Read Forty Days at Kamas Online
Authors: Preston Fleming
Forty Days at Kamas
Forty Days at Kamas
Preston Fleming
PF Publishing, Boston
This eBook is a work of fiction. Names characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Preston Fleming
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form of by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
PF Publishing
Boston, MA
Cover design by Charlotte Zoller; cover image by Markus A. Wagner
Edited and formatted for eBook by:
Launchpad Press
Cody, WY
ISBN-10: 0-982-95940-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-98295-940-4
Contents
Dedication
Für Elise
"Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity."
—Leon Trotsky
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2024
The train lurched forward. I reached out to regain my balance and my hand closed around the cold ankle of the sickly high school teacher who had boarded four days earlier in St. Louis. He had been oddly silent through the night and I felt a fleeting pang of guilt for the sleep I had enjoyed when his coughing finally stopped. After six days on the floor of an unheated prison compartment with twenty other prisoners, I felt little else. Anyway, the teacher's suffering was over.
Still only half – awake, I sensed that the prison car had been nudged from behind, as when a train switches engines. Then all was silent except for the sniffling and wheezing of the men packed in around me. Before I could be sure what had happened, a twinge of pain darted up my spine from the pinched discs in my lower back. It was like no other pain I had ever known. It was a glowing fireball that roared up through my neck, filled my skull, burst out the crown of my head and pierced the ceiling of the sleeper compartment, propelling me with it into the clear moonlit sky. The fire and I became one, soaring over the icy rail yard where the prison train had come to rest.
Suddenly the pain and the cold were gone. Below me, rock–strewn hills rippled out in all directions, meeting a line of jagged mountains in the distance. Halfway between the rail yard and the mountains was a scene that both disturbed and attracted me. A string of brilliant flood lamps atop tall poles outlined the perimeter of a vast prison camp. The camp's wire fence enclosed a neat quadrangle, marked at intervals by wooden guard towers and surrounded by a broad swath of ploughed no–man's–land. Transverse walls divided the camp into five equal sections. Three of these sections housed row upon row of elongated single–story lodges. The other two held an assortment of structures resembling workshops, administration buildings, and utility sheds.
A steady wind blasted the camp from the north, creating swirls of snow and waist–high drifts in the lee of the tightly strung barbed–wire fences. I directed my attention toward the lodges in the center of the camp and saw them loom larger. Now I could hear the whistle of the gusts more clearly. As I hovered above the camp, a surge of terror overtook me, followed by waves of hatred, despair, and grief, each frightening in its power, yet unfocused and without object, as if the collective anguish of all the camp's inhabitants had risen up to meet me in a whirlwind of human misery. I turned my face from the camp and climbed higher until the fear subsided.
When I looked down I noticed a solitary road leading from the camp past a cluster of sandbag bunkers. I followed the road beyond an administration compound and motor pool, over a line of hills and into the next valley, where a concentration of street lamps and neon signs marked the outskirts of a town. The instant I focused my gaze on the town, I closed in on it at astonishing speed. Below me lay the same darkened rail yard where a locomotive had shunted our four battered prison cars onto a siding before towing the civilian coaches to the terminal.
The flashing red and white lights of a shunting engine illuminated a half–dozen canvas–topped troop trucks that disgorged black–uniformed guards in helmets and body armor. Other guards led snarling attack dogs on short leather leashes. As the shunting engine retreated toward the passenger terminal, the guards switched on their flashlights and formed a skirmish line opposite the coaches.
Not the dogs again, I grumbled. But before the fear of mauling could grip me, I realized that I was dropping back to earth at an angle that seemed certain to land me on the roof of the last prison car. Just before impact I looked away.
A tremendous blow shook the wall of the sleeper car. Then it struck again. But I had felt no impact. When I opened my eyes, I saw huddled forms all around me rising slowly and painfully from the compartment floor. In the gray light filtering in through the compartment's dust–caked windows, I saw others on the floor who did not stir at all.
More crashing blows struck the sides of the rail car. It took me a moment to recognize that these came from the banging of clubs and rifle butts signifying that the time had come to unload. Almost in unison, our crowd of shivering, half–starved public enemies began pressing itself against the barred door of the compartment.
Because I had occupied a place far from the door, the crowd’s shoving toward the exit gave me enough room for the first time in days to stretch out my cramped limbs. As I stretched, I felt lice crawling down my legs and suppressed an urge to scratch. With only a few seconds left before the guards would slide open the door, there was no time to waste hunting lice, much less to think about my strange vision of the landscape outside.
Casting aside all thoughts other than how to haul my feeble body off the train, I rolled sideways onto my hands and knees, trying to tuck my right foot under me to stand. But there was no feeling in either leg. Apart from being debilitated from hunger and cold, the endless hours of sitting with my back propped against my fellow prisoners had cut off circulation to my legs.
The pounding of clubs and rifle butts began again at the head of the train and moved quickly down the line toward our car. From earlier stops I knew that once the door rolled open, anyone too slow to join the initial rush off the train would risk a thumping about his head and shoulders. A fear came over me that I couldn't move fast enough to avoid a beating so I made another attempt to get on my feet. But I lost my balance and fell back against the schoolteacher's stiffened corpse.
I had forgotten the schoolteacher in the odd fascination of my dream and the urgency of leaving the train. Now I wondered whether there was time to scavenge anything edible from him. I patted down his pockets and the usual places where prisoners tended to stash a bread roll or an uneaten ration bar, then searched for a bag or a bundle. But it was no use. While I had slept the prisoners behind us must have noticed the schoolteacher turn cold and seized his belongings. For a moment I envied them and then I felt ashamed.
Outside the compartment a key turned the deadbolt in the steel door. Under power from the guards' beefy shoulders, the door slid open and reached its limit with a heavy thud. A moment of silence followed.
Then began the hellish din of rifle butts on wood, cruel rasping curses, and discordant music playing from worn–out loudspeakers overhead. The music, I knew, was required by convoy regulations to mask the cries of prisoners and the blows of nightsticks and rubber truncheons. Why the music was invariably an atonal modern symphony, none of us knew.
I was still on hands and knees at the edge of the crowd when the rush began. The guards shouted and cursed at us as they herded us outside.
"Pile out, you sorry turds!" one yelled over the frenzied barking of his well–fed German shepherd. "On the double to the blacktop and plant your raggedy butts inside the markers!"
A thinly spread line of guards with submachine guns leveled at the hip surrounded the four rail cars. Another line of plainclothes thugs armed with truncheons, pepper gas canisters, and other non–lethal weapons herded the swift–moving stream of prisoners toward an assembly zone marked by orange traffic pylons.
The few stragglers who didn't sit promptly upon reaching the ice–covered blacktop felt a sudden kick in the leg or a sharp jab in the ribs from a guard's rifle butt. Still another detachment of guards armed with sinister–looking jointed truncheons lurked further on, walloping any inattentive prisoner who failed to link arms with his neighbors. As the guards waited for the rail cars to empty, a flurry of snowflakes fell around us, diffusing the yellowish glare of the floodlights.
Anxious for my legs to recover in time to drop the meter and a half distance to the ground without injury, I followed the crowd down the corridor on my hands and knees. To jump without full control of my legs might cost me a broken bone, which in a labor camp could lead to reduced rations and eventual starvation. Yet to be last out the door meant certain punishment and damage that might be just as bad. With each second I prayed for my circulation to return. Then I heard Will Roesemann's voice coming from the other side of the compartment.
"Paul, quick—I need your help."
The preoccupation with my legs had made me forget about my former cellmate at the Susquehanna interrogation prison. My first impulse was to refuse, but Roesemann had come to my aid many times when my strength had run out and he had never asked anything in return.
"Give me a second, Will," I told him. "My legs aren't quite right yet."
I put my weight on my right foot, then my left. To my surprise, I found I was able to shuffle awkwardly to the far corner of the compartment where Roesemann sat cross–legged at the side of a bruised and bloodied prisoner.
The night before, at an unscheduled stop near the Colorado border, a squad of security men had tossed the prisoner aboard like a sack of potatoes. Word spread through the sleeper car during the night that his name was Glenn Reineke and that he had escaped from a corrective labor camp at Kamas, somewhere in the Wasatch Range east of the Great Salt Lake. He and his partner had managed to evade capture for two weeks before a logging crew spotted them and held them at bay. The security men who finally took the fugitives into custody had given them exceptionally brutal handling because both had escaped from Kamas before.
Roesemann pulled one of Reineke's arms over his shoulder and offered the other arm to me. He was surprisingly heavy for so lean a figure and I could feel the thickness of his arm and shoulder muscles. During his time on the run he had grown a full black beard flecked with gray that matched heavy eyebrows knitted together at the bridge of a prominent nose. Reineke’s eyes were shut and his body completely limp. I wondered if he was even alive.
"This is pointless, Will. He's a goner," I said.
Suddenly the wounded man stiffened and raised his head. He mumbled something unintelligible.
"He thinks he's back at Kamas," Roesemann said with a troubled look.
"I'm not sure I can handle this, Will," I replied. "I can barely walk myself."
"Try anyway."
"Will, this guy is trouble…"
"Goddamnit, Paul, stop whining and give me a hand."