Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (19 page)

“There’s a reason we require you to be able
to read,” he said. “What are you going to do if you’re in combat
and you need to radio in your position, and you don’t know where
you are because you can’t read the street signs?”

I thought that if I was in combat, the street
signs probably wouldn’t be in English and I wouldn’t be able to
read them even if I wasn’t dyslexic, but I kept my mouth shut.

He said, “That wasn’t a rhetorical question.
What do you think you’d do?”

“I’d cover the Marine who’s reading them for
me,” I said. “We’re never supposed to be in combat alone, sir.”

“If something’s never supposed to happen, you
can be certain that it will,” he said. But I guess my answer was
good enough, because he said, “Torres, I’ll offer you a second
chance to become a Marine. It’s conditional on you going through
boot camp until you pass the written tests, though.”

I was willing to go through boot camp fifty
times, if that was what it took.

“Yes, sir! I’ll do it, sir!” I said. If I’d
had a tail then, I’d have wagged it.

Sergeant Hahn told me, “It’s also conditional
on promising me that you’ll disclose your problems reading to
everyone you have to work with. In advance, not when you’re under
fire.”

I was fine with repeating boot camp, but that
pulled me up short. I understood why he wanted me to do that. But
if I did, everyone would think I was an idiot and a pain in the ass
and wonder how I’d even gotten into the Marines.

He nodded like he was reading my mind, and
said, “Every unit has the guy everyone thinks got in by mistake.
That’s going to make you that guy. They might change their minds
later. Or they might not. So you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Do I want
to be popular? Or do I want to be a Marine?’”

I said, “I want to be a Marine, sir.”

And then I repeated boot camp. Twice. I
failed the written exam the second time, too. But by the third
go-round, I was less stressed about it, or someone decided I was
needed for the war, or a miracle occurred. I made it out of boot
camp, got through combat arms training which thank God had more
diagrams and less reading involved, and made it into my unit.

I faithfully explained to everyone that I
couldn’t read. And sure enough, everyone thought I was an idiot and
a pain in the ass and wondered how I’d even gotten into the
Marines. Some guys called me stupid, I punched them, I got in
trouble, rinse and repeat. There’s a limited time that I can keep
myself to “yes, sir, no, sir,” and I’d long since passed it. I got
a reputation as a stupid, mouthy asshole.

I’ll cop to the mouthy asshole part. It
wasn’t a great time for me.

This was all in the US. Then I got
transferred, possibly because someone was sick of me, and deployed
to Afghanistan with a bunch of guys I didn’t know. But they all
knew each other already. I was the fucking new guy who was
replacing a Marine who’d rolled his car and smashed up his ankle so
bad that he’d never be fit for combat again. That guy, needless to
say, everyone had liked. So even apart from everything else, I had
big shoes to fill.

I couldn’t face going up to a whole new set
of guys who already didn’t want me and saying, “FYI, not only am I
not your awesome buddy, but I can’t read.” I decided that unless I
really was in combat and had to read a street sign or something, I
wasn’t saying a thing.

I got assigned to a fire team as the
assistant automatic rifleman. That meant I carried extra ammunition
for the automatic rifleman. That was Roy.

Roy was a couple years older than me and much
more experienced. He’d fought in Iraq. He’d fought in Afghanistan.
He had friends all over the Corps. He had a reputation for being a
Marine’s Marine, you know? The guy everyone looks up to.

Oh, and he’s fucking huge. Like a Viking. An
Irish Viking. Black hair, gray eyes, tallest guy in the platoon and
built like a tank.

I was intimidated, so I decided to make a
show of not being intimidated, which basically made me act like an
asshole again. The whole first day, I could see that everything
about me was irritating everyone, especially Roy, but I couldn’t
figure out how to stop.

I decided to at least do something useful,
and reached for the SAW. That’s the squad automatic weapon, the
machine gun I was carrying the ammo for. Roy grabbed it and glared
at me like it was a child and I was a molester.

I said, “I’m just going to clean it.”

“
I
clean the SAW,” he said. And that
was that.

The capper was that our base was in the
middle of nowhere. The electricity wasn’t too reliable and we
weren’t allowed to have personal electronics because they needed to
save the juice for important things. So since there wasn’t much
else to do on our off-hours, everyone read a lot.

I really wanted to get along with Roy, so I
kept trying to talk to him. Usually when he was trying to read. I
figured he was only reading because he had nothing better to do.
Actually, Roy would way rather sit down with a book than a video
game. So the more I tried to befriend him, the more I drove him up
the wall.

One night he shoved a book at me and said,
“Sit down, shut up, and read this.”

It was a fat book I couldn’t have read in an
infinite number of years. And it had rabbits on the cover. I
thought he was hazing me.

I said, “Who sent you this, your ten-year-old
sister?”

Roy said, in that extra-patient way people
talk when they’re really pissed, “It’s not a kids’ book. The guy
who wrote it served in World War II. It has some of the best battle
sequences I’ve ever read. Just read the first chapter. I think
you’ll like it if you give it a chance.”

I could tell he was serious. So I sat there
and turned pages until I figured it was safe to say, “It’s
boring.”

Roy just shrugged, but I could tell he was
wishing I’d fall into a black hole and never emerge to bother him
again.

Meanwhile, we’d been patrolling around, but I
hadn’t seen any combat yet. I was getting antsy, waiting for the
other shoe to drop. You can’t know for sure how you’ll do till you
actually experience it.

Then the shoe dropped. One second our platoon
was patrolling in broad daylight, next second we were taking fire.
We all took cover and ended up scattered around the street. I was
behind a wall with my fire team and two guys from another one. Next
thing I know, Marco’s telling us we’re going to breach the building
where the enemies were.

It was like someone hit a switch on my
nervous system. A sense of absolute calm washed over me. All my
usual jitteriness and restlessness and obsessing over what people
thought about me and whether I was good enough went right out the
window. Instead of having five million thoughts bouncing around my
head, I had one:
We’re going to breach the building.
It was
like being a wolf in a man’s body: wolf instincts, human
intelligence. I wasn’t afraid at all. Everything was perfectly
clear.

It felt fucking amazing.

“You stick by me, Torres,” Roy told me. “I’ve
got your six.”

“I’ve got your back, too,” I said.

He said, “Thanks,” but I could tell he was
thinking, “Sure you do, fucking new guy. Fucking new guy who hates
my favorite rabbit book.”

We breached the building and fought from room
to room. It was my first time in combat and it fried my brain. I
only remember fragments. A crow flying past a window. My shoulder
banging into the wall when I ran through a doorway. Shell casings
bouncing on concrete. A man’s shoe in the middle of the floor.

After we secured the building, Roy started
yelling for Sibrian, the hospital corpsman. I thought he’d been hit
but it turned out it was for me. My helmet had gotten ripped off
somehow, and there was blood all over my head and running down my
face. I remember Roy trying to make me lie down and me arguing with
him. Sibrian showed up and told us both to cool it. I was fine—
just a few cuts from flying glass. They’d bled a lot but I didn’t
even need stitches.

Back at the base that night, everyone else
collapsed into bed. But instead of getting exhausted, I got wired.
It occurred to me that if I’d moved my head even a quarter of an
inch, the glass could have hit my eyes or my throat. And once I
thought that, I started thinking about all the other things that
could have gone differently. I could see every way I could have
died, and there were thousands of them.

My heart was slamming into my chest. My skin
was too tight. Blood was pumping through my veins like water in a
fire hose. I felt like I was standing on a conveyor belt, and I had
to move fast or the ground would get yanked out from under my
feet.

Roy grabbed me by the arm and took me
outside. I paced around, talking a mile a minute, and he just
walked with me. I don’t think he said a single word for over an
hour, while I went on and on about fractions of an inch and the
rotational speed of the earth and alternate timelines where I was
dead. I must have sounded like a lunatic.

Eventually I ran out of energy. It happened
so suddenly that I had to sit down on the ground. Roy sat beside
me.

I was shaking. It had just hit me that not
only could I have died, but I’d killed someone. I don’t mean that
I’d fired my rifle and later I’d seen bodies. I remembered shooting
a man who’d appeared around a corner with an AK-47. Sure, he was
the enemy and that was what I was there to do and if I hadn’t shot
him, he’d have shot me. But still. I shot a man, and I watched him
fall down and die.

When I’d joined the Marines, I hadn’t just
been going toward something, I’d been going away. I love my pack
but they drive me crazy too, and there’s a lot about wolf culture
that’s suffocating and rigid and small-town and not me.

But right then, all I could think was how
much I wanted to be a wolf and feel the pack sense and have one of
my pack groom me till I felt better. And there I was, about a
million miles from my pack, stuck in the middle of the desert with
a bunch of one-bodies who couldn’t stand me. I felt more alone than
I had in my entire life.

Roy put his hand on my shoulder. If we’d been
wolves, he’d have shoved his whole body up against mine and licked
my fur. But it meant the same thing. He was telling me I wasn’t
alone.

I said, “I’m really fucked up. I don’t know
what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Roy said. “This
is combat stress. They taught you about it in boot camp, didn’t
they? You’ve got kind of a weird version of it, but otherwise, this
is normal. You’ll be fine tomorrow.” He took another look at me,
then he said, “Or maybe the day after tomorrow.”

I laughed, and he said, “Or maybe in an hour.
Hard to say.”

“Why don’t you have it?” I asked.

“This wasn’t my first time,” he said. “Once
you get more experienced, it takes more to shake you up. You’ll get
there. You did fine. You did better than fine.”

“I did?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “You did great. At first I
wasn’t sure I could rely on you, but now I know I can. I’m glad
you’re on my team.”

I could tell that he meant it. Then I
remembered that fucking rabbit book, and I felt guilty for lying to
him. And I was still pretty wired.

I said, “Farrell, there’s something I should
tell you. About that rabbit book…”

I told him everything— well, everything but
that I was a werewolf. I told him all about boot camp and what
happened after it and how I’d wanted to turn myself into a brave,
honorable, disciplined Marine, and instead I’d turned myself into
an obnoxious asshole.

Roy sat there and listened to the whole
story. Then he said, “So, should I call you Scottie?”

He wasn’t ragging on me. I’d told him it had
made me feel like I belonged. But everything had gotten so fucked
up after boot camp, I wanted to start from scratch.

I nearly said, “No, call me Lechon.” But that
was a wolf thing, and I wanted my life to be more than just pack.
And also people who knew what it meant and weren’t wolves would
laugh their asses off.

Then I thought of saying, “No, call me Dale.”
But that was my civilian name.

I didn’t DJ seriously then, just at parties
for friends. I used to announce myself as DJ Torres, but it was a
joke. No one called me that. But I liked the idea of a new name to
go with the new leaf I was hoping I’d turn over.

So I said, “No, call me DJ.”

He said, “Okay. Then you call me Roy. What
was your drill instructor’s name?”

“Sergeant Hahn,” I said. “Black, my height,
weighs twice what I do. At least.”

“I know him,” Roy said. “Not that well. But
he’s a smart guy. I think you should do what he said.”

It never even occurred to me that I could
refuse. I said, “Here we go again.”

“No,” Roy said. “It won’t be like that. Not
after I tell everyone how you saved my life.”

By then I was starting to sober up. I said,
“Thanks, but don’t lie just to make people like me. Fuck them if
that’s what it takes.”

Roy started laughing. He said, “Did you think
I meant I’d make something up? Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?” I asked.

“One of the enemy got the drop on me. You
shoved me out of the way and shot him.”

Once he said it, I remembered the part I’d
blanked out before:
why
I’d shot that guy. “Oh. That.”

“Yeah.
That
,” he said. “Think you can
sleep now?”

“Uh-huh.” I could barely keep my eyes
open.

The last thing I remember was him hauling me
to my feet. He must have practically carried me back inside and put
me in bed.

I did feel more-or-less back to normal the
next day. And the next time everyone got out their books, Roy
grabbed me, sat me down next to him, picked up the rabbit book, and
started reading out loud.