Meridien K - Chapter 21: The Routine (Again)

It's like we were wearing uniforms. The uniforms of our generation, at least. I had been half-in, half-out of school the prior year, working at an office, buried in a cubicle, switching between a school blazer and a white dress shirt and khakis and tie, three different-colored pens in my breast pocket, blue black red. But that was over. It was a new place now. Everyone around looked like that, like me, like all the cogs and clockwork at the bottom rungs of any major corporate machine, all the blank faces and sharp eyes of serfs buried under mounds of endless data, capable of far greater things. And we just sort of stood there. Standing next to our bunks with our shoulderbags, most still wondering why the hell we were there, second-guessing, sure.

             

Our Instructor, probably eighteen or nineteen, only a few years older than all of us, started near the door.

             

"Codename?" he asked.

             

It threw the first guy off.

             

"Uh…"

             

"'Uh' is not acceptable," said the Instructor with a smirk.

             

"Pointman," said Pointman, and he was Pointman now and forever.

             

"You. Codename?"

             

"Horse."

             

No other questions. Thinking of the prior meetings. When I talked with the recruiter there was no need for my address, my Social, a phone number, anything. Just a time when the bus would pick me up and take me to The Base With No Name located three hours west.

             

The Instructor was one bunk to my left and I was tapped for ideas.

             

"Mars," said Mars.

             

A few steps and, "Codename?"

             

"Meridienkraid."

             

No question and, "Too long. You're Meridien K," said the Instructor, and he moved on.

             

That quick, and I was branded for life.

             

The Instructor made his rounds, collected the rest of our names. He stood at the head of the barracks and told us to put on our PT gear.

             

"It's in your footlocker by your bed," he said after our initial confusion.

             

I thought it odd he didn't say "bunk," "rack," or "cot." And he didn't do anything stupidly cruel like give us only fifteen seconds to change or that old Marine Corps thing of Dressing By The Numbers. I didn't exactly take extra time, but I was sizing everyone up as I unbuttoned my dress shirt, took off my pants and put on the black t-shirt and black shorts, neither of which bore any symbols or insignia, no marker of the Forces whatsoever. I look inside the tongue of the boots and there was stamped a "13," my size, laced up and they fit with all the discomfort of new shoes. Most of the guys in the room were all facing the walls as they changed, whole rows of the backs of guys' grey boxer shorts as they bent over and put on their shorts, none of them visibly comfortable, probably the first time in a long while they've had to change in semi-public, probably dredging up bad memories of gym class.

             

It was pretty easy, then and there, to see that the Unit had some cases in it, guys with an obvious Condition before it became common knowledge that we were chosen for our Conditions. But I'm not one to point fingers. In the civilian world I had my nightly cocktail of pills - The Family Curse my brother and I called it on one of the very few occasions we talked about it - since I refused to get my genome mapped andor corrected or get a one-pill g-med to take care of everything. I didn't want to know if I was predispositioned for blindness or Alzheimer's and that wasn't too uncommon, that ignorance-bliss, at least back then. Men in my family had a tendency of dying early of unnatural causes - the military, car accidents, One's Own Hand, limbs of our family tree dripping young blood - so I had no idea what was in store for the long haul. All this considering I had just signed on to an organization well known for turning fine young men into corpses, albeit with ample compensation for anyone who made it through unfucked. Hell, even the partly-fucked guys who got one or two limbs blown off were still treated pretty good.

             

I had the codenames memorized as soon as they were said, and I was wondering about some of their picks. One guy called himself "Candy," and he didn't look anything special, and I figured maybe it was like how a few Roman gladiators called themselves weak-sauce names to lull their opponent into a sense of false security, like they were going up for an easy kill. But our enemy, as far as I knew, weren't going to hear our codenames, and I already sort of knew it was part of the plan of desensitizing ourselves to each other, so ifwhen Candy got popped (and he did), no one would give that much of a care because he was just Candy, not a first and last name and DOB and hometown and mom and dad and maybe a sweetheart tucked into all that past.

             

So we changed into our PT gear as the Instructor went over paperwork at the head of the barracks, waiting us out. It took a few minutes. All of us changing from that omnipresent work uniform of Business Casual into the training uniform of the Forces. The Instructor then said we were going for a short one-mile run and we followed him out. Not in a single-file line, not in any order. We went out through the fresh paint of the hall, blue tape still on doorframes and ceiling edges and then out onto the nearby compound, where most of the newly-laid cement was roped off, lawns still sectioned into clumps of sod.

             

All of us bunched up in the middle of the pack during the jog. No one wanted to stand out from the rest, either as a better runner or a laggard. It was only a mile, but it was hot and sticky, and we were wearing black under a rising sun, and we were running in stiff new boots across uneven grass and a root-strewn wooded path. Me? I get on a treadmill and pound out a few miles, but anything on physical terrain ups the difficult by a factor of ten. I felt that blood-burn in the back of my throat only about a quarter-mile in. And then that sickly feeling of your intestines bouncing up and down on each spring of a step and the crash of a footfall. Throw in a sideache or two and that random sensation of a sharp pinch on your heart and I pointlessly hoped we wouldn't do much running. No luck with that: 716 built more like hyperlean marathoners than Reg packmules with all their vein-covered biceps.

             

A few of the guys threw up on the hike, and that might've been our first teambuilding exercise, I guess, whoever nearest going over to make sure they were all right, helping them back into the pack as the Instructor turned and jogged backward and didn't stop but it wasn't in an asshole way. None of us really said anything during the jog. We didn't call cadence or follow the call-and-response of a halfway-salty running song. We had been transformed from post-secondary loners and office biscuits and lab assistants into Forces recruits in the course of one morning, and it was still too surreal to collect any coherent thoughts. Not like it was a sinking I've Made A Terrible Mistake feeling or anything, since our contract unequivocally stated that we could quit at any time. Any time: In the middle of a run, the middle of Mess, the middle of a drill, in the middle of a goddamn firefight; anytime, our recruiters crossed their hearts, and my older brother swore on gravity it was the truth. A bit of a faint promise from him, but while I'd never say it to his face, I trusted him.

             

It's not like I was go-hung and trigger-happy the whole time; that thought of quitting lingered. It lingered only because it was a possibility. Even though I was only a dropship ride away from going back to Chicago or Easthaven, I didn't want to quit. I never wanted to quit. So I never did.

(Chapter 22 coming Wednesday, January 4, 2012.)