Trying to suck enough air into my gasping lungs through the muffler of the mask was torture, especially when pushing through my own personal hell of pull-ups and monkey-bars. I had never known, until I started basic training, that I had absolutely no upper arm strength at all. None. Zero. Zilch. The guys in our group swung across the bars like orangutans and hoisted themselves up on the cross-bars with only the odd groan. Bruce’s buff form was made for brutal exercise, and Mitch hardly broke a sweat. That didn’t surprise me — he was a big, muscled nineteen-year-old from New Orleans who, but for the plague, might have wound up playing football for The Saints. But Tae-Hyun, the slim masked kid from the transport, and Cameron, a geeky-looking guy with glasses who came from Tennessee and who hardly ever said anything, also managed the upper-body workouts with relative ease. Even Leya, the only other female cadet in our division apart from me, had a wiry strength which kept her swinging and hoisting when my muscles were screaming or just plain giving out.
Failure is not an option. I will not quit. Failure is not an option. I will not quit. I repeated the lines over and over in my mind until they became my personal mantra.
Some nights, I was so sore I would have cried myself to sleep, but usually I was so exhausted, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. One evening, as I hobbled stiffly back from dinner in the cafeteria to my quarters, holding hands with my pirate, Quinn shook his head at me.
“Sweet mercy, but this is pitiful. Would you like a massage and all, Jinxy?”
“A what?”
“A massage. A rubbing down of your sore muscles. They say it helps.”
My heart tripped and stumbled. He wanted to touch me. With his hands.
“Where — here?” We were standing at the entrance to the west wing.
“No, Jinxy,” he said, very slowly, his fingers playing with a pale-blue length of my hair. “In your room. Your bedroom.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“If you invite me in, I promise not to ravish you. Though now that we’re on the subject, maybe I could just put it out there that you are most welcome to jump my bones anywhere, anytime.”
I could feel my cheeks flame.
“Um, are we allowed in each other’s rooms?”
“I don’t see why not. This is a training academy, not a convent. No one’s said we can’t.”
I’d often had Leya in my room, sitting on the end of my bed for girl chats while we painted each other’s toenails, and once all six of us in the unit had gathered in my room to have a gripe-session about Sarge. But we were all from the same division. I couldn’t, however, recall any rule on the lists we’d been given that prohibited a cadet from a different division visiting us in our rooms — provided we didn’t speak about our work, of course. And somehow, I didn’t think that was what Quinn had in mind.
“Okay, yeah, sure,” I said.
My voice sounded high to me. A boy in my bedroom. A boy about to touch my body. It was a first. I was terrified. I felt self-conscious as I sat on the edge of my bed with Quinn on the floor at my feet, rolling up the legs of my jumpsuit. I prayed that my legs were smooth, wished that my room was less messy.
“Now Jinxy, as the doctors say, this might hurt a little,” said Quinn, warming a squirt of anti-inflammatory gel between his hands.
I smiled back nervously. Gently at first, and then more firmly, he rubbed the gel into my calves. Within minutes, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was blissed out on sensation. The almost painful pleasure of his strong, warm hands kneading my stiff muscles left me limp as a noodle, and I flopped back on the bed. After my calves, he moved onto my arms.
“Oh, Quinn,” I sighed, wanting something. Wanting more.
“Yes, Jinxy?”
His voice asked a question. But I couldn’t answer with what I really wanted to say — More! All over! — so instead I murmured, “S’so good. Thank you.”
One night after a particularly brutal day’s upper-body workout, I was in too much agony to feel shy. I rolled up my T-shirt and he massaged my back and shoulders, working deeply into the sore muscles, moving his warm hands around and under my bra strap while I lay on my stomach, close to passing out. If anyone could have overheard my groans of pain and pleasure, they would have assumed that we were doing something else for sure. I woke up the next morning, alone, with the T-shirt pulled back down, the covers pulled up over my shoulders and my running shoes on the floor next to my bed. I wasn’t sure if what I felt was relief or disappointment.
Every day, we spent hours honing our marksmanship with light and heavier-caliber rifles, semi-automatic weapons, and small sidearms. These were my favorite hours of the day, when we learned to shoot in all conditions — in low or bright light, from high and low angles. We practiced observing and detecting, estimating ranges and hitting targets (large and small, stationary and moving), at close quarters in the simulated urban arena at the PlayState warehouse, or over seemingly impossible distances in the wooded area behind the Academy, or on the target shooting range behind the screen of a concrete wall at the far back of the compound. When we weren’t exercising or shooting, we were assembling, disassembling or cleaning our weapons; sitting through lectures on applied explosives or hide-construction; or playing Kim’s Game — an exercise designed to train our observation skills by noticing what item had been added to, or removed from, a scene.
We pitted ourselves against each other constantly. The Game must have trained our snipers’ eyes, because we were all pretty accurate, though Mitch was fastest in situations where we had to run to certain spots and then shoot, and Tae-Hyun was best at high-angled shots. Bruce was exceptional, his only flaw a tendency to pull his shots to the left when he got nervous or angry. Cameron was a good all-rounder, but he unnerved me. His impassive face showed no emotion, and he never said any more than was strictly necessary, so I could never tell what he was thinking. From the way his eyes followed Leya, though, I guessed he did have a heart. Leya was the weakest in marksmanship, but she was excellent at concealment, camouflage and stalking.
On a good day, I could outshoot them all — as long as the targets were made of tin or paper — but when the targets had paws and whiskers, I came unglued. Cameron and Bruce were not at all fazed when we began practicing on live targets. Rats.
“It doesn’t bother you that these are perfectly healthy creatures we’re about to kill?” I asked, as we trudged into the alley inside the PlayState warehouse. We only practiced with the rats there, where they could be contained and prevented from escaping into the wild.
“They’re still freaking mutants,” said Tae-Hyun.
“’Sides, I’ve shot plenty of perfectly healthy creatures before,” said Bruce. “And prettier ones than rats.”
“Really?”
“Hunting,” said Cameron.
“Oh.”
I’d never liked the idea of hunting animals for sport. It seemed kind of sick to stick dead, stuffed heads above the mantelpiece, and it had always struck me as unfair — pitting high-powered scopes and rifles against dumb bucks. Bare-handed moose-wrestling would have been fairer sport.
“We’re not hunting the rats, though. I mean, we’re not going to eat them. It just seems wrong, such a waste of life.” At least with venison, the meat was used.
“Aw, you’re the hottest greeny-beany bunny-hugger I ever met,” said Bruce, giving me a squeeze and lifting me right off my feet.
He was always finding excuses to touch me and pass inappropriate comments, even though I made it plain I was in no way interested in him. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I’d asked Leya, and she’d advised me to ignore it.
“If you don’t react, eventually he’ll get bored and lose interest,” she said.
“You think?” I had been ignoring it so far, but I hadn’t noticed any slacking off in his attention.
“Sure. Even now, I think he only does it to rattle you. Not that you’re not pretty, or anything,” she added quickly.
“Why does he want to ra
ttle me?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes and gave me a duh! look. “Because you’re the best marksman in the unit. And he thinks that if he can get to you with his stupid comments and free hands he’ll make you lose your nerve, and then your performance will suffer and he’ll step into first place.”
I thought about that for a moment. It could be true, I supposed.
“So you don’t think I should complain to Sarge about it?”
“Hell no! Can you imagine how that would go?”
I could. I could just hear Sarge telling me to toughen up and stop being such a delicate snowflake, and that if I couldn’t take the heat I should quit the kitchen.
“The thing is, Jinx, that females are still majorly in the minority here, especially in the sniper unit. We have to be twice as good, twice as strong, twice as tough, just to be taken half as seriously as the guys. If you complain about this, you’ll only come across as weak. You need to handle this one on your own, not go crying to papa-Sarge. Though you know I’m always here for you if you need to download.”
I knew she was. We tended to stick together in training and often hung out together afterwards, especially when Quinn wasn’t free. I liked her a lot. She was clever and funny, and she encouraged me whenever I had doubts. If I’d had a sister, I’d have liked her to be like Leya.
“Okay, I’ll keep ignoring Bruce,” I’d said. “But he’d better not push me too far.”
Right now I made a point of stepping away from him, taking up a position on the other side of Cameron. The others were still trying to help me overcome my reluctance to shoot a live being.
“Don’t think of them as individual animals,” suggested Mitch. “They’re just tangos.”
Tango was the phonetic alphabet word for T. T was for target. Target was for the thing you shot, but both my instructors and my co-cadets had a real aversion to using real words to describe live things about to become dead.
“Need practice,” said Cameron.
“We could practice on little robotic rats, like in The Game,” I said. “I mean, if they can build RoboDogs, they can build RoboRats, right?”
Bruce laughed like I’d said something hilarious. Cameron shook his head.
“It wouldn’t be the same, though, would it?” said Mitch. “We need to train on what moves, sits, behaves, and looks exactly like what we’re going to be taking out.”
Leya nodded. “Jinx, I understand why this upsets you, I do. But sometimes the ends justify the means. Even if it does seem a bit cruel, the better we are, the more useful we’ll be in the war against the plague. It’s critical that we know our enemy.”
Still I hesitated.
“Blue, we’re not going to win this war unless we’re prepared to take them out,” said Bruce.
“I guess,” I said.
They were right. I knew that in the rational part of my mind. But still, when I had to kill my first rat — a live, healthy, uninfected and even kinda-cute-from-a-distance rat, with perky ears and twitching whiskers that reminded me of my old pet hamster — my stomach knotted.
“Is this absolutely necessary?” I asked Sarge.
“Is a frog’s ass watertight?”
I pulled on my ear protectors, raised my rifle, aimed, and hesitated.
“Do it, Blue! Don’t be a goddamn pansy. You’re a sniper, soldier!” Sarge shouted. “On my command: ready, aim, fire!”
I did. I took careful aim, then fired. And missed by about a mile.
“Our motto is ‘one shot, one kill’, Goldilocks, not ‘one shot, one miserable piss-ant miss’!”
Sarge had me do fifty push-ups as punishment. “Pain is good, now feel the goodness!”
Up — Failure is not an option. Down — I will not quit.
I had to track the rat and set up the shot all over again.
“You can do it, Jinx,” said Leya, smiling encouragingly.
I wiped my sweaty palms on the legs of my jumpsuit, then shook out my arms, which were trembling from the PT, made sure my rifle was stable, waited for the rat to stop moving — the little critter was munching on something to the side of a metal trashcan — and then sent a round down the chamber that blew off most of its head. It was the first time I’d ever killed a living being.
“Congrats, you’ve popped your rat-cherry,” whispered Bruce into my ear.
The others cheered. I swallowed hard and wiped my ear against my shoulder.
Prickly with guilt, I spent the rest of the day killing time. I wished I could tell Quinn about it that night as we played a game of pool in the rec room.
It was the night we were given the all-clear on our test results and granted permission to remove masks and gloves. Everyone, it seemed, had gathered in the rec room to celebrate, reveling in the fun of being able to openly eat and drink the snacks and sodas we bought from the vending machines.
It was strange and wonderful to finally see everyone’s faces. Everyone looked completely different and somehow naked without their masks. More vulnerable. We all shuffled about, staring at each other and grinning sheepishly, like newly stripped visitors in a nudist colony.
I discovered that Leya had a small rosebud of a mouth, that Bruce had a square chin and Cameron a faint scar through his top lip, and that Tae-Hyun’s tongue was pierced with a red barbell. His habit of tapping his tongue against his front teeth explained the faint clicking sound I sometimes heard coming from him.
Quinn’s face was lean, with a strong jaw and a faint, but totally fascinating, cleft in his chin. His mouth was wide, his teeth white and even, and his humor infectious. Every time I saw his smile or heard his deep, lilting voice clearly without the slight muffle of the mask, something tight and hard melted inside me, and a glowing bubble of happy took its place.
Quinn stared and stared at my face until, embarrassed, I eventually ducked my head so that my hair swung down to hide my warm cheeks.
“Something’s really bothering you, Jinxy.” He brushed my hair back from my face, twisting one of the fading blue strands around his finger before tucking it behind my ear.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get out of here. It’s too crowded and noisy to talk.”
It was. There was a whole lot of shouting and cheering coming from the pool table, and the digital jukebox was at full volume. One of the blue unit recruits, a heavily tattooed girl called Dasha, was doing a roaring trade selling prepaid cash cards. Probably black-market.
The day before, Quinn had urged me to buy a couple of the cards in a few different denominations.
“Why?” I’d asked. “I have a credit card.”
“You never know when you might want to buy something without it leaving a trail for someone to follow.”
Nobody used cash anymore — it was too risky when rat fever was so easily spread — but people still wanted a way to buy stuff without it showing up on their charge cards. Teens especially wanted a way to buy booze, cigarettes, age-restricted apps, movies and reading material without tipping off their parents. They said you could even buy banned books and firearms with cash cards — if you knew where to look. I’d taken Quinn’s advice, more to please him than with any real idea of ever using them myself.
It was a relief to get away from the loud music, the din of the pinball machines and the shouts of the crowd.
We headed to the huge indoor arena of the gymnasium and walked slowly around its silent floodlit track. Quinn kept sneaking glances at me as we walked. I was hyper-aware of the way his ungloved hand wrapped around mine — it was big and hard, and warmer than I could have imagined — and the way holding hands with him made me feel. Safe and confident. With my hand in his, I could have taken on the world.
“So, tell me about it.”
“I can’t. It’s, you know, work.”
“I got to say, I don’t get this whole secrecy thing.”
I looked up at him, surprised. I hadn’t questioned the need for the rule.
“I can just about understand why they think we shoul
dn’t talk about our work to the outside world. Though I think people would be pleased to hear that there’s a program to train experts in fighting the war against the plague. But why can’t we talk to each other?”
I thought about that, but couldn’t actually come up with many good reasons.
“We might tell someone outside?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re locked in a super high-security facility — we can’t run off and alert the media.”
“We could tell them on a call or in an email.”
“Jinxy,” he said, laughing down at me. “You do know our calls and mails are monitored.”
“What?” I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even suspected.
“Every communication coming in or going out from this place is scanned and checked for classified information.”
“But, isn’t that illegal, an invasion of privacy? They should have told us!”
“I think you’ll find they did, somewhere in the fine print of those contracts we all signed.”
I scanned back over my calls and mails to Robin and my mother and the few friends I’d had contact with since coming here, trying to think if I’d said anything very personal. I already knew I hadn’t said anything classified — I’d been a good girl on that front. Embarrassment blazed hot when I realized that I’d gushed to Robin about Quinn. Whoever was monitoring our communications would know all about my crush on him.
“Hey, you’re blushing! Have you been doing something you shouldn’t?” he teased.
“Not really.” Not nearly enough.
He stroked a finger down my cheekbone and trailed it down my throat to the opening of my jumpsuit. The pit of my stomach tightened.
“Can I tempt you to do so, then?” he said. He cupped my chin and tilted it up, so that I was gazing straight into his warm eyes, and rubbed his thumb over my lower lip. “Can I lead you well and truly astray?”
Yes, please, I wanted to say. I’d like that a lot. All I managed was a soft, “Uh …” But my parted lips seemed answer enough for him.
He lowered his head, by slow, halting inches, then touched his lips to mine. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Mom and Dad back when I was a tiny kid, and I’d sure as heck never kissed anyone like this. It felt foreign and familiar, forbidden and necessary. Exotic. Dangerous.
Recoil Page 9
