by Stacey Mac
“God, get a room,” Delilah says, taking my upper arm. “Come on, time to go.”
I follow her and the swarm of initiates out into the corridors and up the stairwell. “How’s the ear?” I ask her.
“Can’t hear, talk into the other one.”
“I kissed him,” I tell her abruptly.
“And by ‘him’, I assume you don’t mean Vince?”
“Heard that alright, didn’t you?”
She smirks. “Well, it was inevitable, from the sounds of things. Question is –” she lowers her voice, “Are you going to keep seeing him?”
I frown at her.
“Come on, Tess. Look, I get it. The things I would do to that Resolute boy are strictly prohibited, but you know you’ll either have to break it off now before you get caught, or take the risk and watch him go back to Resolute in a few weeks anyway.”
I shrug, denying the obvious.
“Think about it,” Delilah whispers as we enter our new training room. “It might not be worth getting caught over.”
This training room is much smaller than the Arena; the ceilings lower, the concrete floor stained and chipped in most places. We will spend half our time here, learning the ‘fundamentals of weaponry’ (how to shoot a gun), and then implement these ‘in the field’ (which is the official term for – get this – outside). And so, purgatory or not, there is a reasonable chance that I might be a less-sulky version of myself over the next few weeks. I can practically smell the stale freedom from here.
The weaponries trainer: a dark-skinned, imposing mass by the name of Jiyah, arrives, and the usual routine ensues. We stand in formation, listen to a long stream of profanities meant to remind us of our inferiority, a lucky initiate cops a beating, and then the fun begins.
The first day of weapons is always the same, you suffer the slow torture of standing straight and unmoving as Jiyah drones on about barrels and lines of sight and safety switch procedures and shooting posture. This is followed by an even longer lecture about missiles and grenade construction (which one could beg the necessity of, if one knew that our very own compound bunker was pretty well stoked in such things). By the time we have reviewed the detailed diagram of a basic molotov, we have missed the first ten precious minutes of our lunch hour, and I’ve mastered the fine art of sleeping whilst standing with open eyes, which, by the way, is quite a feat.
Initiates of Galore can be sure of two things: (1) you will know the acute pain of deep tissue trauma; and (2), nothing you touch will be new, nor will it be yours, per se. Everything from uniforms, to sheets, to shoes, to toilet paper (literally – the toilet ‘paper’ is rewashed cotton cloth) is recycled, reused, remade, and in some cases revolting. Not that this is unexpected, it is the way of the world as we’ve known it. So when Jiyah starts handing out these lovely, almost new automatic rifles, the likes of which we have never used before, the energy in the room becomes nervous. Has he been talking about these the whole time? I don’t remember the mention of machine guns during my stand-up coma, and no one said anything at lunch…?
Jiyah shouts as he walks along the lines. “Initiates, as seniors these are the weapons you will be learning how to function. Make no mistake, they are semi-automatic, and pack a far more powerful punch then any rifle you’ve used before. Let me be clear, if you shoot another initiate out of carelessness, I will very carefully shoot you soon after.”
There are murmurs of appreciation as we break away from our lines to collect our magazines. I see Vincent’s eyes lighting up like a kid’s as he strokes the barrel. “Now this,” he emphasises, “is what I’m talking about. Do you think we get to keep these? I mean as part of our arsenal outfit?”
I sigh. “Probably.” I pick up a magazine from a table and follow Vincent to a work station. We need to disassemble, and then reassemble the gun, load it, unload it, repeat. Jiyah is testing our capabilities at the end of the day.
“She sighs,” Vincent drawls. “How I dread it when she sighs.”
I roll my eyes at him. “Don’t you find it a bit odd?
“Odd? No.”
I cannot stress this enough: Galore initiates never get anything new. Or next to new.
“I mean, has anyone ever mentioned machine guns to you? Like, your family? Anyone? Because mine haven’t. What if we are the first ones to train with these things?”
“So what if we are?” He says dismissively.
Mia comes to join us as we get to work. We err and fumble, our fingers unused to the mechanics of the rifles, our muscle memory solidly attuned to the old and worn shotguns.
It takes hours for Jiyah to pass every initiate and by the time we are dismissed, dinner has come and gone, and we return to our sleeping quarters, unfed and unclean.
“I don’t know about you,” Mia says, tucking herself into the cot beside me, her eyes already closed, “but I can’t wait to gun down those Scarce fuckers when I get the chance.”
And it is this last murderous sentence from a seventeen-year-old girl that renders me sleepless, wondering why – if there is barely enough of the human race left – we are in need of the facilities to gun down so many at once?
*
My eyes protest against the sudden light, squeezing it out, finding a pillow to bury themselves into.
“Up! Get up!”
I imagine Vincent standing at the end of my cot, being a smart ass, screaming at me.
“Every last initiate in the Arena. And I don’t mean in five minutes, I mean now!”
My eyes finally open, having only been closed for what feels like minutes. I awake to the dorm alive with chaos as everyone scrambles into uniforms at warp speed, staggering around drunk with sleep, stumbling as they struggle to slide on boots. The too-bright light is coming from the wrong places, from the roof instead of the windows. Night time, the clock tells me. Only three-thirty.
Delilah shoves me off the bed just as I’m sitting up. “Move it!” She hisses. “Hurry up!”
I throw myself towards the lockers and swing on my jacket over the top of my singlet. I’ll freeze but I don’t have time for more layers. Quickly I jump into trousers and run back to the door with my boots in my hand, trying to sprint and step into them at the same time.
The stairwell is chaos, congested to breaking point, and as we push free of its clutches, we break into a sprint again along the corridor and to the Arena’s entrance.
About three-quarters of the compound’s occupants is already in line, tousled, unkempt and wired. Wide eyes stare straight ahead, anticipating. As I walk briskly to my place I meet eyes with Dean. He stands with the Resolutes in the back, and I see his chest deflate, his expression becomes relieved. I give him a tiny grin.
Trey barks something nonsensical and the last late-comers go sprinting to their places. It has been perhaps three minutes since the wake-up call.
Trey steps towards us, looking positively livid. “My young friends,” he says, sounding vaguely Snare-ish. “There is a traitor among our ranks.”
Something inside me shrivels and my mind goes to Dean. In those few seconds I see it: I see him, a gun to his head, his crimes announced and the shot ringing around the room.
I think: he has been caught.
I think: they are going to kill him.
“Initiates of Galore, what is our creed?”
“Accept, endure, obey,” we call back.
“Embrace this,” Trey’s voice rings out, “Or you will find yourself in the same position as my friend here…” At this, Trey gestures to a night guard, a fronter – the very one who permitted Dean and I to exit out into the grounds many times. The man, fully uniformed in Galore green and an arsenal kit, brings forward a boy.
Felix, a senior. A good one, at that. Status one since he was ten years old. His hands are tied in front of him. Long strands of sandy-blonde hair stick to his sweaty face and he trembles.
A smirk cuts across Trey’s face. “The punishment for treason in the sector of Galore is death, jumper,” he anno
unces, with all the malicious integrity of a pitbull. “And so it has been sanctioned by our Commander.”
This is how it happens: they allow Felix a few words, of which he chooses instead to sob and plead, “I don’t want to die I don’t want to die please don’t don’t don’t please let me go just let me go!”
It’s horrible to watch. Always is. Strong, reliable Felix splutters his apologies and begs so pitifully that I close my eyes, as though not baring witness to his discrediting last moments will save him from shame. They strip Felix of his jacket and boots, march him to a narrow door in the back of the arena and open it. Snow flurries burst into the Arena. They stand him in that doorway, him facing the cold outdoors, and us facing his execution, and they shoot him. The bullet cuts so cleanly through the base of his neck and up into his brain that the gore hits only the snow, and leaves no trace of him inside the compound at all. They shut the door on the disgrace of his body, and he might as well have never existed at all.
After, I still feel the shot quaking through me in waves. But it isn’t just this execution, it is every execution: all the Galore citizens turned traitors to some affect that I’ve seen exist and then not exist in the space between breaths; jumpers and thieves and other law-breakers. I think of Felix and how I’d known him as the only grazer who was respected in the compound, an excellent fighter and a deadly shot. Now dead, not from the glory of combat, like he would have expected, and probably wanted, but just in the bloody aftermath of his attempts to escape his own militia.
Trey returns to his lecture in the place where a eulogy should be read, and instead I hear my father’s voice, remembering something he’d said, conjured from a similar scenario. I’d been walking home with my father after our contribution was made and I’d watched a boy, my age, digging a grave in a field for the blanketed body that lay beside it.
“Why did he die?” I’d asked aloud. Because he was shot, honey, was my father’s only answer. “Yes,” I’d pressed, “but, why?”
I remember him turning my face away, taking my hand and walking me firmly down the road, stopping me from looking back. I haven’t thought about it until now, what his reply was: some people would rather die with freedom.
I turn my head a little, searching through the line-up, and I see Tilly’s stark white face, her slight frame shakes as she tries not to fall.
The tenuous loyalties I keep with Galore fall away.
Chapter Fifteen
The day following Felix’s demise is a sombre affair.
Unfortunately, I cannot say that people are necessarily grieving their loss of him. From what I can tell, Felix didn’t have many friends, being a cow-tipping grazer and all. Predictably, the gossip is flowing: where was Felix running to? How did he try to escape? And of course, the expected shock that someone would leave the splendorous accommodations of Galore, etc. Speculation is rife.
There’s that, but also, people are pissed…and nervy. Nervous, because nothing puts you in your place more than watching a hole shot through a human skull; and pissed, because Felix’s attempt to jump Galore for parts unknown has not only disgusted his former comrades, but has now put all superior personnel in the compound on high alert, and if you so much as sneeze without permission you should expect a lashing (figuratively. Literally speaking, you’ll be beaten by hand, because trainers don’t carry whips around).
In our weaponry course, the convenient proximity of so very many firearms escapes no one, so we jump at every order and sweat over every practice shot.
As it happens, it is too hard to tell whether or not anyone misses anything. Jiyah was clearly not prepared for the implementation of the assault rifles, because he gets us to commence our normal target practice (taking turns shooting at ten or so paper targets across the empty room from where we stand). At twenty rounds every two seconds, the paper is blown to a million little papers, and there is really no telling how accurate our aim is, but suffice to say that all targets are well and truly dead. If it wasn’t abundantly clear before that these machine guns are a first for the compound, it is now.
And so we are treated to an early expedition into the grounds. It is still within the compound’s fence line, but I’ll take what I can get. My fellow initiates show the same mild excitement I do. Our happiness is clouded considerably, however, when we pass Felix’s body, covered in a heavy layer of snow, but still quite visible. Face-down and broken, the body still lies just inches from the exposed brick exterior of the compound. I notice a small group of Resolute initiates who have stopped ahead of me. They stare, disgusted by the blatant abandonment of a corpse, and I am suddenly ashamed, embarrassed to belong to this militia who would leave their own dead out in the snow, without even the courtesy of a burial.
It shouldn’t matter to me. Wherever Felix is now, it isn’t here.
We stomp a quarter mile into the grounds through shin-high snow until we reach a section where tall trees have been allowed to remain standing. Jiyah orders us to go around the skirmish range to place red, wooden crosses into the ground, on top of hay bales (supplied by yours truly), in trees, and in places obscured by low-growing shrubs. They will act as our enemy in lieu of actual enemy.
Ahead of me, Vincent is stalking into the trees, three crosses swinging from his belt and one in his hand. His rifle is slung across his back on its strap. With my own crosses to bear (literally), I hurry to catch him.
“Vince, wait up!”
He waits, and then we head off together, going deeper into the trees then we strictly should, but still remaining in Jiyah’s line of sight; fifty feet away.
Vincent’s expression perplexes me: deadpanned; his dark eyes glowering. He stabs a cross into the ground with unnecessary zeal.
“You seem a little more murderous than usual,” I note.
“Hm.”
“Something you wish to share?”
“Not particularly, no,” he says, walking further into the trees. I follow him for a couple of seconds, glancing nervously over my shoulder, we really weren’t asked to go in this far.
“Vince! Hey! Halt there, comrade.”
He halts, turning towards me with all the huffiness of a prepubescent girl.
“I owe you one,” I remind him. “Tell me what’s up.”
“Nothing is up,” he shrugs.
“It is abundantly clear that something is up.”
He dithers for a moment, clearly deciding how to word whatever is on his mind. “I took your advice. I told her…told Mia…that I…you know…”
“Love her with the fire of a thousand suns?”
He rolls his eyes. “It was far more original, but yeah. And it didn’t go as well as I’d planned, okay? So now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shoot some targets with your imaginary face on them.”
“Me? What? What did I do?”
“You gave me the shitty advice,” he says, wedging his last cross into a tree branch above his head.
I shrug. “Fair enough. So what did she say exactly?”
He turns his back on me and begins trekking back towards the compound. “Simply translated,” he calls over his shoulder, “she loves me only with the fire of about three suns.”
I watch his hunched shoulders as he saunters away, and feel wretched for him. I’ve watched Vincent, the best friend I have, bend to Mia’s every whim since we were minors. He would be good to her. I know for a fact he would take a bullet for her; he is the bullet-taking type. And Mia…is clearly a moron.
We clear the trees just as Jiyah calls everyone to report. We are made to line up facing the range, about fifty feet away.
“Usually, you are required to scout the area and shoot the crosses on sight,” Jiyah shouts to us, “however, these rifles require your bodies to be firmly grounded. You’ll be shooting from here, hitting as many of the enemy as you can see from your position. With these babies, all we do is sit tight and wait for the bastards to show their stupid faces.” Many of the heroes around me light up, including Vincent, Mia and De
lilah.
“shred them up,” Jiyah continues, “And leave no survivors.”
At this, the group cheers, pumping their fists in the air, and instead of joining in, like I should, I am all caught up in the paradox of the well-used Galore manifesto: leave no survivors. I can’t help but find the parallel spoken just days ago: …attacked by Scarce mercenaries, and there were no survivors. No Galore survivors, so we deploy the largest campaign in our milita’s history. No enemy survivors, and it is a victory.
I take my place in the snow, my breaths sharpening as the frost creeps under my gloves, melts through my clothes. With my stomach flattened to the ground, I space my feet apart, and position the rifle into the crook of my shoulder. I adjust the microscope and my eye finds the first target through the crosshairs.
Beside me, Adriel kicks my boot. “Don’t take your eyes off that target now.”
“Open Fire!” Jiyah shouts.
Shit.
The roar of gunfire fills the air, as nineteen initiates lying in the snow hit their desired targets, and one initiate (that’s me) stares at hers, still swinging from a branch of a giant spruce. I prepare to fire, but it’s too late. Adriel decimates it to splinters before I can locate it in the crosshairs again. Panicking now, I search furiously for another target, and find one, but it is blown apart a second later, and I’m out of time.
I forget to breathe. Around me, shots still ring out, but my gun is still cold.
Even through my jacket, I feel the hand grab the scruff of my neck before I see its owner, and I am dragged to my feet. The rifle swings dangerously from my shoulder. Jiyah takes my arm and holds me upright as I struggle to find my footing in the snow. “You are dead, initiate,” he spits. The gunfire still rings out from all around me, but I hear him clearly enough. “You failed to shoot your target, the target shoots you, and now you’re dead. Do you understand that?” He shakes me hard.
“Yes, trainer.”
“CEASE FIRE!” he bellows, and one by one, the shots die out. Jiyah drags me into the skirmish range, leaving the other seniors behind, and then spins me around to face them, finally stopping.