Sometimes Boys Die.

'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. 

'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?'

'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.

'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.

His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, 'The Boy', should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.

'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.

The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.

He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'

'Yes. But the real point of the story----'

Human Reclamation

THOR

I don't even like Banner.

(bad impersonation)

"I'm into numbers and science and stuff."

HULK

Thor go. Hulk Stay.

THOR

Fine. Stay here. Stupid place.

It's hideous, by the way :

The Red, The White - 

Just pick a colour.

"We had quislings, just like the real thing, but winterized. We had these Human Reclamation units, pretty much just glorified animal control. 

They’d do their best to dart any quislings we came across, tie ’em down, ship ’em to rehabilitation clinics, back when we thought we could rehabilitate them. 

Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot of them weren’t kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day. 

Of course, HR would always try and dart them, and, of course, that didn’t always work. When a two-hundred-pound feral bull is charging balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq ain’t gonna drop him before he hits home. 

A lot of HRs got pretty badly smashed up, a few had to be tagged and bagged. The brass had to step in and assign a squad of grunts for escort. If a dart didn’t stop a feral, we sure as hell did. 

Nothing screams as high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code that human life, any human’s life, was worth trying to save. 

I guess history sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight. 

If they had had the resources, they might have been able to do the same for animals. Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. 

I’m not just talking dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always telegraphed their attacks. 

I’m talking “Flies” : F-Lions, cats, like part mountain lion, part ice age saberfuck. Maybe they were mountain lions, some sure looked like them, or maybe just the spawn of house cats that had to be super badass just to make it. 

I’ve heard that they grew bigger up north, some law of nature or evolution. I don’t really get the whole ecology thing, not past a few prewar nature shows. 

I hear it’s because rats were, like, the new cows; fast and smart enough to get away from Zack, livin’ on corpses, breeding by the millions in trees and ruins. They’d gotten pretty badass themselves, so anything tough enough to hunt them has to be a whole lot badder. 

That’s an F-lion for you, about twice the size of a prewar puffball, teeth, claws, and a real, real jonesing for warm blood. 

That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs. 

Are you kidding? They loved it, even the little dachmutts, made ’em feel like dogs again. 

I’m talking about us, getting jumped from a tree limb, or a roof. They didn’t charge you like F-hounds, they just waited, took their sweet time until you were too close to raise a weapon. 

Outside of Minneapolis, my squad was clearing a strip mall. I was stepping through the window of a Starbucks and suddenly three of them leap at me from behind the counter. They knock me over, start tearing at my arms, my face. How do you think I got this? 

[He refers to the scar on his cheek.] 

I guess the only real casualty that day was my shorts. Between the biteproof BDUs and body armor we’d started wearing, the vest, the helmet . . . I hadn’t worn a hard cover in so long, you forget how uncomfortable it is when you’re used to going soft top. 

Did ferals, feral people that is, know how to use firearms? 

They didn’t know how to do anything human, that’s why they were ferals. 

No, the body armor was for protection against some of the regular people we found. I’m not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE,5 Last Man on Earth. 

There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic nature or something. 

They hadn’t seen real people in so long, a lot of the initial shooting was just accidental or reflex. Most of the time we managed to talk them down. 

Those we actually called RCs, Robinson Crusoes— that was the polite term for the ones who were cool. 

The ones we called LaMOEs, those were the ones who were a little too used to being King. King of what, I don’t know, Gs and quislings and crazy F-critters, but I guess in their mind they were living the good life, and here we were to take it all away. 

That’s how I got nailed. 

We were closing on the Sears Tower in Chicago. Chicago, that was enough nightmares for three lifetimes. It was the middle of winter, wind whipping off the lake so hard you could barely stand, and suddenly I felt Thor’s hammer smash me in the head. 

Slug from a high-powered hunting rifle. I never complained about our hard covers anymore after that. 

The gang in the tower, they had their little Kingdom, and they weren’t giving it up for anyone. 

That was one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that’s when the Bradleys started making a comeback. 

After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat environment. It was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City. 

Each squad was issued pamphlets with the “Threat Pyramid.” It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. 

Zack at the bottom, then F-critters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs. I know a lot of guys from AG South like to bitch about how they always had it tougher on their end, ’cause, for us, winter took care of Zack’s whole threat level. 

Yeah, sure, and replaced it with another one: winter! 

What do they say the average temperature’s dropped, ten degrees, fifteen in some areas?

6 Yeah, we had it real easy, up to our ass in gray snow, knowing that for every five Zacksicles you cracked there’d be at least as many up and at ’em at first thaw. 

At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn’t have to worry about rear area attacks like us. 

We swept every area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. 

We lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. 

And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew . . . it’d be like, “oh shit, here we go again.” 

I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring’s like winter used to be, nature letting us know the good life’s over for now. 

Tell me about liberating the isolated zones. 

Always a hard fight, every single one. 

Remember these zones were still under siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands. 

The people holed up in the twin forts of Comerica Park/Ford Field, they must have had a combined moat—that’s what we called them, moats—of at least a million Gs. 

That was a three-day slugfest, made Hope look like a minor skirmish. That was the only time I ever really thought we were gonna be overrun. They piled up so high I thought we’d be buried, literally, in a landslide of corpses. 

Battles like that, they’d leave you so fried, just wasted, body and mind. You’d want to sleep, nothing more, not eat or bathe or even fuck. 

You’d just want to find someplace warm and dry, close your eyes, forget everything. 

What were the reactions of the people who you liberated? 

Kind of a mix. The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, “I relieve you, sir—I stand relieved,” shit like that. 

There was also a little bit of wienie wagging. You know “we didn’t need any rescuing” and all. I understand. 

Every grunt wants to be the one riding over the hill, no one likes to be the one in the fort. Sure you didn’t need rescuing, buddy. 

Sometimes it was true. Like the zoomies outside of Omaha. They were a strategic hub for airdrops, regular flights almost on the hour. 

They were actually living better than us, fresh chow, hot showers, soft beds. It almost felt like we were being rescued. 

On the other hand, you had the jarheads at Rock Island. They wouldn’t let on how rough they had it, and that was cool with us. 

For what they went through, bragging rights was the least we could give them. Never met any of them personally, but I’ve heard the stories. 

What about the civilian zones? 

Different story entirely. We were so the shit! 

They’d be cheering and shouting. It was like what you’d think war was supposed to be, those old black-and-whites of GIs marching into Paris or wherever. 

We were rock stars. I got more . . . well . . . if there’s a bunch of little dudes between here and the Hero City that happen to look like me . . . 

[Laughs.] 

But there were exceptions. 

Yeah, I guess. Maybe not all the time but there’d be this one person, this angry face in the crowd screaming shit at you. 

“What the fuck took you so long?” 

“My husband died two weeks ago!” 

“My mother died waiting for you!” 

“We lost half our people last summer!” 

“Where were you when we needed you?” 

People holding up photos, faces. When we marched into Janesville, Wisconsin, someone was holding up a sign with a picture of a smiling little girl. The words above it read “Better late than never?” 

He got beat down by his own people; they shouldn’t have done that. 

That’s the kind of shit we saw, shit that keeps you awake when you haven’t slept in five nights. 

Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we’d enter a zone where we were totally not welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, “Fuck you, army! You ran out on us, we don’t need you!” 

Was that a secessionist zone? 

Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots. I never got close to any of those zones. 

The brass had special units for Rebs. I saw them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. 

That was the first time since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that was gonna end. 

There’s been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by certain isolated zones. 

Yeah, so? Ask them about it. 

Did you see any? 

Nope, and I didn’t want to. People tried to tell me about it, people we liberated. They were so wound up inside, they just wanted to get it off their chests. 

You know what I used to say to them, “Keep it on your chest, your war’s over.” I didn’t need any more rocks in my ruck, you know? 

What about afterward? 

Did you talk to any of those people? 

Yeah, and I read a lot about the trials. 

How did they make you feel? 

Shit, I don’t know. Who am I to judge those people? I wasn’t there, I didn’t have to deal with that. 

This conversation we’re having now, this question of “what if,” I didn’t have time for that back then. I still had a job to do. 

I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Army had such a low casualty rate during the advance. 

Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe the Russkies. 

Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. 

There were a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren’t on that pyramid. 

Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like, in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well, and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt, the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. 

Every time we entered a city, or liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for quarantine. 

In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks. 

Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then. Just seed mile after mile and wait for Zack to blow himself up. 

Only problem is, mines don’t work that way. They don’t blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That’s what they’re designed for, not to kill people, but to wound ’em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send ’em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see ’em that maybe supporting this war isn’t such a good idea. 

But Zack has no home, no Ma and Pa Civilian. All conventional mines do is create a bunch of crippled ghouls that, if anything, just makes your job that much harder because you want them upright and easy to spot, not crawling around the weeds waiting to be stepped on like land mines themselves. 

You couldn’t know where most mines were; a lot of the units that set them during the retreat hadn’t marked them correctly or had lost their coordinates or simply weren’t alive anymore to tell you. 

And then you had all those stupid fuckin’ LaMOE jobs, the punji stakes and trip-wired shotgun shells. 

I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were deported back to El Salvador because they were technically illegal. 

My buddy was plopped there right before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn’t have any family left, no friends, just his adopted home. 

He loved this country so much. Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who’d stopped breathing years before. Fuckin’ mines and booby traps. 

And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down. 

I lost someone else like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto garage. She fired her weapon, that’s all it took. I don’t know how many pounds of snow and ice brought that roof down. 

She was . . . we were . . . close, you know. We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it “official.” I guess we thought it would make it easier in case something happened to one of us. 

[He looks over at the bleachers, smiling at his wife.] 

Didn’t work. 

[He takes a moment, a long breath.] 

And then there were psych casualties. More than anything else combined. 

Sometimes we’d march into barricaded zones and find nothing but rat-gnawed skeletons. I’m talking about the zones that weren’t overrun, the ones that fell to starvation or disease, or just a feeling that tomorrow wasn’t worth seeing. 

We once broke into a church in Kansas where it was clear the adults killed all the kids first. One guy in our platoon, an Amish guy, used to read all their suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give himself this little cut, this tiny half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he would “never forget.” 

Crazy bastard was sliced from his neck to the bottom of his toes. When the LT found out about it . . . sectioned eight his ass right outa there. 

Most of the Eight Balls were later in the war. Not from the stress, though, you understand, but from the lack of it. We all knew it would be over soon, and I think a lot of people who’d been holding it together for so long must’ve had that little voice that said, “Hey, buddy, it’s cool now, you can let go.” 

I knew this one guy, massive ’roidasaurus, he’d been a professional wrestler before the war. We were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New York, when the wind picked up the scent of a jackknifed big rig. 

It’d been loaded with bottles of perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall scent. He froze and started bawlin’ like a kid. Couldn’t stop. He was a monster with a two grand body count, an ogre who’d once picked up a G and used it as a club for hand-to-hand combat. Four of us had to carry him out on a stretcher. 

We figured the perfume must have reminded him of someone. We never found out who. 

Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a paunch, as much as anyone could have back then, the kinda face you’d see in a prewar heartburn commercial. 

We were in Hammond, Indiana, scouting defenses for the siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of a deserted street, completely intact except for boarded-up windows and a crashed-in front door. He got a look on his face, a grin. We should have known way before he dropped out of formation, before we heard the shot. 

He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR between his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was his home. Those were extreme examples, ones that even I could have guessed.

A lot of the others, you just never knew. For me, it wasn’t just who was cracking up, but who wasn’t. 

Does that make sense? 

One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of bleached bones that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these skulls and start doing a skit, the one from Free to Be, You and Me, the two babies. I only recognized it because my big brother had the record, it was a little before my time. 

Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it. A little crowd started gathering, everyone laughing and howling at these two skulls. “Hi-Hi-I’m a baby.—Well what do you think I am, a loaf’a bread?” And when it was over, everyone spontaneously burst into song, “There’s a land that I see . . .” playing femurs like goddamn banjos. I looked across the crowd to one of our company shrinks. 

I could never pronounce his real name, Doctor Chandra-something.7 I made eye contact and gave him this look, like “Hey, Doc, they’re all nut jobs, right?” 

He must have known what my eyes were asking because he just smiled back and shook his head. That really spooked me; I mean, if the ones who were acting loopy weren’t, then how did you know who’d really lost it? 

Our squad leader, you’d probably recognize her. 

She was in The Battle of the Five Colleges. Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who’d sung that song? She didn’t look like she used to in the movie. She’d burned off her curves and a crew cut replaced all that long, thick, shiny black hair. 

She was a good squad leader, “Sergeant Avalon.” 

One day we found a turtle in a field. Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got this look, I don’t know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her whisper something to the turtle, I thought it was gibberish: “Mitakuye Oyasin.” 

I found out later that it was Lakota for “all my relations.” I didn’t even know she was part Sioux. She never talked about it, about anything about her. 

And suddenly, like a ghost, there was Doctor Chandra, with that arm he always put around their shoulders and that soft, no-big-deal offer of “C’mon, Sarge, let’s grab a cup of coffee.” 

That was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little voice. “Hey, buddy, it’s cool now, you can let go.” 

I know a lot of people weren’t so into the VP, like there was no way he could replace the Big Guy. I really felt for him, mainly ’cause I was now in the same position. 

With Avalon gone, I was squad leader. It didn’t matter that the war was almost over. There were still so many battles along the way, so many good people to say good-bye to. 

By the time we reached Yonkers, I was the last of the old gang from Hope. I don’t know how I felt, passing all that rusting wreckage: the abandoned tanks, the crushed news vans, the human remains. I don’t think I felt much of anything. Too much to do when you’re squad leader, too many new faces to take care of. 

I could feel Doctor Chandra’s eyes boring into me. He never came over though, never let on that there was anything wrong. When we boarded the barges on the banks of the Hudson, we managed to lock eyes. 

He just smiled and shook his head. I’d made it."