Free Foreign Enemies and Traitors by Matthew Bracken

laundry baskets stood near the open end of the enclosure.
    “What about my stuff?  Will I get it back?” 
    “Sure, don’t worry,” replied the driver.
    Carson undressed, dropping everything into a basket.  In the center of the cement floor were painted-on footprints, three rows by three, enough for nine people at a time.  He’d last seen footprints like that in boot camp, more than forty years before.  Even after all of the intervening years, somehow it seemed familiar.  He already had the short haircut, but this time it was gray.  He felt like he was processing back into the Army.
    The black medic said, “Okay, stand in the middle.  Don’t worry, it’s SOP, routine decontamination.  We’ve all been through this plenty of times.  Nothing to it.”  The driver walked to the front side of the cement wall.  Rickety galvanized pipes extended from the ground and along the insides of the enclosure.  He turned a valve, and after a few seconds a series of nozzles extending from three sides of the enclosure blasted Carson with cold water.  The black medic said, “Here, catch this,” and tossed him a small plastic bottle filled with brown liquid.  “It’s disinfectant.  Use it for shampoo and everything else.  It stinks, but it’ll clean you up good.”
    Phil Carson did as he was told, sticking to his plan of trying to appear as compliant and non-threatening as possible.
    “Okay, give it a minute to work, and then we’ll rinse you off.”  When Carson finished washing, he was sprayed again.  The driver cut off the water and threw him a threadbare white towel, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
    Since approaching the checkpoint two hours earlier, Phil Carson had been increasingly worried that he had made a grave error in strategy.  At each step he had been rendered more powerless, first at the checkpoint, then in being ordered into the cage on the truck, and now finally in being disinfected, naked.  All that was missing, he grimly noted, were the indoor “showers” and the Zyklon B poison gas pellets.  At any rate, he had no choice but to follow their orders.  He was unarmed, deep within a military base and surrounded by armed soldiers.  He tried to imagine that he was simply reenlisting in the Army, instead of being processed into some kind of concentration camp.  He had chosen his plan for reentering society, and now he had to ride it out to its conclusion, whatever that might be.
    He stood naked and toweled off while the driver and the medic chatted casually.  When he finished, he was handed a set of pale blue hospital scrubs and green flip-flop shower shoes.  It took only a minute to dress.  He was grateful to be covered again, even in the thin cotton. 
    “Grab your pack and your clothes basket and follow me,” ordered the pock-faced driver.  “You know, you’re lucky—you’ll have a tent to yourself.  You should have seen this place last year: our daily census averaged almost a thousand, and the dead were stacked up like cordwood.  Now we mostly just get stragglers like you, except when a hotspot flares up.”  A black family with small children occupied one other tent, but they avoided eye contact and said nothing as the three walked past.  Rectangular areas of dead grass showed the locations of previous tents, interspersed among the dozen still standing in this one fenced-off section of the quarantine camp.
    They stopped halfway down the row of tents.  “Okay, this is it, your home for the time being.  You’re lucky to have a roof over your head tonight.  We just put them back up after the storm yesterday.”  The tent front was rolled up and tied off, allowing in sunlight and fresh air.  The ground was still wet from the recent tropical rains, but the area under the tent was raised above the ground level on wooden pallets.  “You can close the flap if it gets too cold for you tonight.” 
    The medic said, “Take your pack and your clothes basket