THE GATES OF HELL
A/N: I'm finally back on line! I moved to a new apartment and everything was suppose to transfer when I moved but, of course when do things ever go that simply? The phone company messed up my information which resulted in a two week delay getting my phone and my internet back on. But, thankfully, now everything is fixed and I'm back on line and enjoying my new apartment. One good thing about the delay is that it gave me time to complete this story and get started on the next one.
CHAPTER 3
David sat against the wall of the shed in a daze. There was nothing else to do for hours at a time except to sit in one place. The days were long and sweltering hot. So hot that it was hard to even breathe. With so many men crowded into such a small space, what little air there was hung heavy and stale in the room. And the insects were a torment all by themselves. Almost every exposed inch of David's skin was covered with bites and stings that he scratched at without even noticing.
Suddenly, the door to the shed slammed open and four guards with guns came in. Two of them stood by the door, keeping their guns trained on the other prisoners while the other two guards began scanning the faces of their captives. David felt a block of ice settling in his veins as one of the guards turned his attention on him with a leer on his face. Snarling something in Vietnamese, the guard pushed his way across the room to where David was sitting and grabbed his right arm, pulling him roughly to his feet. The other guard grabbed another man sitting on the far side of the room. The guard holding David twisted his right arm behind his back, pulling his wrist up between his shoulder blades until his shoulder screamed with pain. The man shoved him towards the open doorway and then outside. David blinked his eyes rapidly, the glare of the sun hurting his eyes after being accustomed to the dimness in the shed where he'd been held for the past four days.
The door to the shed slammed shut behind them and was locked securely in place. While two of the guards turned their guns towards David, the third guard took his prisoner and walked off in the opposite direction. The guard who had grabbed David jerked his other arm behind his back and securely tied his wrists together with a thin cord that bit deeply into his skin. Without a word, he reached down and grabbed a heavy piece of coiled rope lying on the ground at his feet. With a sinister laugh he looped it around David's neck and tightened it, grabbing the loose end with one hand. He started walking towards a one story block building sitting in the middle of the compound, pulling David along behind him like a dog by jerking on the rope around his neck. David had no choice but to stumble along behind him. He tried to keep the fear he felt from showing on his face as he was led into the block building and down a long dimly lit hallway.
The guard pulled him into a large room, lit more brightly than the rest of the building. Without any warning, he yanked on the rope causing David to fall to his knees in front of the other man. David coughed violently and inhaled deeply as he tried to catch his breath. He stole a glance around the room with wide frightened eyes. The room was filled with instruments all designed for one purpose. To torture the prisoners.
David forced himself to remain calm and to keep his face devoid of any expression at all as another Viet Cong officer came into the room. He was obviously a higher ranking officer than the guard who had pulled him into the room because the other man instantly stood at rigid attention. The officer stepped up in front of David and glared down into those sapphire blue eyes that looked back at him with just a hint of defiance. "Who are you?" the man demanded in broken English.
"Private First Class David Michael Starsky. United States Army. Division C. Serial number 443-26-4058." David recitedThe officer apparently didn't like that answer because it earned David a punch in the jaw that rocked his head to one side and made the entire right side of his face ache.
"Wrong." The man snarled "You are nobody. You are nothing. You have no name. You are our prisoner. If you live or if you die, it is all up to us." He glared into the dark haired youth's face fully expecting to see panic and fear in those eyes, however he was surprised and angered to see the same defiance in those eyes as before, even in the face of danger. "Where are you from?" he hissed
"California." David replied with a stubborn tilt to his chin, only to receive another vicious punch to his face, followed almost immediately by a hard kick to his stomach that sent him sprawling to the floor. David gasped in pain and instinctively curled up into a fetal position, trying to protect the more vulnerable parts of his anatomy.
"Wrong! You have no home! You are nothing because we say you are nothing!" the man growled angrily. He repeated the same questions several more times, each time punching or kicking David viciously when he refused to give him the answers he wanted to hear. By the time he had finished questioning him, David was barely conscious and his whole body screamed with pain.
He barely felt the rough hands that pulled him to an upright position, a man on holding him on either side. Too disoriented to walk, the two men drug him back down the hallway and out into the blistering sun. But instead of returning him to the small cramped shed, David was drug across the compound to one of the large wooden cages at the far end of the enclosure. It was a cage that housed almost fifty men, most of them the healthier prisoners in the camp.
The guards let David fall to the ground just inside the cage and left him there. He lay there for a few minutes, breathing heavily, until he found the strength to crawl over to one corner of the cage. He curled up against the wooden bars in a fetal position, nursing his aching muscles and bruised ribs. The other prisoners ignored him. They'd seen it all before. It wasn't anything new to them. It was just a normal part of their everyday existence. Most of them were just thankful that it wasn't them this time.
David drifted in and out of awareness. He jerked, startled, when he felt a hand fall on his back, rubbing gently between his shoulder blades. Forcing open his eyes, he looked up at the middle aged man with the deep brown eyes who was crouched beside him, smiling gently.
"Hey, kid…." The man said with just the faintest trace of a southern accent "How ya doing?"
"I've been better." David muttered through his badly swollen lips. He flinched as he felt the man's hand running over his ribcage and tried to pull away.
"Relax solider…" the man told him "I'm just trying to see how bad they worked ya over."
"I'm okay." David said through tightly clenched teeth, as he recklessly pushed himself into a sitting position, a move he regretted almost immediately as a wave of nausea swept over him and he began to retch violently. The other man caught him in his arms and held him as his stomach tried to crawl out through his mouth. With nothing in his system to bring up, all David could do was dry heave.
"Easy, kid…" the other man told him soothingly as he patiently waited for David to stop heaving. When the spasms finally eased up, he helped David to sit back up. "You okay now?" he asked in a genuinely concerned voice.
"Yeah…." David mumbled, too weak to feel embarrassed about losing control in front of this stranger.
"What's your name?"
"Dave Starsky."
"I'm Jeremy Holiday. Glad to meet ya, kid." He smiled warmly "How long you been here?"
"Four days, I think….." David told him, as he licked his lips and wished he had a drink of water to soothe his parched throat.
"How long have you been in country?"
"Eighteen months." David said with a heavy sigh, his stomach still cramping uncomfortably.
"Well, Dave….you got some bruised ribs but I don't think anything is broken. The guards are good at what they do….they know how to make it hurt like hell without causing any real damage. You're gonna be pretty sore for awhile."
"You sound like a medic."
"That's because I am. That's why they keep me around. I'm more valuable to them alive than I am dead. I help them keep you guys alive." For the first time David noticed that although Jeremy was as underweight as the other prisoners, he seemed to be in better overall physical condition.
"How long have you been here?"
"Almost nine months. They killed everybody else in my unit….would have killed me to if I hadn't been a medic."
"As far as I know they killed everybody in my squad too….except for me and five other guys…but one of them died just after we got here."
"I ain't gonna lie to ya, kid. You probably won't make it outta this place alive….unless you're very very lucky." Jeremy told with a hint of sadness in his voice. "Take care of yourself, huh?" With that, he pushed himself to his feet and disappeared into the group of prisoners milling around the cage. David leaned his head back against the wooden bars behind him and closed his eyes, praying that he would be one of the lucky ones.