The Apocalypse Club (14 page)

“World isn’t what you think it is, sonny boy. About time you had to live without complimentary WiFi and gourmet food.”

I just saw seven tornadoes drop out of the sky
on command
, Mr. Man-of-the-world. The world isn’t what
you
think it is, either. And what the hell do you mean
gourmet food
? Surely you are not talking about my mother’s “trademark” dumplings, right? The same ones that got everyone admitted to the ER last thanksgiving with food poisoning?

I didn’t say any of this, of course. I had sinned. And because I had sinned, it was my duty to stay silent and listen to the invidiousness of the faithful. That and I was terrified of the very real possibility that, if I did say something, the next funnel cloud to descend from the sky might be coming for me.

As I mentioned, this marked the end of BO-224. Max and I were forbidden to have any more contact with one another after we were released. We were not supposed to consort with any known criminal element and, since we were both technically criminal elements, we had to stay apart as part of our bail conditions. I didn’t see him again until the bus dropped us off in the large parade ground of the military base known only as The Circle, where we were supposed to report for JD basic training. We only had time to nod and wave before a giant Master Sergeant came to give us our platoon assignments. I was assigned to Alpha Company. Max went to Delta.

Alpha, simply known as A Company, was headquartered in a rusty tin can of a building on the perimeter of the enormous central parade ground – a stretch of dull black asphalt so large that people could die of thirst trying to cross it. Under the scorching noonday sun, temperatures out there peaked at 110 degrees. I called it “The Devil’s Hammer.” Every morning at 5:45, we were blasted out of our squeaky metal bunk beds, would scramble into our itchy wool socks, blister-inducing boots and baggy green fatigues to be yelled at by sadists who would march us from one end of the parade ground to the other and back in the broiling heat.

Every time I mistook my right for my left and went one way while 31 other cadets went the other, I silently cursed my lousy luck and tried not to think about my parents, who were on a month-long trip through the south of France and northern Italy.

Our platoon commander was a skinny, 21-year-old sergeant with an enormous nose named Poole. He had just completed officer candidate training with the JD’s special training division, and was finishing his final instructional rotation before rotating to an assignment with a higher probability for getting into some of what he called “heavy-ass shit” and “capping dumb-fuck EOS” (pronounced
Eee-Ohs
, it was GDI shorthand for “Enemies Of the State”).

As far as he was concerned, we were nothing but a bunch of the laziest cock-grabbing, tit-sucking, shrivel-dicked, shit-for-brains, mall-ratting, cell phone-addicted, pansy-assed, good-as-dead, dumb-ass excuses for freedom-sucking deadweight he had ever seen. Having seen plenty of movies about the military, I was fully aware of the finer psychological points of its training philosophy: strip the individual down through humiliation and degradation and assign them a new group sense of self-esteem by purging judgment and replacing it with obedience.

There’s a difference, however, between understanding that on a theoretical level and having your head held underwater until you almost pass out by a man with chronic acne who has only been legally allowed to drive for five years and has a life’s ambition to kill people. That was on the second day. We were on the obstacle course and I foolishly admitted that I couldn’t swim very well. He asked me if I knew what would happen if I fell into deep water. I (once again) foolishly admitted that I would probably drown. He asked me why I was so afraid of drowning.

“I dunno,” I said. “Because I might die?”

That, it turns out, was the wrong answer.

Sergeant Poole was going to teach us to not be afraid of death. He was going to teach us to be bringers of death. To be masters of death. To be merchants of death. He was going to teach us to make the enemy wish for death. Fear of death was not permitted in the JD.

I’m not sure how long he held my head under the muddy black water. In reality, it was probably only for 10 or 15 seconds, but it felt like a lot longer. As soon as he let me go, I barfed up about a gallon of ditch liquor along with most of that morning’s brittle bacon and charred toast.

As both my consciousness and breakfast returned, I worried that, hard as I might try, I might not actually be able to finish basic training. That meant I would be booted out of the JD, which in turn would mean that I would be in violation of my bail conditions. Which probably meant that I would go to jail and my family would be sued into insolvency. After the first two days, I had decided I could live with that. Only one thing kept me going.

The JD was co-ed.

Of the 32 recruits in A Company, 21 were female. More girls tended to enrol in the JD than boys because it offered a wide selection of university credits, degree programs and scholarship options. And, unless you were in the JD as part of a mandatory court order (like me), it paid you to take them. Since university admissions were now running at about 75% women to only 25% men, it made sense that one of the most financially manageable paths to that education would reflect those numbers. Max’s platoon commander in Delta was a petite brunette named Sgt. Marianne Hebert and, by all accounts, she made Sgt. Poole seem like Mr. Rogers (the dropout rate was higher in D Company than any other unit).

Because the JD pursued a policy of full combat integration, there was no separation of the sexes whatsoever. Our quarters, mess hall, bathrooms, showers – all were shared. As you can imagine, taking a group of highly stressed 17- and 18-year-old boys and packing them in to a room with 21 girls where nudity is a regular factor and you are generating enough of a charged atmosphere to create ball lightning in the Arctic.

Ida Melendez was the first girl that I saw naked in the flesh. I didn’t mean for it to happen. All the girls tended to shower in a big group right after evening manoeuvres. Most of the boys waited until they were done and showered after. No one discussed this plan. We all just sort of started doing it in unspoken agreement. I did it mostly because I hate making people uncomfortable, including myself, and I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to walk into a room full of naked girls without generating a boner of the approximate size and construction time of the Chrysler building. There were exceptions to this agreement, of course. Neehan Gupta and his toad of a sidekick, Pervez Harif, always made a point of showering at the same time as the girls, even if the showers were full and there wasn’t enough room. They kept it up even though the girls did nothing but mock them the whole time. One of the best sources of entertainment for the rest of us was listening to these conversations from the bunkroom.

“Hey, Neehan, if you wanted to show us your dick, you should have brought a magnifying glass.”

“More like the Hubble.”

“Yeah, Neehan. Have you got an erection or is that just a stray pubic hair?”

Laughter, followed by Neehan’s wounded but still desperately-trying-to-be-suggestive voice. “Laugh if you will, girls, but I bet each of you is secretly dying to get your hands on my manly meat.”

More laughter. “We would if we could find it.”

“We’ll have to stop calling him what he obviously doesn’t have.”

“That’s why he brings Pervez with him. Pervez has a schlong for the ages.”

“Yeah – ages three to six months.”

Laughter and catcalling. Some evidently thought the last joke stepped over the line. Neehan, as you can probably tell, was not easily deterred. “Come on, ladies! Who wants to step up and feel the throb of my pulsing manhood?”

“To do what? Some needlepoint?”

“Yeah, be careful with that thing, Neehan. You might accidentally trip and fix a torn sofa cushion.”

Neehan went back in for that abuse night after night, but none of the rest of us felt compelled to step up for similar treatment. The girls nicknamed the two of them “Wee Man” and “The Perv.”

I had gotten back to the barracks late one night because I had once again gone left instead of right during parade drill and had been forced to run circuits of the square until I vomited or collapsed (not wanting to pick sides, I did both). Not feeling in the least bit hungry, I grabbed my towel and headed for the showers. It was my intent to clean myself off and drop immediately into bed, where I would do my best to pretend that the whole miserable day had never happened.

I had just hung up my towel and stepped into the shower when I heard a voice from behind me.

“Hi Mark.”

I turned around and there was Ida, towelling herself off in the stall behind me. I had been so tired that I hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t the only one in the place. She was using one of the standard issue white towels (like a hotel towel, only smaller and rough as recycled carpet) to dry her back. Her skin was a light caramel colour and speckled with water droplets. She must have just finished. Her breasts were not enormous, but there was no arguing their existence, capped by nipples the size and colour of Kalamata olives. Some of the girls buzzed their hair short and others pinned it back. Ida was one of the latter. Her dark chestnut curls clung to her cheeks and neck as she raised the towel to rub them dry. This was a shade or two lighter than the dark triangle between her legs, which I glanced at and then immediately tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen.

“Ida!” I said in a strangled voice. “Hi!”

Ida’s family was from either Columbia or Venezuela, I couldn’t remember which. She was in the JD on track for a medical scholarship. I think I remember somebody saying that she wanted to specialize in oncology because her brother had died of bone cancer or something like that. She finished towelling her hair and leaned on the side of my stall. She made no effort to cover herself up. I pretended to find the shampoo fascinating.

“So Poole’s got you running circuits again, eh?”

I poured a ridiculous amount of shampoo into my hand and stuck my head under the nozzle. I was desperately trying to think about something that would forestall my penis on its journey skyward. Watching my dad bury the dog in the backyard. That was sad. And that lady I saw downtown once, who’d lost her baby in a fire and carried around a doll for months. That was super sad.

“Yeah.”

“That guy’s an asshole,” she said.

“Yeah. I’ve heard the unit commander for Delta is worse.” Sad was most certainly not working. I needed a nuclear option. I tried to imagine my parents having sex. That slowed things down, at least temporarily.

“Oh, really?” she said. My eyes were closed, so I couldn’t see what she was doing. “I heard Poole flunked out of the JD on his first two tries. They only made him a unit commander because their first choice came down with pancreatitis.”

I continued to scrub my hair like I had just stepped out of a coal mine. The base barber had given us no choice about how we wanted it done and had buzzed all males to stubble on arrival. I stuck my head under the stream and felt the lukewarm water run down my back. One of the disadvantages of showering after everybody else was the lack of hot water. I opened my eyes and saw that Ida was still leaning against the side of the stall. She had draped the towel around her neck so that both breasts were now covered. The rest of her, however, was still very much in play.

“I prefer to shower later,” she said. “That way, I don’t have to put up with Wee Man and The Perv coming in to ogle me and wave their dicks around.”

“Sorry about those two,” I said.

“Don’t apologize for them,” she said. “They’re just über-horny morons. Adrianna told Wee Man that she would blow him if he gave The Perv a hand job.”

I laughed. “Did he do it?”

She snickered. “He was reeeally thinking about it, but The Perv got mad and ran off before he could do anything.”

“If he had done it, would she have gone through with it?”

Ida shuddered. “Shit, no! Wee Man masturbates with the same piece of rolled-up foam rubber every night. It looks like one of those artificial vaginas they use to collect bull semen. It’s disgusting. I wouldn’t touch his penis with the Mars Rover, let alone put it anywhere near my mouth.”

This line of inquiry was in no way helping my cause. I pumped out a handful of the grainy liquid soap and started trying to clean the rest of me.

“Ugh,” she said. “That soap is the worst. I think they bought it surplus from a Siberian work camp. Here, use some of mine.”

She went back to her stall and returned with a small green bag from which she pulled a white bottle. Despite my aching back and shoulders, I did my best to turn only my top half around to take it from her hand. “Oh, thanks!”

“No problem,” she said. “Just bring it back when you’re done. You know where my bunk is, right?”

I fumbled with the lid of the soap and dropped it on the floor, kneeling quickly to pick it up. “Oops! Sorry about that. Uh, yeah. I think so.”

“I’m on the pre-med track,” she said. “I’ve already been able to take a lot of the prep classes through the JD. You get kind of desensitized to human bodies after a while.”

I was soaping myself as quickly as I possibly could. The faster I could get out of here, I figured, the less embarrassing it would potentially be. “Yes, I, uh, imagine you would.”

Her voice dropped a notch. “Of course, that doesn’t mean that I still don’t find them…interesting.”

I felt her step up behind me and take the soap bottle out of my hand. She poured some out into her hand and started to rub my back. Her hands worked their way around and started to work from my chest down. I could feel her breasts pressing into my back just below the shoulder blades. Before I could figure out what to say, her right hand had slithered down and wrapped itself around the one digit over which I had no control whatsoever.

“Well, this is interesting,” she said in my ear. “What do you have to say about this, cadet?”

I tried to formulate a response. Nothing came immediately to mind.