She makes the bed, pulls the ratty sheet over the mattress and tucks it in tightly, then straightens out the wrinkles. Then she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes for a nap. Fed and rested can fight longer and run faster than hungry and tired.
When the door opens again, she is awake instantly. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits on the edge, hands clasped in front of her. At least they didn’t shackle her wrists.
The tall, lean, handsome visitor from before walks into the room. He’s wearing the same sanitized fatigues—no rank insignia, no name tag, no unit patches. He eyes the empty meal tray on the floor. Then he picks up the chair from the corner of the room again and puts it in the precise spot he had placed it earlier, as close to the bed as possible while still being out of the reach of the shackled Jackson.
“Where am I?” she asks him. “Who are you? How long have I been under?”
He flashes the sparest of smiles. Then he sits down on the chair and straightens out the tunic of his fatigues.
“You are in PRC Detroit-22, in one of the residence towers we control. My name is Lazarus, and I am in charge of the force that captured and disarmed your platoon. You have been under for three days.”
“Lazarus,” she says, and almost chuckles. “Come back from the dead, did you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Lazarus says. “It’s a bit of a long story, and I’m not sure you’d be interested even if I were in the mood to tell you.”
“They’ll tear this place apart when they come looking for us,” Jackson says. Lazarus shakes his head slowly.
“I have no doubt they’ll be back soon with more people, but we’ve long left the block where we ambushed your unit. We never use the same trick twice from the same spot. They’ll need to drop a whole battalion just to get control of one block, never mind twelve.”
“You control the entire PRC,” Jackson says, incredulity creeping into her voice.
“Most of it,” Lazarus says. “The wonders of centralized control and command. Now let me ask you a question.”
He reaches into one of the chest pockets of his tunic and pulls out a set of dog tags on a chain. Then he dangles them from his fingers for her to see.
“You had these on you when we stripped you of your gear. Would you mind telling me how you got them?”
The dog tags are those of Anna McKenney, of course. She had been carrying them in the water-tight pocket insert where she keeps all her personal stuff. She looks at Lazarus, who is returning her gaze impassively.
“I took them off a woman’s neck on the street in one of your shithole PRCs in the center of this shithole of a city.”
“Did you kill her?”
Jackson senses that a lot is riding on her answer. She doesn’t even consider lying.
“She wounded one of my troopers. Was about to finish him off. I put two bursts into her. Fuckin’ right I killed her.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at her with this steely, unmoved expression, but she can tell there’s a lot swirling behind those eyes right now. Then he lets out a small sigh and looks down at his hands.
“I suspected as much. We never found her body, but we had a lot of missing that night. What a waste.”
Jackson agrees, although for different reasons. She doesn’t say anything else, though. Lazarus shakes his head and puts the dog tags back into his pocket.
“It’s all a waste, you know. Us down here, squabbling about who gets to eat how much of what shitty calories, you up there putting the boot on our throats whenever the pot boils over.”
“We keep order,” Jackson says. “We hold the line.”
Lazarus shakes his head with a sad smile.
“Is that what you think you’re doing? Do you see anyone glad for your presence whenever you come down into a PRC? Do you honestly not know how these people see you when you come in with your gunships and your battle armor, and walk the streets like you own the place?”
“Food’s shitty,” Jackson says. “Life sucks. I know. I was welfare before I joined up. But without the TA keeping you all from burning the place down, there wouldn’t be any calories for anyone.”
“You ought to know better than that, Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” Lazarus says. “You’re not there for our benefit. You’re there to keep the shit from spilling over into the suburbs and the upper-class gated communities. You’re attack dogs, and you don’t even know who is holding your leashes. When people see you tromping down the street in the PRC, they don’t see law and order. They don’t see civilization. They see an occupying army.”
Lazarus gets up, puts the chair back into the corner of the room, and looks at the door in front of him, fists clenched. Then he turns around, and for the first time Jackson can see emotion through his disciplined, collected expression.
“Just so you know, Anna McKenney was one of my platoon leaders. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known. Hell of a fighter, too. She was Navy, you know. Never had a lick of infantry training. We were together. If I had something like a soulmate in this life, she was it.”
Jackson feels her face flush, and she’s glad her skin color doesn’t make it obvious to Lazarus.
“I’m telling you this so you can appreciate how hard it is for me to not just go outside, fetch a rifle, and shoot you right in the forehead.”
He turns around and leaves the room. The door falls into its lock in his wake. Jackson doesn’t even realize she has been holding her breath for the last few moments until she exhales shakily.
Chapter Eight
Choices
The noise of the door opening shakes Jackson out of her sleep. Two of the uniformed civvies walk in. One stands by the door with a rifle, the other tosses a set of fatigues and a pair of slip-on shoes onto the bed.
“Get dressed,” he says. Then he steps up to the foot of the bed and snips her plastic restraints with a tool. “You try any funny shit, Olsen’s gonna go full auto on your ass.”
She gathers the clothes they gave her and gets out of bed. The pain in her side is still there, still just this side of tolerable. She wonders if anything got broken permanently.
The uniformed civvies don’t look like they have any intention of letting her get dressed in private, so she puts on the clothes while they’re watching her. She glances at their gear and the way they’re positioned, then concludes that she won’t be able to drop the closer one before the rifleman by the door mows her down with the M-66 he’s aiming at her.
When she’s dressed, they step out of the room and wave her forward.
“We’re moving. Go in front of me. Olsen will be behind us. You turn toward him, he’ll shoot you. Now move.”
She obeys and leaves the room, careful not to give Olsen an excuse to twitch his trigger finger.
Outside, there’s a narrow hallway that looks like it’s in a basement somewhere. Jackson follows the first civvie as instructed. The hallway leads out into a spacious vestibule. Out here, at least a dozen armed civvies in partial battle rattle are gathered, Lazarus in the middle of the group. He’s wearing chest and back plates, a sidearm on a drop holster, and a harness with magazine pouches. When she steps into the vestibule, it seems that every pair of eyes in the room is on her.