Authors: Bruce Bethke
bunch of kids who’d not only seen
Managua Blood
, they’d
identified
with that pathetic slab of revisionist history!
Just back of the wing there was an open seat on my left, next to a
freckled kid with a semi-friendly expression on his face and the name
“D.K. Luger” stenciled on his shirt. I wrestled my suitcase up to the
baggage rack, wedged it in between all the camo duffel bags, flopped
into the seat. The freckled kid scanned me over a few seconds, then
offered a handshake and drawled, “Hi, I’m -- “
“Don’t talk to him, Deke,” someone behind us hissed. “He’s an
Involuntary.” D.K. Luger got embarassed, pulled his hand back, and
turned to look out the window.
“Aw, c’mon Deke,” I said. (Actual, I whined it, just like Georgie.)
“Ten hours ago my olders crashed me and stuck me on a lear. Okay, so
I’m an Involuntary. Can you cancel that for a nano and—”
“Cryminelly,” the kid behind us grumbled. “We got us’ns a
cyberpunk
.”
I cancelled the hot retort and tried again in Ultra CleanSpeak.
“Deke, could you please tell me where we’re going?”
“To Pleasure Island!” Payne shouted in my left ear, damn near
startling me into the luggage rack. “Where we turn naughty boys like
you into jackasses!” I uncringed my neck again and turned around to
look at him. For a flash, Payne’s face softened a little, maybe. “And
once in a great while we turn jackasses into decent men,” he added.
The softness flashed off. He spun around, walked up to the front of
the plane, went into the pilot’s compartment. A second later, one of the
engines made a
chunk!
and a whine and started turning over. Soon’s it
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caught, they fired up the other. Two minutes later we were rattling out
onto the runway, and five minutes after that we were groaning into the
air.
When we finished climbing and banking the sun was shining straight
in Deke’s window. Okay, we were going north. The sunlight bugged
Deke, so he closed the shade, pulled an analog book out of the camo
gym bag (also stenciled D.K. Luger) beneath his seat, and buried his
freckled nose in reading. I tried to look around for somebody else to talk
to, but nobody’d look me in the face. By and by, my stomach started
reminding me that it was expecting breakfast.
Great. I was hungry. I was tired. I was cold, now that Deke had
closed the shade. And I was flying into Canada with a bunch of
depressed punks and twenty junior jarheads who were treating me like a
total zero.
I didn’t have a clear idea yet of what I was gonna do to Dad when I
got back, but it was gonna be
good
.
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Chapter 0/ 8
After the bleary eyes wore off, most of the jarheads started to get
real chatty. I managed to tap part-way into a couple of the conversations
going on around me—the engine noise put some garble in everything,
but I caught enough to make sense—and I picked up we were going to
someplace called The Academy. With capital letters. I also learned that,
while none of the kids had actually been There before, a few had friends
or older brothers who’d gone last summer.
I detensioned a little. So it was a summer camp. Not a life sentence.
Further, the story going around was that the friends/ brothers had
had nothing but non-stop fun at The Academy. Just when I started to
think this might be worth an actual look forward, I picked up that fun
meant exercise, drilling, and playing soldier. Jarheads define things
weird, I decided. When the kids in front of me started talking about war
games at The Academy I tried to crack in and tell ‘em all about my
Battle of Peshawar program, but they clammed and pretended not to
hear me.
Okay, if that’s the way they wanted it, I could go into silent mode
for awhile. Their idea of war gaming sounded pretty lame, anyway.
Around 11:0/ 7:0/0/ , Deke lifted the shade again. Then he reached
down and pulled a sandwich out of his bag: Bologna on Wonder—not
something I’d eat, normal—but I was starting to get real concious that
it’d been 17 hours since my last meal, and I’d have eaten a dead mouse
on rye if he’d had one and offered to share it. Never taking his eyes off
his book, Deke unwrapped the sandwich and started to munch it, slow. I
watched him until it was gone. I watched his cheeks pouch out and his
jaw grind; I watched every crumb that fell into the book. I chewed my
nails and tried to get up the nerve to beg half of it off him.
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No, cancel that. I needed to make a friend out of
somebody
on that
plane, and I’d already made Deke squirm once. Pushing myself in D.K.
Luger’s face was not gonna make it any better.
Derzky
was how I needed
to be. I’d be derzky, I’d be smart. I wouldn’t push him. He’d loosen up.
About the time he finished the sandwich, the plane started nosing
down and the wheels groaned into landing position. Still trying to keep
cool, I casual looked around Deke and got a peek out the window. All I
could see was big trees, small lakes, and more trees. No roads, no
houses, no smokestacks; nothing but tall pine trees coming up
fast
. Just
when I was starting to do a little worry about whether this landing was
planned, I saw a bunch of plowed fields flash by the window and then
we set down in a clearing.
Or maybe it was another plowed field. We hit the ground, bounced
hard, hit the ground again. The pilot reversed engines, braking us, and I
kept looking out the window, trying to get some idea of what The
Academy looked like. Still nothing but trees.
When we’d almost stopped rolling, I finally saw some buildings: A
pathetic little shack covered with camo netting, a couple green
corrugated tin sheds that might’ve been hangars. I didn’t get more of a
look, though, ‘cause that was when Payne stuck his face into the
passenger compartment and yelled, “Plane’s on fire! Clear and take
cover!
Now!
”
The jarheads went crazy. I would’ve too, if my brain hadn’t been
running on five-second delay. Sudden, everybody was up and clawing
for their stuff. Deke pulled the gym bag out from under his seat, climbed
over me to get his duffel bag off the overhead rack, knocked my suitcase
down. Missed my head by about two inches. The plane stopped moving;
the propellors stopped turning. Someone popped the front and rear
hatches, and then it registered.
Jesus Mary and Joseph FIRE?
Most of the other kids were already
compressed into two tight jams around the front and rear hatches; looked
like the Ticketron booth the day Stag Preston tickets went on sale.
Someone near me got a bright idea and popped the emergency exit over
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the wing. I hesitated a second, then got a good grip on Mom’s suitcase
and dove through.
Just for laughs, sometime, find yourself a nice big slab of aluminum
and jump on it, face first. They make it look so
easy
on video.
I lost hold of the suitcase, of course; it went sliding down the wing
and I went rolling after it. The suitcase and I flipped off the back edge of
the wing together. It bounced one way and I bounced the other, but
together we put a pretty good dent in the ground. When my headchips
reseated themselves in their sockets, I flagged everybody was running
for the woods like they were being chased by a pack of LowerTown
rollerbladers, so I decided I’d look for the charred remains of the
suitcase later. Stumble-running after the jarheads, totally expecting to
feel a blast of flames behind me at any second, I reached the edge of the
airstrip, closed my eyes, and dove headfirst into the weeds.
Silence.
Incredible,
awesome
silence. I could almost
feel
my ears growing, as
they struggled to grab some audio they recognized. The first sound that
soaked through to my brain was my own heavy breathing.
Then a nervous young whisper or two. Then birds chattering up in
the treetops; a rustle of wind seeping through green leaves. Some kind of
insect buzzing by, slow, droning, and erratic, like it was flying drunk.
A minute or two more and I realized the plane was continuing to not
explode, so I opened my eyes and looked back. Payne had lowered the
boarding ladder, and he and the pilot were taking a nice, leisure stroll
towards the camo net-covered shack. There wasn’t any fire. There
wasn’t even any smoke. I remembered the thing Payne had said back in
Seattle about liking to keep us disoriented, and fed that to the inference
engine in my head. It kicked out the idea that this was going to be one
long
summer. If I didn’t get out.
The pilot went into the shack and started talking to someone. Payne
stayed outside and brayed, “Fall in!” When the jarheads and most of the
punks had trotted over he looked straight at me and shouted, “Are you
waiting for an
invitation
, pissant? Or do you like lying in poison ivy?”
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Poison ivy
? Oh, just fritzing terrific.
Slow, gingerish, trying not to touch one more leaf than I absolute
had to, I started getting up out of the weeds. Payne turned back to the
rest and began barking out orders. “Ten-
shun
! For
mup
! By twos! Rye
face
!” All that kind of military babble stuff. A couple seconds later most
everybody had collected their bags and gone trotting off down a jeep
trail into the woods, except for me and the two McPunks. I was just
standing there, wondering what the Hell I was ‘sposed to do about
poison ivy now that I’d been lying in it, and trying to figure out how
cooperative I felt. The McPunks were staring at the rutted, weedy dirt
trail, and fondling the wheels of their skateboards.
One of them started giggling. The other one got a fierce scowl on his
face and punched the giggler on the shoulder, but that just made him
giggle harder. He kept building up, and building up, until finally he was
laughing and howling like he’d gone full-blown nutzoid. Then he took a
big spinning windup and threw his skateboard off into the trees just as
hard as he could throw it.
The other one stared at him a minute longer, then shrugged, grinned,
and followed suit. Laughing Boy settled down long enough to program
his Casio for a funky marching rhythm, and then the two of them started
off after Payne and the rest.
Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I walked over to the plane,
picked up Mom’s suitcase, reset the mileage counter in my right shoe,
and followed them.
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Chapter 0/ 9
Up and down, twisting and turning through the deep shadowy