then you were fighting fit and ready for action. No point wasting cannon fodder for a little thing like insolence. There were other ways to skin a carrot. McGuire nodded to the sergeant and made a sign with three fingers of his left hand – probably scheduling the whelp for a nasty scavenging mission in Gangland.
I made a mental note not be a smart-ass. Captain McGuire, I surmised, had two very dangerous personality traits: he had no sense of humour and he held a grudge.
II
We broke for lunch, not that I’d had any breakfast. The mere mention of Whopperfuuz and fries brought a smile to everyone’s face. I noticed that the girl I had been eying up had perfect teeth. That meant she was pretty and rich. Being neither put me at a double disadvantage.
I tried to find a bright side. I used the last of my black market toothpaste that morning, so at least my breath was fresh. And I still had all my own teeth, which is more than could be said for most of our brothers and sisters-in-arms. I had no scars, no tattoos, and the appropriate number of body parts. I also used to attend an elite university, and had the good sense to drop out of it. Most importantly, I was a strict vegetarian even before the Bo virus, so there was no chance of me going loopy one day and trying to rip her throat out. That’s gotta be a plus in any potential boyfriend. But was it enough?
To bolster my confidence, I reminded myself that I had nothing to lose. Even if she shot me down I was still a penniless conscript, with nowhere to live, nothing to eat, and no prospects. She couldn’t take that away from me.
“Troops dismissed!” the sergeant yelled.
“Jaysus, fired on my first day. What’ll me ma say?” a spotty punk said to the girl.
She gave him a withering look and he withered away. Part of me wanted to skulk away with him, to take up my place with the anonymous losers, but I steadied my nerve and resolved to walk beside her on the way to the mess hall.
I tried to impress her with conversational charm.
“Did you like your debriefing?” I asked her.
The double entendre slapped me across the face a second after I said it. I blushed.
“Are you being lewd or crude?” she said.
“Neither! I just meant… did you like McGuire’ speech? Did it rouse you?”
“Rouse me?” she asked, and I thought I’d get a real slap in the face to add to the metaphorical one.
She didn’t and I stopped asking stupid questions. Instead, I asked sensible ones, but that only seemed to irritate her more. She told me her name (Carol) but not a lot else. She dodged questions and was as evasive as a government information officer. You meet a lot of people like that nowadays. People who don’t want to talk about their past. We had all lost people. Some of us had lost everyone. Everyone’s backstory was a smorgasbord of blood and guts, so I stopped prying.
To be honest, I thought I’d blown it. My mouth was so dry that my voice was more of a rasp. My movements were jittery, like some amphetamine head on a three-day bender. Even I didn’t want to sit beside me. When we collected our food trays, I expected her to ditch me like a talking hamburger, and sit at the cool people’s table, or even the captain’s table. To my surprise, she continued to walk beside me, over the sawdust and the oil stains, and sat opposite me at a plastic garden table. A table with only two seats. It was practically a date!
A beam of light broke through the grime of the factory’s rooftop window. The cobwebs turned to silver, colour came back to the universe and the rats danced in front of their boltholes. God was in his Heaven and he was smiling at me. And about bloody time!
I tried very hard to be funny. Too hard, really. She tried to laugh. It was awkward, yes. A bit tense. But neither of us had to be there. There was an attraction, I felt. And I was right. When we were slurping our King Colas, she told me I reminded her or her dog, Fluffy. I had his dopey eyes and shaggy hair, she said. I cocked my head to one side, like a confused dog might, and did a Scooby Doo impersonation, “Whar r ru ralkin’ r-bout R-arol?” As a reward, she scratched behind my ears. If I’d had a tail, I’d have wagged it.
Captain McGuire blew his whistle and the sergeant shouted at us again. They never seemed to get tired of doing this.
Lunch was over and we had to move our sorry asses to the BTF, the Basic Training Facility. This was just another factory in the industrial estate. Volunteers got to go to real military training grounds for a whole month, but conscripts were brought to empty factories in suburban industrial estates. On the plus side, recruits had to actually fight on the front lines, whereas conscripts were kept in the rear, and the rear is where I intended to stay.
A few bored teenagers stood guard on rooftops, cadging spliffs off one another. Another type of grass came through the cracks in the pavement, just like everywhere else in the city. There was a whiff of rotting meat in the air. A carcass was nearby, but I couldn’t see it. The fencing around the estate looked sturdy enough, but these things always do, until a herd comes running through it. I was looking for a gap in it, or a way to climb over it, in case the proverbial shit hit the fan. I noticed a car parked near a truck. Both were no doubt siphoned long ago, but you could use one to scramble up on to the other, and if you took the nearby soggy carpet with you, then you could throw it over the fence’s razor wire, and make a hasty retreat.
Carol asked me what I was looking at and I told her how I planned to rescue her, if the zombovs broke in. She said she would be very grateful and patted me on the head. I decided then and there to stay with Carol until she told me to go away. This was my grand strategy. I also tried to look as much like a dog as possible, short of going on all fours and sniffing her crotch. Unless she asked me to. I would be an honourable hound.
III
The best way to describe our basic training would be to capitalise every letter in the word BASIC.
It only lasted an afternoon, for one thing. The army meant a free lunch, but you only got one of them. After that, you had to work for your Whopperfuuz.
Marching and all that parade ground nonsense had gone out the window long ago, even for the regulars. I didn’t really know what they intended to train us how to do. Which way to point a gun, perhaps, or how to look tough if you were manning a sentry point at the edge of Gangland.
The word on the street was that there wasn’t all that much equipment left to train us with anyway. The real soldiers died with their guns in their hands, and you can’t expect a corpse to hand in his rifle. Much less so one who’s turned. At least they tried. From what I heard, the conscripts kept selling their guns to the gangs, or to any other black market fence.
We would have little equipment and even less time. “Urgent deployment requests have just come in from HQ”, the captain told us, and we were being “fast tracked into operational readiness.”
“Brought to the bleedin’ slaughter, more like” a smelly yob to my left muttered. If that’s what he smelt like before he got to the trenches, I shuddered to think how he would reek once he got there. I made a mental note to keep as far away from Latrine Breath as possible when they started wedging us into the trenches.
His attitude changed when Captain McGuire held up a rifle and told us we were about to start our Weapons Training. What is it about young men and guns? The effect it has on them is almost pornographic. All higher order brain functions disappear. All that’s left is the desire to put holes in living things. This is what Fromm would call the Death Drive, Thanatos. I wrote a paper on it once, in a different life, in university, but understanding the psychopathology of guns would be no help whatsoever in understanding the mechanics of the damn things. You can’t tell a rifle to lie back on the couch and ask it about its mother. You can’t talk to a bullet.
The conscripts genuflected before the power of the mighty pistol. Open-mouthed, agape and agog, they stood in awe and wonder. I am the Lord, thy gun, and thou shall have no other God before me.
I stifled yawns through earnest eulogies on the power of Glocks, Mossberg 500’s and AR15’s. Or maybe it was Cl
ocks, Icebergs and old ‘45’s. I wasn’t really listening. McGuire rattled his way through some kind of gun biography, detailing every gun he had ever fired, how it had handled and what its strengths and weaknesses were. After an hour of this, I wondered how there was any enemy left, our captain having personally dispatched so many of them.
The conscripts ate it all up though, swooning in hero worship. Five minutes before, the only thing they wanted from Captain McGuire was to spit on him, but now that he held a gun, now that he brandished the ballistic jawbone of an ass, they couldn’t get enough. Their souls had died. Shot by the call to arms. A hall full of zombies, under the gun. It doesn’t take much to wash away the humanity. Hail to the Chief.
“Could Rambo McGuire head get any bigger?” I whispered to Carol.
“Be quiet, Fluffy. This is important,” Carol said and gave me a filthy look.
I tried to focus. It all depended on the situation you found yourself in, McGuire explained. If a herd charged you, then you’d want an Uzi (we didn’t have any, of course). If you were sniping lone targets, then you’d be better off with an Enfield rifle (none of those left, either), and if you were going house to house, sweeping an estate in Gangland, then an automatic pistol would be your best friend (not issued to conscripts, I’m