Free The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) by Jon Land

them mounted her she felt the pain even worse than before. She wanted to scream but lacked the strength; she thought of holding her breath until she was dead.
    Suddenly three well-dressed men stormed into the tent. The savage on top of her was yanked off and his throat slit as guns were drawn on his fellows. Then a concerned-looking man who smelled good gently lifted her from the floor as she passed out.
    When she came to, it was daytime and she was being led out of a car with vague memories of flying in a jet larger than those that buzzed the camps constantly. She was wearing clean, fresh-smelling clothes that were almost her size. Before her was a camp not at all like the others. It had gardens and buildings instead of tents, and there were spacious grounds and woods. The compound was enclosed by a waist-high stone fence rather than the barbed wire she had grown up staring at. The buildings contained rooms laid out in dormitory fashion with six children in each. By the time she was escorted to hers, more fresh new clothes had been stacked neatly in a chest of drawers, and still more hung in her closet. Dinner that night was the greatest meal of her life, the food hot and plentiful, and Danielle—though she had not yet come to be called that—almost cried with happiness.
    There were fifty or so other children present, and she was among the oldest. Many of the others looked to be no more than five or six. Danielle watched as a new world began to open up for her. She had never seen so many different kinds of people with different skin, hair, and eyes. All seemed happy to be there.
    The lessons started almost immediately. Danielle had had virtually no schooling up to this point, and the work was hard, including courses in math, science, and a variety of languages including French, English, and German. She learned fast, completed her work diligently, and often had to be prodded to go outside to play with the others in the neatly sculptured gardens. Her world began at the stone fence and ended in the woods. Still, it was a massive world compared to what she had been used to for as long as she could remember. The children were encouraged to run free in the rolling expanse of wooded land at the back of the compound. Hide-and-go-seek was the favorite game, and it grew more elaborate as the months passed. The children’s training had begun though they didn’t know it, even as their numbers slowly dwindled. Occasionally at night a child would disappear without question or explanation.
    For her own part Danielle was too engrossed in her studies to notice. She thoroughly enjoyed the new challenges presented her almost daily, and she began to thrive. She mastered the languages with ease, along with other complex subjects such as world currency tables and various laws for entry and exit visas. Here again she did not question; she simply learned.
    The years passed and Danielle grew taller and more ravishing. Of her original batch of children, barely a third remained. Friendships were not encouraged, and she had made none. She knew she was being singled out by the men who were her instructors, knew she was excelling in the complicated field games added to the classroom work. Drilling in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry had started, and the remaining children accepted this as easily as everything else. After all, the one thing that held all of them together was that before coming here they had all lived with violence. With such a perspective, nursed almost from birth, there was no resistance to the training they were now required to undergo. It was simply a part of life.
    Danielle excelled at the training. She approached the drills and practice sessions diffidently yet with the same precision with which she attacked her studies. The ones who failed, both boys and girls, seemed to be trying too hard. For her it all came easy. In the camps she had known neither failure nor success, just depression and destitution. Her new life taught her