Free Warlord: Dervish by Tony Monchinski Page A

billions of dollars into these countries, and they’re gonna, what? Thank us? Presidentthink that?think that? Thank us. That’s just not a part of their mentality. Let me tell you about the mind. You want to win, you got to stamp them out. Kill them all. Like roaches. All of them. Cause that’s what they are. They deserve to die.I’d do it again I had the chance. It’s the only way.

Was he awake or asleep when the little girl in the bee costume came and stood where he lay, saying his name?
    Jason .
    He didn’t know. When Jason opened his eyes the girl was gone and he was alone.
    Sitting up on the bunk, swinging his legs around, he placed his socked feet on the cool linoleum floor. He felt groggy and held the side of his head as he looked around. The room was enormous, filled with double steel bunks. Of all the beds he could see, each was neatly made except for his.
    He seemed to be the only person in the vast room.
    Standing, he looked down on his dark blue shorts, a t-shirt of the same color. He didn’t remember putting them on. There was a storage locker at the foot of his bed. When he opened it, Jason found a pair of white socks and running sneakers. He reached down, retrieved the foot gear, and settled back on the mattress.
    He was starting to remember things: His cold cell…what they’d done to him…the needles…Dr. Kaku. Jason shuddered.
    Though he was by himself, he didn’t appear to be a prisoner. Despite the Spartan, uniform surroundings, he didn’t feel like a prisoner. Apparently there was no Dr. Kaku here. After he pulled on his socks, Jason tied his sneakers. They fit perfectly.
    He made his bed like he’d been taught, pulling the sheet and thin blanket tight, tucking both under the mattress. He patted the bed when he was finished, satisfied he could bounce a quarter off it. His head feeling better, clearer, Jason decided to poke around his environs, see what was what.
    The barracks could hold hundreds of people in two-tiered bunks. The beds were laid out in neat rows, a fixed space between each, groups of four bunks set off by aisles. Painted lines marked the aisles. Almost like boot camp , thought Jason, or maybe some combination of boot and what he imagined a disaster relocation center might look like.
    He stepped out into an aisle. There was a set of double doors at the far end of it. Looking in the opposite direction, he didn’t see a door in the far wall. The expanse of the dorm made it hard to tell if there was one. Jason walked towards the doors he could see, crossing the room, checking the other bunks as he went, satisfied that he was the only person here.
    As he walked, other details stood out in his mind. There were no signs of life in the room, no rumpled sheets or blankets, no personal belongings or pictures taped to bed posts. Each bed was neatly made. Each had a foot locker. No windows in the room. Harsh, fluorescent light emanated from recesses in the ceiling. As he neared the doors, Jason noticed a blinking green light above them, and he immediately thought of the camera outside his cell wherever he had been. When he got close enough he saw his intuition was correct, that the light accompanied a lens tracking his movements.
    He wanted to wave at the camera but suppressed the impulse. Not wave merrily, but wave to show he was here, to show that he was awake. Like, hello motherfuckers . But whoever’d put him here knew where he was. And Jason didn’t know who had placed him here. Just because he wasn’t in a cell, he reminded himself, didn’t mean Dr. Kaku wasn’t nearby.
    The wide double doors under the camera gave to a long windowless hall. Jason stepped through the doors and into the corridor, looking back once as they closed behind him, spying a second camera on this side of the doors. He flipped it the bird, hoping someone was watching, hoping that someone was Kaku.
    Passing several double doors on either side of the hall, he paused briefly to try each. None would give. He