EIGHT: The Camps

Alasdair and Sarah Granger had recovered from their apparition, and were standing in a field surrounded by dozens of their friends and neighbors and many other people who, judging by their looks of absolute fear, were Muggles, just like they were. Alasdair didn't understand how just a few seconds ago, he had been feeling just fine, albeit scared and depressed by all the destruction he'd been witnessing, but he now felt pain in almost every part of his body. His wife, he noticed, was pale and sweaty, because of her broken ribs on top of everything else, and the cocktail dress she had worn for the dinner they were going to have with Hermione's boyfriend was ripped in specific places, causing Mrs. Granger's more intimate parts of her body to be a little more noticeable. Mr. Granger and the men were hardly better off. Mr. Granger shuddered in the combination of the cold and his nerves. Suddenly, there was a collective gasp from the millions of people gathered in the field.

An arch had appeared out of nowhere. It was a very stately arch, built of marble, but did not have the appeal that marble usually has. It was impressive in size, but the whole thing was creepy. The color of the marble, combined with its height, was making everyone's spines tingle collectively. Emblazed in bright green across the top was the name,

ATROX DOMUS

Below which was inscribed a motto:

"Ut nostrum prosum operor otium, ut nostrum improbus operor ingratus."

("To our good worker peace, to our bad worker hell")

Mrs. Granger, thoroughly educated from her own school days in Latin and Greek, shuddered at the signs. Mr. Granger held her closer.

"What happened to the good old days, eh?" it was Nicholas Creek, and his wife Mariah. Nick and Mariah Creek had been the Grangers' best friends and neighbors. Their daughter Emma had been best friends with Hermione, and had been the only one who had not partook in teasing Hermione about her then-unknown magical abilities, and had stood up to Mark, her brother, whenever he tried to get away with it.

"Nick! Mariah! What're you all doing here?" Mr. Granger asked, shocked but happy to see his best friend. For some reason, Nick became very dark at Mr. Granger's greeting.

"What do you think, Alasdair? We've been captured. As have you by the looks of it." He responded coldly.

"How's Emma doing?" Mrs. Granger asked, timidly, taken aback by Nick Creek's sudden change. At this question, however, Nick's face went even darker and Mariah gave a dry sob.

"Something's happened to her. I don't know what it was, I couldn't see it; none of us could. Emma was out playing with a friend of hers from Secondary school, and all I know was that when she came in, she couldn't remember anything. Barely remembered how to walk. She couldn't talk, didn't know where she was, who she…" he cut off, attempting, and failing, to stifle the sob that escaped him. "I don't know what's happening, Alasdair, but I really want the old days to come back. It broke Emma's heart, you know, when Hermione ran off to that…that…wherever it is you send her these days for her education. Now Emma doesn't have any friends, and is locked in St. David's hospital." Mr. Granger let his head fall sadly against his shoulders. It sounded like a Dementor attack on Emma Creek. Hermione had, naturally, told both him and Mrs. Granger about them, but knowing about them had been little help, since Muggles could not see Dementors, and therefore, couldn't fight them. Suddenly, a figure clad in a black robe with a black hood approached them all.

"Good morning, Muggles! Welcome to Atrox Domus. This camp shall be your home for as long as we find it necessary. My name is Nigel Rathbone, and I am the liaison between you and…your captors. The rules of this camp are simple: Work well, and you will be treated well. Work badly, and you will die. Slowly, and painfully. That we can assure you. When you enter, you will pass through administration. You will be required to surrender all your clothes and valuables at the door, and then proceed to the cleansing showers. Now hurry up!" As he said his last words, he became much more forceful and commanding, and the groups of people huddled by the arch when it had appeared were now beginning to move.

"Men to the left, women to the right!" Nigel Rathbone called. It was a tearful parting of the ways. Sarah Granger clung as hard as she could to Alasdair Granger, tears streaming down her face. The parting for Nick and Mariah Creek was hardly less emotional. Just then, as two burly men came to assist Nigel Rathbone in parting the women from their men, Mr. Granger got a quick look at Nigel's face.

"Nigel! It's me! Alasdair! Don't you remember me? I'm your dentist! I helped put braces on your son!" Nigel suddenly became very dark.

"I've never seen you before." Nigel said coldly.

"Nigel, how can you be like this?" Mr. Granger said, panic rising like bile in his throat. "This is not you, Nigel! It's…it's these Death Eaters! This is not right, Nigel! What happened to the Nigel Rathbone I used to know?" tears stung Mr. Granger's eyes as he, recognizing defeat, followed Nick Creek into the cleansing showers. Mr. Granger had overheard Hermione's boyfriend's father and that extremely scarred man who had been at Ron's brother's wedding comparing the war they were coming into to the Holocaust, and Mr. Granger could now see the terrifying similarities, not the least being that the Death Eaters were conditioning the Muggles to hate other Muggles, like the Nazis had conditioned Jews to hate other Jews. Mr. Granger and Nick began taking off all their clothes and valuables and piling them up. They then stepped into the showers. For a brief moment, the lights in the shower area flickered, and people panicked, thinking that these might be Nazi-like gas showers. Thankfully, a cold stream of water came a moment later. It was freezing, but at least everyone was alive. They got out of the showers a moment later, put on baggy prison clothes, which were sewed very inexpertly and made out of very itchy material. The doors then opened, and Mr. Granger got the first look at where they were going to be living.

It was the most depressing place Mr. Granger had ever set eyes upon. The whole area was surrounded by a shield similar to the one Hermione and Ron had cast around the Grangers' household, except that it looked much stronger, and sentries stood on platforms that held the prisoners in with small dragons on leashes, and occasionally a creature Hermione had said was called a "blast-ended Skrewt", which as she had said, looked lethal. There were eight warehouses that ran the camp lengthwise, which Mr. Granger guessed were the living quarters. At the far end of the enclosure there were tall black chimneys belching immensely black smoke. Mr. Granger shuddered as he imagined what went on in there. Beside the smoking buildings were two other buildings that did not contain smokestacks but looked at least as lethal, and just behind those were various paddocks, torture areas and what looked like the entrance to a mine. Soon, however, the line was again moving, and Mr. Granger was thrown against a wizard, or so Mr. Granger assumed because he had a wand.

"Stick out your left arm." The wizard commanded. Mr. Granger did so, and the wizard rapped his arm with the wand. "There." The wizard said in a satisfied voice, "Your new name." Mr. Granger looked down and saw a jet black tattoo on the arm he had offered to the wizard. It read:

ZXM555-9M12

"That," the wizard said, "is your identification number. This one," he pointed to the number 9M12, "indicates what building you live in, and what bunk number you have. Now get moving. We do not tolerate stragglers here." Mr. Granger did as he was told, and did not look back until he was in shed number nine and lay down on bunk number 12. He wished he could be with his wife, but was at least thankful that Nick Creek got the bunk beside him. Then, without warning, a shorter man, dressed in the black garb of the guards burst in.

"Now we get our long winded official welcome." Nick muttered. Mr. Granger tried to grin, but from the moment he stepped into the camp, such an action seemed impossible.

"Welcome to your new home away from home," the man began, "I am Eli Schwartz. I am a Muggle like the rest of you, and I want to make sure that you understand every rule here, because believe it or not, we don't want your stay with us to be a miserable one…"

"No, I don't believe that." Mr. Granger muttered under his breath, "not if half of what Hermione said about those Death Eater people is true."

"…so as long as you pay attention, we shouldn't have problems." The short man said. "So, as I've said, I am Eli Schwartz, and I'm the head of this barrack, so naturally, you all report to me. Roll call begins at six in the morning and work begins at six thirty. As I'm sure you've already heard, lateness is not tolerated, nor is slacking on your work. We expect the very best of all of you, so be warned. The chambers wait for those of you who fail to meet those standards. Good night." Mr. Granger rolled over, and after a few moments, fell into a very uneasy sleep.

No Rooster crowed at Atrox Domus. Instead, Eli Schwartz came in, banging his beating stick against the various beds, hollering at everyone to get up. It was fortune, perhaps, that Mr. Granger, as a dentist, had always had to rise early, and so when Schwartz had seen Mr. Granger up, he did not whack his bed. If Mr. Granger had thought of this as a move of friendship, he was sorely mistaken. Schwartz was not nearly as nice towards Nick Creek, who was not nearly as adept at getting up early.

"Get up, you bag of slog!" Schwartz yelled at Nick, whacking his beating stick over Nick's head. "Up, up, up!" Whack! Whack! Whack! It was almost like a rhythm. Finally, all of barrack 9M was up.

"Breakfast, mess hall. Hurry up!" Schwartz spoke in clipped, commanding tones, and the inmates shuffled out, following Schwartz to the mess hall. Breakfast was a sorry sprig of parsley and a quarter bowl of very watery soup. Soon, Schwartz and the other heads of the various barracks were walking amongst their charges, tapping them on the heads and calling out what they would be working on. Mr. Granger's stomach did a weak backflip as he saw Sarah Granger sitting a few tables away; her eyes were quite puffy and red. Her head tapped her and called out that she would be working with the diggers. Schwartz was walking up the table, also calling out the day's jobs.

"Mines." Schwartz grunted, tapping Nick's head. He approached Mr. Granger.

"Mines." Mr. Granger got up and followed Nick and the others from his barracks towards the mine.

The mines were unimaginable. Miles long, the Muggles who labored there had to endure unendurable heat and were not wearing anything protective and did not observe the safety rules that any Muggle mining company would. A Death Eater met them at the entrance to the twelve mile long, fifteen mile deep mine, and roughly thrust a pickaxe and a tiny lunch pail in the hands of each miner in turn, and told them that they were looking for a white crystal that was used to make Gobstones for little wizarding children, as well as a very specific type of oil that filled the Gobstones to spray onto the looser when they lost.

Nick and Mr. Granger took their pickaxes and lunches without complaint, rightfully figuring that complaining would probably get them killed, or at the very least hurt. Both men had already observed people who even did so little as to slow down for even a second got a nasty blow by the Death Eater and Muggle supervisors alike. The stone they were searching for must have been rare, for Mr. Granger and Nick had been mining for at least a half an hour, but weren't finding anything. Mr. Granger's clothing was sticking to his back from sweat, and working so hard on so little food was making his thinking cloudy and giving him a splitting headache.

Up on the surface, Sarah Granger was not much better off. Not only was she suffering, like her husband in the mines, from heat exhaustion, but she was digging a grave near the crematories, she also had to deal with the putrid smell of burning flesh, and the anguished cries of the people forced to be burnt alive. It was all Mrs. Granger could do to keep from crying out, fainting, or being sick. It was all she could do to keep herself from imagining her little Hermione in one of those chambers. Mrs. Granger hated being this far from her only child, but was thankful at the same time that Hermione could be under the care of her boyfriend and not be here in this hellhole. At various points during the day, both on the surface and down in the mine, the guards kept calling out various identification numbers, and those folks were sent to meet with a doctor who decided what to do with them.

"AXF346!" Madam Gyro, the manager of Mrs. Granger's barracks called out.

"ZXM1980!" Schwartz called out, from the bellies of the mine. Both AXF346 and ZXM1980 slowly left their positions, led on by their managers, to the infirmary, and were not seen again. Mrs. Granger had actually seen AXF346 led into one of the gas chambers, wearing the saddest expression anyone had ever seen. At this, Mrs. Granger could not hold in a small sob, and ended up spread out on one of the torture machines, receiving 150 lashes to her back, and forced to spend a night with a Dementor. Forced to spend the night reliving her worst memories, Mrs. Granger had a tough sleep that night.

She was five, and her older brother was teasing her something awful for making a comment about his teeth, and had received a beating from her father from disagreeing with her older brother…she was sixteen, and had finally plucked up the courage to ask her crush to the end of the year prom, only to be coldly rejected…she was twenty two, pregnant with Hermione, listening to a doctor saying that a third trimester accident may result in Hermione being still-born…she was thirty, and five year old Hermione was hospitalized for a severe allergic reaction and fever…she was thirty eight, at the funeral of her brother while Hermione was off in her third year at Hogwarts in danger of a man named Sirius Black…

Waking up felt like a miracle to Mrs. Granger who had spent the night sweating and crying over her dark memories. Memories that she would sooner do without.

Mr. Granger may not have had to spend the night with an invisible Dementor, but he had had his fair share of unpleasant dreams, which had him waking up just as uncertainly. In his nightmare, he had walked in on Hermione and Ron snogging, and just having a general good time, when suddenly, Ron melted away to be replaced by one of the Death Eater sentries, who raised a wand on Hermione, whispered an incantation, and watched as a jet of green light flew from the wand along with the sound of rushing wind, hit Hermione, who crumpled, untouched, but unmistakably dead. Mr. Granger had awoken shaking with silent sobs.

"Up, up, up!!" Schwartz was walking along the barracks, whacking everything and everyone in sight with his beating stick. Breakfast was once again a very pitiful meal, but Mr. Granger was surprised and nothing short of overjoyed to be joining his wife on the digging team.

"AXF550!" Madam Gyro called. Mrs. Granger was very surprised, and no less than frightened to observe Mariah Creek get uncertainly to her feet and follow Madam Gyro, visibly shaking.

Later, Mrs. and Mr. Granger were making the final adjustments to the pit that the team Mrs. Granger had been digging for started yesterday. It was slow work, as pickaxes didn't dig nearly as well as shovels, but they made good progress nevertheless. A few minutes later, a Death Eater stopped by, and dumped a load of bodies into the pit.

"Bury them." He ordered. No one dared disobey, not wanting to be whipped and forced to spend the night reliving their worst memories. Everything went along well until Mrs. Granger overturned a woman's body, and found the hauntingly dead face of Mariah Creek staring back. Mrs. Granger couldn't hold it in. She turned away from Mariah's body and vomited. Mr. Granger performed the cross, kissed Mariah's forehead, and silently thanked god that Nick was still in the mines. Mr. Granger held onto his wife as she was consumed by grief, which was not helped when she recognized a girl who had been one of her favorite patients.

Mr. Granger spent the rest of the day comforting his sobbing wife, which meant that it was his turn to sleep with a Dementor. As he fell asleep, the Dementor taking away all his almost already nonexistent happy thoughts, he felt, for the first time in his life, a stab of anger towards the world to which his daughter belonged. He never blamed Hermione for what had been happening, he'd be a fool to do so, especially as he knew she fought tooth and nail for justice, but it was wizards, nevertheless, that were destroying the Grangers and all their friends.

The next day was simply a misery for both Mr. and Mrs. Granger. Mr. Granger had, in whispers, told Nick Creek about Mariah, and he had refused to touch his already miniscule breakfast, and as if to complicate matters, Nick was placed with the diggers, while Mr. Granger was sent back to the mines, and Mrs. Granger was transferred to a sort of machine shop, where it was her job to maintain the instruments of torture. The three worked hard, but they were loosing steam, especially Nick, who was trying to deal with his grief, became less and less of a productive worker, refusing all his meals and slowly but surely, just wasting away. Day by day, hour by hour and minute by minute, the cycle of life at the camp continued, and every day, more bodies were buried, more lives taken, more families grieving their losses, and more people loosing the will to live. For the first time ever, Mr. Granger felt like he might just be living in a nightmare.

The only thing that kept either Mr. or Mrs. Granger going was something their daughter had told them. Something that her Headmaster, Dumbledore had said. He had once said that love was one of the most powerful forms of magic there was. It was easy to see that the ultimate goal of the Death Eaters was to make as many people as miserable as possible, in the most inhuman ways. Hermione had always said that Dumbledore believed that love would end this conflict, and be the force that brought the dark side down, and so the Grangers tried desperately to remember love, and remember that there were people out there they loved, and who loved them, but with each passing day, there seemed to be less and less love around, and people were starting to loose hope as they watched the ones who had made them strong with love pass away. It would only be a matter of time…it would only be a matter of time until they could see Hermione again…and they would be free.