M16, racing outside as all the barracks empty out, hundreds of recruits pouring across the yard toward the access tunnels that lead underground.
I was a couple of minutes behind the squad because Nugget was hollering his head off and clinging to me like a monkey to his momma, thinking any minute the alien warships would start dropping their payloads.
I shouted at him to calm down and follow my lead. It was a waste of breath. Finally I just picked him up and slung him over my shoulder, rifle clutched in one hand, Nugget’s butt in the other. As I sprinted outside, I thought of another night and another screaming kid. The memory made me run harder.
Into the stairwell, down the four flights of stairs awash in yellow emergency light, Nugget’s head popping against my back, then through the steel-reinforced door at the bottom, down a short passageway, through the second reinforced door, and into the complex. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, sealing us inside. By now he had decided he might not be vaporized after all, and I could set him down.
The shelter is a confusing maze of dimly lit intersecting corridors, but we’ve been drilled so much, I could find my way to our station with my eyes closed. I yelled over the siren for Nugget to follow me and I took off. A squad heading in the opposite direction thundered past us.
Right, left, right, right, left, into the final passageway, my free hand gripping the back of Nugget’s neck to keep him from falling back. I could see my squad kneeling twenty yards from the back wall of the dead-end tunnel, their rifles trained at the metal grate that covers the airshaft leading to the surface.
And Reznik standing behind them, holding a stopwatch.
We missed our time by forty-eight seconds. Forty-eight seconds that would cost us three days of free time. Forty-eight seconds that would drop us another place on the leaderboard. Forty-eight seconds that meant God knows how many more days of Reznik.
Back in the barracks now, we’re all too hyped up to sleep. Half the squad is pissed at me, the other half is pissed at Nugget. Tank, of course, blames me.
“You should have left him behind,” he says. His thin face is flushed with rage.
“There’s a reason we drill, Tank,” I remind him. “What if this had been the real thing?”
“Then I guess he’d be dead.”
“He’s a member of this squad, same as the rest of us.”
“You still don’t get it, do you, Zombie? It’s freakin’ nature. Whoever’s too sick or weak has to go.” He yanks off his boots, hurls them into his locker at the foot of the bunk. “If it was up to me, we’d throw all of ’em into the incinerator with the Teds.”
“Killing humans—isn’t that the aliens’ job?”
His face is beet red. He pounds the air with his fist. Flintstone makes a move to calm him down, but Tank waves him away.
“Whoever’s too weak, too sick, too old, too slow, too stupid, or too little—they GO!” Tank yells. “Anybody and everybody who can’t fight or support the fight—they’ll just drag us down.”
“They’re expendable,” I shoot back sarcastically.
“The chain is only as strong as the weakest link,” Tank roars. “It’s frickin’ nature, Zombie. Only the strong survive!”
“Hey, come on, man,” Flintstone says to him. “Zombie’s right. Nugget’s one of the crew.”
“You get off my case, Flint,” Tank shouts. “All of you! Like it’s my fault. Like I’m responsible for this shit!”
“Zombie, do something,” Dumbo begs me. “He’s going Dorothy.”
Dumbo’s referring to the recruit who snapped on the rifle range one day, turning her weapon on her own squad members. Two people were killed and three seriously injured before the drill sergeant popped her in the back of the head with his sidearm. Every week there’s a story about someone “going Dorothy,” or sometimes we say “off to see the wizard.” The pressure gets to be too much, and you break. Sometimes you turn on others. Sometimes you turn on yourself. Sometimes I question the wisdom of Central Command, putting high-powered automatic weapons into the hands of some seriously effed-up children.
“Oh, go screw yourself,” Tank snarls at Dumbo. “Like you know anything. Like anybody knows anything. What the hell are we doing here? You want to tell me, Dumbo? How about you, squad leader? Can you tell me? Somebody better tell me and they better tell me right now, or I’m taking this place out. I’m taking all of it and all of you out, because this is seriously messed up, man. We’re going to take them on, the things that killed seven billion of us? With what? With what?” Pointing the end of his rifle at Nugget, who’s clinging to my leg. “With that?” Laughing hysterically.
Everybody goes stiff when the gun comes up. I hold up my empty hands and say as calmly as I can, “Private, lower that weapon right now.”
“You’re not the boss of me! Nobody’s the boss of me!” Standing beside his bunk, the rifle at his hip. On the yellow brick road, all right.
My eyes slide over to Flintstone, who’s the closest to Tank, standing a couple of feet to his right. Flint answers with the tiniest of nods.
“Don’t you dumbasses ever wonder why they haven’t hit us yet?” Tank says. He’s not laughing now. He’s crying. “You know they can. You know they know we’re here, and you know they know what we’re doing here, so why are they letting us do it?”
“I don’t know, Tank,” I say evenly. “Why?”
“Because it doesn’t matter anymore what the hell we do! It’s over, man. It’s done!” Swinging his gun around wildly. If it goes off…“And you and me and everybody else on this damn base are history! We’re—”
Flint’s on him, ripping the rifle from his hand and shoving him down hard. Tank’s head catches the edge of his bunk when he falls. He curls into a ball, holding his head in both hands, screaming at the top of his lungs, and when his lungs are empty, he fills them and lets loose again. Somehow it’s worse than waving around the loaded M16. Poundcake races into the latrine to hide in one of the stalls. Dumbo covers his big ears and scoots to the head of his bunk. Oompa has sidled closer to me, right next to Nugget, who’s holding on to my legs with both hands now and peeking around my hip at Tank writhing on the barracks floor. The only one unaffected by Tank’s meltdown is Teacup, the seven-year-old. She’s sitting on her bunk staring stoically at him, like every night Tank falls to the floor and screams as if he’s being murdered.
And it hits me: This
It is hopeless. It is crazy. Tank is the sane one because he sees it clearly.
Which is why he has to go.
47
THE SENIOR DRILL INSTRUCTOR agrees with me, and the next morning Tank is gone, taken to the hospital for a full psych eval. His bunk remains empty for a week, while our squad, one man short, falls further and further behind in points. We’ll never graduate, never trade in our blue jumpsuits for real uniforms, never venture beyond the electric fence and razor wire to prove ourselves, to pay back a fraction of what we’ve lost.
We don’t talk about Tank. It’s as if Tank never existed. We have to believe the system is perfect, and Tank is a flaw in the system.
Then one morning in the P&D hangar, Dumbo motions me over to his table. Dumbo is training to be the squad medic, so he has to dissect designated corpses, usually Teds, to learn about human anatomy. When I come over, he doesn’t say anything, but nods at the body lying in front of him.
It’s Tank.
We stare at his face for a long moment. His eyes are open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He’s so fresh, it’s unnerving. Dumbo glances around the hangar to make sure no one can overhear us, and then whispers, “Don’t tell Flint.”
I nod. “What happened?”
