The Volunteer

by J B Cantwell

  “It’s kind of a long story,” she finally said.

  I looked around, thinking about the many months, or maybe even years, that I would be spending in this place. This filthy, stinking place.

  “I’ve got time,” I said.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  It might’ve been my imagination, but her verve for shoveling seemed to ebb somewhat.

  I looked over at the two men who had exchanged information. Now they were standing several feet apart, seemingly invested in their work, acting as if nothing at all had conspired between them.

  I watched them while I said, “So, you can talk here?”

  “Why?” she asked. “What it is you have to say?”

  It took me a few long moments to come up with an answer to her question. I dug into the pile, my upper back protesting.

  What did I have to say?

  That I needed help.

  That I had watched the Volunteers die.

  That I, myself, had killed.

  That I felt like nothing without Alex by my side.

  In the end, I came up short.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  By the time we were closing out our second hour, I was exhausted and covered in sweat. A horn blared from an unseen speaker.

  “Break time,” Julia called.

  I stopped work, standing up straight for what felt like the first time in days. I would’ve loved nothing more than to strip down out of my suit and breathe some fresh air. In any other situation, I would’ve eagerly peeled away my face mask and goggles so I could wipe the stinging sweat from my eyes.

  But my goggles stayed on, though I saw that many who wore them had pulled them off their heads, wiping their faces clean with the backs of their shirtsleeves.

  Those people didn’t look sick. How were they able to take off their masks and not damage their bodies?

  The answer came a moment later, when most of them put the goggles right back on again.

  “It’s okay once in a while to take them off,” Julia said beside me. She had pulled off her own pair, which were hanging now around her neck like some sort of demented necklace. She let the respirator drop from her nose and mouth. Now that I could see her face, I found that I did recognize her. She was red-headed, face covered in freckles, her hair tied back into a neat ponytail, every strand of it slicked away from her face. I had seen her as I’d walked into the bunk room for the first time. She was one of the few who had been asleep. Everyone had looked so exhausted that I’d figured she had been among those who’d just gotten off their shift.

  Now that I saw her awake, though, it was a different story. Her eyes were bright green, and they shone with a fire I wasn’t used to seeing.

  I wondered who this girl was, this Red who had murdered. I tried to imagine her at the other end of a rifle. I couldn’t do it.

  “You mean, it’s really okay for us to, you know, to breathe this all in?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, it’s not ideal, but you need to come up for air sometimes, you know?”

  I didn’t need telling twice. I pulled off the sweltering goggles and face mask and took my first breaths of the rancid air on the floor of the Burn.

  It wasn’t so bad.

  I could see how those who removed their gear would be tempted to keep it off. Sweat was pouring from my face and neck, and I tried to wipe it away, unsuccessfully, with the back of my arm.

  Julia had pulled out a small towel, almost delicate looking, from her pocket and was using it to wipe the sweat from her face. She rubbed it over her eyelids as I looked on, jealous.

  She caught my eye, but I immediately looked away, pretending that I hadn’t seen a thing, pretending that my eyes weren’t on fire from the salty sweat.

  A moment later, her hand was waving the small cloth in front of me.

  “Go ahead. It’s already all sweaty, but it’ll help.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course. I’ll get you one when we get off today. They’re just scraps of old sheets.”

  I took the cloth from her gratefully and immediately put it to my eyes.

  The relief was palpable. My hands were gloved, but underneath the rubber coating they were also covered in sweat, making them useless to wipe more of it from my face.

  But this little piece of cloth was heaven. I squinted hard and rubbed, letting a sigh of relief go as the sweat was wiped away from my eyes, my mouth. And though our faces had been covered, I’d somehow managed to get dirty, even underneath my mask. The cloth came away a light shade of brown.

  I held it out to her.

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize …”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “There’s more where that came from.” And she pulled out a second cloth from her pocket. “Need another one?”

  Everything about this girl made me want to like her. And though I’d planned on being cautious with whom I connected with, Julia seemed like an obvious choice for an ally.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I think I got most of it.”

  “Come on,” she said, tucking the pieces of fabric away in her pocket. “We’d better get some water before break’s over.” She turned, and I saw that she was headed for a small table that had been set up with steel cups of water and little packages of nutrition squares. I hadn’t realized that I had already become hungry again so soon after having stuffed myself in the mess hall. But I was grateful that someone else had thought to prepare for us. I walked up next to Julia and took my place behind her in line for the water station.

  “Don’t get too excited,” she said when she saw the look on my face. “They do it just to keep us working longer.” She shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” Jeff said, pushing his way into our line and standing beside us. “Food is food.”

  Julia huffed.

  “What?” he said, defensive.

  “It’s just like you to see it that way,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Jeff is our resident cheerleader. He seems to like the hard work more than any of the rest of us, so he takes every opportunity to let us know how lucky we are.”

  “Hey,” he protested. “It could be a lot worse. And besides, check this out.” He held up his arm and flexed his bicep muscle, which bulged beneath his suit.

  Both Julia and I laughed. It felt nice, like I hadn’t laughed in months. Maybe I hadn’t.

  “Oh, come on. Squeeze it.”

  We just stared on, trying to control ourselves.

  He finally lowered his arm, but our laughter wasn’t enough to stop his gloating.

  “You’ll see, ladies,” he said. “Someday I’ll get out of this hellhole, fed and fit, and I’ll be fighting the dames away.” He winked at me, but there was such a good natured look on his face that this wink didn’t make me cringe like Jones’s had.

  Finally, it was our turn at the table. Julia pulled off her protective gloves and put them under her arm. I followed her lead. Then each of us took a cup and a package of squares and made our way toward an empty spot on the floor.

  “We only have ten minutes,” Julia warned. “So hork it down while you can.”

  I tried taking a bite of the cracker, but it was too dry for me to chew. I was dehydrated from working so long without water, stewing underneath my uniform. I took a swig of water to wash it down, but soon I found myself gulping the whole cup, which left nothing for me to wash down the rest of the square. Beside me, Julia munched enthusiastically.

  I looked longingly at her cup.

  She shook her head, but smiled.

  “This one’s mine.” She held back her head and gulped the entire cup in a matter of seconds. “I’d tell you to go get more, but time’s about to be up. Look.”

  She pointed up toward Wilson’s post, which was now empty. But there behind him, I hadn’t noticed before, was a clock. On the top it showed the time, and underneath was a timer, counting down the seconds until the break was over.

  Wilson must have temporarily abandoned
the platform, because he was walking back up the stairs now to the lookout point, a steel cup in his hands, too. I noticed for the first time that he wasn’t wearing any protective gear.

  “Why isn’t he suited up, too?” I asked. Then I realized, the glass was enough to keep him safe from the fumes. It must have been airlocked like the barracks had been.

  The timer behind the lookout post was ticking down now from thirty seconds.

  “Come on, girl,” Julia said. She carried her cup over to the table, setting it down in a stack with the others. Then, she walked with her shovel back over to the muck pile, throwing the wrapper from her nutrition squares into the mess. I followed her, doing the same.

  I stared at it for a few moments, the shiny clear plastic wrapper glinting in the dim light. Then, as the horn blared again, Julia’s shovel scooped the waste away.

  I looked toward her, my new friend, but her eyes stayed focused on her task.

  Fill shovel. Empty shovel.

  My new life.

  Chapter Four

  Hours later, as my eyes were starting to glaze over with boredom from this repetitive task, my mind wandered to thoughts of Alex.

  I wondered where he was. He hadn’t been forced to come here with me, but surely he would have been found guilty of many of the same crimes as I.

  Alex is valuable.

  I filled my shovel.

  You’re not.

  I emptied it.

  Alex had been altered. Now, just a glimpse of his former self could be seen in his artificially enlarged body. He was an asset. His Prime status was enough to save him from a fate like mine.

  I hoped.

  I willed my stomach to stop turning as I sank my shovel into a particularly putrid pile of dead sea animals, eyes bulging. Some were large and freakish, all were slimy, and most, but not all, were dead.

  In a way, it would’ve made sense for Alex to be sent here. Surely his massive body would have been useful to the Burn, though I doubted he could fit into a regular sized uniform. He could probably do the work of five regular men.

  But Alex was a soldier, first and foremost. He had been bred to be a killing machine, not a hard laborer.

  My breathing grew shallow as I thought about his fate. The first time around, when he had gone through the first of his phasings, he had been so brainwashed that he hadn’t even recognized me after just a couple short months apart. Would they do that again now? Wipe his memory of me entirely?

  Maybe they wouldn’t even bother. Maybe I was so unreachable that they wouldn’t even think about the threat of him running. Maybe … no … surely, they were lying to him. About me. About my fate.

  I thought about those two men again, the ones who had traded whispers in those first few moments of our shift. I looked over at Julia and wondered if she was someone I might have a whispered conversation with. Did she know a way out?

  Somehow, I felt sure that she did. She had a type of confidence that I wasn’t used to seeing. Like she knew this place inside and out. Like she knew all the secrets the Burn held and hid. Though, if that were really true, if she really did know a way out, I couldn’t imagine why she stayed in a place like this.

  She would be a fugitive if she ran.

  I watched her now as she shoveled across the pile from me, the outlines of a smile around the edges of her goggled eyes. We had separated over the course of hours as we tackled the pile from different angles. In those hours, three different trawlers had come through the station, dumping their waste again and again. It was never-ending. I remembered the trash I’d seen on the surface of the sea when I’d still been fresh from boot camp. As far as the eye could see, the garbage had stretched out in every direction, the waves gently rocking the plastic bottles and bags that floated upon them. A large swath of it had been gobbled up by the trawler as we made our way up the coast. Gobbled up and shipped here.

  I glanced around at the rest of the crew. There were about twenty of us, half of whom were not wearing any protection on their faces or hands. I wondered if this helped their speed. It must have. To be free and clear of the stuffy suits, the stifling masks. And they looked happier, relieved to be able to suck in the air freely, no matter how bitter the taste.

  Then, my eyes fell on the kid in the cell. He was lying down now, right on the concrete floor. No blanket. No pillow. Not for him.

  Soldier Eric Larkin

  Designation: Black

  Just like me.

  I wondered what he had done. Just seeing him there made my skin crawl.

  Beneath my respirator, my nose itched, but I didn’t dare stop my work to scratch it. I picked up my shovel and walked over to where Julia was working. In just this short amount of time, I had made a decision about her. I wanted to be friends.

  Someone … someone here on the floor right now, maybe, would be able to help me escape. Surely it was a topic of conversation, probably a popular one. Because who would want to stay in this stinking place year after year?

  “Hey,” I said, digging into a pile of plastic beside her.

  “Hey, yourself. You drifted away, there.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I tilted my head in Eric’s direction. “What did he do to get in there?”

  Her eyes didn’t follow mine. She knew exactly what I was talking about.

  She didn’t speak, and she didn’t halt her shoveling either. Finally, she said, “He tried to escape.”

  “Really? I thought there was no escape.”

  “There isn’t,” she said. “He’s lucky he didn’t get shot. But he didn’t get very far, and they were able to catch him instead. The next thing we knew, he was locked up, designation changed and everything.”

  I glanced back again.

  “How long has he been in there?”

  Her eyes lowered ever so slightly, and she took a deep breath.

  “A month.”

  I could feel my eyes growing wide, and a prickly feeling had started to crawl up my back.

  Designation: Black.

  Terrorist.

  I wondered how long it would be before I, myself, landed in one of those cells.

  I forced my gaze away from him and glanced up toward Wilson, whose eyes quickly locked with mine. I put my head down and started in again on the pile with a large sigh.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Julia said. “Just keep your head down and you’ll be fine. It’s almost over for the day. They keep us on six hour shifts here, but it’s every day. No rest for the wicked.” Her eyes glinted at me from behind her mask.

  I tried to not hear her, to not let my brain comprehend this fact. No days off. Ever.

  “Do you get to go home ever? Like, in the rest of the Service we would get a week long break in early fall.”

  She shrugged. “Some do. But not us Reds. We work straight on through.”

  I frowned.

  “Then why are you so … so happy?”

  She snorted. “What else can I do? I’m stuck here for another two-and-a-half years. We’ve gotta keep our heads up, don’t we?”

  “How long is your term?” I asked.

  “Five years. Murder gets you five. And then there’s the matter of shifting from Orange status back to Green, too. So there’s another three. Though, I could possibly be in the Service for that part. I bet it’s nice out there; is it? Out in the fresh air?”

  Murder. Five years. And another three to get out of the trap of being labeled an Orange.

  How long was treason?

  I shook my head. “It’s not great,” I said, remembering my own kills, not considered murder if the lives were taken behind a military-issued automatic weapon. Then, looking around, I imagined spending not just an afternoon here shoveling, but years.

  “How do you do it?” I asked.

  She glanced up.

  “How do you ‘keep your head up?’”

  At that moment, the horn signaling the end of the shift blared. Julia unbent herself and stood up straight, stretching her back with a loud groan. Then, within
seconds, the mask and respirator were off.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked. “That’s how. Six hours at a time, and as many frosted nutrition squares as you can eat.”

  She smiled and picked up her shovel, then turned away from me to hang it back up with the others along the wall.

  “Are you coming?” she called over her shoulder.

  Just then, I noticed Wilson, respirator on this time, striding toward me. Julia glanced around and saw him, too, then threw a worried glance my way and turned to go.

  “Taylor!” came his voice, booming across the floor, sharp and crystal clear. Now that he was down from his perch, I found that he was actually quite short. He had seemed so tall from our vantage point of him up in the lookout tower, but I was half a head higher than he was. “Come with me,” he said curtly from behind his mask, then turned and walked away.

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t even bother to hang up my shovel, instead carrying it with me, not willing to take a risk of seeming insubordinate. Because this man, with his baton in his belt and who knew what else, frightened me. Anyone carrying weapons that might be used against a worker would have made me cringe in anticipation. And this man was angry, already angry, at me.

  He moved quickly, his short legs propelling him across the floor on their way to some unknown location. For a moment I thought he would take me back up into the watchtower, but he strode right by it and led me through an airlocked door on the first level.

  He immediately removed his respirator as he walked, not missing a step. I paused, just briefly, to remove my own gear. I took off my protective goggles first, and the feeling of the cool, air conditioned air upon my skin was heavenly.

  Wilson turned back.

  “Hurry up. You— you didn’t hang up your shovel? What is wrong— Ugh! Idiot! Leave it here. I’ll be done with you soon enough.”

  I did as I was told and leaned it up against the wall, blushing furiously in the dark hallway, heart pounding.

  He turned around again. “Are you coming this time?” he asked.

  “Yes, Sir.” My voice was muffled, my mouth still covered by the respirator. I pulled it off and wiped the sweat that had pooled around my lips with the back of my sleeve, wishing desperately that I had kept one of Julia’s rags. I licked my lips then, and instead of the taste of sweat, I tasted the chemicals that had gathered on the outer part of my suit that I had just wiped my mouth with, bitter and poisonous.