Recoil (10 page)

“It’s not really fresh any more. But I miss knowing him at this
age. Like I wonder what he would think of my work here? I wonder if he’d rather
I stayed at home with Mom.”

We were at the entrance to the west wing, now, where the black
unit’s living quarters were.
Leya
came out, followed
by Bruce, and deposited their trays on the stainless steel trolley parked
outside the door.

“Better hurry, Blue, we’re due in Lecture Room Four in twenty
minutes,” said
Leya
as she headed back in the
direction we’d just come from.

“Yeah,
Sarge
won’t like it if you’re
late,” added Bruce, with an unfriendly look at Quinn.

“I’d better go,” I said to Quinn.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

Then he leaned forward and pressed his respirator against mine.
If we hadn’t been wearing the masks, it would have been a kiss.

I blinked in surprise and he was gone, walking to his wing. I
touched my gloved hand to the mask.

“
Jinxy
!”

I looked up just in time to see and catch what Quinn had tossed
to me. A chocolate muffin.

Soft and sweet as a hug.

Chapter 12

Hot and Bothered

Three weeks into boot camp, the streaks in my hair had faded to a
paler sky blue. I didn’t intend to color them again, even though they seemed to
fascinate Quinn, who would occasionally twist one of the blue strands around
his fingers and play with it. I loved it when he did that, but in one of our
sessions on camouflage and concealment,
Sarge
had
stressed the need to blend in.

“Anything that makes you stand out, anything that makes you
memorable, increases the risk of your being made by the enemy and becoming a
bullet magnet. Like your tattoo,
Leya
, or your hair,
Blue.”

“Rats can see blue streaks in my hair and know that makes me a
sniper?” I said.

“You’ll be amazed what those vermin can do,” said
Sarge
with that flash of a smile.

I had learned enough about our unit commander not to mistake that
grimace for an expression of joy.
Sarge
was the
hardest, toughest, meanest SOB I’d ever met. Scratch that — I hadn’t met enough
people in my life for it to be a meaningful comparison. He was the strictest,
most merciless, stony-hearted, take-no-prisoners SOB I could ever imagine. From
day one, when he put us through our first “smoke session”, that manic grin had
flashed on and off every time he pulled down his mask to yell at me.

“Blue, you’ve got another thirty laps of the track. Pick up the
pace, sweetheart — my grandmother can run
faster’n
you.” Grin.

“Princess, they’re called push-ups, not fall-downs. Tell you
what” — grin — “add another twenty to the total. You need the practice.”

“45, 46, 47 … Work those abdominals, Goldilocks!” Grin.

Failure is not an option, I will not quit
, I told
myself. I wasn’t grinning.

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 rattle 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?”