Savages

into intricate pieces on a beach towel. Because Ben would fucking freak if Chon got oil on the table or the carpet. Ben is fussy about his things. Chon says he’s like a woman but Ben has a different take. Each nice thing represents a risk—growing and moving hydro.

Even though Ben hasn’t been here in months, Chon and O are still careful with his stuff.

O hopes the gun parts don’t mean Chon’s getting ready to go back to I-Rock-and-Roll, as he calls it. He’s been back twice since getting out of the military, on the payroll of one of those sketchy private security companies. Returns with, as he says, his soul empty and his bank account full.

Which is why he goes in the first place.

You sell the skills you have.

Chon got his GED, joined the navy, and busted his way into SEAL school. Sixty miles south of here, on Silver Strand, they used the ocean to torture him. Made him lie faceup in a winter sea as freezing waves pounded him (waterboarding was just part of the drill, my friends, SOP). Put heavy logs on his shoulder and made him run up sand dunes and thigh-deep in the ocean. Had him dive underwater and hold his breath until he thought his lungs would blow his insides out. Did everything they could think of to make him ring the bell and quit—what they didn’t get was that Chon liked the pain. When they finally woke up to that twisted fact, they taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H₂O.

Then they sent him to Stanland.

Afghanistan.

Where . . .

You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.

The Taliban don’t surf.

Neither does Chon, he hates that faux-cool shit, he always liked being the one straight guy in Laguna who didn’t surf, he just found it funny that they spent six figures training him to be Aquaman and then shipped him to a place where there’s no water.

Oh well, you take your wars where you can find them.

Chon stayed in for two enlistments and then checked out. Came back to Laguna to . . .

To . . .

Uhnnn . . .

To . . .

Nothing.

There was nothing for Chon to do. Nothing he wanted, anyway. He could have gone the lifeguard route, but he didn’t feel like sitting on a high chair watching tourists work on their melanoma. A retired navy captain gave him a gig selling yachts but Chon couldn’t sell and hated boats, so that didn’t work out. So when the corporate recruiter looked him up, Chon was available.

To go to I-Rock-and-Roll.

Nasty nasty shit in those pre-Surge days, what with kidnappings, beheadings, IEDs severing sticks and blowing off melons. It was Chon’s job to keep any of that shit from happening to the paying customers, and if the best defense is a good offense, well . . .

It was what it was.

And with the right blend of hydro, speed, Vike, and Oxy it was actually a pretty cool video game—IraqBox— and you could rack up some serious points in the middle of the Shia/Sunni/AQ-in-Mesopotamia cluster-fuck if you weren’t too particular about the particulars.

O has diagnosed Chon with PTLOSD.

Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder. He says he has no nightmares, nerves, flashbacks, hallucinations, or guilt.

“I wasn’t stressed,” Chon insisted, “and there was no trauma.”

“Must have been the dope,” O opined.

Dope is good, Chon agreed.

Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it’s good, if you catch the reverse moral polarity of it. Chon refers to drugs as a “rational response to insanity,” and his chronic use of the chronic is a chronic response to chronic insanity.

It creates balance, Chon believes. In a fucked-up world, you have to be fucked up, or you’ll fall . . .

off . . .

the . . .

end—

5

O pulls her jeans up, walks over to the table, and looks at the gun, still in pieces on the beach towel. The metal parts are pretty in their engineered precision.

As previously noted, O likes power tools.

Except when Chon is cleaning one with professional concentration even though he’s looking at a computer screen.

She looks over his shoulder to see what’s so good.

Expects to see someone giving head, someone getting it, because there is no give without the get, no get without the give when it comes to head.

Not so fast.

Because what she sees is this clip:

A camera slowly pans across what looks like the interior of a warehouse at a line of nine severed heads set on the floor. The faces—all male, all with unkempt black hair—bear expressions of shock, sorrow, grief, and even resignation. Then the camera tilts up to the wall, where the trunks of the decapitated bodies hang neatly from hooks, as if the heads had placed them in a locker room before going to work.

There is no sound on the clip, no narration, just the faint sound of the camera and whoever is wielding it.

For some reason, the silence is as brutal as the images.

O fights back the vomit she feels bubbling up in her belly. Again, as previously noted, this is not a girl who likes to yank. When she gets some air back, she looks at the gun, looks at the screen, and asks, “Are you going back to Iraq?”

Chon shakes his head.

No, he tells her, not Iraq.

San Diego.

6

OMG.

RU Reddy 4—

Decapitation porn?

Check that.

Gay decapitation porn?!

O knows that Chon is seriously twisted—no, she knows Chon is seriously twisted —but not like day-old-spaghetti-in-a-bowl twisted, like getting off on guys getting their heads lopped off, like that TV show about the British king, every cute chick he fucks ends up getting her head cut off. (Moral of television show: if you give a guy really good head (heh heh), he thinks you’re a whore and breaks up with you. Or: Sex = Death.)

“Who sent this to you?” O asks him.

Is it viral, floating around on YouTube, the MustSee vid-clip of the day? MySpace, Facebook (no, that isn’t funny), Hulu? Is this what everyone’s watching today, forwarding to their friends, you gotta check this out?