The Conscript the Girl and the Virus

felt a bit woozy, so I just propped myself up against a wall near the exit. Being slightly stoned only added poetry to Carol’s movements. Like a lethal ballerina, she glided over the oil stains, her pickaxe as light as a wand.

  I wanted to sit back and watch her dance the afternoon away, but my radar told me something was up. Captain McGuire kept looking at his watch and checking with the perimeter guards on his walkie-talkie.

  When both he and the sergeant headed out of the hall, on the double, my instincts told me to follow. McGuire was checking his uniform and the sergeant went into super swagger mode. They had to be meeting someone important.

  I eventually got Carol’s attention and told her I was going to sniff out what was going on.

  “Go, get ‘em, Fluffy!” she said.

  She said it far too loudly for my liking. Sniggers led to nudging and grew into snarls.

  “Carol,” I whispered, in anger, “do you know there are at least twenty erections watching you dance?”

  “Dicks will be dicks!” she said and continued dancing.

  I tailed our officers at a discreet distance. I’m good at being invisible. It’s a skill I developed as a teenager to avoid bullies, and it’s proved to be the most useful thing I ever learned in school.

  The captain and the sergeant went into what used to be the director’s office, near the factory’s main door. I tiptoed into an adjacent office, ignored the mess and the smell of rat droppings, and moved a desk against the wall, two legs at a time. Carefully, I stood up on it, holding my arms out like a tightrope walker to keep me from falling off. I wished I hadn’t had the spliff earlier, which was probably the first time in my life I had ever made that wish.

  I peeped over the glass partition that separated the two offices. Captain McGuire and Sergeant Driscall were sitting opposite a man in his fifties with grey hair and a smart tailored uniform. He had large black circles under his eyes and his hands shook a little. He was a man who had not embraced sleep in a long time.

  One of the panes was broken which made eavesdropping easier, so I crouched down a bit, in case they saw me.

  “Are your brave young soldiers ready to do battle, Captain McGuire? To ride once more into the breach and all that?” the stranger asked.

  He had a posh accent and everything he said felt as though it had been marinated in irony. He had the face of a bureaucrat, but to have risen so high, he must have joined up early on. He probably also had the knack of avoiding active combat duty. Officers who were still alive generally did. We were commanded by cowards and staffed by ghosts.

  “They’ve had one day’s training, colonel. They’re sharing clapped-out hunting rifles and about to fight hand-to-hand with farm tools. How ready do you think they are?” the captain said.

  “What they lack in equipment they shall have to make up for in spirit. How’s their fighting spirit, Sergeant Driscall?”

  “They’re cowards, sir. Their only achievement in life has been staying out of the war for so long. They’re also ill-disciplined, insolent and ignorant,” Driscall said.