The soldier wrenched me to my feet and began to march me towards the shore. I couldn’t help but struggle. With a heavy sigh, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder, ignoring my fists beating into his back and my screams fading into the air.
As soon as we got near the boats, he set me down, and I immediately tried to take off. With an exasperated sigh, he grabbed me by the waist and then used some rope from one of the boats to tie my feet and hands together so I couldn’t run.
I sat there on the cool sand, watching as the soldiers went in and out of the lush jungle, pulling bodies to the shore with them. Every new body was a terrifying experience thinking that it could be them.
But it never was.
Finally, once darkness had completely fallen, they all congregated back to the boats and started piling the bodies in. The soldier who’d dragged me to the beach picked me up and set me in one of the boats.
“Wait! Where are we going? My pack isn’t here. That can’t be all the bodies. ”
He looked at me with a mix of exasperation and pity. “The rest of the bodies are just body parts. It would take resources we don’t have to bag them all up and try to identify them. This wasn’t supposed to be this kind of mission. We heard there were stolen weapons on the island, and we were sent to retrieve them. We weren’t expecting this…”
I was stuck on the words “body parts”. “You didn’t find any survivors?” I whispered in an aching voice.
He pressed a hand to my head that I guessed was supposed to be comforting if not for the fact I was still tied up.
“I’m sorry. There’s no one alive.” He cocked his head. “Who was your pack?”
Tears flooded my vision until everything around me was distorted and dark. “It doesn’t matter now,” I whispered as my world once again fell apart.