I fought through a dense patch of undergrowth and bolted across the open ground beyond. Something huge crashed and rattled and hissed behind me. I hadn’t caught a glimpse, but I had some guesses as to what could produce sounds like that, and none of my theories were promising.
Yanking the straps of my pack tighter, I cut to the right, past a tree the width of a house. The ground sloped sharply downward, and I lost my footing, falling backwards into a slide. As I flew down the slope, I stirred up a whirlwind of slippery leaves.
A chasm waited for me at the bottom. I dug my feet into the slope to brake my descent. Instead of slowing down, I flipped forward, careening toward empty space.
I stuck my arms out to meet the ground and felt a splintery crack as my left wrist broke. Sharp white blades of pain tore their way up my arm. I rolled to a stop just short of the edge, then forced myself up and into a stumbling run.
A round black rocket buzzed out of the pit and whipped over my head. I ducked, buffeted by the wall of air that followed, and glanced up to see the beetle wheel and whizz back for another pass, mouthparts slavering.
The beetle was only a bit bigger than me, and when it hit me I was able to jam my right hand against the side of its head to hold the clacking razor-edged jaws at bay. It wrapped me in its legs and carried me over the chasm. Ignoring the pain, I scrabbled with my left hand for the knife at my side, dimly aware of the bottomless pit below.
As the jaws fought to reach me, I jammed the knife hilt-deep into the beetle’s thorax. The impact jarred my broken wrist, and my fingers spasmed free of the knife, but the damage was done. The beetle let me go.
I landed on the far edge of the chasm. More black shapes blurred out of the pit as I picked myself up. I dove into a thick wall of razorgrass, covering my face with my arms. Again I heard the rattling hiss, the heavy crunching footfalls.
Bleeding from a hundred minor lacerations, nearly blind with pain and fear, I made for a dark cove beneath a fallen branch. No sooner had I slid into the darkness than a tarantula flattened the razorgrass and bulled into the open.
For a moment I held my breath and marveled at the spider’s enormity. It was twenty-five feet across, with legs the diameter of telephone poles. Stiff black hair covered its swollen body.
The tarantula lifted two legs and pivoted, pedipalps scrubbing the air. My heart pounded in my ears. Its eyes were like enormous oil droplets, smooth and reflective and black.
I stiffened when it faced my way. Between the pedipalps lurked brown, curved fangs the length of my arm. I needed to breathe, but I couldn’t stand to do it while the tarantula faced me.
It hissed, and I felt the vibrations in my ribs.
Then something soft pressed against my leg and I rolled away, flicking my headlamp on, horror swelling within me.
The cave was filled with huge, glistening maggots. Startled by the headlamp’s harsh light, the maggots squirmed away, clustering at the far end of the burrow.
All except for the one that had brushed my leg. Sensing a meal, it wriggled closer. I reared back and kicked it in the head with both boots.
The maggot’s upper half imploded, white goo splooshing outward in all directions, coating my legs. The smell released was rotten, fatty, and sour.
I swung my head around to check on the tarantula and found its gigantic face pressed against the opening to the burrow. When my headlamp hit its eyes, the spider screamed, and its legs came scrabbling into the gap. I scooted downward, through the gooey remains of the maggot, but the tarantula kept probing, lifting the branch, ripping the ceiling away. Exposed, I scrambled and ran, but the tarantula was much faster than me, and one of its legs effortlessly pinned my lower half to the ground.
Grasping limbs lifted me off the ground, drew me toward the mouth --
I felt the fangs slide into my back --
And then overwhelming white-hot pain, and the simulation shut down, cutting to black. I ripped the VR helmet off my head and yanked the electrodes from my neck. The room was brighter than a camera flash.
Sergeant Rivers barged through the door.
“Careful with the equipment, recruit,” he bellowed. “That rig’s worth a lot more than you are.”
“Yeah, alright,” I said.
The adrenaline made me jittery. My hands shook as I laid the helmet down on its mount.
“That’s your second strike,” said Rivers. “One more failed sim this month and you’re out of here.”
I stalked out, flexing my left hand. It always took my brain a couple minutes to figure out that injuries sustained in the simulation hadn’t actually occurred in real life.
What were my mistakes? Rivers wouldn’t tell me anything until I’d come up with a good explanation on my own. Breaking my wrist was an error. Should have stayed calm on the descent, stopped myself without flipping. Then I could have dodged the beetle and used my grapple gun to escape.
And picking a burrow to hide in had obviously been the wrong move. Maggots were the best-case scenario there. More likely were trapdoor spiders, or snakes, or any number of other predatory things that hid in the forest’s crevices. I should have kept running and grapple-gunned into a tree when I got some distance.
I walked past the leaderboard and couldn’t keep myself from checking it. Lindsey Li was still at the top. She’d scored a perfect ten on each of the past four courses.
My score was near the bottom. Two failures already this month. The two successes were close calls, a pair of sixes, certainly nothing to celebrate.
There were still three simulations to go in September. I had to score much higher, probably eights or nines, to make it through the next round of cuts. And even that was assuming I could place well in the half-marathon next week, and the obstacle course the week after that.
I went into the bathroom and leaned over a toilet, waiting for the nausea to pass. My temples throbbed. VR always gave me a pounding headache. I closed my eyes and counted the pulses of pain.
When the nausea refused to fade, I tried to vomit and failed. As I retched, I watched an oblong black beetle crawl down the wall behind the toilet.
I saw these beetles everywhere. They walked across the ceiling at night and waited for me on my nightstand in the morning.
Following my standard operating procedure, I squashed the beetle with my thumb. The beetle’s remains adhered to my skin, and I brought them close to my face to examine the color of the fluids that had squirted out. Then I tugged off a length of toilet paper and wiped my thumb clean.
At the sink I washed my hands under blistering hot water, switched it to cold, and splashed my face.
Determined to avoid human contact for a few hours, I took the scenic route back to the barracks and crashed on my bunk. The springs wheezed under my weight, and the mattress sagged, but at the moment I didn’t mind a bit.
The room was filled with the acrid odor of industrial glue. The source of the smell was a Scott Brown-shaped hole in the far wall, which hole had been repaired and painted over just this morning. Scott Brown, whose most notable feature was an abundance of dark hair boiling out of his back, chest, arms, and legs, had been avoiding group showers since the earliest days of boot camp, sneaking in after everyone else finished, or washing himself in the bathroom sinks at night, and no one had ever been able to figure out why. The general consensus, fueled by the cloud of body odor that followed Scott everywhere, was that he was simply a hygiene-averse individual. Or at least that had been the consensus until last Thursday, when Hollywood hid in the locker room during dinner and waited to hear the shower turn on, then burst out to discover what Scott had been so afraid of revealing all along: he had an absurdly tiny penis.
Hollywood, true to form, ran to the mess hall to spread the word. By the time Scott arrived, half the recruits were already calling him Acorn.
Scott could have shrugged it off and gone about his life, nickname or no, but he was on the verge of being cut, and the additional pressure of open ridicule broke him wide open. After a few days of “Acorn,” he stole a knife from the kitchen and tried to stab Hollywood to death.
Illustrating the spontaneity of his murder attempt, Scott chose to stage the assault right before lights out, at Hollywood’s bunk, in the middle of thirty-five alert and able-bodied recruits. After regarding the scuffle for a moment, Junior, whose bunk was next to Hollywood’s, sighed and padded over. Junior was immense, almost as tall as Sergeant Rivers, and he lifted Scott into the air without visible effort.
“Chill,” said Junior.
Scott, arms pinned at his sides, tried to figure out a way to slash him.
Junior hurled him into the wall. The impact sent little bits of foam raining down from between the ceiling tiles.
For a moment or two, nobody said a word. Then everyone was talking at once. Someone ran to get help. Scott, embedded in the wall, moaned and twitched.
I was disappointed to see that Hollywood didn’t have a scratch on him. A shallow gash, perhaps on his face somewhere, would have been great. I kept a mental list of all the things I hated about Hollywood. He cut the sleeves off his t-shirts and regaled anybody who would listen with tales of sexual conquest. He took the crusts off of sandwiches and chewed with his mouth open. He used “faggot” as a casual insult and examined his biceps for minutes at a time in the bathroom mirror.
Hollywood stood and gloated over Scott Brown’s plaster-strewn body, twirling the kitchen knife. When the EMTs arrived, he followed them to the ambulance, leaning over the stretcher and mouthing “Acorn.”
Rivers came by a couple minutes later with his boss, a Ranger Corp executive named Diane. Diane listened to the story and scratched away in her notepad, but that was it. The whole incident was swept under the rug with typical Ranger Corp alacrity. When I reported for my sim in the morning, Scott Brown’s name had already been removed from the leaderboard.
Part of me envied Scott. He wouldn’t get to be a ranger, but at least he got to go home.
Suddenly, lying on the bunk with my head throbbing, I decided I wanted to quit. More than anything, I wanted to quit. I wanted to tell Rivers to stuff it, go retrieve my civilian clothes from Reception, and hop on the next airship back to Indianapolis.
Giving up would be so easy. No more waking up every morning at 5 a.m. to run and lift and drill. No more mess hall food, no more simulated death, no more group showers and no more stupid nickname.
Quitting was hardly a solution, though. Every direction I looked, my options were bleak and gray. There was no future for me in Indianapolis. There was only my dad and his house with its once-white paint peeling in long, thick curls, and the garbage can overflowing with bottles at the curb, and the mailbox with its door that didn’t close.
There was only one path that led to the future I wanted. Rangers made enough money in ten years to retire forever. The thought of the money made me salivate. More money in a single year than my dad had made in his entire life. And I was so close, honestly. I’d made it through four months of physical trials. I’d outlasted hundreds of lesser recruits. There were only thirty-five of us left, and sneaking into the final stages of training was as simple as securing a spot in the top twelve.
Except, Christ, the competition…
I felt a heavy hand clap my shoulder.
“You look bad,” said Zip, my best friend.
I squinted at him momentarily and decided he wasn’t worth opening my eyes for.
“Thanks.”
“I take it you fucked up the sim again?”
I rubbed my closed eyelids and didn’t respond.
“Don’t be such a downer,” he said.
“Every morning, part of me dies,” I said.
“That’s a bit dramatic.”
“At five a.m., when I jog out the door into that miserable cold, Zip, I feel a layer peel away from my very existence.”
“You’re not wrong about the cold.”
“When we run that first lap around the field, splinters of me are actually freezing and falling into the grass.”
I felt him sit down on the bed near my feet. The bedsprings twanged.
“I bet you didn’t even try to use your grapple gun,” said Zip. “I bet that’s why you failed.”
“I didn’t have a chance.”
“That’s because you’re so slow with it, man!”
“Lay off.”
He slapped my shin. “Look, we’ve got two hours until lunch. Let’s go to the course and get some practice in.”
“I’ve got a killer headache,” I said.
“Who cares? VR gives everybody headaches.”
“Not like this, man.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a super-special one-of-a-kind headache there, buddy, I’m sure.”
“I feel like Junior threw me through a wall.”
“Come on! Lindsey Li’s over at the grapple course.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what that’s supposed to mean.”
I sat up and glared at him.
“No, I don’t.”
“Dude. I see you looking at her.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Zip laughed.
“You don’t have to be ashamed, man.”
I shook my head.
“I’ll come along,” I said, “but not because of Li.”
“Whatever you say,” said Zip.
Next Chapter
Yanking the straps of my pack tighter, I cut to the right, past a tree the width of a house. The ground sloped sharply downward, and I lost my footing, falling backwards into a slide. As I flew down the slope, I stirred up a whirlwind of slippery leaves.
A chasm waited for me at the bottom. I dug my feet into the slope to brake my descent. Instead of slowing down, I flipped forward, careening toward empty space.
I stuck my arms out to meet the ground and felt a splintery crack as my left wrist broke. Sharp white blades of pain tore their way up my arm. I rolled to a stop just short of the edge, then forced myself up and into a stumbling run.
A round black rocket buzzed out of the pit and whipped over my head. I ducked, buffeted by the wall of air that followed, and glanced up to see the beetle wheel and whizz back for another pass, mouthparts slavering.
The beetle was only a bit bigger than me, and when it hit me I was able to jam my right hand against the side of its head to hold the clacking razor-edged jaws at bay. It wrapped me in its legs and carried me over the chasm. Ignoring the pain, I scrabbled with my left hand for the knife at my side, dimly aware of the bottomless pit below.
As the jaws fought to reach me, I jammed the knife hilt-deep into the beetle’s thorax. The impact jarred my broken wrist, and my fingers spasmed free of the knife, but the damage was done. The beetle let me go.
I landed on the far edge of the chasm. More black shapes blurred out of the pit as I picked myself up. I dove into a thick wall of razorgrass, covering my face with my arms. Again I heard the rattling hiss, the heavy crunching footfalls.
Bleeding from a hundred minor lacerations, nearly blind with pain and fear, I made for a dark cove beneath a fallen branch. No sooner had I slid into the darkness than a tarantula flattened the razorgrass and bulled into the open.
For a moment I held my breath and marveled at the spider’s enormity. It was twenty-five feet across, with legs the diameter of telephone poles. Stiff black hair covered its swollen body.
The tarantula lifted two legs and pivoted, pedipalps scrubbing the air. My heart pounded in my ears. Its eyes were like enormous oil droplets, smooth and reflective and black.
I stiffened when it faced my way. Between the pedipalps lurked brown, curved fangs the length of my arm. I needed to breathe, but I couldn’t stand to do it while the tarantula faced me.
It hissed, and I felt the vibrations in my ribs.
Then something soft pressed against my leg and I rolled away, flicking my headlamp on, horror swelling within me.
The cave was filled with huge, glistening maggots. Startled by the headlamp’s harsh light, the maggots squirmed away, clustering at the far end of the burrow.
All except for the one that had brushed my leg. Sensing a meal, it wriggled closer. I reared back and kicked it in the head with both boots.
The maggot’s upper half imploded, white goo splooshing outward in all directions, coating my legs. The smell released was rotten, fatty, and sour.
I swung my head around to check on the tarantula and found its gigantic face pressed against the opening to the burrow. When my headlamp hit its eyes, the spider screamed, and its legs came scrabbling into the gap. I scooted downward, through the gooey remains of the maggot, but the tarantula kept probing, lifting the branch, ripping the ceiling away. Exposed, I scrambled and ran, but the tarantula was much faster than me, and one of its legs effortlessly pinned my lower half to the ground.
Grasping limbs lifted me off the ground, drew me toward the mouth --
I felt the fangs slide into my back --
And then overwhelming white-hot pain, and the simulation shut down, cutting to black. I ripped the VR helmet off my head and yanked the electrodes from my neck. The room was brighter than a camera flash.
Sergeant Rivers barged through the door.
“Careful with the equipment, recruit,” he bellowed. “That rig’s worth a lot more than you are.”
“Yeah, alright,” I said.
The adrenaline made me jittery. My hands shook as I laid the helmet down on its mount.
“That’s your second strike,” said Rivers. “One more failed sim this month and you’re out of here.”
I stalked out, flexing my left hand. It always took my brain a couple minutes to figure out that injuries sustained in the simulation hadn’t actually occurred in real life.
What were my mistakes? Rivers wouldn’t tell me anything until I’d come up with a good explanation on my own. Breaking my wrist was an error. Should have stayed calm on the descent, stopped myself without flipping. Then I could have dodged the beetle and used my grapple gun to escape.
And picking a burrow to hide in had obviously been the wrong move. Maggots were the best-case scenario there. More likely were trapdoor spiders, or snakes, or any number of other predatory things that hid in the forest’s crevices. I should have kept running and grapple-gunned into a tree when I got some distance.
I walked past the leaderboard and couldn’t keep myself from checking it. Lindsey Li was still at the top. She’d scored a perfect ten on each of the past four courses.
My score was near the bottom. Two failures already this month. The two successes were close calls, a pair of sixes, certainly nothing to celebrate.
There were still three simulations to go in September. I had to score much higher, probably eights or nines, to make it through the next round of cuts. And even that was assuming I could place well in the half-marathon next week, and the obstacle course the week after that.
I went into the bathroom and leaned over a toilet, waiting for the nausea to pass. My temples throbbed. VR always gave me a pounding headache. I closed my eyes and counted the pulses of pain.
When the nausea refused to fade, I tried to vomit and failed. As I retched, I watched an oblong black beetle crawl down the wall behind the toilet.
I saw these beetles everywhere. They walked across the ceiling at night and waited for me on my nightstand in the morning.
Following my standard operating procedure, I squashed the beetle with my thumb. The beetle’s remains adhered to my skin, and I brought them close to my face to examine the color of the fluids that had squirted out. Then I tugged off a length of toilet paper and wiped my thumb clean.
At the sink I washed my hands under blistering hot water, switched it to cold, and splashed my face.
Determined to avoid human contact for a few hours, I took the scenic route back to the barracks and crashed on my bunk. The springs wheezed under my weight, and the mattress sagged, but at the moment I didn’t mind a bit.
The room was filled with the acrid odor of industrial glue. The source of the smell was a Scott Brown-shaped hole in the far wall, which hole had been repaired and painted over just this morning. Scott Brown, whose most notable feature was an abundance of dark hair boiling out of his back, chest, arms, and legs, had been avoiding group showers since the earliest days of boot camp, sneaking in after everyone else finished, or washing himself in the bathroom sinks at night, and no one had ever been able to figure out why. The general consensus, fueled by the cloud of body odor that followed Scott everywhere, was that he was simply a hygiene-averse individual. Or at least that had been the consensus until last Thursday, when Hollywood hid in the locker room during dinner and waited to hear the shower turn on, then burst out to discover what Scott had been so afraid of revealing all along: he had an absurdly tiny penis.
Hollywood, true to form, ran to the mess hall to spread the word. By the time Scott arrived, half the recruits were already calling him Acorn.
Scott could have shrugged it off and gone about his life, nickname or no, but he was on the verge of being cut, and the additional pressure of open ridicule broke him wide open. After a few days of “Acorn,” he stole a knife from the kitchen and tried to stab Hollywood to death.
Illustrating the spontaneity of his murder attempt, Scott chose to stage the assault right before lights out, at Hollywood’s bunk, in the middle of thirty-five alert and able-bodied recruits. After regarding the scuffle for a moment, Junior, whose bunk was next to Hollywood’s, sighed and padded over. Junior was immense, almost as tall as Sergeant Rivers, and he lifted Scott into the air without visible effort.
“Chill,” said Junior.
Scott, arms pinned at his sides, tried to figure out a way to slash him.
Junior hurled him into the wall. The impact sent little bits of foam raining down from between the ceiling tiles.
For a moment or two, nobody said a word. Then everyone was talking at once. Someone ran to get help. Scott, embedded in the wall, moaned and twitched.
I was disappointed to see that Hollywood didn’t have a scratch on him. A shallow gash, perhaps on his face somewhere, would have been great. I kept a mental list of all the things I hated about Hollywood. He cut the sleeves off his t-shirts and regaled anybody who would listen with tales of sexual conquest. He took the crusts off of sandwiches and chewed with his mouth open. He used “faggot” as a casual insult and examined his biceps for minutes at a time in the bathroom mirror.
Hollywood stood and gloated over Scott Brown’s plaster-strewn body, twirling the kitchen knife. When the EMTs arrived, he followed them to the ambulance, leaning over the stretcher and mouthing “Acorn.”
Rivers came by a couple minutes later with his boss, a Ranger Corp executive named Diane. Diane listened to the story and scratched away in her notepad, but that was it. The whole incident was swept under the rug with typical Ranger Corp alacrity. When I reported for my sim in the morning, Scott Brown’s name had already been removed from the leaderboard.
Part of me envied Scott. He wouldn’t get to be a ranger, but at least he got to go home.
Suddenly, lying on the bunk with my head throbbing, I decided I wanted to quit. More than anything, I wanted to quit. I wanted to tell Rivers to stuff it, go retrieve my civilian clothes from Reception, and hop on the next airship back to Indianapolis.
Giving up would be so easy. No more waking up every morning at 5 a.m. to run and lift and drill. No more mess hall food, no more simulated death, no more group showers and no more stupid nickname.
Quitting was hardly a solution, though. Every direction I looked, my options were bleak and gray. There was no future for me in Indianapolis. There was only my dad and his house with its once-white paint peeling in long, thick curls, and the garbage can overflowing with bottles at the curb, and the mailbox with its door that didn’t close.
There was only one path that led to the future I wanted. Rangers made enough money in ten years to retire forever. The thought of the money made me salivate. More money in a single year than my dad had made in his entire life. And I was so close, honestly. I’d made it through four months of physical trials. I’d outlasted hundreds of lesser recruits. There were only thirty-five of us left, and sneaking into the final stages of training was as simple as securing a spot in the top twelve.
Except, Christ, the competition…
I felt a heavy hand clap my shoulder.
“You look bad,” said Zip, my best friend.
I squinted at him momentarily and decided he wasn’t worth opening my eyes for.
“Thanks.”
“I take it you fucked up the sim again?”
I rubbed my closed eyelids and didn’t respond.
“Don’t be such a downer,” he said.
“Every morning, part of me dies,” I said.
“That’s a bit dramatic.”
“At five a.m., when I jog out the door into that miserable cold, Zip, I feel a layer peel away from my very existence.”
“You’re not wrong about the cold.”
“When we run that first lap around the field, splinters of me are actually freezing and falling into the grass.”
I felt him sit down on the bed near my feet. The bedsprings twanged.
“I bet you didn’t even try to use your grapple gun,” said Zip. “I bet that’s why you failed.”
“I didn’t have a chance.”
“That’s because you’re so slow with it, man!”
“Lay off.”
He slapped my shin. “Look, we’ve got two hours until lunch. Let’s go to the course and get some practice in.”
“I’ve got a killer headache,” I said.
“Who cares? VR gives everybody headaches.”
“Not like this, man.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a super-special one-of-a-kind headache there, buddy, I’m sure.”
“I feel like Junior threw me through a wall.”
“Come on! Lindsey Li’s over at the grapple course.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what that’s supposed to mean.”
I sat up and glared at him.
“No, I don’t.”
“Dude. I see you looking at her.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Zip laughed.
“You don’t have to be ashamed, man.”
I shook my head.
“I’ll come along,” I said, “but not because of Li.”
“Whatever you say,” said Zip.
Next Chapter