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As I watched V for Vendetta, an idea came to mind. Loosely based on that movie, written by me...
Black Vans
I am writing this now in need. In need to survive and in need to be remembered. Weather it is to be remembered by the rats that infest my cell or by whatever poor soul shall inhabit this hell next, I do not care. I simply care that my words are recorded, that my thoughts will be here as long as this paper is in existence.
I was born a poor girl in the northern part of our grand country. Poor, but not too poor. My parents made enough money to feed and clothe my brother and I. We lived a simple existence, with I oblivious to what was going on around us.
It started with a war. Not a big one, but enough to drive our country into debt. A few hundred soldiers were killed, a few billion dollars wasted. But for what? Not for national security, for the opposing country had little to do with our own politics.
Or, at least, that was what my parents knew. The media fed us lies like my brother and I were fed foods grown from the earth. Long gone were the standards of health, and now almost everything was filled with pesticides and growth hormones. Gone were the medicine standards, and it got so bad that a dose of headache medicine could stop your heart.
But we never heard about that from the television, or from the radio, or even from the internet. Slowly, the blogs that called out our leadership disappeared. Now I know that those writers ended up in facilities like mine.
My father himself was a political writer. He wrote about the atrocities that our government had committed. About how cronyism had lead to corruption of our government, how tax cuts and lowered regulations had made the food and drug industries boom.
He angrily reported on an internet radio station for the first seven years of my life the actions of our president, how he was destroying our beloved country.
My father was a proud man, tall and strong, with gray hair, brown eyes, and a warm smile. He remained that way to the end, or, at least I think he did.
When I was eight, he disappeared. Hauled away by a mysterious black van right before my eyes. He told me to run. I did, and those who took him did not follow me.
My fathers disappearance was never investigated. The local police had become as corrupt as our government, and the few who cared were never heard. They also vanished.
My mother was a frail looking woman, and I grew past her height when I reached the age of ten. With no husband, and with two growing children to raise, she threw herself into her work. My brother and I rarely saw her, we raised ourselves.
My brother went into the tenth grade when I graduated into eighth. He took after my father, tall and handsome, and very kind. He was a lover, not a fighter. And soon I learned his secret.
He never brought home a girlfriend, and he never would. Even though societies pressures had become great, they could not stop the course of love. He fell for a charming boy one grade his senior. They kept their relationship a secret. Only my mother and I knew.
But secrets are hard to keep. I did not utter a word of my brothers forbidden love, but someone learned of it. One day they were both walking home from school. Witness reports say that a black van carried them both away, leaving two backpacks and two grieving families behind.
Like my father, this kidnapping was never in the news. My family was falling apart around me. My mother became a raving lunatic, never getting what she desired.
Answers.
She, like my father, began to coast the underground movement against our leaders. She learned that her husband and her son were not the only two who had been stolen. Others. Hundreds. Those who had fought against our government through literature, through words had been taken. Gays and lesbians had been hauled away in black vans. And sometimes, innocents were stolen too. Never to be seen or heard from again.
I matured from a meager 13 year old into a 14 year old. My mother needed more care than I, and she soon started home schooling me. She feared that I would be taken from her, so I rarely left the house.
We got what we could from internet radio and hand written letters. Those who were in opposition were now marked targets, and every night I feared that we would be taken by a black van.
My fifteenth birthday passed, and with that, the whole country began to fall apart. Nuclear missiles were launched on our old enemies. Our president reformed the political system. He became a king, our savior. No one could oppose him.
Gone were the articles in the newspaper that criticized him, gone were those that opposed him. They all disappeared. Gone were those who he disliked. Gone were those who were not the same as him.
My mother became faint and ill, and we had to leave our small hose in our small town to go to a big hospital in a big city. We poured what money we could into getting her treatment. But the damage had been done. Cancer had stolen her from me in the summer of my fifteenth year.
I laid one rose at her grave. My father, my brother, and my mother had all been taken from me. I was the only one who remained.
My thoughts raced as I tried to recollect my life in that giant city. I joined a gang of self labeled freedom fighters. We consisted of all the undesirables. Those of different ethnicity's, sexual orientation, and religion ran free in the lowest part of the city.
Armed with a can of spray paint, a knife, and an idea, I began my own private war. I slowly worked my way up, painting the walls with my messages. I hoped for uprising.
But, I wasn’t safe. None of us were. Each time our gang met, there were new members, and there were missing members. Some had been killed by the secret police that patrolled the city, some had been murdered by our kings supporters.
I gained respect and rose through the ranks, becoming the right-hand woman of our leader, a kind boy with dark eyes and a bright smile. We fell in love, and began dating in my seventeenth year.
My messages in paint got more daring as I grew older and more skilled. Now I freely roamed the better parts of the city, cloaked in the darkness of night. I slinked along, painting the messages, my arm moving along like a robot. It knew the pattern. I could write it perfectly, even with my eyes closed.
I was nearly seventeen and a half when I was taken. I had been careful that night, for the secret police (Also known as the Preservation Society, or the PS, which was a backwards anagram for what they really were) had issued an order for all those involved with the graffiti.
A silent black van drove up behind me, and in one swift movement, the PS members poured out the back. A bag over my head, my hands bound behind my back, I was thrown into the van.
I screamed loudly, but they only beat me. Whether with the butts of rifles or with their hands or with sticks, they beat me all over my body. On my back, my face, my legs, my breasts. I was assailed from every side.
At last when I had quieted, my nose pouring with blood, my eyes swollen, my face caked with drying blood, they sat me up on a bench. I passed out and fell back to the ground.
We drove for what might of been hours, but could of been just a fifteen minute trip. Everything was a daze. Radio calls were buzzing in my sore ears, voices of those who had taken me. They all imprinted themselves on my brain.
The van stopped, and the doors opened. I was carried out and thrown onto the ground. They ripped the bag off my head. I looked around. Tall, barbed-wire fences made a pen. Guard towers with spotlights. The sound of howling dogs. That’s what I noticed.
The ground was hard and bare, and the crisp smells of evergreen trees and snow identified the place. The mountains.
There were others in the pen, huddled in small groups, looking as if they were in the same state as I. The spotlight painted them with a silver glow sometimes, as they swirled over all of us.
I sat with my head on my knees in a tiny group. We were huddling together for warmth, and they all looked as if they had received the same treatment as I.
More vans arrived by the hour, until there were about two hundred of us. We all sat, shivering, on the bare ground, with not a bathroom or a glass of water in sight. We were like that until morning.
About forty had died during the night, and we tried to bury them. But whenever we started, guards yelled at us. One man stood up, his glasses broken, his face bloody, and yelled back. They shot him and those close to him. That ended the funerals.
At about five-o-clock in the morning (By my watch, at least), they began to herd us to a gate opposite the one where we had arrived.
Men and women were separated, and we were forced into white, sterile rooms. I was forced to strip and shoved under a burning hot shower. The water poured over my skin for a while, and then I was pulled out, dried, and given clothes. Nondescript brown clothes with the number 5683 written across the chest. I changed into them and found that they were slightly too big.
A woman who was a little taller and fatter than I offered to exchange the clothes. She had my size. We were about to do that when a woman hit us with her stick. She wore a black mask so we could only see her piercing, angry eyes. No changes, she screamed at us. When the other woman objected, the guard beat her with the stick until she fell, bruised, bloody, and tired to the ground.
I never knew that became of her, but she was still living when she fell. I was taken roughly by the arm and led over to a long line. I could already tell that I was going to loose my hair.
First, they burned a letter into our arm. My right arm, just below the shoulder, was the target. A hot iron branded the letter ‘F’ into my arm after the woman asked my name. F, for my first name. F.
The woman who cut my hair was large and almost looked gentle, but her eyes glittered like beetles. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and shore it off. She buzzed the rest and slapped me on the back of the head to get me moving.
They were being much more brutal that they had to be, but I had a feeling that they enjoyed my pain.
I was taken by the arm to a cell and thrown in. About fourteen others occupied the cell, which couldn’t have been more than 7x7. Some were talking in quiet voices, others were crying.
So this was the fate that my brother and father had endured. How long had they lasted? Were they still here? Had they ever even been here?
I found another member of my freedom fighting gang, and we huddled together, crying. We had been taken from the world we had loved and were being held by the people we hated.
The day passed slowly. My arm ached from the brand, and my head ached from no water or food.
At about seven or so, judging by the light in the sky, we were given a crude bucket of water and a ladle and a plate of bread. The bread was stale, the water tasted old. I realized that it was the shower water that had cleaned me earlier. I drank it, though. We did not know when we would get our next meal.
The night passed about as slow as the day. I slept on my friends shoulder, as did she. We were back in a corner, away from everyone else. When we awoke the next morning, four people had died. We hammered for the guards to come and take the bodies away, as they began attracting rats. They only laughed at us and said they would take them when they began to smell.
Rats gnawed on the bodies and we batted them away. But soon, they grew in numbers. We gave up, and would only attack the foul rodents if we could hear them eating.
That day was filled with people being taken out of the cell. Some returned, some didn’t. Those who came back were raving and foaming at the mouth. They all died within the night.
Experiments gone wrong... that’s what we placed them at. All of us began to dread that moment when the door opened and the guards looked at who to take.
The numbers shrank. From 10 we had 8, from 8 we had 5. At last, it was only me, my friend, and another man. He was quiet, and he often cried. All three of us were standing up, arm in arm, when the guards came to take us.
When they went for the quiet man, who shrieked when their hands touched his shoulders, we attacked the guards. We bit them, we kicked them, we spat on them. We did everything we could.
Three of us, as weak as we were, were a match for the two guards. They called for help and in came three more. They pulled us off their comrades. They took away my friend and the quiet man, leaving me alone.
And that was how I came to write this. I do not know how I found the paper, I do not know how I found the small nub of a pencil. Perhaps someone else had left them here... I just do not know.
Now you know my story, whoever is reading this. If you are a guard, I hope your soul burns in hell, for you have given me it. I hope that maggots eat your eyes and worms nest in your stomach.
If you are a fellow prisoner, then let me tell you one thing. Remember that this is the worst that it will be, you can only go higher. My strength in body fades but I still remember the kiss of the cool air as well as the kiss of my boyfriend. I still remember the warm air and the warm embrace of my father. I still remember the freshness of the rain and the freshness of my mothers perfume. I still remember all these. As long as you hold these memories close to your heart, you can never be broken. They will try, but they will not succeed. As long as you remember why you are here, for fighting for freedom, then you can never be trapped.
I hear the guards coming for me now. I wish you luck and hope, and I know that your mind and your spirit will fly as free and as high as the great eagle that once represented our country.
-- Fiona, prisoner number 5683.
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