“Andrew?” she says as I am at the door. I turn around, and she smiles at me, the first one I’ve seen on her face in days.
“I’ll try and go over to the food store in the morning. Maybe we can have a decent lunch before you go.”
“That would be nice, Mom.”
I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan...
Chapter 2
“Don’t do it”, the woman says.
I am an obvious target for the protesters that have gathered in front of the military processing station. I’m carrying a ratty travel bag, and I’ve saved the military the cost of a haircut by shaving the hair on my head down to an eighth of an inch.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
The woman has a kind face and long hair that is starting to go gray in places. There’s a whole gaggle of people protesting out in front of the station, holding up signs and chanting anti-military slogans. They stay well away from the doors of the station, where two soldiers in battle armor stand guard and check induction letters. The soldiers carry sidearms and electric crowd control sticks, and while they’re not dignifying the protest with so much as a glance, none of the protesters ever come within twenty feet of the yellow line that separates the public sidewalk from the processing station.
“Don’t do it,” she repeats. “They don’t care about you. They just want a warm body. You’ll die out there.”
“Everyone dies,” I say. That particular piece of wisdom sounds pompous even to my own ears. I’m twenty-one, she looks to be past sixty, and she probably knows much more about the subject of life and death than I do.
“Not at your age,” the woman says. “They’re going to dangle that carrot in front of you, and all you’ll get out of it is a flag-draped coffin. Don’t do it. Nothing’s worth your life.”
“I signed up already.”
“You know that you can back out at any time, right? You could walk away right now, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”
Right then, I know that she’s never been within ten miles of a welfare tenement. Walk away, and go back to that place?
“I don’t want to, ma’am. I made my choice.”
She looks at me with sad eyes, and I feel just a little bit of shame when she smiles at me.
“Think about it,” she says. “Don’t throw your life away for a bank account.”
She reaches out and gently puts her hand on my shoulder.
A heartbeat later, the elderly lady is on the ground, and the two soldiers from the entrance are kneeling on top of her. I never even saw them move away from their posts. She yells out in surprise and pain. Her comrades stop their chanting to shout in protest, but the soldiers don’t even acknowledge their presence.
“Physically interfering with access to an in-processing station is a Class D felony,” one of the soldiers says as he pulls out a set of flexible cuffs. They pry the woman off the dirty asphalt and haul her to her feet. One of them leads her inside, while the other soldier takes up position by the entrance again. The soldier leading the woman roughly by the arm is probably twice her mass in his bulky battle armor, and she looks very fragile next to him. She looks over her shoulder to flash that sad smile at me again, and I look away.
“The building is made of concrete and steel,” the sergeant says. “It’s extremely solid. You don’t need to hold it up with your shoulder.”
The guy next to me moves away from the wall against which he had been leaning, and gives the sergeant a smirk. She has already moved on, as if there is no point in wasting further time on the exchange.
We’re standing in line in a hallway at the reception building. There’s a folding table set up at the end of the hallway, and someone else is scanning the ID cards of the new recruits. The queue moves slowly. When