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blories · 11 years ago

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The Draft

A story for creative writing class:

You hear about the blisters and sores and hallucinations and you think a lot of things. But honestly-

It’s gonna be the sweat that sucks the most.

Ignore anyone who tells you different, and avoid anyone who tells you the same, because if you stick around to listen you’ll really know about it in a couple days.

It’d be cool if I could say you get used to it, but you don’t. Look at me. I just washed. Everyone on planet earth makes you want to feel disgusting and then your body goes ahead and does it too.

Except my dad. I missed thanksgiving because I was coughing so bad. I think he told the neighbors I ran away or something - I never really found out. Anyways, I was so sure he was going to call me in. We weren’t on good terms and he’s not completely to blame for that either - lets just say he wouldn’t need to do too much talking to have the neighbors believe I skipped town (after a few rounds of telephone they’d solidly believe I was in Kansas with my drug dealer or some shit.)

Anyways, I was bad for a whole week before I passed out at breakfast. My mom teaches, so she’s barely ever home around 7. My sister goes to this private school nearby and likes to hang out early with her friends. Her school is a real locked up place - I tried to bring her lunch once before heading off and they had me frisked and metal checked. Hip replacements apparently don’t work as an excuse until you’re past 50.

Basically, I knew I was sick maybe the second day, because I used to sleep 12 hours straight no matter what, but I woke up at four am all sweaty. Whatever the dream was, it wasn’t bad or good enough to be that gross waking up. Not to mention I’d gripped the headboard hard enough to splinter the wood.

Part of me didn’t really want to believe it, but I started wearing one of those red masks anyways. I personally never believed in the hype over those things, but my mom believed in them and the school gave her some (which she gave to me since out of the four of us my daily commute is the shadiest). No one wore them in my school. It was one of those places you go to when teachers don’t believe your GPA will ever pass one-point-nothing, so everyones got something to prove.

Now? I think that was the stupidest trend we could have possibly come up with. And I was around for the Roulette hype. But that was all back when my biggest worry was looking like I actually had money. Lee gave me hell about it. If he could see me...

So i’m on the floor around breakfast, passed out. Moms gone, Karins gone and I see my dad’s shoes. He’s just standing there. It was kind of pathetic because I was holding my breath, trying to pretend I wasn’t coughing. The effort just made my face red and my coughs worse. I’m thinking ‘He’s gonna go get the phone. This is it’ But my Dad is just standing there and I’m just waiting for him to get rid of me like he always threatened.

You’re ill, he said. I would have responded, No Shit, but I think I coughed my voice box out of place - plus my dad got uppity about language. And I still had that mask on, so it wouldn’t have come out anyways. The way he says ‘ill’ makes it easy to see him like the psychologist he had the degree for (maybe more than he did when he tried diagnosing me every other Friday.)

I never noticed him walk away, but when he came back he had a scarf over his face. I knew that meant he was probably talking to me when he hid me in the garage, tucked me in under a couple tarps, gave me something to keep my lungs from spasming so I could take the mask off sometimes and caring stuff like that, but I didn’t want to think about it.

It had only been two days and I could already hear his heartbeat.I could hear mine clearer from the start, but my father’s was loud enough to give me a headache. Symptoms are the kinds of things you can only learn from sick people, you know. Doctors get it wrong.

A week felt like a month in that garage. The car hadn’t run in maybe 6 months but I felt like I was eating exhaust the whole time. I was buried in tools and tarps and boxes and never got to see my sister or mother and I didn’t know why - at the time at least.

Not that I was thinking clearly, but i’m sure the stars had to be aligned for my mother, home alone like she never usually is, to find a reason to go to a garage she never visits.

There was this girl - Chris. She was too smart to really belong in that lousy school, but too poor to go anywhere else. We all really should have taken it as a sign when she took all the money she’d been saving for a Toyota shell and spent it on Red Masks. Not even kidding, there are 8 people in her family, she could have probably gotten an actual working car with that much money.

Lee was an absolute brat about it, even though he was maybe one of three people at the school who’d even seen one in real life back then. He refused to wear it right in front of her and convinced their younger siblings to think it was un-cool. From an angle you could see a long crack on the mouth shield of one - that was Lee’s. The day she brought them home Lee flipped on her for spending that much money on a gimmick - bragged about it to me and everyone else the day after. But I was the only one who knew he actually broke it like an idiot.

Not that he’d ever told me, but after Chris disappeared it was rumored that she’d gone into the border to volunteer on Saturday and never signed out. She had officially ‘disappeared’ Monday when she didn’t sign into school. When Lee finally let me come over a week later I noticed the cracked red masks was missing. Chris was enough of a genius that she probably knew she was bad the moment she inhaled the wrong air. But that was months ago.

Chris always seemed like she was going to do something big - either invent something amazing or kill someone important.

Now? She teaches me to shoot. I’m getting good, too.

For lessons we go above the box where they keep all the ones that are completely gone. They have uniforms like mine, but unlike me all their hair has fallen out instead of just a little. They can break entire tree logs like I can break a spine. They don’t sweat at all, and I sometimes find myself jealous.

Other things I can do now that I couldn’t do before? Stay completely still. Crows like to circle a dozen feet above the pit, and I’m not supposed to shoot them but their wing flapping and heartbeats are incredibly distracting. Every now and then they swoop down and peck at the ears and the eyes of the soldiers in the pit, but even through this I can sit still. My aim isn’t perfect yet - it’s only been a few weeks - but my goal is to become so precise that I can tilt up and silence every bird before anyone can stop me.

Anyways the first gone guy I killed? Looked as young as me, but his uniform was different. A lot of the gones in that park are the POW’s the heads call ‘expired’. They were threatened with a cure or an infection, depending on their state - or at least that’s what I heard on the news. I know now that there’s next to nobody left in anyone’s army who could be threatened with an infection.

One of the first thing the man on the truck had told us all on the bus, when we shackled and Red Masked and freaking out, was that the kind of people - sick people - that we shot wouldn’t bleed. Only under this government could a man abduct a truck-full of dying teenagers and tell a bald face lie in the same breath without making a cop blink; because that kid was bleeding everywhere. One second he was a stumbling target and the next he was acting like a person getting shot.

Another thing: the heads don’t care if you’re crying your eyes out under the heels of their loafers – don’t you ever call a Gone target a person.

…

Hugh, head of Chris’ cohort, is obsessed with bringing things back. I knew that about him before I even met him, and was even more sure when i saw he’d modified his uniform to something so 70’s it hurt to look at.

What I didn’t know was that, thanks to Hugh, Roulette had made a comeback on the site. Several guns from who knows where would circulate a crowd of dozens. Chris was really into it, and seemed to want me to be really into it. Those were the things that made me sure that she wasn’t okay. But the same things she did back then I do now normally, so maybe i’m not okay either.

That’s another thing: Nobody is ever okay, illness notwithstanding.

So there’d be nightly games of shoot yourself in the face and everyone had to play. I’ve never been an optimistic person, but something about that 12% chance of living through the Draft made me scared when a gun was in my face. But the thing is that when you say you’ll do something you’ve got to do it. I watched Hugh pull the trigger until the bullet came out on this guy that chickened – who went from crying to dead in 6 seconds. There are literally almost a hundred people who play this every other night and at least three people die every time. No one cares. We keep playing.

….

Going to the hospital is apparently one of the worst things that everyone believes they should do when they get sick like this. They take you, tell you how likely you are to die, and hold you there until the buses pick you up. After the coughing works it’s self off you feel pretty healthy, really strong, except for the sweating and dizziness. No one tells you that you get strong until they’ve already shipped you off and put you to work – if they did you’d have people punching through hospital walls all the time. When our tank cut off a while back and it was just me all masked up, I thought we’d never move it. It wasn’t until a Head got out and motivated me with his M60 that I found out I could push a tank all by myself – but more importantly I found out that my will to live and my urge to use my skills to kill the man were too balanced for comfort. The day it tips is the day I’m headed to the gone park.

See, the trick is to make yourself so useful that they don’t want to lock you up. Fighting, killing – that’s just the baseline. Those are the things they expect you to do when you enlist (though it’s not much of a choice since it’s either enlist and try for a cure or get shot or used or tossed into the park early. Nothing in me believes the cure really exists anymore. Even back then I was suspicious, but right after I got off the truck I saw Chris who, with her shortened hair and uniform, I mistook for Lee.

They take you without asking, but if you sign up they send a whole lot of money to your family. Maybe a month after Chris went missing Lee disappeared too. I punched him when I saw him again after nothing for a whole second month, walking out of my sister’s school like a ghost in uniform. We hung out. His grades were good. They had enough money for him to go to college at least. And he wasn’t being a brat about it either.

Maybe two weeks after we made up I woke up sweating with my headboard broken.

Days didn’t make much sense in the probably-a-month between getting taken from the hospital and enlisting. They only let you leave when the draft is really set in, and apparently a month is short, but I was bad off when I got there. Wearing that mask exasperated the infection. If I hadn’t, the doctor said, I would have had a whole 20% higher chance of recovering under a cure if I ever managed to get it. I don’t know if it was the fever or the apologetic look on his face that made me want to punch him, but I did it, and paid for it too.

I think after that, when I was stuck in a cell with a couple other disorderlies

TBC: Protag meets Lee in a camp, who was infected during a bio attack on his college. Chris becomes Gone, and Protag kills her during shooting practice?

#writing #lit #prose #school stuff

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