The Apocalypse Club (15 page)

And then suddenly her hand was gone and she was no longer standing behind me. “Now, Adrianna!” she said in a much louder voice than she had been using to that point.

I was dimly aware of someone popping up from the stall in front of me. There was a flash, followed by laughter, followed by another flash.

I blinked. Adrianna was leaning over the stall pointing her cell phone at my crotch and snapping off one picture after another. I stumbled back, tripped over the edge of the shower, and landed painfully on the cement floor.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Very impressive, Simms!” Adrianna said, waving the camera. “Welcome to the club!”

I got up and scrambled to grab my towel. “Club? What club? What in the hell are you talking about?”

“We’re collecting pictures of every stiff cock in the outfit,” Ida said, pulling on her robe. “We’re making sort of an album out of it.”

“They have to be stiff, though,” Adrianna said, paging through the photos. “No limp ones in this outfit.”

“What?” I sputtered. “Why?”

“Wee Man and The Perv were the easiest ones to get,” Ida said. “Hell, Wee Man gets a hard on at the site of his own hand.”

“We thought you’d be the hardest,” Adrianna said, giggling. “So to speak. But Ida had a plan.”

I struggled to my feet, wiping unrinsed soap off. “Why?”

“So that you men would have some idea what it’s like for the rest of us,” Adrianna said. “Consider yourself advised.”

I learned later that Ida was not in the JD on a pre-med track – that was just a story she had spread. Whether it was to cover up the real reason or provide cover for her plan to amass a “Wall of Dicks” I have no idea. I found out that the real reason she was in the JD was because she had found out that her high school boyfriend had secretly taped the two of them having sex and posted it to a porn site. When she found out, she had tied him to a chair and crushed one of his testicles with a hammer, footage of which was posted to YouTube. The 38-second clip garnered more than four million hits in less than 12 hours before it was ordered taken down. Of course, it was still widely available in lots of other places, but I felt no desire to watch it. Like Max and I, she took the JD tour in lieu of a prison sentence.

Adrianna’s motives were less complicated. She was just mean. My bunkmate, a wiry little Mexican kid named PT Rodriguez, also had a theory.

“She ugly, man,” he said when I told him the next day in the lunch line. “Ain’t like she’s seein’ a whole parade of hard ons marchin’ to her door. Y’know what I mean.”

“They got you too?”

“Shit, yeah,” he said. “I was returnin’ those transmitter units to the Comm shed when she asked if I wanted a hummer behind the storage yard. Who’s gonna say no to that? Ain’t like the offers are exactly flyin’ in fer me, either, if you know what I mean.”

“So you went along with it and then…”

“Then they pulled that candid camera shit. Squid face there popped out from behind a bush and started snapping shots of my rod, man. What’s up with that? Shit’s fucked up. I mean,
seriously
.”

“When did this happen?”

“I dunno. Like, last Friday?”

“Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

“I dunno, man. I didn’t know they were doin’ it to
everybody
. Plus she said I say anythin’ to anybody, she’ll post it on the fuckin’ bulletin board for the world to see. I said go ahead. What the hell do I care? I got nothin’ to be ashamed of, you catch my drift?”

“Generally speaking.”

“Right. But then she says she’ll email it to my mom. And that shit just would not fly, man. My mother calls me in here like once a week, dude. I could not envision a version of events that I could present that would explain it in a way that would not end with my spending the rest of my days nutless in a convent, man. Baking bread for a bunch of nasty old nuns or some shit like that.”

“She was probably bluffing.”

PT shook his head and poured a less than healthy amount of syrup on his bacon. “My ma used to run border security for the cartels, man. She wanted to put me in something as far from all that as possible. She gets even a hint of a rumour of the possibility of my gettin’ kicked out of here? She won’t take it well.”

Other male members of A Company told similar stories. The only exception was Philo Anderson, who claimed that he had sex with both Ida and Adrianna when they snuck up on him while he was loading the dishwashers at the end of KP (kitchen patrol). We all felt bad for Philo because he was an albino and had to slather on an entire tube of sunscreen to keep himself from burning tomato red during drills. His complexion also made camouflage exercises difficult. And his father had been killed the previous year when some heavy duty storm drain piping had broken loose from the tie-downs on the back of a transport truck and rolled over him on a highway construction site. So when Philo related his far more erotically charged version of events, the rest of us all silently agreed to let it pass.

There are five rules that they hammer into your skull in the JD. A recruit who can’t recite all five by the end of the second day is mostly likely to find him- or herself running circuits all night or scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush. The incident with Ida and Adrianna ensured that I would never forget the first two:

RULE
#1

In war, trust no one.

RULE
#2

We are always at war.

A
s badly as I felt I was doing in the JD, I still managed to pass Basic with an “Acceptable” rating and was assigned to the Recon Communications division. I couldn’t read a map, use a compass, or make out a damn thing anyone was saying on the radio, so I guess the assignment made perfect sense.

The other options were “Reorientation,” which meant you had to take Basic again, and “Selection,” which meant you were considered an above-average recruit and assigned to the elite Special Teams Unit (STU). STU received advanced weapons, munitions and even counter-terrorism tactical training with real GDI commandos. While the rest of us were playing a glorified game of tag in a parking lot, STUs were learning to blow off steel doors, storming actual 747s, fast-roping out of gunships and just generally doing things considered a hell of a lot cooler than the lame-ass shit the rest of us got to do. Only one or two cadets at most per Company received a “Selection” rating. In A Company, that honour went to Ida.

Delta had the highest number of STUs with four, and one of the four was Max. STU selection was announced during the graduation parade at the end of the second week. Max and 15 other cadets received special red berets. If they passed, they would be given the custom STU patch, which displayed an assault rifle, combat knife and surface-to-air missile all shooting towards a frightened-looking man wearing a keffiyeh.

After the STUs had been announced and the Reorientations ignominiously put on a bus home, we were dismissed and directed to the cavernous assembly hall. Several tables had been set up with pop and snacks. Behind them was a raised platform where a DJ was playing a horrible Aerosmith song to an improvised and empty dance floor.

I caught up with Max and congratulated him on making STU. It was the first chance we’d had to talk in two weeks and I could tell his demeanour had changed. He was standing up straighter. His uniform was actually pressed. He was holding the prized red beret like it was a suitcase containing nuclear weapon launch codes. He seemed to really
like
this stuff.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “Where’d they put you?”

I told him. “Somebody must’ve fucked up. I can’t do any of that stuff.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

“At least I won’t have to deal with Poole any more. Oh, watch out for Ida, by the way. She’ll try and get you alone and take a picture of your dick.”

Max looked puzzled. “Say that again?”

I gave him a selective recap of my encounter with Ida and Adrianna. Adrianna had been Reoriented and was on a bus back to Kapuskasing.

The next six weeks went by pretty quickly. The GPS communication system I got to use was a lot better than the one we’d been given in Basic. I actually got pretty good at finding my way between map coordinates without leading the entire unit straight through a minefield (okay, I did that once, but in my defence, it hadn’t been marked). I never saw Max once in all that time. The rumour was that the STUs did most of their training offsite. One guy said he’d heard they spent a week on an aircraft carrier doing helo drops. Another said they had been relocated to a black site to learn resistance to advanced interrogation techniques. Still another said he heard that the final test involved them being blindfolded and dropped behind the border in North Korea – the first five cadets to find their way back across the DMZ would be allowed to graduate.

Although I didn’t really believe any of the rumours were true, it was a testament to the reputation and secrecy of the STUs that no one was willing to dismiss them out of hand.

The last week was War Games. Every day for four days, each unit would be assigned an objective, provided with limited (and often completely wrong or misleading) intel, and then graded based on how close it came to meeting that objective. Day 1 we were tasked with locating an arms cache and tagging it for an air assault. It wasn’t where they told us it would be and we didn’t know that another unit had been assigned to defend the site and take us out. Everyone was issued a standard assault rifle filled with 30 paint pellets and two backup pouches of 60 rounds each. I figured out immediately that the coordinates they had given us were either phony or a decoy because the location was right in the middle of a river, which was not the best place to try to hide a large stack of explosives. After a few wrong guesses, we did manage to locate the target, although we lost five cadets in the process. I was able to punch in the coordinates for the air strike before I myself was capped, so technically that one counted as a success.

The assignments got progressively harder from there. Our final assignment was protecting a high-value asset from another unit that was going to try to knock him off. We were located in a three-storey concrete structure that sat in the middle of a phony neighbourhood designed to stand in for anywhere from Mogadishu to Baltimore’s east side. We set up cadets at every access point with eyes on every corner. We figured the attack would probably come from the back, where there were multiple ways in and out and plenty of other buildings to provide cover.

They didn’t tell us that the assaulting unit would be STUs.

Or that they would be coming at night.

In stealth helicopters.

With
munitions
.

We waited all day and nothing happened. They hadn’t actually given us a timeframe. All of the previous exercises had been over and done with by lunch time, so we weren’t sure what to do. Did we hold the post? Did we leave? What? We didn’t plan provisions for more than a day and were already starting to run low on rations and drinkable water. I called in for instructions and got only static in reply. After a quick discussion, we decided to hold post and see what happened. Maybe they were just trying to wait us out and as soon as we set foot on the street, we’d be shot to bits. It was the last day. Something special had to be in the works.

RULE
#3

Always be ready for anything.

The hours passed. The sun got lower and lower on the horizon and then dropped out of sight. I tried a few more times on the radio and got nothing. We turned on some lights in the hallways, stairwells and around the perimeter of the building. We didn’t want anyone sneaking up on us.

Despite its name, a stealth copter makes about as much noise as a regular one – it just has a smaller radar signature. We heard it coming for at least five minutes before it landed on the roof with a thump. What it meant, however, we had no idea.

“What the fuck is going on?” said Cadet Will Piloski, looking upward in the direction of the roof. He was our designated unit commander for this scenario, but he sure as hell wasn’t comfortable with it. He’d finished his water and food ration an hour ago. His eyes were bugging out of his head and stress was leaking out of his pores in beads.

“Are they picking us up or something?” This from cadet Dwight Higgs. He was our northeast corner spotter and had been the first to see the chopper. He was an accurate shooter, but had the IQ of a mechanical pencil. “Is it over?”

“I think the assaulters are here,” I said, trying to keep my voice level.

Piloski did not like this theory. “Assaulters? Are you fuckin’ nuts? They don’t have fuckin’ helicopters, man! This has gotta be somethin’ else!”

At which point, we lost the lights.

All of them went off at once. Somebody had cut the power for the entire building. I could hear shouts on the stairwell and the first few pops of an air gun being fired. We hadn’t stationed anybody on the roof because there was, we thought, no way that any possible attack could come from that direction.

We had committed one of the cardinal sins.

We had
assumed
.

“We need to get the fuck out of here now!” I hissed. “We need to evac the asset through the back door!” I desperately hoped that whoever was coming at us wasn’t doing it from the ground at the same time. If they were, we were screwed. I knew we were probably screwed anyway – anyone who could attack us with a helo was probably smart enough to secure the ground at the same time – but it was our only option at this point.

I began running toward the room where the asset was stashed. Piloski tried to stop me.

“No way, man! Stay here! We’ll just –”

He was interrupted by a thumping noise. In the dark, I could just make out an object that appeared to be roughly the size of a grapefruit come bouncing through the door. It bounced twice and then exploded with a flash between Piloski and Higgs, covering the two of them in day-glo yellow paint. The two of them landed on their backs looking stunned. We had never seen paint grenades before. Up until that second, we had no idea they existed.