Free Bringing Stella Home by Joe Vasicek

the hood back
over his face. His hands were bound tightly behind him, his wrists
raw from the rough bonds. He was still naked, and the air was cold
enough to draw goosebumps across his flesh as he lay sprawled out
across the hard metal floor.
    Everything but the immediate present
seemed nothing but a half-remembered dream to him—random, with no
pattern. Hood lifted, food forced into his mouth, dribbling down
his chest. Water poured across his face. Buzzing off, sleep for a
few precious hours. Coldness, heat; sweating, shivering. Weeks
could have passed—months, even.
    But the present—that was not a dream.
That was more real than he could bear. His hunger, his
nakedness—even the pain faded into a low drone after a while. It
was the terrible, inescapable presentness of his thoughts that ate
at him. He could not escape the torture of his own mind—the torture
of consciousness.
    Stella . He had to get to her; had to save her. Whatever they did to
him wasn’t important—he had to stop them from hurting
her.
    Then they came for him.
    The buzzing stopped, leaving an empty
ringing in Ben’s head. A door hissed open, followed by footsteps on
the metal floor. Hands lifted him to his feet, and the hood was
pulled off, exposing his face to light so brilliant that it seemed
to burn his eyeballs. Ben blinked and shut his eyes.
    Someone cut his bonds, freeing his
hands. Others lifted him roughly to his feet, but he didn’t have
the strength to stand. Soldiers on either side held him up, half
dragging, half carrying him forward.
    Once out of the prison cell, his eyes
adjusted to the dim light of the corridor. The walls were a dark,
greenish-gray, the steel floor hard and black. The booted feet of
the soldiers trod loudly over it.
    They lined him up next to two other
prisoners, both men, both strangers. Their bodies were bruised,
their emaciated ribs quite visible. Ben glanced down at his own
stomach and realized that it was the same with him. He knew he
should find this unsettling, but he felt too worn out to
care.
    The soldiers made them face a glass
wall. On the other side, Ben saw three prisoners: two men and one
woman, their naked bodies as bruised and emaciated as his own.
Something about the room seemed odd to him. The wall on the
opposite side of the room was actually a large door, like the
opening to a hangar bay.
    Or perhaps an airlock.
    Before he could say or do anything,
the door flew open, revealing the black, starry void of space. A
mighty roar of outrushing air drowned out the screams of the
prisoners, then quickly faded into silence—absolute, terrible
silence.
    Both men were immediately sucked out
of the airlock, fear glazed across their faces as they raced into
oblivion. The woman, however, found a crevice in the wall and held
on to the last. Ben watched in horror as her arms and legs turned
blue and slowly began to bloat. Her eyes rolled back in her
sockets, revealing the ghostly whites. Her grip came loose, and her
body drifted slowly out into the starry expanse like a twisted
marionette. Her stiff, frozen limbs had the appearance of a child’s
action figure, arms and legs jutting out like plastic
appendages.
    The door closed, and the airlock
refilled with air. The taste of vomit filled Ben’s mouth, and his
stomach went suddenly weak. His legs fell out from under him; only
the grip of the soldiers at his side kept him on his
feet.
    They were getting the airlock ready
for another execution.
    A thousand stray thoughts raced
through his tortured mind, assailing him with flashes of pure
terror. Images from his memory blinked across his mind’s eye like
the random splash of characters across a dying computer. He felt
caught up in a nightmare, like a spectator in his own body,
powerless to run from the terrors that chased him.
    The soldiers shoved him through a
door, into the airlock with half a dozen other prisoners. His
screams mingled with theirs as together they pounded their fists
against the glass and