Author's Note: For clarification, paragraphs describing a "flashback" are written in present tense (ie. I do, I run, I see). Paragraphs which represent thoughts and events in the 'present' are written in past tense (ie. I did, I ran, I saw). Dialogue from the past or that is remembered is italicized.


2.

I dreamed about Ben that night.

It was a dream I hadn't had in a long time. It was the dream I had every night after he died for months on end. I used to pray for the dream to stop. When it stopped it was as though someone had sliced away a piece of me, I no longer acted or felt like a whole person.

In the dream I find him standing in a field of tall grass. It's the field where I found him years before after they brought his father's body back to camp. There are fireflies all around. A star falls from the sky. He turns to me. He's been crying. He reaches out a hand and before I can reach back the sky turns black and blisters red and I wake up.

I sobbed myself to sleep again but the dream didn't come back.

In the morning, one of the other boys kicked my mattress. I startled. My eyes opened, light burned them. I shut them again.

"Get up," the boy commanded.

His eyes were a satin brown color. His mouth was too big for his face. The tag on his neck was etched with a two and a seven. This was the leader of my dorm. It was his job to wake us in the morning, too early for the sun to rise. It was his job to make sure we did our chores. It was his job to herd us all into the reprogramming classrooms. It was his job to test that the reprogramming was working.

He would gladly tattle on another boy for a pat on the head.

"Everyone has their turn with the warden, four-eighty-one, just because it was your turn last night doesn't mean you get special treatment today. Get up," he told me.

There was too much snide for his words to be a kind of sympathy. He was glad it had been my turn. They all were. It meant it wasn't theirs. He walked away to wake others.

I sat up. I grimaced and choked down my moans. Pain rippled up and through me. The night came back to me in blinding flashes. I dressed. I couldn't let the others see my pain. I couldn't let them see I was weak.

Though there were twenty beds, there were only twelve boys in my dormitory. At the start, when I'd first arrived at Rochester, all of the beds had been filled. Over time, boys left. They graduated. Or they died. One way or another we all get out of Rochester.

The reprogramming facilities had been established exactly five months after the final cease fire and the last resistance units were subdued. After occupying our camps, we were separated by age. Everyone under sixteen went to one place. Everyone over fifty went to another place. Everyone in between went to another place.

I had been taken with the under sixteens to a housing development surrounded by barbed-wired fence. There we were separated by sex. Girls were kept in one house, boys in another. The houses had been stripped of all items, nothing but empty husks. For weeks, we were interrogated and assessed. They took our information; age, height, weight, health, history, our role in the war. They had never told us why they wanted the information, but they tortured some of us to get it.

I had refused to talk at first. I didn't want them to know who I was or where I had come from. I had begged them to send me back to my unit. I had demanded to see my captain. They told me he died. He'd fought back. He'd been executed. Learn from his mistakes.

They had tied my hands down, flicked a switch across my forearms for every question I wouldn't answer. It bit away my flesh until there was nothing left but the red underneath. It was then that I had cried and I told them what they wanted to hear.

In many of the resistance units, some of the children had worn an alien device called a 'harness'. It had been used to enslave them. During the war, we had rescued those children and removed the harness. After assessments and interrogations were finished, they took those children away. They put them in the basement of one of the houses. They locked them inside. They filled the basement with a gas.

Morning chores at the reprogramming facility always started in the fields. There were two acres of corn, squash, beans, tomatoes, lettuce. We cleared the crops of weeds, watered and fertilized them, sprayed them with pesticide. We harvested any ripened product.

Next came the animals. There were three herds of cattle, at about twenty heads a herd, and a pen of thirty or more pigs on the facility grounds. We mucked the stables, refreshed the water troughs, dumped feed in the corrals. The youngest boys went to the five hen houses, sprinkled corn meal on the ground and checked the nests for eggs.

After, we went inside and the oldest boys stripped the youngest of their clothes and showered them. We dressed them in fresh linens and sent them to their first reprogramming class. Then we were allowed to shower. By that time, the water was cold. It was nice. It eased my sore muscles. I stood still and let the water rush over me. I knew I'd never be clean but the biting of those water droplets was a refreshing pain. It reminded me that I was alive. Some days I needed the reminder. Most days I couldn't stand it.

Cleaned and clothed, we shuffled into our first reprogramming class of the day. We always begin with the True History of Humanity. In the class our reprogrammer, Professor Staten, stood at the front of the room. He told us the Overlords have always been with us. They came here centuries ago. They were our gods then, they built the pyramids, promised the Incans they'd return, and told the Mayans it would be in the year 2012.

Even before then, they were here. They led us from the primordial sludge. They directed our evolution. They gave us our intelligence. They have always been our masters. We have always been their slaves.

Despite what they tell us, the men who surrendered weren't envoys of gods. They didn't see the divine light and step forward to save mankind from himself. They weren't even just trying to protect their friends, their families, their loved ones from having to suffer a long, futile war.

They were opportunists who sold their own species for personal gain. They were cruel and merciless, capable of anything if it benefited them. Their payment for mankind and Earth was power and authority in the new, alien-governed world. They became our rulers. They answered to no one but the Overlords.

After the assessments and the interrogations, they had lined us up outside along a ditch dug behind the housing development. Inside the ditch had lain the decaying bodies of the men and women over fifty. The in-between age group were then given a choice. They could pledge allegiance to the Overlords or join the elders in the grave.

Those that had pledged were forced to prove their loyalty by killing those that hadn't. We had all been made to watch, as they instructed the last true humans in the world to crawl into the grave, and the pledges opened fire.

It was as the bullets ripped through the bodies of good men and women in that grave that I had broken away from the group. Outside of that basement, a truck had pulled up. The bodies of the children who had had their harnesses removed were being piled into the truck's bed.

Struggling against a pair of soldiers determined to restrain me and drag me back to the group, I had watched them lift Ben from the basement. His body had been limp. His head lolled between his shoulders. They had tossed him into the truck to be disposed of with the others. I didn't even realize until they had finally struck me with the butt of a rifle that the entire time I had stood there I had been screaming his name.

Eventually, the Overlords had arrived at our camp. They had come to select children to take and harness. They had us line up and two of the Overlords walked the length of the line, looked us over. Children around me had wept and pleaded to be overlooked. At that moment, I prayed to be chosen.

I thought then that Ben had worn the harness and that if I wore it, through it, we would be forever connected. In that way, I could have a part of him with me always.

But I wasn't chosen. Whatever the Overlords were looking for that day, I didn't have it.

The Overlords had left with the children they chose that night. The following day, the rest of us were loaded on buses and sent to reprogramming facilities where the evil bastards that had forfeited our world were to teach us the true meaning of surrender.

On arriving at Rochester, we immediately began the process of losing our humanity. We were stripped entirely of all our belongings. We were no longer allowed to own anything. Then they shaved our heads. We were no longer allowed our individuality.

They lined us up naked and assigned us each a number. It was branded into the back of our necks, a black barcode. We were later given tags with the number punched into it for easier identification. That first day they made us call off our numbers, shouting them down the line. If we made a mistake, or took too long to call off, they made us run a lap around the facility.

Then they switched us around, made us call off our numbers again out of order. We did this the entire day. The sun had begun setting. The air had grown chilly and we struggled to remember when to call off as we shivered and huddled together in attempt to warm our bare bodies. Finally, they had sprayed us down with a high-powered hose and told us to run laps until the whistle blew.

When the whistle had blown, our feet were bloody. Our bodies were covered in sweat and cake with mud. Some of the boys had collapsed during the laps. We were told to leave them there. I still don't know what their fate became. We were taken inside.

They had given us things to wear. Gray sweats and t-shirts, underwear. These weren't to be ours. In the morning we would be given day clothes. At night we would be given new clothes for bed. The clothes we wore would be shuffled into the laundry, handed out to someone new the next time. Essentially, we all shared clothes.

In those first few months, we were made to forget our names and become our numbers. Beginning in the morning, every hour on the hour, they took us outside. We were made to remove our pants and kneel on the pavement. It was littered with jagged pebbles that bit into our bare knees. Then we called off our numbers.

They had started teaching us our daily chores. At first, some of us had felt like fighting and struggling. They had fed us only a bowl of brown rice soaked in chicken broth for every meal. They had worked us for hours on end without break until our bones cracked, our skin blistered and cracked, and our hands bled. Some boys had died in those first months of exhaustion or from other undisclosed reasons.

We had eventually lost the will to fight. That had been when they began the lashings. At night before bed we were made to stand in a line outside our dormitory. Our shirts were removed and our hands lay flat on the wall. One at a time, they came to each of us and whipped us. We were given a lashing for every year of our life. As one boy was lashed, the others were made to count off.

For countless months we endured this. Then they gave us a way out. We were given a choice. We could take the lashing or we could say this line, "The Overlords are my masters. I live and die for them", repeated once for every lashing. If we hesitated in our recitation, said it wrong, or didn't sound as though we meant it, then we would still be given the lashings.

Every night we were given this choice. At first most of the boys refused to say the line. Then one by one, they each gave in. I was one of the last to refuse. It took a week of my being the last in my dormitory, the other boys jeering behind my back "what do you have to prove", pinning me in my bed and beating me at night helpless in the dark, before I finally broke.

It wasn't many days after that we had all broken. The boy that had held out the longest was brought outside to the front of the facility to be punished for his obstinacy. We had been made to watch as he knelt naked on the ground before us and repeated the line over and over and over and over again. They had given us rocks and they instructed us to throw them at him.

The thought to hesitate, to question the instruction, to disobey it, never entered our minds. We didn't just throw our rocks at him. We had taken our aim carefully. We had put our full weight into the toss. We had wanted to hurt him. We had wanted to do damage. We had wanted to teach him a lesson.

He continued repeating the line for as long as he could as rocks pummeled into him. One had struck him on the head and he keeled over silent, blood gushing from the wound, but still we lobbied the rocks at him. We had picked more rocks off the ground, scoured for the tiniest pebble that could do any possible damage.

Our rage at that moment, even now, I can't understand.

After we had calmed down, he was dead. We had killed him. That night, me and two other boys, the other two that had taken their lashings longer than any others, were made to bury him. When we lifted the boy up to lower in the grave we dug, I had thought of Ben, and how he had looked in those soldiers arms being tossed into the back of that truck.

I needed to know. That name written on a tab in the warden's book, I needed to know what it said in its entirety. I needed to see it, to read it, to be certain.

I needed to know if it was Ben.