Forty Days at Kamas by Preston Fleming Read Free Book Online

had learned to cast aside their old values and seek only those things that would preserve life, however humbly or crudely. Whoever looked backward risked slipping irrevocably into the abyss.
    Bernstein's commentary had a sobering effect on us. But to me he still seemed a bit too eager to gain our confidence.
    Nothing more was said among our small group until the last of the new prisoners emerged from the transit center in their fresh orange coveralls. Then the warders ordered us to count off by threes and divided us into teams to shovel snow from the entrance roads, walkways, and parade grounds around the camp.
    Renaud led one team to the Service Yard, which contained workshops, storage sheds and maintenance facilities and served as a buffer zone between the women's camp in Division 1 and the men's camp in Divisions 2 and 3. Grady took another team, including Will Roesemann, to Division 2, where the foreigners' barracks were located. Jerry Lee and I remained in Division 3 with Mills.
    In less than an hour of shoveling snow from the Division 3 parade ground, blisters formed on my hands and my entire upper body began to ache. Nearly a year and a half of captivity without exercise had made me quite unfit for hard labor. I found myself moving more slowly, using less effort, and faking it as much as I could without drawing Mills's attention. I observed how the others paced their work and learned to follow their example. By the third hour I had become an energy–efficient robot.
    As the sun sank lower in the sky and hid behind the western hills, an icy wind arose and poked its way under our collars and up our sleeves and pant legs. Despite my blistered hands, aching shoulders, and the shooting pain in my lower back, I shoveled faster just to stay warm. I kept my head down, glancing up only occasionally to watch the advance of leaden clouds across the darkening sky.
    How had my life come to this? How often my mind had returned to that thought through the months of jail and interrogations. All my life I had worked hard, done the right thing, grown a family and built a business, and now the government had taken it all away and thrown me into the camps for having tried to emigrate. How had these Unionists managed to seize power and turn themselves within a few short years into such brutal masters? How had so many of us been so foolish during those days of economic hardship to trade our freedom for the empty promises of the corrupt political class?
    Suddenly I heard the sharp crack of a rifle shot and instinctively hit the dirt. Craning my neck around to see what had happened, I watched a pair of uniformed guards clamber down the ladder from the nearest watchtower, enter the gate in the inner perimeter wall, and draw their pistols from their holsters. One covered the other as the latter knelt beside the fallen figure of a young woman in coveralls a few yards from the wall. The kneeling guard rolled her body over, revealing that the entire back of her skull had exploded from the force of a rifle shot exiting her head. Then the guard waved to the watchtower and the marksman inside fired a second shot into the air. This was the girl's warning shot. The official report always required a second bullet casing as evidence that the warning shot had been fired.
    Once satisfied that the woman posed no further threat to camp security, the two guards holstered their sidearms and dragged her body by the ankles through the open gate into Division 2. Then they ordered the rest of us to resume shoveling while they retreated to the warmth of the heated watchtower. It was all over so quickly that none of us had time to react. One minute the girl was scribbling on her clipboard, the next moment she was carrion.
    Within minutes, word spread among the hushed shovelers that the girl's name was Lillian, that she had been a work scheduler from the women's camp, and that she was in the habit of leaving her hat and scarf near the perimeter wire while she worked.