I didn’t answer her. It was after lights-out. But for a long time I couldn’t sleep.
Fort Drum sucked. Snow and cold and it was almost April, for Chrissake. Back home, flowers would be blooming. Sarah would be barefoot in shorts.
She sent me a letter. She was way better’n me at writing.
Dear Jo,
I hope you get this letter. My teacher told me what address to put on it and she give me a stamp. She is nice. I got A on my math test last week.
The big news here is that Jacob is getting married. Nobody knew till now. Her name is Lorna and I don’t like her she is mean but then so is Jacob sometimes so maybe they will be happy together.
My main reason to write you is to say COME HOME!!! I had a real good idea. If you shoot an alien I bet Daddy would forgive you. Seth too. DO IT!!!
“What’s that?” Drucker said. She was looking over my shoulder and I didn’t even hear her come up behind me.
“Nothing!” I said, folding the letter. But she already read it. She must read real fast.
“I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, Jo,” she said—that’s the way she talks. “But I have to say that Sarah—is she your younger sister?—sounds like a really smart kid. With the right ideas.”
Then Drucker looked at me long and serious. I wanted to punch her—for reading my letter, for talking fancy, for not being my family. I didn’t do none of that. Keeping my nose clean. I just said, “Go fuck yourself, Drucker.”
She only laughed.
And who said she gets to call me “Jo”?
Fort Drum was not just cold, it was boring. Drill and hike, hike and drill. But we warn’t there long. After a week, fifty of us had a half-hour to prepare to ship out, down to a city called Albany. Drucker was one of us. For days she’d been trying to friend around with me, and sometimes I let her. Usually I keep to myself, but listening to her took my mind off home, at least for a while.
“Where the fuck is Albany?” I said on the bus.
A guy in the seat behind me laughed. “Don’t you ever watch the news, Addams?”
“It’s the capital city of New York State,” Drucker said without sounding snotty, which was the other reason I let her hang around with me. She don’t ever act like she knows more’n me, though she does.
I gave the guy behind us the finger and lowered my voice. “What’s going on in Albany?”
Drucker said quietly, “It’s bad. You ever hear about the T-bocs?”
I shook my head. Our buses tore through the gates like it was fleeing demons. Wherever Albany was, the army wanted us there fast.
“The Take Back Our Country organization. Anti-alien terrorists, the largest and best armed and organized of all those groups. They’ve captured a warehouse outside Albany, big fortified place used to store explosives. The owners, a corporation, were in the process of moving the stuff out when the T-bocs took the building. They’ve got hostages in there along with the explosives.”
“And we’re going to take the building back?”
Drucker smiled. “Marines and US Rangers are going to take the building back, Addams. We’ll probably just be the outer perimeter guard. To keep away press and stupid civilians.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid myself. “Okay, then.”
“Thing is, some of the hostages are kids.”
“Kids?” I thought of Sarah. “Why were kids in a warehouse?”
“They weren’t. They were brought there. It was all timed just so. This is big.”
Big. Bigger than anything that ever happened to me, or might happen to me, in Brightwater. Then Drucker said something that made it bigger.
“Our kids, Jo. And three of theirs.”
Drucker was right, about every last thing. We were perimeter guards for a real big perimeter—half a mile around the warehouse. There was houses and train tracks and other buildings and trucks with no cabs and huge big dumpsters and a homeless tent town, and every last one of them had to be cleared of people. I was with a four-man stack, flushing out everybody who didn’t have enough sense to already leave, which was a lot of people. We cleared rooms and escorted out squatters and made tenants in the saggy houses pack up what they could carry and then leave. Some of them got angry, shouting that they had no place to go. Some of them cried. One man attacked with a sledge hammer, which didn’t get him nowhere. My sarge knew what he was doing—he cleared rooms in Iraq, where the enemy had more’n sledgehammers.
Drucker was right about something else, too. There were kids in there. Turns out that seven years ago, while Daddy and Seth and Jacob were losing their jobs in the mines and we got evicted from our house, the Likkies put some of their kids in special schools with our kids so they could all learn each other’s languages and grow up together just like there warn’t no difference between us and them. The T-bocs took that school and transported six kids to the warehouse. Seven bodyguards and five teachers at the school were dead. They mighta been pretty good bodyguards, but the T-bocs had military weapons.
“I told you it was big,” Drucker said.
“Yeah, you did.” We just spent twenty hours clearing buildings. Then fresh troops arrived to relieve us, more experienced soldiers. We’d been first just because we were closest. Rangers and Marines were there but they warn’t permitted to do nothing while the negotiators tried to talk the T-bocs down. Drucker and I were off-duty, laying on mats in a high school gym that was now a barracks. I had a shower in the locker room and I was so tired my bones felt like melting. It warn’t a bad feeling.
But Drucker wanted to talk.
“What do you think about all this, Jo?”
“I’m not thinking.”
“Well, start. Do you think the T-bocs are justified?”
“Justified? You mean, like, right to kidnap kids? How old are them kids, anyway?”
“Second graders. The humans are seven years old, two girls and a boy, all the children of VIPS. Who knows how old the Likkies are? Maybe they just live a real short time, like insects, and these so-called ‘kids’ are really adults halfway through their lives.”
“That warn’t what our lectures said.”
“Do you believe everything the army tells you?”
I raised up on one elbow and looked at her. In the half-light her eyes shone too bright, like she was using. Was she?
Drucker sat all the way up. We’d hauled our gym mats into a corner and nobody else could hear.
“Jo, you told me your family are all unemployed and on welfare because of the Likkies. I imagine that’s a deep shame to people like yours, isn’t it?”
“Shut up,” I said, ’cause she was right. Shame is what made Daddy and them so angry. All their choices got taken away by the aliens.
“But it’s not right,” she said, real soft. “This is supposed to be our country. These aliens are just more damn immigrants trying to take it away. Sometimes I think the army is on the wrong side. Do you ever think that, Jo?”
“Shut up,” I said again, ’cause I didn’t like hearing my thoughts coming from her mouth. “You using?”
“Yes. Want some?”
“No.”
“That’s all right. I just wanted the chance to express my thoughts, so thank you for listening. You’re a real friend.”
We warn’t friends. I shoulda said that, but I didn’t. I waited, ’cause it was clear she warn’t done. If she was trying to recruit me for something, I wanted to hear what.