Many of the prisoners who’ve been sleeping jerk awake. One of them is Charlie. He looks around, disorientated and panic-stricken. I catch his eye and nod to him, trying to reassure him. But his large, fearful eyes keep being drawn to the figure that just entered the room, a man dressed in a long, black robe, with a large hood that completely obscures his face.

“Morning, sleepyheads,” the man says in a thick southern accent. He uses a cheerful tone but I can hear the undercurrent beneath it, one that tells me this man is anything but friendly, that he is cruel and mean. “Who’s hungry?”

People begin to moan, stretching their hands out desperately for food. The other prisoners must have been survivors before they were kidnapped, living out in the harsh desert wasteland.

More people enter the room behind the black-clad man, all in similar attire. They’re carrying buckets. The buckets are dropped in front of us, one bucket to three or four prisoners. Breakfast. But when I look inside, I recoil. They’re filled with dead cockroaches.

“Come on, slaves, eat up!” the man cries sadistically. “We gotta get y’all strong for a day’s hard labor!”

I look up at him sharply, trying to make eye contact with him through the slit in his hood.

“Why don’t you just take us to the arena and get it over with,” I bark at him. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

There’s a pause before the man walks over to me slowly, his heavy boots clunking. He bends down at the knees and gets close to my face.

“That’s not why you’re here at all, missy,” he hisses. “We don’t have any arenas here. We’ve got much better things for y’all to be doing. You see, the other biovictims, they’re jealous of y’all, with your pretty features and your healthy bodies. All they want is to eradicate you. Not us. We know that God chose us. We’re biovictims because of his grand plan. This new world, the one that exists after his Armageddon, it’s a world made for us.”

He pulls his hood off in one quick movement. In spite of myself, I flinch. His face is horrific. It looks as though half of it is melting, with one of his eyes dropping down his face at an awful angle. His teeth are exposed on one side of his face where the flesh is no longer there, and there are places on his bald head where the skin has bubbled and burned.