Chapter 14: Hunger Pains

That first morning, from the black void nothing of deep sleep, an explosion of words ripped John back into consciousness.

“Wake the fuck up!”

The fluorescent lights above blared down. John shouldn’t have taken the top bunk, but there was no time for regret. He hit the ground running, snatched his socks out of the footlocker, and scrambled to put them on. Through the numbing haze of the adrenaline, his back roared in pain. The muscles spasmed and locked. He couldn’t stand.

“Count off!” The DI walked down the line, and the recruits yelled out their number: “one”, “two”, and “three.”

John’s upper body still dangled like his entire body hung from a butcher’s hook. Only a few more until the DI found John helpless within his own body. Sylvester cupped his arm underneath John’s armpit and pulled up.

“Seven!” John barked out his number, and the DI passed by. A sudden desire to laugh out loud almost leaped from his mouth. He clamped his jaw shut.

“Eight!” Sylvester couldn’t catch, but he came through when it mattered.

The whole counting off thing was to make sure none of the recruits ran off in the night. But where were they supposed to escape? The DI kept walking, and the tension in John’s back drained. The potential shitstorm had passed. It had taken six tries to get the count off finished the night before. The day before drained the recruits, and the brief sleep did nothing to replenish them.

“Twenty-three!”

“Twenty-five!”

John and the recruits across the way winced. It seemed like such a simple task. Start with one and incremented the count. It ended up to be plenty hard to do through the maelstrom of sleep-deprived thoughts. Whatever sleep they got, it wasn’t near enough.

“I didn’t see any empty beds,” the DI screamed in the recruit’s face, “so that means you deformed children of incestuous union ran out of fingers and toes to count on. Let’s do it again!”

***

John squeezed his fist behind his backpack and ground his knuckles into the shredded muscles. He didn’t see much besides the rocks and dirt of the trail in front of him, not Hollow Mountain’s supposed view of the city behind him. He didn’t have the energy to turn around and see it, but the few times he dragged his chin up, trees and plants surrounded him. Their leaves showed pallid shades of green fringed with a dying brown. All of that didn’t matter. He walked among nature, a far cry from the urban density of Hadfield. They had climbed above the pollution. Plants, moss, and soil permeated the air. Still, he was too tired and in far too much agony to give a rat’s ass.

The recruits swapped out their gray sweatpants for green fatigues. The DI had loaded up their packs with equipment they wouldn’t need. The early morning wake up stunned the recruits far too much for them to ask why. Once the DI had told them to hike up that the mountain at the end of the O’Neil, a mission had popped up in the WarFace, a measly 10 XP. Still, 10 XP was ten closer to Level 1, and one level closer to that ineffable victory.

Cocoon City must have been on one of the outer levels of the O’Neil. No matter how much John climbed, the gravity stayed the same. They were nowhere near the center.

“What do you think your class will be?” Elroy asked everyone.

Bravo company climbed the mountain in single file along the trail. Their band of four—Justice, Sylvester, Elroy, and John dead last—pulled up the rear. They took it slow for John’s sake. His stomach churned, and theirs must have, too. None of them ate that morning.

“I hope I get roughhead.” Sylvester stopped crunching the rocks under his boots. He held out his arms like he was resting a weighty machine gun on his hip and made machine gun sounds with his mouth like he was unloading into the leafy underbrush. In reality—or whatever this was—a massive gun would put Sylvester on his ass.

“I think I’ll get corpsman,” Elroy pointed a thumb at his face, “since I’m already a doctor.”

Elroy probably wanted to drop that knowledge. The guy had a tendency to steer the conversation by asking questions he didn’t really care to hear the answer to. More socially acceptable than just blurting out what he wanted to say.

Sylvester bit down on that hook, glad to have someone else lead him around. “Oh, yeah? What kind of doctor?”

“Neurophysics.”

“So, not practicing?” Justice spoke over his shoulder.

“No.”

The liquid contents of John’s bowels shifted and gurgled.

“What about you?” Sylvester asked Justice.

Justice shrugged. “Dunno. Corpsman, maybe?”

Justice said as little as possible. When he did, he spoke only in vagaries. He wore mystery like a cloak.

“Nobody wants to be an invader?” Elroy asked. “In too much of the shit?”

“How about you, John?” Sylvester spun on his heel. “You going to be our invader or bowman class?”

Class. Her first class.

John would miss Oly’s first class at school. She hadn’t even started kindergarten the last time he saw her in the Easterbrook residence, her deep brown eyes gazing into his. He would miss her first class, her first dance, her first date. Without him, she would grow into a girl, into a youthful woman. She would marry, and John would never know her new caste family name.

That wailing, the same cry of Oly’s that tortured John in his cell, bounced inside the confines of his skull. An iced hand reached into his guts and squeezed. John halted, unbuckled the pack, and let it slip off his shoulders to the ground. He planted his ass on a dust-covered rock. “I can’t do this.”

The others stopped with him.

Sylvester scratched his chin. “What do you mean you can’t?”

John’s stomach rumbled. He flipped open the pack’s top and rummaged around for the MRE somewhere down there. “I can’t do this without food in my stomach.”

“I don’t think we have a choice.” Elroy shifted the weight on his back. “The DI said we can eat when we get to the top.”

“I don’t care what the DI said.” John snaked his hand around the useless shit in the pack: a tent, a fly, poles, and pegs. They weren’t even going to spend the night outside. It baffled him how some nylon would make for a decent shelter.

“If you want to get your ass beat twice,” Justice looked up the mountain where the DI had led bravo company, “go ahead. Don’t listen to the DI.”

“I’m hungry.” John reached down for the thick foil container. He shouldn’t have put the MRE on the bottom.

“You know,” Sylvester lowered his weight down onto the rock beside him, still wearing the pack, “my caste family wasn’t always working.”

John stopped his rummaging. Something inside him told him to listen.

“In between contracts, we had to ration our food.” Sylvester looked between the trees, to the city shrouded in smog. “Most of the time, by the start of the next contract, the food had already run out. We would have to work, anyway. If we didn’t, we’d keep on starving. And the hunger? Hunger is just a sensation. We can make it up this mountain, food or no.”

“I love this town!” The voice came from above. Only the DI could be that loud. He stood on the edge of a rock outcropping. One more step and he would meet death. Yet, he belonged there like he had always been part of the mountain itself.

John peered up the mountain. “Gotta wonder what up with them.”

“Like, are all the DIs the same guy or what?” Sylvester pointed a thumb at John. “Maybe you should ask him.”

“Naw. Not going to do that.”

Four barbwire topped fences quartered the training camp, each with an identical layout. John found Bravo Company’s quarter. He traced the pre-sunrise route. The other quarters must have been for other companies. A multi-story square building in the center dominated the camp.

John said, letting the words grumble out of him. “He doesn’t sound too far.”

Sylvester nodded. “We’re not far.”

John put his arms through the pack straps. “Let’s get this suckage over with.”