“We were made to operate alone, to work alone, and I believe that our nature remains so to this day; solitary creatures made to kill, but only taught to obey authority. I should have known better than to leave you alone with those vampires when they’d been isolated up here so long, away from all constraining influences, festering in their own desires. Most naturals have no restraint, it is something the General struggles with and it gets worse as the blood farms become less and less productive.” I felt sick. He shook his head slightly, “Sometimes I blame myself,” he said more quietly.
“When my groups training had completed, we were shipped off one by one. I sat in my room for two weeks straight only taken out to exercise a couple of hours and each night in the exercise yard I noted that my fellows’ numbers had shrunk. In my room I read and practiced languages when the instruction came on a television. One night, I had not yet seen the light of day outside of the TV and pictures and believed that I was always awake during the nighttime, they came for me. Four big men in thick canvas jackets, leather gloves and wearing face shields stepped into the room without saying a word. As I stepped down from the bed where I’d been sitting cross-legged with a copy of National Geographic, the last one stepped in carrying a metal pole with a loop of rough fiber at one end which he snagged around my neck and pulled it tight. It scratched and itched. “We’re not gonna have any trouble with you right?” He called out and I shook my head. I knew that resistance was futile. Another man in a white lab coat filled with a clear liquid which he squirted into the air in front of him before flicking the reservoir with one nail. One of the canvas clad men bound my hands behind my back as the other kept the loop pulled taut around my neck, stretching me forward. The liquid was cold but burnt as it spread into my triceps. I gritted my teeth, but the feeling quickly evaporated once the needle had been pulled from my arm and the doctor left the room. Soon I couldn’t feel anything, and I lost all sense of orientation. I felt as if I was floating, having left my body behind, and when they pulled the noose over my head I laughed when I saw that it was a hoop large enough to leap through. The darkness at the edge of my vision bubbled up like a pot that was boiling over my retina, until it lapped together over my vision and I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, I was lying face down on cold metal, a screw digging into my cheek, my hands still bound behind my back, and my lips resting in my own drool. The drone of an engine filled the air and kept the floor vibrating rapidly so that combined with the cold the cheek that was pressed into the metal felt numb and unresponsive. I pulled my legs up into the fetal position and then pushed myself up into a sitting position. Wooden crates stamped USMC filled the area between the rounded walls and roof behind me. In front of me was nothing but a dull gray wall, broken by a giant square.
The plane flew on for hours, constantly bobbing and jerking occasionally so unexpectedly and so violently that it threw me to my knees as I paced among the crates trailing my hands along their rough splintering boards. The emptiness was interminable after the hours of training and videos, florescent and spotlights and little chocolates slipped to e by a third shift guard. Though I knew I was flying through the air it was hard to deny the premonition that this was a trick of the mind, a result of the drug that they had given me, but my arm was bruised and sore and my feet were cold against the metal floor. I cannot now recall what I thought as I awaited a change in my circumstances. I don’t know that I thought much at all, but I was beginning to grow thirsty. Eventually the engine tone shifted, and the plane shuddered as if the wind were pressing back against it. I sat down with my back to one of the crates and my palms flat against the floor as the plane pitched sharply forward. After the plane landed with a bump and the roar of air through the engines, I could hear the distant honking of car horns and the cries of birds. A vehicle rushed up the door in the cargo hold and I stood to one side waiting amongst the crates. The door slid back, just revealing a crack of harsh red-light hat cut through the darkness, glaring off the metal floor into my squinted eyes. A harsh voice yelled using the same intonations and blockish phrases of our instructors. ‘Back away from the door.’ I complied, stepping back deeper in the hold but where I could still see the bright outline of the door. It opened fully into a blazing square of orange and white that I could see through and I kept my eyes on the corner of the plane’s hold only watching the door with my peripheral vision. A rush of sweltering dry air rushed into the plane. The outline of a man appeared pointing a machine gun into the hold and sweeping it along with his head slowly back and forth scanning. ‘Where are you?’ he yelled, but I remained silent. He stepped just inside the doorway and a rounder outline appeared behind him. ‘Show yourself or I’ll open fire,’ the first shouted,
