  “How’d you get in here? No, I don’t know why I’m here, but it’s good of you to come and visit. Do you want to play Scrabble? You always win, but I want to try again. You will? Great!”

  He laid his head sideways on the floor.

  “C’mon honey, how ’bout a kiss first?”

  He closed his eyes, puckered his lips and waited. He opened his eyes, disappointed. The rat scurried off a few steps, sniffing the floor.

  “It’s been so long. Sure, it’s okay, we’re married. You’re a lovely girl, c’mon sweets, be romantic. Here’s some food.”

  He flung a piece of cracker on the floor near the rat, who eagerly snatched it and ran off.

  Benson curled up on the bed, pulling the blanket over him but for his face. Massaging his temples with clenched fists, his body trembled in spasms of pain.

  “My head! It hurts so bad, Jane, make it stop! O-o-ow.”

  He pulled the blanket completely over him and rolled over on his side.

  Hours passed. Benson hadn’t stirred. Soiling his clothes, an evil stench permeated the small cell. A meal tray was passed through the door slot. It sat on the floor, untouched.

  A guard opened the porthole on the cell door and peered inside. Eaten through in spots, the last meal tray remained on the floor, “Jane’s” droppings scattered on top. The guard retched when he caught the wicked smell, hastily withdrawing his face from the opening.