The Belial Stone (The Belial Series #1)(11)

He struggled to recall. I walked down Jordan Street, cut down the alley behind the Civic Center, and then… His head jolted upright. And then some guy stepped from behind a dumpster wielding a knife.

He’d turned to run, only to find another man behind him. He’d felt a sharp pain and then everything went black.

He couldn’t remember much after that, but he knew he’d been conscious on and off. He’d been in a warehouse. He recalled being allowed to use the bathroom and then being stuck with a needle and forced back into the black. He recalled two other moments of brief lucidity as well. One was in a truck, and the other must have been at the airfield. He’d heard planes both times. He struggled to make sense of it. He could have been out for days. What the hell was going on?

An hour later, Tom was no closer to answering that question. He watched the clouds give way to a landscape of ice-capped mountaintops and green fields, followed by a plateau of flat barren land. He only saw one small town and a handful of houses. Wherever they were, there sure weren’t a lot of people.

Tom felt the plane jolt. The pilot must have lowered the landing gear. He strained to see farther out the window. He saw the same barren land broken up by fields of green. What he didn’t see, though, was anything even remotely resembling an airport. As far as he could tell, they were landing in the middle of nowhere.

As the descent became steep, he began to slide towards the front of the plane. On the other side of the plane, he saw a man turn around and grab a strap attached to the side of the plane that was used to secure cargo. Tom followed his example, as did the handful of men who had taken up positions at the other windows.

His shoulders ached, but he knew he got off lucky compared to the men in the middle of the hold. With nothing to hold onto, they crashed into one another as the plane bumped and bucked to a landing.

Almost as soon as the engine stopped, the giant cargo door at the back of the plane began to open. Tom stared at it with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He braced himself, knowing whatever came through those doors was not going to be friendly.

He wasn’t wrong. When the door was fully open, four commandos in dark grey uniforms holding AK-47s rushed into the hold. “Get out! Get out!”

Tom was caught up in the mass of bodies as they were herded out of the plane. A few men moved too slow and were prodded none too gently with the nose of a machine gun.

Part of his mind yelled that they should turn around and fight. They outnumbered these guys. They could take them. But the rest of his mind just told his feet to move faster.

Once outside, Tom scrambled up a ramp into the back of a truck. He had barely turned around when the tailgate of the truck slammed shut and it pulled away. His face crashed into the wooden beams that lined the truck bed. Blood from his nose trickled down to his lip. He pressed chest-out against the beams to keep from being flung to the ground and trampled on.

Panting, he pushed his way back into a standing position. He struggled to control his breathing, but his racing heart was making that all but impossible.

Around him were the endless fields he’d seen from the sky, rimmed by an incredible mountain range in the far distance. If it weren’t all so surreal, he would have thought it was beautiful.

He craned his neck, trying to find any sort of landmark. For the longest time there was nothing. Just more land. But then, in the foreground, he began to make out the outline of a structure.

“What the hell is that?” someone asked.

No one answered. Disbelief flowed through him. It was a walled enclosure, lined with barbed wire, and boasting two guard towers. It looked like a prison.

No, he thought. I did my time. I’ve been doing everything right. This can’t be happening.

As they drew nearer, he noticed there were no paved roads, just a single dirt road leading to the entryway. And the wall wasn’t made of cinderblocks. It was wood, and huge. He couldn’t actually see the end of the wall when they pulled up in front of the entrance, which looked like an enormous castle gate. Whatever this thing was, it was not a prison.

Tom caught sight of a smaller structure outside the walled enclosure.

“Oh, this is not good,” he mumbled.

The cage was made of chain link with barbed wire running through it. The top was also covered in barbed wire. A small tarp had been thrown over it to serve as a roof, although it covered little more than half of it. About a hundred men slept inside the cage, crammed together on bedrolls, spread across the ground.

Two armed guards in the same grey uniforms as the commandos played cards at a makeshift table in front of the only entrance to the cage. They glanced up for a moment when the truck pulled in and, uninterested, went back to their game.

A bear of a man decked out in head-to-toe grey camouflage strode from the entrance of the enclosure to the truck. The commandos from the plane fell in step behind him. Obviously, this was the guy in charge.

The man reached the truck and, without warning, shot off a volley of automatic gun fire above their heads. Tom dove for the ground, his head crashing into the man next to him, who’d had the same impulse.

“Out,” the man bellowed.

His head throbbing, Tom scrambled out of the truck with the rest of the men. Most fell a few times, their bound hands leaving them off-balance. They lined up in front of the camouflaged man in a sloppy version of military formation.

He glared at them. Tom straightened his posture in response, noticing most of the other men with him doing the same.