Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

“You should go see your father,” my mom says from the kitchen.

I look up from my book reader and glance at her. She is putting a meal tray into the warming unit, and her back is turned to me, so she can’t see the smirk I’m giving her. I go back to reading about the destruction of the Pequod, which is a much more interesting subject right now.

“Did you hear me, Andrew?”

“I heard you, Mom. I’m just ignoring you.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Are you not going to go and say good-bye before shipping out?”

“Why the hell should I? He’ll just be drugged out of his mind, anyway.”

Mom takes the meal tray out of the food warmer, which seems to work as intended for a change. She walks over to the table and puts the tray in front of me, with emphasis.

“Put that thing away for dinner, please.”

I let out a sigh—also with emphasis—and turn off the book reader.

“You’ll be in training for months, Andrew. With the way his cancer is going, you’ll probably never see him again.”

“Good,” I say.

Mom glares at me with an expression that’s a blend of sadness and anger, and for a moment, I’m expecting her to slap me across the face, something that she hasn’t done since I was ten. Then her glare softens, and she looks out of the window, where thick bands of rain are pouring down onto the concrete gerbil maze of our Public Residence Cluster. I hate rainy days—the moisture makes the smell worse.

“He’s still your father,” she says. “You’ll never get another chance to speak to him again. If you don’t go and see him, you’ll regret it someday.”

“You broke his nose when you left him,” I remind her. “You weren’t too broken up about the cancer. Why the hell should I care?”

“That was seven years ago,” Mom says. She pulls out a chair and sits down at the table. “A lot of stuff has happened since then. He was proud of you when I told him about you being accepted into the Service, you know.”

She looks at me, and I try to ignore her gaze as I peel off the seal on the meal tray. The flavor of the day is chicken and rice. There’s not much you can do with the processed protein in the Basic Nutritional Allowance to make it appealing. I poke the fake chicken patty with my fork, and look up to see that Mom is still looking at me, with that dejected expression she has when she’s trying to make me feel bad about something. I hold her gaze for a moment and then shrug my shoulders.

“I’ll go and see him,” I say. “And if I get robbed and killed on the way over there, I hope you feel bad about it.”

My room is just big enough for a bed, desk, and dresser. All the furniture is made out of stainless steel, bolted to the floor so we can’t dismantle it for scrap. The dresser is half empty. I don’t own enough stuff to fill it up.

I open the top drawer, and toss the book reader onto the small pile of clothes inside. I traded a box of ancient rimfire ammunition for it last year, and the guy who traded with me thought I was a complete moron. The school property stickers are impossible to remove, but the Public Housing Police doesn’t get excited about school hardware. When they do their sweeps, they only look for guns and drugs. I could keep the book reader hidden if I wanted, but the cops gets suspicious when they find nothing illicit at all.

As I walk through the apartment to the front door, my mother sticks her head out of the kitchen nook.

“Andrew?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“It’s Sunday. Are you going to stop by at the food station and pick up your allowance for the week?”

“I’m leaving for Basic tomorrow. I won’t be around to eat it.”

Mom just looks at me, and she almost looks like she’s ashamed. Then I catch her drift, and I shrug.

“I’ll pick up my allowance, Mom.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but I turn around and close the door behind me, and her reply blends with the hollow clap of the door slamming shut.

The elevator in our wing of the building is out again. I pop the door of the staircase near the elevator, and listen. The stairs are a hangout for the various packs of apprentice hoodlums, who use the confined space to gang up on people. The Public Housing Police only shows up in force when they do a drug and gun sweep. The rest of the time, they stay well away from the tenements. We have security cameras on every floor, but most of them are broken. Nobody gives a shit about welfare rats.

Our apartment is on the twelfth floor of a thirty-floor building. I make my way down the stairs, taking three and four steps at the time, speed over stealth. At the bottom of the staircase, I pause again to listen. Then I open the door to the lobby, and hurry out of the building to fetch my gun.

Guns are illegal, especially in welfare housing, but just about everybody has one anyway. I don’t keep mine in the house because of the random checks, and because Mom would have a fit if she found it. I hide it in a waterproof tube that’s stuck into a crevice of the building’s huge mobile trash incinerator. It’s a great hiding place-nobody ever checks there, and the container is always in the same spot-but it leaves me easy prey until I get out of the building. I check to make sure nobody is watching, and walk over to the trash container.

Every time I reach into the crevice, I expect to come up empty. Every time my hand closes around the cool metal of the magnetic storage cartridge, I let out a breath of relief. I open the lid and take out my gun. It’s an ancient cartridge revolver, made over a century and a half ago. It holds only six rounds, but it works even with crummy ammunition, which is far more common than the good kind. Most of my meager ammo stash is hand-loaded from old brass cases and scrounged lead scraps. Revolvers are more popular than automatics because a dud doesn’t tie up the gun.

I stick the revolver into my pants, right behind the hip bone, where the tension of the waistband holds the gun in place. It’s risky to walk around with an illegal gun, but it’s riskier still to walk around in the Public Residence Cluster unarmed.

There’s one thing that’s nice about the rain. It keeps most people indoors, even the predators. When it rains, the streets outside are almost peaceful. I pull up the hood of my jacket, and walk out into the street.

I’m soaked to the bone within five minutes. You can stay mostly dry if you use the awnings and building overhangs as cover, but I’d rather get wet. Doorways and other dark places close to buildings are dangerous. You walk past one where a bunch of apprentice thugs loiter, and your journey is over. I almost got mugged twice last year, and I’m more careful than most.

My father’s apartment building is almost at the other end of the PRC. There’s a Public Transit station nearby, but I can’t enter without setting off the gun scanners at the entrance, so I walk.

This is the place where I grew up. I’ve never been outside of the Boston Metroplex. Tomorrow, I’ll be off to Basic Training, and if I don’t wash out, I’ll never see this place again. I’m leaving behind everything I’ve ever known, and everyone who’s ever known me, and I can’t wait.

Dad opens the door after my third buzz. I last saw him over a year ago, and for a moment, I am shocked at how much he has changed since then. His face is haggard. When he was younger, he was a very handsome man, but the cancer has eaten away most of his substance, physically and mentally. His teeth are horribly bad, enough to make me want to recoil when he opens his mouth to smile.