Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  “And that means, Doctor?”

  “These aliens have set up a forward base on Ganymede. They’ve generated an atmosphere for an entire world.”

  “And what does that tell us?” The anchorman knit his brow.

  “They covet a world with water and an atmosphere. Which is why these Projectiles are being fired at us instead of nuclear warheads. Precisely large enough to slowly strangle us but clean and small enough to allow Earth to escape true ‘Nuclear Winter.’”

  “They don’t want permanendy damaged goods?”

  The TV professor nodded.

  Mr. Ryan waved his fork. “So fly the Marines up there! They’ll permanently damage some goods!”

  Mr. Ryan was very upset about his trees. But the human race couldn’t fly a gerbil to Jupiter. We hadn’t had the hardware or the will to send a person as far as our own moon since the 1970s, much less attack some super-race that could air-condition a whole planet.

  “Walter, two wrongs don’t make a right.” Mrs. Ryan tweezed individual peas into Tupperware like pearls.

  Mr. Ryan clamped his jaw as he’d done it for a lifetime.

  The anchorman faced the screen. “When we return. Military unpreparedness. Worse than Pearl Harbor?”

  Mr. Ryan clicked off the TV box. “I’ll just read the paper.”

  They were actually publishing daily news on paper again. The Greens didn’t bitch since the trees were already dying.

  Mr. Ryan turned to me. “What branch did you pick?”

  “The Queen of Battle.” It sounded so cool.

  “Christ on a crutch! Not Infantry?”

  Uh-oh. “The sergeant recommended it.”

  “I was in sales. You always push the shit first. Besides, if we ever win this war, it’ll be the rocket jocks that do it.”

  Actually, I’d thought of that. The United Nations Space Force was already up and running. But you had to be a math brain like Metzger to get in. My verbal test scores were so high that I had to sit through weekly counseling about the tragedy of underachievement. However, I C-minus’d precalc and took the Computer-Repair-Shop low road junior year. Even though it split up Metzger and me for the first time since third grade.

  Mr. Ryan shook his head. “Infantry. You better spend next month getting in shape.”

  I spent next month dropping Prozac to forget Mom, drinking up my signing bonus on a fake ID, sleeping and downloading porn. The rest of the time I wasted.

  The day before I shipped out I went down to the recruiting office to pick up my travel allowance. A guy in Space Force cadet uniform was coming out. Khaki jumpsuit, high boots, royal blue neck scarf. Even through the gloom, that looked wick.

  “Wander!”

  It was Metzger. His face reddened. “I heard you, uh, signed up after…”

  Metzger was sort of my best friend, but we hadn’t spoken since I got suspended after my monstrous homeroom assault

  “It’s okay.” I shrugged. What could he say? It wasn’t his fault that he still had parents and a life. I don’t know if I’d have called him up if the situation had been reversed. Mom would have said adolescent males form dysfunctional friendships and told me to forget about it

  I said, “So check you out! I thought only delinquents with a court order could enlist without graduating.”

  “If you score high enough and your parents consent, you take ROTC while you finish high school. After graduation…” He put his hands together and swooped them toward the sky.

  Already the military was shooting missiles up from Earth, swatting away some Projectiles. But within months Interceptors, really updated space shuttles, would patrol space between here and the moon. It was going to be a holofantasy come true. Metzger succeeded at everything.

  But on hologames he was the best anybody had ever seen. They said game reflexes were success predictors for an Interceptor pilot.

  “So whadya get, Wander? Rotary-Wing Flight School?” Metzger acted like an adult, sometimes. Tactful. We both knew I couldn’t do rocket-science math. Helicopter gun ships were the next-sexiest thing.

  I flipped his blue braided shoulder cord with a finger. “Flight school’s for pussies.”

  “So? What, then?”

  Two girls walked by. The blonde looked Metzger up and down and whispered behind her hand to her friend.

  He grinned.

  Girls always looked at Metzger like that. Now he was Luke Skywalker, too. I rolled my eyes, then squinted at the gray sun. “Infantry.”

  “Infantry.” He blinked. “That’s good. Really” He looked off at bare trees. “So. When do you go?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “I guess you’ve been getting in shape.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We gotta get drunk tonight.”

  In next morning’s darkness I slouched, hungover, in the airport lounge and watched the transport parked outside the window. It squatted on its landing gear, its floodlit paint as gray as every dawn had been since the war began.

  I’d never seen a propeller plane except in a museum. But jet engines sucked in so much Projectile-impact dust they chewed up their own insides. Two jumbo jets had crashed, so the commercial fleet got grounded and became parked aluminum scrap. Airports these days were all military.

  The dust ate propellers, too, but they’d rigged filters for prop planes so the old, mothballed crates could operate. Filter bags hung under the four engine nacelles like udders.

  I rubbed my throbbing temples. Metzger and I had bought beer, driven out to the country, kidnapped a goat, and let it loose in the school cafeteria. Metzger’s idea, as always. Roguish daring was another trait prized in fighter pilots.

  I turned to the guy beside me, who looked as hungover as I felt. “You think that old cow’s safe to fly?”

  Big and black, he sprawled, like the other fifty of us enlistees, across a departure-lounge chair.

  He scowled. “Cow? A Hercules? The C-130 was an outstanding ship in her day!”

  Another gung ho letter-and-number spouter. These recruits actually wanted to enlist. I was the only sane one.

  “Saddle up, ladies!” The corporal from the plane was more fanatic than the recruits. We fifty stood, stretched, groaned, and drooled. If milling around could win a war, we were going to kick ass.

  We boarded and took off. The Hercules’ saving grace, besides not crashing, was that it was as loud as riding in a trash barrel rolling across cobblestones. None of the gung ho crowd disturbed my misery. We landed twice to change filter bags, then hit the runway—not a figure of speech—for the last time around noon, local time, wherever local was.

  “Saddle up, ladies! Welcome to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania!”

  That sounded civilized. Not Greenland or the jungle or someplace.

  The plane’s back ramp dropped, and Antarctica whistled in. By the time they ran us down the ramp and lined us up in four rows on the runway’s cracked, weedy asphalt my teeth chattered so hard my eyeballs ratded. Pennsylvania wasn’t so civilized.

  “Platoon! Atten-shun!”

  I’d watched enough holoremastered war movies to know that meant stand straight and still. Like your mommy stood you up against the doorjamb to mark your height with a pencil. What crapola.

  Wind scraped curled leaves across snow as it carried away the last Hercules exhaust fumes. Somebody coughed.

  I stared straight ahead. Indiantown Gap was snow-dusted hills carpeted with the gray, leafless hardwood forest a pine-sniffing Coloradan seldom saw.

  I said to the big black guy from the airport, “We should’ve joined the Hawaiian army.”

  He laughed.

  It wasn’t my best laugh line. Once, while he lunched with a cheerleader, I made Metzger snort milk out his nose.

  “What’s your name, trainee?” The voice boomed behind me and hair stood on my neck.

  “Me, sir?”

  “Sir? Commissioned officers are addressed as ‘sir!’” He stepped around in front of me and stared into my eyes
, so close that I thought he’d poke my forehead with his brown, Smokey Bear hat brim. He was leather-faced and so old that the hair fuzz above his ears was gray. Like his eyes. They were colder than Indiantown Gap.

  “I am Senior Drill Sergeant Ord and am so addressed! Name?” A spit bead arced from his mouth. It froze before it hit my chin and ricocheted away like a foul tip.

  “W-Wander, Drill Sergeant!”

  “Trainee Wander.” He paused. He was talking loud, so everybody could hear, even over the wind.

  I bet he pulled this routine with every incoming group. And some poor dweeb—me—was made an example. Maybe I rolled my eyes at the thought.

  “At the position of attention, you may blink, swallow, and breathe! Not joke, roll your eyes, and dance the macarena!”

  The what? I shook in the wind like an out-of-tune Pontiac.

  He turned away, hands clasped behind his back. “The platoon will move out of this mild breeze and indoors as soon as you assume the position of attention, Wander.”

  I could feel the hatred of every frozen-ass person on that asphalt. It was so unfair. I couldn’t stand still. Shivering was an involuntary reflex. I hadn’t done a thing. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have talked.

  I was freezing inside my ski fleece. Drill Sergeant Ord wore just an olive drab, starched-cotton uniform shirt and pants Moused over laced boots that shone like glass. And that fool hat. But he strolled back and form like he was poolside.

  It was probably three minutes but felt like thirty until my body went numb and motionless.

  Ord faced us, hands behind his back, and rocked on his boots. “Very well. When I dismiss this platoon, you will shoulder your gear, face right, and move out smartly to the quartermaster building.” He pointed at a whitewashed shed on the horizon. It was probably four hundred yards away but looked like it was in the next county.

  Somebody whimpered.

  “There you will receive a hot meal and be issued uniforms, including field jackets with liners. These you will find to be the finest cold-weather protection ever devised.”

  Somebody whispered, “Dear God, let’s go!”

  Ord seemed not to hear. “They are provided to you at no small expense by this country’s taxpayers, whom you are privileged to defend.”

  The wind howled.

  Somebody whined through clenched teeth. “My dick’s frozen, or I’d pee my pants.” If he did, we’d all be trying to warm our hands off the steam.

  Ord ignored all these other whisperers. I’d bet the taxpayers would be pissed if they knew they were paying Ord to pick on an orphan who got railroaded into the army.

  “Dis-missed!”

  Evidently, “move out smartly” was army talk for “stampede.” If I’d known what came next, I’d have run the opposite way.

  Chapter Four

  We thundered in from the cold to the quartermaster shed like we were taking Omaha Beach. It was a barn of a room split lengthwise by a waist-high counter. Behind it loitered vacant-eyed men in olive fatigues and behind them shelves sagged beneath clothing and equipment just as drab.

  We lined up and one by one got piled chin-high with clothes that smelled like Grandma’s closet.

  I said to the gung ho black guy from the airport, “This stuff’s used!”

  “Not since the war.”

  “Second Afghan?”

  “Second World.”

  I laughed.

  “Seriously.” He plopped his gear on a wooden table and jerked a thumb at rough, whitewashed board walls. “The army’s overcrowded. Last time they opened In-diantown Gap was Vietnam.”

  A bored clerk behind the counter tore plastic from another packet of field jackets. Mothballs trickled onto the counter.

  I stuck out my hand to the black guy. “Jason Wander.”

  “Druwan Parker.” His hand swallowed mine.

  “How come you know so much, Parker?”

  “I always figured to enlist My uncle’s a general. Adjutant General’s Corps.”

  This smart guy picked Infantry! So I had made a good choice.

  “He says I gotta do time in hell before he’ll swing me a branch transfer to AG Corps. So I’m starting in Infantry.”

  My heart sank, then rose. “Branch transfer?”

  He shook his head. “Unless you got connections, it don’t happen in wartime. Most everybody here’s Infantry ‘til they die.”

  “Maybe the Space Force is at war. The war’s out by the moon.”

  “That’s not the point. The economy’s tanked. Unemployment’s the highest in a century. The army is America’s soup kitchen. They’re demothballing posts like this and dragging out old equipment to train us all.”

  “Train us for what?”

  He shrugged. “Clean up craters that used to be cities. Evacuate new targets. Shoot rioters when food runs out. Don’t you watch the news?”

  Why, when I could get the Cliff Notes version from Parker? He was a nice guy and smart to boot.

  A garage-size door at the building’s end rumbled, rolled aside, and let winter in. Snow shot at us, horizontal on the wind. A canvas-topped truck backed up and plugged the opening. Framed in the truck’s cargo bay stood a guy in white fatigues, hands on hips. Fumes belched into the I building. The military was still allowed to use diesels.

  I never believed that back before the turn of the century internal-combustion-engine cars rumbled over the roads like stampeding buffalo and turned the air brown. Until now.

  I coughed. “That’s bad!”

  “No, that’s good!” Parker stood and tugged me toward the track. “That’s the mess truck.”

  Parker’s quick action put us fourth of fifty in the chow line. This was a relationship to cultivate.

  The white-suited cook tossed us each a cardboard box maybe eight-by-five inches and we walked back to our table.

  Parker muttered, “Botulism in a box!”

  “Huh?”

  He tore open his box and undersized green cans and brown foil packets spilled onto the table. “C-rations. One can’s a main course, then there’s dessert and stuff. These have been in some warehouse since Vietnam! The army never throws nothin‘ away.”

  He shrugged and read one of his cans. “Some of the main courses are edible. Like this one. beef with gravy.”

  I tilted my box toward me, peeked in, and read a can top, stenciled ham and lima beans.

  “But,” he said, “there’s one, ‘ham and lima beans.’ Recycled barf.”

  “Trade boxes, Druwan?”

  Fifteen minutes later I stood in line burping up lima beans, realizing that Parker was even smarter than I thought, and pushing my civilian bag forward with my foot. At the head of the line Drill Sergeant Ord sat at a table while each of us emptied out all our crap for his inspection.

  Ord didn’t look up as I scooped my stuff onto the table.

  “Warm now, Wander?”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  He tossed my Chipman into a big, green poly envelope labeled with my name. “You’ll get it back after Basic.”

  “How’m I supposed to mail people?”

  He snapped his head up.

  I added, “Drill Sergeant.”

  He nodded.

  I figured it out. You just had to use their little suck-up words.

  “You know the satellites aren’t receiving, trainee. And there are no land repeaters in these hills. Your little personal assistant is good for nothing here but stored porno and hologames. You’ll be too busy for either.”

  He reached into a box and pulled out a dull green Chipboard. “This is yours to keep.”

  “Some trade! Army-surplus junk that nobody’s mailed with since before the Broncos won the Worldbowl.”

  “The army encourages you to write home, trainee.”

  A lump swelled in my throat. The bastard probably knew I had no home to write to.

  He dug through my shaving kit, tugged out the shaving-cream squirt can, and chucked it into the envelope. “You will shave
daily but with this cream.” He tucked an old-fashioned, capped squeeze tube in my kit.

  I was an orphan. War had taken my mother. War had taken my home. This war-loving bully had nothing better to do than take my shaving cream?

  Annoyance rose in me and spilled. I raised my voice to be heard over all the sniffling and milling and whispering behind me. “Begging the drill sergeant’s pardon, why is he harassing us about this crap instead of teaching us things that might save our lives?”

  The place went morgue-still. Somebody whispered, “Oh, fuck.”

  Ord stared at me, then his eyebrows twitched one millimeter. “A fair question. And you asked with appropriate military courtesy, Trainee Wander.”

  He stood, hands on hips, and addressed the assembled multitude. “Many of the weapons-control, vehicle, and other systems on which you will train were designed before the advent of reliable voice-recognition technology. Chipboard practice will allow you to refine or develop keyboard and handwriting skills today’s generation lacks. That may save your lives and those of your fellow soldiers.”

  He held up my shaving-cream can. “Your unit may on a moment’s notice be transported anywhere in the world aboard aircraft which are, or may unexpectedly become, depressurized. Pressurized aerosols become bombs that at a minimum can ruin your gear and at a maximum could bring down an aircraft. You will be clean-shaven at all times because your gas mask will not seal against a beard. Additional questions?”

  I smiled to myself. “Military courtesy” meant you could be a smart-ass and not get in trouble.

  “Trainee Wander, your question indicates you believe you know better than the command structure what is best for your unit?”

  Uh-oh. “No, Drill Sergeant.”

  “Are you cold?”

  Was there a right answer?

  “It’s a bit chilly, Drill Sergeant.”

  Ord nearly smiled as he nodded. “Then let’s all warm up. Platoon! Drop and give me fifty push-ups.”

  Anonymous groans as fifty bellies hit the deck. I supposed that if I’d said I wasn’t cold Ord would have said how nice, the temperature was perfect for exercise. We’d be doing push-ups either way. Could Ord be a bigger dick?