Destroyer made a face at that but said nothing.
Mac pitched his citrus baseball — Destroyer swung, hit the orange dead on. It angled like a meteor across the barracks and smacked wetly into the wall just above Duke’s head. Fingers dancing over keyboard and mouse, Duke didn’t even flinch.
Another orange whooshed by, just missing Goat’s left ear. Maybe Mac did that on purpose — being a practical joker, he probably did.
“Where you going, Kid?” Duke asked, still not looking up.
The Kid paused in his brooming. Everyone looked at him. He cleared his throat. “Me? Oh…I gotta stay here.”
Portman made a bogus sound of sympathy. “Oh. Oh that’s tragic. Grunt’s been here, like, ninety seconds. He ain’t never been in rotation.”
Destroyer reached into his bag of oranges. “Sorry, Kid, you don’t get R&R till you’ve at least been shot at…”
Head ducked low, Portman shot the Kid a glare. “My heart fuckin’ bleeds for you. Sweep up, you fuckin’ pussy.”
Duke clucked his tongue in disapproval of Portman’s tone. “Hey, this kid was the best marksman in his entire division. Don’t listen to ’em, Kid. We’re all glad to have you here.” After a moment he added, “Now sweep up, you fuckin’ pussy.”
Everyone laughed at that, even the Kid. Okay, so not everyone, after alclass="underline" Reaper hadn’t laughed since the last assignment. Right now, the Kid saw, as he swept his broom into an alcove off the main room, Reaper was sitting at a table, assembling and disassembling a heavy, gunmetal black light machine gun so fast his fingers blurred. The Kid whistled in admiration at Reaper’s skill.
“How fast, sir?” he asked.
“Not fast enough,” Reaper said.
Reaper assembled the weapon again. His fingers, picking up components and snapping them into place, seem to have a life of their own.
“Looks damn fast to me, sir,” the Kid said.
Reaper looked at him. “Call me John, Kid. I work for a living, just like you.”
The Kid smiled. But the uncertainty must’ve been there in his face anyway, because Reaper added, “Give it time, Kid. You’ll get it.”
“What about you, Reaper?” Destroyer asked, raising his voice so Reaper could hear, in his alcove, tossing an orange from hand to hand. “Where you going?”
Reaper didn’t answer.
They all turned to look — they knew about the psych-tech. They’d picked up on his mood, anyway, you couldn’t miss it.
You felt the burn of his bad mood like a tanning light on sunburn, Destroyer thought.
“Yeah what’s it gonna be, Reaps?” Duke asked — actually glancing up from the game this time. “An armed conflict someplace quiet.”
“Little relaxing jungle warfare?” Portman chimed in.
Duke grinned. “Or you gonna stay here cleanin’ your piece, doing push-ups?”
Reaper winked at the Kid, picked up his rifle. “Well you know, Duke, I thought maybe I’d drop by your mom’s house, wait in line.”
The others laughed. Duke didn’t. Reaper just stared him down.
Reaper didn’t feel like letting them know that for once he was looking forward to R&R. He figured maybe some vacation would get him into another frame of mind. Anything so he could stop thinking about Jumper. That day in the jungle.
He put the gun aside, and went to pack his duffel.
But he was wasting his time, packing for R&R. He didn’t know it yet, but he wasn’t going on furlough.
He was going to Hell.
In the dimly lit, spartan NCO quarters down the hall, sat the NCO himself, the guy whose men just called him Sarge. He sat on his bunk, shirtless, staring at a blank wall. Big guy. About as muscular as you can be without being pussy enough to resort to steroids. Head shaved, dark skin reflecting his indeterminate racial mix. But you could see the tattoos — he’s a living canvas for tattoos muraling his massive shoulders, down his arms, across his chest: each one a souvenir of a campaign, or an invasion — an invasion of a whorehouse, in some cases.
Anybody just walking in might’ve thought he was talking to himself, till they noticed the headset.
“Go ahead…” He listened. Nodded to himself. “Access level of threat,” he said. “Code black. Containment or quarantine…”
He was repeating what someone was saying to him, verifying, confirming it to memory.
“…Extreme prejudice…Search and destroy…Orders received and understood.”
Sarge stood up and shrugged into a cammie T-shirt, already on his way out the door, down the hall, his big boots ringing on the steps down to the barracks.
At the bottom of the stairs he took one step out into the barracks, and the laughter in the room ceased. Everyone looked at him with a mixture of dread and anticipation.
“Ah, shit,” Portman muttered.
Something in Sarge’s face, his whole manner clued them in to what was coming.
“Listen up,” Sarge said. A voice like an electric bass on its lowest note. The Marshall amp’s volume knob was on three but it could go up to ten. “Leave is canceled.”
The men looked at one another. Amazement. Disgust. Wry resignation. No one with the nerve to complain, though it was obvious from Portman’s expression that he’d like to. Finally, looking at those expressions, Duke had to laugh out loud.
“You got a problem, Duke?” Sarge asked.
“Me, Sarge? Hell, no. I love my job.” Duke smiled sunnily. Mac grinned.
Sarge just looked back at him, his dark, deeply etched face almost expressionless.
It was time to ask the obvious question. They waited. Finally, Destroyer asked it. “Whassup, Sarge?”
“We got us a game.” He looked at the Kid. “Kid — you’re up.”
The Kid leaned his broom against a locker. Reaper could tell he didn’t know what to do with himself after that. Just sort of stood there in the middle of the floor.
“You’re in the RRTS now, boy,” Sarge went on. “And what do we do in the RRTS?”
Everyone responded to that one at once: “Pray for war!”
Except for Goat, who only shook his head. He’d been praying along different lines.
Reaper was thinking maybe it was better this way. In some part of his mind he’d been afraid he might be a loose cannon in the civilian community. The way he’d been feeling, it might be dangerous if he got drunk.
He didn’t want to spend any time in prison. Not even a civilian one.
“Fall in,” Sarge told them, his eyes on Reaper as he spoke.
Portman growled deep in his throat but fell in with the others to file out of the room, heading upstairs.
“Great vacation,” Duke muttered to Destroyer, as they went. “They go so quick, don’t they?”
“Almost like we’ve never been away.”
Reaper started to go with them — but Sarge stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Not this time, Reaper.”
“What?” Reaper was genuinely surprised.
“Take the furlough. We can handle this one.”
“We got a game, Sarge.” The term in this unit’s argot meant it was going to be tough — balls-out, hard-core tough. Yeah: maybe that was just what he needed. Something so demanding there’d be no time to think. That was another problem with R&R: you had too much time to think. “We got a game, I’m ready.”
And Reaper started obstinately for the stairs.
“It’s Olduvai,” Sarge said, simply.
Reaper stopped in his tracks. A shiver went through him. A feeling like superstitious dread. “Olduvai?”
“Just take the leave.”
“Is that an order?”