... we moved. The guy I was chained to tugged at my wrist. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you okay?’ He grinned at me, friendly like. I nodded, told him I was okay. We sat up and I looked around to see what kind of place we were in. There wasn’t really much to see and I soon concluded that my first impression had been correct; we really were in the middle of nowhere. Sand, patches of barren ground and occasional tufts of grasses and stones here and there was all there was, with maybe some insects about, hiding underneath. Not a tree in sight, only sandy hills, dune-like, to our left quite a distance away. I squinted to see better and this focused squinting revealed that these weren’t even proper dunes like I’d seen on tv; these were just big piles of windblown dirty sand. It made for a depressing sight.

Does anybody know where we are? Somebody asked no-one in particular. Nobody knew but everyone was keen to speculate; of course, we knew it was kind of pointless but we did it anyway. We sat down in a circle, shackled together two by two, trying to figure things out. Everyone, except the unconscious man, was there, seemingly okay. The unconscious man and his partner were outside the circle, a bit to the side, as there was blood seeping out of the injured man’s skull, and nobody wanted to go near to deal with it. From where I sat, it looked like he was going to die any minute so there really was no point in trying to prolong his agony even if there was something we could do for him, which there wasn’t, except perhaps strangling him to death to put him out of his misery. But he lay there quiet, completely still so the impression I got was that he was at peace and that was good enough for me. In prison, one learns not to get involved.

Anyway, we had other problems to deal with. We were handcuffed together, left without a key or a knife to cut the chains. If that wasn’t bad enough, none of us knew where we were or why we were here. Everybody came out with the same story; the last thing everyone remembered was eating the beef stew. When people woke up, they were in the cage in the helicopter. We didn’t even know how long it took to get here, or what direction we flew from. The only thing we were sure of was that this was not a good thing for anyone. We had no food, water or shelter. We literally had nothing but the clothes on our backs and a pair of runners on our feet. So what were we supposed to do?

We sat around bewildered until night fell, which wasn’t too long in coming after the sun went down. As luck would have it, the night was dark, starless, completely pitch black and as it began to get cold, it got harder to bear so we hunkered down, two by two, and eventually all conversation ceased.

I couldn’t sleep. I was cold and scared but also excited. I didn’t know what any of this meant but I was glad to be out of the dungeon. For me, day forty-five had turned out pretty good so far. Of course, I realized being dumped in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of hardened criminals wasn’t meant to improve my health, but still I was out here, free. Well, almost. I was, of course, shackled to another man, but this, in my mind, was only a small problem and one that would be solved in the very near future. The main thing, I thought, was to figure out how far from civilization we were and how to get back there before we starved to death, seeing we had been dumped here with literally nothing. I mulled these things over in my mind, not wishing to involve my partner, who seemed to take this change of luck in his stride; he slept like a log. I could hear a couple of people whispering somewhere to my right but I wasn’t close enough to hear what was being said and I couldn’t go near them obviously, so eventually I too fell asleep.