"Try the next one. Maybe he has the brains to talk a little," the leader said. "If not, have fun. Take your time. You've earned a little entertainment for yourselves."

Oh fuck.

I was shoved against the wall and hands chained to a hook, one of them coming up close to stare into my eyes for a moment. He had a smile, sort of. His hand pulled back and I snapped awake before I could feel the pain, shaking in fear.

Damn! The Dream. Again.

It happened more often in the last few years, the old nightmare of being helpless, alone and in pain. Worse was the idea of agony neverending, just for someone else's idea of entertainment, nothing I could say or do to change it, nothing I could do to stop it. And once it started, it would never, ever end. The ultimate horror. I laid in bed trying to deal with the shakes.

I wasn't a coward, I knew that much. I'd experienced some of the terror, but at least when I had something like that in reality I knew it wasn't going to last forever. You see, there's a camp in Eastern Washington where they teach survival. A few days in the woods building shelters and playing evasion games was supposed to teach us basic skills and give us the confidence that, having been through it once, we could get through a real situation. One young pilot had done quite well and successfully evaded capture for nearly a week before rescue. The funny thing was watching his video was where he confessed he was probably the worst survival student ever, it was just something to have fun with, to tell tales of later at the Officer's Club.

That part is publically told about all the time. What they don't tell the news crews is the other part of it, the 'special' training behind the fenced in gate. I can tell you, that place is where we learned survival. It's a POW camp and we were the POWs. I took beatings from the guards that were painful but not damaging, bruising but didn't injure (seriously) and expertly given. I saw one guy bent over backwards, head leaning against a wall while the guard had a little chat with him. Apparently the guy got tired of it and told the guard to fuck off. You know how fast a human body can fold in half and hit the ground when a billy club is punched into your belly? It ain't long, I can tell you. The poor bastard rolled and moaned on the ground, the guard grabbing his collar and hauling him off. He was going to learn a lesson the hard way.

The real point was to teach him that was the wrong way to resist as pissing off a guard would get you killed in the real world. That lesson was, quite literally, pounded into our heads that week.....(cont)