Forty Days at Kamas
by Preston
Fleming
Forty Days at Kamas is the first book in The Kamas Trilogy. Also available: Star Chamber Brotherhood and Exile Hunter (read my blog post).
For another book by Preston Fleming, see my blog post on Dynamite Fishermen, the first book in The Beirut Trilogy.
Description
Inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of a Soviet labor camp
revolt in Gulag Archipelago, Volume III, the story of Forty Days at Kamas follows political prisoners and security
officials at a corrective labor camp in Kamas, Utah, where inmates seize
control during the summer of 2024.
Kamas, Utah. 2024. In the totalitarian dystopia that America has become
after the Unionist Party's rise to power, the American West contains vast
Restricted Zones dotted with ghost towns, scattered military garrisons and
corrective labor camps where the regime disposes of its real and suspected
enemies. Kamas is one such camp.
On a frigid March night, a former businessman from Pittsburgh, Paul
Wagner, arrives at a labor camp in Utah's Kamas Valley, a dozen miles east of
the deserted resort town of Park City, which prisoners are dismantling as part
of a massive recycling project.
When Wagner arrives, he is unaware that his eleven-year-old daughter,
Claire, has set off to Utah to find him after becoming separated from her
mother at the Philadelphia Airport. By an odd quirk of fate, Claire has
traveled on the same train that carried her father into internal exile.
Only after Wagner has renounced all hope of survival, cast his lot with
anti-regime hard-liners and joined them in an unprecedented and suicidal revolt
does he discover that Claire has become a servant in the home of the camp's
Deputy Warden. Wagner is torn between his devotion to family and loyalty to his
fellow rebels until, on the eve of an armored assault intended to crush the
revolt, he faces an agonizing choice between a hero's death and a coward's
freedom.
In Forty Days at Kamas, author Preston Fleming offers a stirring
portrait of a man determined to survive under the bleakest of conditions and
against formidable odds. Fleming's gift for evocative prose brings the
characters and events to life in a way that arouses emotional tension while
also engaging the reader's intellect with fundamental questions about the
future of American society.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
“Not believing in force
is the same as not believing in gravity.”
~ Leon Trotsky
~ Leon Trotsky
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
The train lurched forward. I reached out to steady myself, and my hand
closed around the cold ankle of the sickly high school teacher who had boarded
the train 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 of sitting 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. A glowing
fireball roared up through my neck, filled my skull, burst out the crown of my
head and pierced the ceiling of the 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. Some of the 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 down 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 car’s exterior wall. Then it struck again.
But I 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 that some 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 to the corridor, 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. Fear came over me
that I couldn’t scuttle fast enough to avoid a beating. I made another frantic
attempt to get on my feet, but I fell back against the schoolteacher’s
stiffened corpse.
I had forgotten about him 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, and then
searched for a bag or a bundle. 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; 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 outside. 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 and gained my footing in time to join the scrum as it heaved forward. The
guards shouted and cursed at us as they drove 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!”
Through the filthy window, I could see a thinly spread line of guards
with submachine guns leveled at the hip. Closer in, 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 received 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, diffusing the yellowish glare of the
floodlights over the railyard.
Anxious for my legs to recover in time to drop to the platform without
injury, I hung back and let others pass. 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 a beating 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 next compartment.
“Paul, quick—I need your help.”
Preoccupied with my legs I had forgotten about my former cellmate at the
Susquehanna interrogation facility. My first impulse was to refuse, but
Roesemann had come to my aid many times and he had never asked anything in return.
“Give me a second, Will,” I told him. “My legs aren’t quite right yet.”
I dropped out of the packed corridor into the compartment where Roesemann
knelt 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 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 force that finally took the fugitives into custody had given them an
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.”
I swallowed hard, and then took Reineke’s arm.
The shouting of the guards outside became frenzied, their grunts and
howls making them sound more like victims than aggressors. As prisoners we knew
better than to cry out when hit because that only provoked the guards to beat
us harder.
When we reached the car’s exit, by some miracle no guards remained on
hand to harass us other than the dog handler stationed five yards back from the
tracks. Roesemann jumped out and put his arms around Reineke’s chest while I
lowered myself to the ground holding the wounded man’s legs.
At that moment a pair of guards looked our way from the edge of the
blacktop and started toward us, clubs raised to strike. Roesemann and I put our
heads down and rushed forward, prepared to meet their blows. But the guards
were not after us.
Without a word, the pair lit into a shuffling graybeared just ahead. They
rained blows upon his distinguished bald pate until his scalp was awash with
blood. He scrambled desperately to break free but a vicious kick in the gut promptly
felled him. He lay motionless a few feet short of the blacktop, rivulets of
blood streaming onto the thin layer of new snow. Then two other guards seized
him by the feet and dragged him between the orange pylons, his bald head bouncing
across the frozen ground with sickening thuds.
Throughout the beating, Roesemann and I kept lugging Reineke between us,
evading all blows except for a few glancing kicks from a young guard who
stopped pursuing us the moment we reached the pylons.
“Get down and link arms!” the uniformed youth threatened from a spot
safely beyond reach.
Behind us a truck engine roared and I turned around to look. At that
instant a rubber truncheon caught me behind the ear and sent my knit cap flying
from my head. Though dazed, I tucked my chin into my chest to protect my throat
from additional blows. When none followed, a murderous rage well up inside me,
not only at the pain and humiliation, but at the absence of any warning. The
guards treated us not like fellow humans but like domestic animals that
responded better to physical correction than to words.
We waited anxiously on the snow-covered blacktop until the guards were
satisfied that no prisoners remained in or underneath the coaches and none had
concealed themselves anywhere else in the rail yard. My lice stirred again,
this time in my scalp and up and down my neck. I caught one and crushed it
against my boot, but left the others alone. It was pointless—no matter how many
I destroyed, more always appeared.
“Get up! De-link arms and form a single column four abreast!”
Having performed this operation many times, we succeeded in forming a
workable column within seconds. Roesemann and I lifted Reineke and held him
between us.
“Prisoners, prepare to march at my command!”
With guards flanking us on either side, we crossed the tracks and
followed a deeply rutted path through a patchwork of open fields for fifteen or
twenty minutes before it intersected a four-lane paved road that led toward town.
Carrying Reineke had depleted my last reserves of strength, and the pain in my
lower back had become unbearable.
“Keep to the road! One step to the right or left and I’ll fire without
warning!”
I spotted a line of six unmarked tractor-trailer rigs parked two hundred
yards ahead along the shoulder and resolved to hold out until we reached them.
When we closed to within a hundred yards of the nearest truck, Reineke suddenly
began to mutter and shuffle his feet. Roesemann and I looked at each other,
unsure of what to do, and in that split second of hesitation, the man twisted out
of our grip and broke away toward the fields.
Without thinking, I left the column and tackled him around the waist.
Someone fired a warning shot and a half dozen guards swarmed after us. I lay
still, anticipating a shower of blows. But to my amazement, the prisoners nearest
to us closed in around us to form a protective screen. All Roesemann and I
needed were a few seconds to pull the breathless fugitive onto his feet and we
all managed to keep moving. The guards withdrew.
After the scuffle, I let go of Reineke for a moment to see whether he
could walk without my support. It was only because of my odd position that I
was able to see someone keeping pace with us among the trees. A moment later an
old woman carrying a basket and a duffel and a young girl wearing a canvas
backpack emerged from a thicket onto the road’s shoulder.
At first the guards failed to see them. The woman made the sign of the
cross, then calmly stepped into the road, removed the cloth covering from her
basket and began handing out bread rolls. The half-starved men broke ranks and
collided with each other to get their hands on a precious roll.
A burst of submachine gunfire erupted, aiming over our heads. Dogs whined
and barked, straining at their leashes to attack.
“Everybody on the ground! Sit! Link arms!”
The command rang out again and again as prisoners dropped to the ground,
stuffing precious bread into their clothing.
“You! Woman! Freeze!” screamed the enraged dog handler closest to the old
woman. But the woman had already taken the girl’s hand and was leading her back
into the trees with remarkable speed and agility.
Without a moment’s hesitation the handler reached down to unleash his
dog. In a flash a black German shepherd was racing alongside the column in
headlong pursuit. Having seen dogs like these maul prisoners many times, I
shuddered at the thought of what would happen to the unfortunate woman or her
child. For an instant I considered stepping between the dog and its quarry but
I lacked the nerve. The beast galloped past me at top speed.
Then I heard a high-pitched canine yelp followed by shouts and cries of
animal pain. I turned my head in time to see a broad-shouldered prisoner
sitting astride the black shepherd dog, one forearm locked firmly in the dog’s
jaws and the other pinning the dog’s windpipe against the icy road. Guards
converged upon the man and beat him senseless but the dog remained limp when
they pulled it away from the prisoner’s inert body. Angry murmurs spread among
us but another burst of gunfire silenced the crowd immediately.
“Major Whiting! Sir! Request permission to track the women!”
A young dog handler stood at attention before the convoy leader, a lean,
sinewy man of about forty.
“Stand down, Rogers,” Whiting responded with an Oklahoma twang. “We have
prisoners to deliver. Leave the women, and help move these vermin onto the
trucks.”
Whiting waved off the eager young soldier and strode back to where one of
the guards was directing two prisoners to drag the dog slayer’s body to the
nearest tractor-trailer.
“Is he still alive?” Whiting asked the guard.
“He was a minute ago.”
“Then tie his hands and feet. If he lives, send him to the isolator with
Reineke.”
“Yes, Sir!” the guard answered.
“And next time, son, when you open fire, don’t waste your bullets firing
into thin air. Hit somebody.”
Roesemann and I looked at each other in mute fury. On command we hoisted
Reineke between us and lifted him onto the truck.
Praise for the Book
"A brutal
portrait of a dystopian America, full of dramatic irony and shocking
revelation." ~ Kirkus Reviews
"A
page-turner…moves at a solid clip. An overtly political story that succeeds as
entertainment." ~ Pacific Book
Review
"Weighty in
ideas, Fleming’s book is both informative and deeply disturbing and provides an
intriguing read." ~ San Francisco
Book Review
"Masterfully
paints a grim landscape with believable detail and vivid characters." ~ bookpleasures.com
About the Author
Preston Fleming was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He left home at age fourteen
to accept a scholarship at a New England boarding school and went on to a
liberal arts college in the Midwest. After earning an MBA, he managed a
non-profit organization in New York before joining the U.S. Foreign Service and
serving in U.S. Embassies around the Middle East for nearly a decade. Later he
studied at an Ivy League law school and since then pursued a career in law and
business. He has written five novels.
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