Lance Corporal Kim Bock didn’t know what was going on, but she knew things were fucked. The day after China dropped the nuke they were told it was boots up, and then they were told to stand down. Yesterday there had been a hastily organized training session to review procedures for putting on bio suits and gas masks, and it looked like it was going to be boots up again. But then they’d been ordered back to barracks and after spending a couple of hours packing and repacking gear, they’d been left to their own devices. There wasn’t any news, and even Honky Joe, who had been on and off the phone with his father, had no real information to add.
And then, all of a sudden, the radio and television and Internet were exploding with news and everything was all India and spiders and every goddamned airplane in the country was grounded and then everybody with any kind of ribbons or medals was yelling at them to clean their weapons and gear up and board a bus. Go, go, go!
So here they were. On a bus. A school bus. An honest-to-God yellow school bus. Mitts had looked at Kim and she’d shrugged. It didn’t make a lot of sense to her either. They were good Marines, and so they had gotten onto the school buses, packs on their laps and M16s beside them. Elroy had his earbuds in and she could hear the music leaking out—the same old country shit he always listened to—and Mitts, Duran, and Honky Joe were playing cards with Goons. Kim squirmed around in her seat so she could talk to Sue.
To say that Private Sue Chirp came from a very different background from Kim was putting it mildly. Kim’s parents had met at Howard University. Her mom was a pediatric oncologist and her dad taught ninth-and tenth-grade history at the National Cathedral School. He liked to joke that he—and Kim, when she’d been a student there, which was one of his perks as a faculty member—was a nice splash of color for the school. As far as Kim could tell, she was the only person in her graduating class who hadn’t gone directly to college, and even though her parents had eventually come around to her desire to serve, they still expected her to go to college at some point. While Kim’s family wasn’t rich compared with most of her friends at the National Cathedral School, they were well-off, and that made them seem like billionaires compared with Sue.
Sue Chirp came to the Marines straight from the backwoods of West Virginia. Kim hadn’t really thought there was a backwoods anymore, but meeting Sue had convinced her otherwise. Sue was smart and she was going to be a good Marine, but that was only because she didn’t really have any other choice. She’d never met her dad, and her mom cycled through a series of boyfriends and was in and out of jail, usually for drugs. Once they’d gotten to know each other a bit, Sue told Kim that the scar on her arm was a burn from when she was six and her mom’s meth cooking had gone awry. But the Marines were a great equalizer, and despite their very different upbringings, with Sue white, poor, and mostly neglected, with the armed forces her only way out, and with Kim black, relatively wealthy, and the focus of her parents’ lives, choosing the Marines over the easier path that had been laid before her, the two of them had become very good friends. Maybe it was just that they were both women trying to make their way through what had always been a man’s world, or maybe it was just that Sue was nice and smart. And funny.
“How long do you think we’re going to be on these buses?” Sue asked. “Long enough for the brass to figure out that some of their Marines can’t piss in bottles?”
Duran, who had a bit of a thing for Sue, leaned back, holding his cards to his chest. “I’ll hold the bottle for you if you want to try.”
“You into golden showers, Duran?” Sue said.
That got Sue a laugh, and it made Kim smile. She’d been trying to persuade Sue to give Duran a chance. He was a good guy, and from what Sue had told her about her dating history, a good guy was something she wasn’t used to. Besides, with the Chinese dropping nukes and spiders eating India and this fucked-up deployment, why not?