Free A New World: Taken by John O'Brien Page B

another.
    She doesn’t have the energy to fight over clothes so dons her old ones.   They are taken to their rooms and that’s where they remain for the night.   The only difference being there are two guards during the evening sitting behind the desk.   At one point, she has to go to the bathroom and asks one of the guards if she can go.   He rises and escorts her across the hall to a door marked “girls.”   To her horror, he enters along with her.   He doesn’t enter the stall but she is mortified having to go with a man so close.
    During the night, she hears faint shrieks rising in the darkness every so often and wonders what those are.   She worries they are torturing people or found someone escaping.   They don’t sound like shrieks of pain but she can’t figure out what else they could be.   Rising in the morning, she undergoes the same routine; breakfast, shower, field, and then back to the room.   Time passes slowly and depression sets in; a constant, tired feeling mixed with restlessness.   She is told in the evening that she is being assigned a work team and guided to a different classroom after her shower.
    The next morning, she is shaken awake early, taken to breakfast, showers, and then is guided to one of the parked yellow school buses.   They are driven to an open field with partially completed structures and tilled soil.   She is assigned to work in the fields preparing the ground for planting or picking from crops already sown.   The guards around the perimeter are intermixed with the various groups working.   It’s hard work and a long day but at least she isn’t given too much time to think; the work occupies her mind.   Over time, she comes to learn what happened to the world and hearing that makes her even more anxious for her kids.   The sun lowers to the west and they are herded back into the buses for the trip back to the compound.   This is how her days and weeks continue.
     
    *    *    *    *    *    *
     
    Gonzalez awakes.   The pain is immediate and unrelenting.   Her head throbs with her heart beat and it feels like someone stuck a stiletto in it; starting at her forehead and driving it through her brain and down her neck.   There is first the dull, throbbing pulse followed immediately by a sharp, penetrating pain through the entirety of her head.
    With her eyes still closed, she raises a hand and feels a tender bump on her forehead just above her right eye.   Her foggy mind recalls seeing the windshield of the Humvee closing in quickly.   She opens her eyes and the bright light sends pain shooting through her head.   She groans and squints through one eye.   The sight confuses her for a moment.   The white ceiling and part of a hanging light fixture doesn’t fit with the thought of her in the Humvee.   She remembers the red truck and knows she was pulled from the wreck.   But to where?   She thinks.
    At first she thinks her and the kids were taken back to Cabela’s but the sight above her doesn’t fit.   Oh shit, the kids , she thinks and begins to rise.   The pain intensifies and she is struck by an instant bout of nausea.   She lies back down and the pain and sick feeling subside.   She turns her head to one side and sees Michelle sitting upright on a cot with her head in her hands.   Glancing around the room as much as her head allows, Gonzalez notices rows of cots in what looks like a classroom of some sort.   The bookshelves in the back and chalkboard up front give her that impression.   Rolling her head in the other direction, she sees Bri lying in a cot next to her with her eyes closed.   She also sees an armed man sitting behind a desk by the blackboard.   Sitting up slowly and fighting pain and nausea all of the way, she reaches a sitting position and leans over until the intensity of both subside.
    “Ah, you’re up.   Good,” she hears the man at the desk say.   She gives a grunt in reply.
    “Okay, listen up because