A Block of Broken Houses

Caged

Our village inhabited the better side of seven hundred people at the time it was raided. They came in the cover of night, swooping in by the hundreds, or so it seemed. We would later learn that only twenty-three of them were responsible for taking us—twenty-three to skirt our watch, swarm, and capture seven hundred. They were quiet and so incredibly efficient, and in the days that followed I would hear them refer to that dark night as both a "clean capture" and "textbook."

I woke suddenly, my breath escaping me in hasty, hard gasps. Our cabin had creaked, which it did sometimes from the wind, but that night was windless, the air stale and heavy. Despite this, I began the process of convincing myself it had been a dream-noise, but when I heard it again—the low groan of the damp floor planks just outside of our front door—I knew I had woken to a nightmare.

I sat up on my mattress and peered into the darkness toward where my brother slept.

"Gareth?" In the silence my whispers were deafening, and in my hushed echo I heard a shift from outside. I glanced toward our door just as it fell open, quickly and quietly, and before I could regain my breath to warn my parents, a dark figure was upon me, gagging my mouth and binding my arms and legs. They bound Gareth in the same manner before he had even begun to shake the veil of sleep. My parents were next, and they had heard not a sound.

We were led outside and into the common area, where groups of us were gathered and more were being ushered, and not kindly. A young man named Leonard called out angrily and was backhanded by someone, a tall figure. Leonard fell to the ground, cowering, weeping, his arms held before his face. Others had offered resistance, but these attempts were also crushed and, before long, our village stood watching the small group of dark figures before us.

Our seven hundred were eventually shepherded from the common area to the main road leading from our village, where we joined another four hundred from a neighbouring camp. We all pooled in the Y where our road (from the north) met with theirs (from the west), all of us stunned and disoriented. While our captors, strategically surrounding us, smoked and muttered clipped conversations, we did nothing; only in retrospect would it have been quite possible to overpower them. But of course we did not know how many of them there were, and we were fearful that the ones we could see represented a mere sample of the ones hidden from us, possibly waiting in the surrounding bush to assist if we grew restless and problematic.

Then orders were barked, people were jabbed with stunning canes (which appeared to be the only weapons any of them held), and we were once again on the move. The march was long with very little rest. As we travelled over familiar land to foreign, fear was numbed by fatigue, and fatigue eventually gave way to exhaustion.

Hours in to our walk, we broke free of both the treeline and the darkness and into a warm breeze and the first light of morning. Ahead of us lolled a large spread of land, rolling hills in the distance. Eventually we crested a small peak, all of us staggering, and on the other side we stumbled on toward something that looked like a barn the colour of worn, dry paper. Attached to its rear was a highly fenced yard, the top of which was lined with razor wire, and we were all steered toward the towering gate at its middle.

The sight of the large building caused some in the mass to shake from their weariness at the threat of a new fear: that none of us would ever leave the approaching compound. Mumbled conversation escalated to moans, worry, panic. A young man wearing filthy jeans and no shirt broke from the group, bolting back toward the trees. Where he found the strength to do this I will never know. A crack disrupted the morning's silence, and as he went tumbling forward, blood leapt from the hole in his head, briefly dancing in the breeze before spattering the grass. He collapsed in a heap and they left him there, forgotten. Or perhaps he was later collected. No one saw the gun that took him, nor who had pulled the trigger, but if there were ever any doubts of how efficiently (and quickly) we would be slaughtered if we did not comply, that single gunshot erased all of them.