He heard the patio door slide open right beneath him. The twins came out and crossed the pavers to the edge of the pool. While they waited for its thermal cover to retract, they peeled each other’s clothes off, taking their time with it, kissing, whispering to each other in whatever language it was they spoke. They weren’t really twins; Cobb had simply thought of them that way since the day he’d met them. They looked like each other, that was all—same skinny little bodies, same big dark eyes and pert little tits, same pouty expressions when the whiskey or the vodka or the pot ran out, though there was always someone by to restock it inside of an hour. Cobb didn’t even know the girls’ names. In his head he called them Callie and Iola, for shits.
He watched as the steam from the uncovered pool filled the air around them—the girls insisted on keeping the damned thing at 100 degrees, and Cobb didn’t argue; he sure as hell wasn’t paying the energy bill for this place. Before the steam cloud obscured them, Callie slipped into the pool and Iola seated herself at its edge, her feet dangling in the water. Callie went under the surface and came up again right in front of Iola, her face between her thighs. The girls were only shapes in the steam now; Cobb watched as Callie’s face dipped forward and Iola leaned back on the pavers, her breathing turning into cute little moans. Cobb glanced over his shoulder at the nightstand clock in the bedroom. Thirty minutes until his shift started. Plenty of time to go down to the pool and join them.
It was the damnedest thing, the turns life could take. A year and a half earlier he’d been a logistics specialist—which was to say a warehouse worker—stocking shelves at a supply depot in Ramadi. In addition to killing camel spiders the size of his Christ-loving hands, that life had consisted of squaring away pallets of toilet paper and potato chips and coffee for the private American army in Iraq—about the same size as the real army that’d withdrawn a few years before. Cobb had woken up every morning there in his shitty little particleboard housing unit, his twenty-third birthday just behind him, his framed diploma from Ohio State six thousand miles away at his folks’ place in Rochester, and he’d thought the same thing he so often thought now: How the hell did I end up here? Hadn’t that always been the million-dollar question, though? Yes indeedy. Seth Cobb, the directionless wonder. Where will the wind take him next?
Where it had taken him about fifteen months ago was to a hiring office out at the edge of the company grounds, there in Ramadi, after someone had stuffed a bright green flyer under his door in the middle of the night. The flyer had been both vague and right to the point.
GENEROUS PAY EXCELLENT LIVING CONDITIONS (NON MIDDLE-EAST LOCATION) MUST BE WILLING TO CUT OFF CONTACT WITH FAMILY, LOVED ONES FOR FIVE YEARS / EXTENSIVE PHYSICAL AND PSYCH TESTING REQUIRED
Cobb had family and loved ones, but he was more than willing to miss out on their company for five years, and he was quite sure the feeling was mutual. So just like that, he’d found himself sitting at a little desk in the run-down building the flyer had directed him to. It was a disused hangar of some kind; he could see fuel stains on the concrete floor. There was a door to a back room, and every time someone opened it Cobb got a glimpse of bulky, high-end medical equipment inside. One of the machines was an MRI, he thought.
Before he got any closer to that room, there were written tests to complete. These would turn out to be the strangest part of the whole process. None of the questions were difficult, exactly. There weren’t even right and wrong answers, only judgment calls, like Your house is on fire and your dog is trapped inside; do you risk your life to save him? Or Would you play a single round of Russian roulette to save a loved one from certain death? After two days’ worth of that stuff, the written tests had culminated in something that deeply puzzled Cobb—at the time, at least. He had been made to sit off in a corner of the big room, away from any other applicant, and a man in his thirties had sat down directly behind him, saying nothing. The man just sat there while Cobb paged through one final test packet. This last test, he saw, contained no questions. There were just instructions, like For the next five minutes, think in detail about the worst things you’ve ever done and gotten away with or Have you ever deeply hurt someone you cared about? Think about it, in specifics, for the next five minutes.
What the hell was the point of this, he wondered. He could sit here running Pink Floyd lyrics through his head and they wouldn’t know the difference. But for the hell of it, he went ahead and obeyed the instructions. He found it oddly stressful, after a while; it even seemed to give him a headache, or at least a funny chill at his temples.
That test lasted an hour, and when it was over, the man behind him stood up and left, taking out a phone as he went. Twenty minutes later Cobb had been ushered into the back room at last, and he spent the next four hours getting poked and scanned and being buzzed into the claustrophobic tunnels of diagnostic equipment. That day had ended in a little office outside the hangar, with Cobb seated across from two men he’d never seen before. Both were fortyish and hard and leathery. He never learned their names.
“If you accept this job offer, you’ll be working for a company called Western Dynamics. You know it?”
Cobb nodded. “Big defense contractor.”
“You’ll be required to take three doses of a drug, a simple pill, the first one tonight if you’re on board.”
“Is this a drug trial?”
“Not at all.”