Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (18 page)

“That was pretty much exactly how it went
with Justin.” DJ lowered his gaze to his hands. He was shredding
the top of the thick quilt into a fringe, like an ordinary person
might shred a piece of paper. “You know, that’s the part of combat
you usually miss. I mean, I’ve seen people die. Of course. But you
don’t normally stay with them for hours, thinking you’re going to
save them, and
then
see them die. Normally you see it from a
distance, or it’s over in seconds, or you’re with them for maybe a
couple minutes and then they get medevac’d out. Someone else stays
with them, somewhere else…”

He sat quiet and still. Not even his fingers
moved. Finally, he said, “I think I’m done.”

“Done with what?”

“Watching people die.” He looked up at her,
an ironic twist in his mouth. “Perfect timing, huh? Right when I
get drafted to be a hit man. I guess I’ll think of it as my last
deployment. What happened to Valerie?”

“They wouldn’t let her contact her pack. They
said they’d kill someone in it if she did, so she didn’t try. She
refused to bite anyone else after Brava, so she had no one. They
sent her on missions, but with a partner to monitor her. She got
more and more careless, and finally one of her targets got the drop
on her. And that was it.”

DJ sighed. “Great. And that was when they
decided to make their own wolves?”

“Not exactly. They decided to try again with
a small pack of kidnapped born wolves, so they wouldn’t snap like
Valerie did. Emmett Anderson, his wife Julia, and Taylor, their
seventeen-year-old daughter. Taylor was the one they really wanted—
she could possess people. Take over their bodies. Just for a couple
minutes at a time, but you can do a lot in a couple minutes. They
were going to train her, and keep Emmett and Julia as hostages to
make her cooperate.”

DJ went back to shredding the quilt. “This is
going to have a depressing ending too, isn’t it? What happened? Did
she commit suicide?”

“No, they all tried to escape. Back then the
guards had regular guns as a back-up to their tranquilizer guns.
Someone shot the guard Taylor was possessing. It turned out that if
you kill the person she possesses, it kills her too. Julia got hit
with six tranquilizer darts and overdosed. Two months later, Emmett
caved and agreed to bite whoever they gave him, so he could have a
pack again.”

DJ’s fist slammed into the headboard, jarring
Echo and making her jump. “This is
fucked.
Someone needs to
take this entire fucking place down.”

“I wish,” Echo sighed.

He whipped around to face her. “You know,
there’s good hospitals out there. Maybe better than what they have
here. My family’s got money. They could get Charlie the absolute
best medical care that—”

“
No
.” Echo heard the ice in her own
voice. “DJ, don’t even ask. Charlie’s happy here. She’s got books
and movies, she’s got friends, she’s got guys to date, and she’s
got a medical team that’ll drop everything to take care of her. She
could have years left to live. If she leaves, she’ll have months.
If that.”

“What if just you left?” DJ spoke as quietly
as if he thought the place was still bugged. His breath blew a
strand of hair against her cheek.

Echo too spoke softly. “Then she’ll have
days.”

DJ slumped back against the headboard. “Okay.
Forget it. Sorry. That’s the last time I’ll ask. I didn’t mean to
pester you about that again, I swear.”

Echo felt as exhausted as he looked. “Well, I
didn’t mean to depress you
more
. So I’m sorry too. I was
hoping if I told you, I’d feel better. Fucking feelings.”

“Fucking feelings,” DJ agreed.

They sat in silence for a while. DJ seemed to
get bored with shredding the blanket, and started peeling flakes of
paint off the wall.

“If you’re going to sit here and destroy my
sleeping space, at least be entertaining,” Echo said at last. “Talk
to me. I mean, about something else.”

“I can talk about anything,” DJ said easily.
“Pick a topic. Or I can just go off and you can smack me if I start
boring you.”

“I’ve been wondering about your buddy Roy.”
Echo barely stopped herself from saying,
The one who got you
into this mess.
It was hardly Roy’s fault that he’d nearly died
in a helicopter crash. “How did you guys meet? Were you in boot
camp together? Was it love at first sight?”

DJ chuckled. “No, and no. But in a way, that
story does start at boot camp…”

Chapter Nine: DJ

DJ’s Story: An Infinite Number of Monkeys

My family didn’t want me to join the Marines.
Not because they were pacifists or anything like that, but because
I’d be so far from the pack for so long, surrounded by one-bodies
on the other side of the world. Wolves are supposed to live with
wolves, and packs are supposed to stick together. Also they thought
I was impulsive and reckless and I’d get myself killed.

Once they realized that “it’s dangerous” and
“you’ll be far, far away from your tiny, cozy, familiar world” were
exactly what appealed to me about it, they started telling me I’d
never make it through boot camp and even trying would be bad for
me. They said washing out would make me feel humiliated and crushed
and like I was a failure, and instead I should go for something I
knew I could succeed at. We fought and fought over it for literally
years.

Later they admitted that they were sure I
would
succeed, and that was why they didn’t want me to try.
But at the time, I didn’t pick up on that and I just thought they
had no confidence in me.

It’s funny how the pack sense works. I always
knew what they were feeling. They loved me and they were scared to
death for me and they wanted me to stay with the pack. But the pack
sense doesn’t give you the subtleties— it tells you the what, but
not the why.

I finally gave up on convincing them, and I
just went and enlisted. So there I was, twenty years old and in
boot camp for the first time.

Yes. There was more than one time.

You’re probably thinking, “But DJ, your power
is super strength, you should’ve breezed through boot camp.”

Or maybe you’re thinking, “DJ and his big
fucking mouth, I’m not at all surprised he had problems at boot
camp, he must have talked back to the drill instructor.”

It wasn’t either of those, actually.
Remember, I wanted to be there. I was planning to do exactly as I
was told and keep my mouth shut except to say, “Yes, sir!”

Mostly, I did. I had some trouble keeping
still and not fidgeting and not letting my eyes wander. I
can
do that. It’s just that it takes all my concentration,
so there isn’t any left for other stuff. Like hearing that I just
got an order. So I had some problems with that.

But on the flip side, even when I’m holding
back and only using my natural strength, I’m pretty strong. I had
no trouble with the physical side of things. Some guys were bigger
than me but some were smaller, so I didn’t stick out that way.
There were a couple other Pinoy— you know, Filipino— guys there, so
I wasn’t the only one. At first I thought I’d fit right in.

I was maybe a little too eager. Any time the
drill instructor, Sergeant Hahn, asked for a volunteer, I
volunteered. I got stuck with a shit-ton of shit jobs, and one day
he said, “Torres, you remind me of a terrier I used to have, a
little Scottie dog. All I had to do was blink in his direction, and
he’d rocket to the door and sit there wagging his tail, waiting to
go for a walk. I think I’ll call you Scottie.”

And for the rest of boot camp— my first go at
boot camp— everyone called me Scottie. I pretended it annoyed me,
but actually it made me feel like I belonged.

The problem with boot camp is that it isn’t
just physical. The class work was all right. I fell asleep in class
a couple times, but I wasn’t the only one. The problem was the
written tests.

I did know that was coming, so I’d studied in
advance with read-aloud software. But it didn’t matter if I knew
the answers when I couldn’t read the questions.

The Marines will let you in if you’re
dyslexic, but they won’t give you any special accommodations. The
idea is that you won’t have any on the job, so if you can hack it
without them, you’re fine, and if you can’t, they don’t want
you.

I got through the first tests by reading a
few words in each question and taking my best guess about what it
was. Sometimes I squeaked through. I’m pretty good at guessing, and
some questions had diagrams— like, a drawing of an M-16 with arrows
pointing to all the parts. That was easy. I’d misspell the names,
but at least the instructors could tell that I knew what they were.
Sometimes I failed, and they made me repeat the test. But since it
was the same test, I remembered the parts I’d read before, so I
could squeak through the second time.

By the time I was near the end of boot camp,
I’d gotten over-confident. Combat is what Marines are for— they
say, “Every Marine is a rifleman.” They don’t say, “Every Marine is
a reader.” I figured they could see how good I was at everything
combat-related, and they’d want me for that and let the written
work slide.

Then I hit the final written exam. Right
before we took it, Sergeant Hahn told me I wasn’t getting a second
chance to repeat that one. I had one shot, pass or fail.

“Just like you might only get one shot at an
enemy,” he said.

I panicked, and reading gets even harder for
me when I tense up. I floundered my way through that fucking exam,
but at the end I knew I’d failed it. No second chances. I felt like
I’d missed my one shot and the enemy had nailed me in the fucking
heart.

Sure enough, I got called into Sergeant
Hahn’s office. He handed me a pen and a piece of paper with a
sentence written across the top and said, “Last chance, Torres. You
have three minutes to write down the answer to this question.”

That was when I knew I was done— he wasn’t
even calling me Scottie. I wasn’t one of them any more. In three
minutes, I was going to be a civilian again. My pack had been
absolutely right. I’d failed, and it was going to crush me.

He took out a stopwatch, clicked it, and
said, “Go.”

My brain just froze. I stared and stared at
the words, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to read any of them.
Finally, I managed to go letter-by-letter and figure out that one
of them said
rifleman.

Just then, Sergeant Hahn said, “Either you
don’t know the answer or you’re very confident, Torres. You’ve got
one minute left.”

There was no way I could read the rest of the
sentence in one minute, let alone write the answer. But I figured
it had to be asking me to write out the Rifleman’s Creed, which is
this thing we have to memorize about the importance of taking care
of our weapons. So I started scribbling it as fast as I could.
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend.

That was as far as I’d gotten when the
stopwatch clicked. I handed over the paper. Sergeant Hahn eyeballed
it like I’d written,
Fuck you and the horse you rode in
on.

“Are you having a joke with me, Torres?” he
asked.

I said, “No, sir.”

He looked back down at the paper and said,
“Then can you tell me why
every single word
is misspelled?
Why
is
is misspelled, which I didn’t even realize was
possible until this moment? And why rifle is misspelled
two
different ways?
”

I said, “I’m dyslexic, sir. I disclosed it
upon enlistment, sir.”

He gave me that drill instructor stare, and
said, “I’m aware of that, Torres. You are not the first person with
dyslexia to go through boot camp. But among that select crowd, you
are something truly unique. Now take your time, read the question,
and repeat it back to me when you’re done.”

I have no idea how long it took me to read
it, because by then ninety percent of my brain was taken up with
“I’ve completely fucked this up, it’s all over, what do I do now,
why was I born this way, it’s not fair,” and so forth. But finally
I did. And then I felt like the world’s biggest tool.

I repeated the question back to Sergeant
Hahn. “Sir, it says, ‘Is every Marine a rifleman, yes or no?’”

That fucking sadist said, “Well?”

I said, “Uh, yes, sir. Yes, every Marine is a
rifleman. Sir.”

“How much do you want to be a Marine?” he
asked.

I said, “It’s the
only
thing I want,
sir.”

Sergeant Hahn leaned back in his chair, put
his hands behind his head, and said, “There’s a theory that if you
give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of
typewriters and an infinite amount of time, eventually the monkeys
will write
Hamlet.
If you repeated boot camp an infinite
number of times, do you think you could eventually pass the written
exam?’

At that point I felt like it was more likely
that I’d write
Hamlet,
but I said, “Yes, sir. I did pass the
ASVAB, sir.”

That’s the test you have to take to even get
into boot camp. I got the minimum qualifying score, but I did
pass.

“How did you manage that?” he asked.

I thought,
A miracle, sir.

I said, “I was less nervous, sir.”

Next thing I knew, he’d sprung out of the
chair and was yelling in my face. “If you’re
too nervous
to
read
in my office,
how nervous will you be in combat?!”

“I think I’ll be
less
nervous, sir,” I
said.

As soon as I said it, I was sure he’d think I
was being sarcastic. I wasn’t, though. And I hadn’t even flinched
when he’d jumped at me.

He said, “I think you might be, too.”

I took a second look at him. I still thought
he was a sadistic bastard. But I was beginning to get the
impression that he hadn’t gone to all that trouble just for the
pleasure of fucking with me.