He poured himself a glass of water, tasting the bitter tang as he drank a few sips, and scowled at the plastic jug. The aliens had given him a jug of water a day and expected him to use it sparingly. They hadn’t missed a trick, either; the plastic jug wasn't even useable for slitting his wrists. Joshua had never seriously considered suicide, not since he’d been sacked from his last job, but now…now he would almost be tempted, if he had something to hurt himself with. He’d tried not breathing, as he’d read in one of the spy novels he’d read once as a younger man, and all he’d got was a headache. Real life didn’t seem to work as well as a novel.
The banging on the door brought him back to himself. He knew the routine by now; the aliens would bang to wake him up, then open the door and drag him out into the light. This time, there were three aliens standing there, their black helms regarding him, before one of them caught him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him out into the main room. It was as cold and barren as before – he’d wondered, despite himself, if they’d stuffed him in a warehouse, rather than the remains of a police station – but there were several more aliens there, watching him as he was carefully secured and marched off up the stairs. The lighting was better outside the cell and he found himself wincing as it struck his eyes. He hadn’t realised how gloomy the cell had become until he saw the outside world.
He looked at one of the guards. “How long have I been in the cell?”
The guard didn’t answer. He just rammed the barrel of his weapon into Joshua’s chest. The pain was incredible and he almost collapsed on the ground, steadied only by an alien hand. In a movie, he would have captured the rifle and shot his way out, but in real life…the pain made it impossible to think. He dry-retched, wishing that he’d had enough in his stomach to throw up all over the aliens, but nothing came. Coughing and wheezing, feeling like a two packs a day man, he found himself being herded into a waiting room. A line of human prisoners, some of them looking much worse than him, waited there. No one spoke to one another, not to Joshua or to anyone else; they were all trapped in their own private hells.
Joshua felt reporting instincts coming to the fore and tried to study his fellow prisoners. Just seeing a human face after so long was a relief, but he didn’t see anyone he wanted to see, not even Loretta. There were girls, some barely entering their teens, handcuffed and waiting for the aliens. There were young men, some of them wounded badly, left to wait as well. Several of them looked as if they were going to die unless they got some medical treatment, but the aliens didn’t seem to care. The handful of older people in the room tried to ignore the aliens and Joshua himself, keeping themselves to themselves. The stink of hopelessness and sour death was everywhere.
He looked back towards the impassive aliens and shivered. What the hell was going on?
An alien caught onto his arm. “You will accompany us,” he said, in an accented voice. He almost sounded German. After everything else he’d seen, that made Joshua giggle, feeling right on the edge of sanity, but the alien ignored it. He pulled Joshua to his feet, escorted him through a pair of doors, and thrust him into another room. Three aliens faced him, all unmasked…and one of them, he saw, was a female. The breasts had to mean a female, right?
It almost sent him into another fit of giggles. If the aliens were going to enforce bare breasts on the human population,
