3-27 (A Stranger Things AU)

Chapter 1

Someone had just turned the hourglass over. The seconds were measured, counted, numbered and slipping away faster than I could reach out to grab them. I closed my eyes against the world. The darkness that followed, comforting and enough to prompt me to breathe. I drew in long even breaths, attempting not to choke on the oxygen that filtered in from the AC unit overhead. It tasted artificial and plastic on the back of my tongue, just like everything else I had been fed in this life. I remained stood in the hangar of the shipping command centre, I had walked a mile underground through tunnels of grey to get here and now the rounded cavern was a darker place than my own thoughts and for a moment a flood of fear ran through my veins. My skin mottled from the oppressive cold. It found a home in my bones. A shiver racing down the back of my spine like a rouge arc of electricity from a lightning bolt.

"Three Twenty Seven for loading."

I stepped forwards, the shackles around my ankles and wrists heavy, the solid metal bomb collar around my neck weighing down every step. I clunked and clanged, a hollow brittle echo that reverberated around the empty space. Squeezing down on the soft octopus plush toy between my hands I had called Ronnie, I whispered to myself silent words of comfort. The kind of words I imagined she'd whisper to me from her tiny little sewn on mouth. I was so acutely aware of the way I moved, my every step mirrored by four others. Soldiers. Clad in bulletproof vests and armed with automatic rifles. I was circled like prey.

But we all knew who the predator really was.

They don't put handcuffs on lambs.

I hesitated briefly, lingering upon the edges of the loading ramp. My shaky breath condensed in front of my face, trailing from the edges of a grimace in wispy clouds. The commander scanned the bluetooth chip wired into the collar sewn around my neck and I watched, my heart racing so fast in my chest that it fluttered as the light above the helicopter loading ramp turned from red to green.

I was lead into the aircraft like a slave onto a slave ship, or a cow into a cattle truck being taken to slaughter. The space felt oppressive like the shadows knew what I had done and what I was to do and they taunted me with it. I'd been quiet for so long. So long that I could hear nothing else above the static of white noise inside my head so when they strapped my body into the cargo netting, anchoring me to the floor with screws and bolts I did not even feel their hands on my body. I didn't live there anymore. It wasn't mine anyway. It never had been.

"God bless America." A soldier laughed, his voice a warped echo in my ears.

A soft prick at the base of my neck.

And then nothing.