He opened his fat slab of a hand and slapped me across the face, again knocking me to the floor. Through my ringing ears, I thought I heard the surrounding younger soldiers laughing.

"You no talking," he shouted. "Understand?"

I got to my feet quickly and licked at the salty blood trickle running from my nose. He opened and clenched his fists repeatedly as he waited for my answer. I nodded in a wince.

"Good," he bellowed. "You go there," he said, slapping me down a long dim hallway lined to the end on both sides with close-set riveted steel doors. The caravan of slapping, clubbing, and catcalls ended as I landed in a heap in front of the last door. The number above read 145.

The fat sergeant jingled his keys in the lock. The door creaked open to reveal a small grey cell, the open ceiling crisscrossed with iron bars, the crude wooden cot complete with reclining African. Four guards each grabbed a limb and heaved me forward onto the dust covered floor. I lay motionless as the door slammed shut behind me. The sound of their laughter slowly died as they walked back down the hall.

I looked up to find the man on the cot looking at me, his red and white fatigues faded into a striped combination of pink and dingy grey. The pant legs were tattered to rags below the knees and the sleeves were ripped off to expose his sleek black arms. His wild eyes shined with the intention, or perhaps the result, of a mischievous spirit. Taut muscles rippled under his skin with the slightest of movement. Deep lines of worry crossed his brow and separated his haggard face from his smooth ebony head, shaved as clean as a billiard ball.

"The joke of it is, they think we're the bloody savages," he said in an English Cockney accent. "My name's Reginald. What's yours?"

I blinked at him in disbelief for several seconds before I measured my response. "I'm Evan Michaels, at least I used to be," I said, turning my eyes toward the bars above.

"Don't fret it," he said getting up. "We'll get ya cleaned up in no time." He walked over to a small, dog-sized steel hatch set low in the wall next to the door. I watched as he opened the lid on what looked like an inverted wooden bucket and stuck his hand inside, pulling out a striped, wet rag that looked to be the remains of one of his sleeves.