The War Game (2 page)

             
I got out of there, no gun in hand, ran around the school to find provisions (namely the snacks, the book, napkin dispensers, and a few odds and ends I found in one of the dressers in the dorm rooms), and locked myself in here.

             
“Hey! You get out of there.”

             
Like clockwork, that man was.

             
I said nothing. He’d tried making friends with me, asking my name and where I was from. Unbeknownst to him, I didn’t really have answers for those questions. I don't know where I was born. Somewhere in Minnesota, but what did he care anyhow? The more questions that went unanswered, the more aggressive he became.

             
I had a million witty responses for this guy. However, my cleverness would have just been lost upon him. There was no need to waste my intellect on someone whothreatens a thirteen-year-old girl by saying:

             
“I have to take a shit and if you don’t get out now, YOU will PAY!”

             
I knew there were many more bathrooms there and one didn’t even need a bathroom to go to the bathroom. A bucket or a corner of a room would do, you know what I’m saying?

             
“I will shit right here in front of this door and the smell of it will annihilate you.”

             
I said nothing. I lined the bottom of the door with a pair of pants that were too small for me anyway. I didn’t need to gag up my breakfast of Pringles.

             
It went without saying that I wished he would shut up. He took some pipe or something and started banging against the door. It was useless and he knew that. That door could have survived almost anything except a nuclear attack. I made up a game to drown the noise out. I envisioned what he looked like. I saw him being overweight, more tall than short, caramel-colored hair (that was balding in the middle and made his head look like a furry donut), and awful scarred, red skin. And a turned-up nose like a pig.

             
The banging ceased. Thank God. Looked like I won.

             
A few flashes of light came from outside and then he interrupted the silence by screaming, “Oh, shit!”

             
And then I remembered nothing after that except the bathtub partially uprooted itself from the floor and I was manically grabbing everything and shoving it in my makeshift hobo bag, thanks to the tarp.

             
Somehow, I did have a few rational thoughts.

             
I took the food-all of it. Then I started with the napkin dispensers but I ended up with just a couple of them since I realized I could use the book for paper later. The book alone weighed as much, if not more, than a newborn baby and all those napkin dispensers together weighed a child or two. I could only carry as much as I could lift and tarp space was quite valuable at the moment.

             
I took the trading stuff, some clothes, one of the pillows I “borrowed” (I was being plain spoiled with five pillows anyhow), and who knows what else. I grabbed an empty toilet paper roll or two. The capacity of rational thoughts must be limited to two or one in times like these.

             
I ran out, catching barely a glimpse of that man behind me. He’d harassed me for a month straight and I didn’t even know what he looked like. He was missing an eye. I don’t even remember his hair color or whether or not he had blotchy skin. That empty socket sucked me in for a moment and then I forgot about it.

             
I only then realized that I didn’t have a plan to escape this maroon and gold colored prison until I saw a huge hole that was blown where the front door would have been.

             
So I left.

CAMP A

             
And I was caught, just minutes after that bomb fell.

             
Then I boarded a school bus.

             
It was full, every seat taken and then squeezed threefold with more passengers. Some were standing or sitting in the aisle. Some kids were even sitting on top of the edge of their seats, their feet resting on other kids, their little hands gripping onto the halfway rolled-down windows.

             
There were a few kids sitting in some adults’ laps but I knew they weren’t their parents. No one here had parents. Most of the kids, if not all, were orphans. The cuter, smaller kids were often “adopted” by some of the adults but kids that young rarely made it into the camps. You were either born here or dragged here.

             
I tried to not think of my moms.

             
Bags and boxes were in laps, whatever meager possessions these people were still lucky to have. I could tell these people came from a different camp than the one I’d been at. I could see all their bones you wouldn’t normally see that well stretched through the skin. I could have beat a tune out on some of their rib cages if I’d had a mallet. There were still some fat ones at the college. No fat ones here.

             
A soldier took the wheel, started the engine, and lurched the bus forward, causing most of those little kids to fall backward into the seat behind them. One kid bumped his head on the metal of the window, crying hysterically.

             
I stood, holding onto the railing near the staircase.

             
I glanced at the speedometer; we were averaging 80 miles per hour on the highway.

             
A little kid with orange hair sitting next to a middle-aged man, also with orange hair, wouldn’t stop staring at me. His dad went on and on, telling all these lies about where we were headed. They pointed at every scrawny deer and cow they saw. Mooooo! For each one there was, the dad was asking the kid what sound it makes, turning this into some sort of educational field trip. It was easier to lie to a child than to anyone else, I thought. Adults were tall like gods. And they were all-knowing too. Once I had children, I would, too, become a god. Or at least a refined liar. Telling them to be good or else Santa Claus wouldn’t drop presents at their house. Adults might laugh at the children because of this but the adults did the same thing. They had to be good too or else they would be dropped off at the fiery gates of hell.

             
“We’re going to the park!”

             
I nodded. I didn’t feel like talking so I tried my best not to make eye contact with him but it was hard, being just inches away from his face. At least I know that this isn’t Camp Z.

             
“We’re going to ride on Something Wicked. It’s the biggest roller coaster in the world.”

             
It wasn’t the biggest, but I just continued to nod my head.

             
“But I can’t go on it because I’m not tall enough yet.”

             
We arrived at our (undesirable) destination no less than twenty minutes later. I think. The wristwatch was in my hobo bag.

             
I could tell from at least a mile back before we pulled at the gates and were kicked off the bus, a large section of the roller coaster’s track was missing. Gone.

             
I wouldn’t have gotten on it anyway.

             
Part of the train of cars on that ride was still stuck on it, facing the missing section of the roller coaster. I had a gruesome thought: instead of whipping people if they fell from exhaustion, they could just load up the unruly folks onto a cart and put them on that ride. Like in cartoons with coal miners. There would always be part of the track missing, you know, the part of the track that runs high over a valley. But yet, the cartoon character always made it over to the other side and continued safely on track. Or if they did fall, they bounced back to life.

             
As soon as the bus driver pulled up and opened the door, a soldier with a funny face stepped aboard with a gun. One man, with clothes free of ash, waved his hand to get his attention. “Excuse me, sir?”

             
The soldier stopped, his face crinkled. “Don’t speak unless you have been granted permission.”

             
He moved on, “Up Up Up. Move it, get up.” We stood up, gathered our belongings, and filed out, one by one.

             
Another soldier, tall with hair so blond it was almost white, directed us to stand in line, parallel to the bus.

             
I pondered what exactly made the soldier’s face on the bus so funny-looking. Then I knew why. It was lopsided. Asymmetrical. Like a kid with budding drawing skills drew it on. Or one of those toys where you could flip the flaps of the picture and make an elderly man wear a dress with baseball cleats. Except making the changeable parts horizontal, they were made vertical for this man.

             
They led us into the amusement park. Right away I found the missing section of the roller coaster. It was charred, lying in the grass. The little ginger kid nearly tripped on it. I didn’t think he’d be riding it anytime soon.

             
A giant octopus heralded our visit. It was a friendlier-looking thing than that lopsided man. At the end of each of its tentacles was a box where people sat and spun around when the ride was moving. It had taken me a few seconds to spot the dead woman, sitting in the cart with her head slumped forward. A few people started to point it out as soon as I discovered it. It was like a disturbing version of I Spy, I guess.

             
The guards or soldiers or whatever they prefer to be called didn’t follow us in. We were left to our own devices and we had no idea what to do.

             
Well, they didn’t and I did.

             
I was aiming for a spot of my own to call and I found it before I even started looking.

             
A tree house. A fabulous, plastic tree house.

             
I bolted to it. It was part of the kiddie section of the park.

             
I would have stayed in it always, peed out of the window, and made it my nest if it weren’t for what I found in it.

             
I opened the swinging doors and climbed the few steps to the second level. I probably jumped, nearly bumped my hand on the plastic ceiling, when I saw that something had already claimed it.

             
The something had stringy, wispy hair, bug eyes, and seemingly no gender. This androgynous creature sat cross-legged in a corner of the tree house (which had a fake, printed rug on the floor and fake printed, framed paintings on the fake wallpapered wall). He or she was surrounded by mounds of junk and garbage. It looked at me with mean eyes, ready to jump.

             
“This is mine. It doesn’t belong to you. Move along.”

             
“Lovely place you got here, did you paint those yourself?” a boy’s voice came breathing up behind me.

             
The wallpaper I noticed earlier was actually drawings of shapes, stick people, and some other simple designs. Done in what appeared to be menstrual blood. The uterus lining made it have a sort of three-dimensional quality to it, I noted.

             
“Get!” She told me all I had to know through her bloodshot eyes.

             
“We’re gone.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me gently away. Almost in a protective way. His brown hair was long, much longer than my brown curly bird’s nest. His skin was really tanned. I trailed the boy out down the plastic brown steps. He was probably my age, maybe a year, two years tops, older than me.

             
We walked out of the kiddie portion of the park and into some sort of meeting the people from the buses were having.

             
A man with a loud, robust voice stood on top of a rusty bench and was talking to a group of our party. No kids, just a bunch of older people.

             
“What we need right now is to get organized. I need a group of people to check out the facilities. The theater, restaurants, bathrooms, and so on. If they’re locked, find a way in.” 

             
A group of three men, who looked like they had a talent for breaking into stuff with all their tattoos and piercings and scarred faces, took off.

             
“You two,” he pointed at us, “Go help the women with finding supplies—food, water, whatever. We need people to build stuff. Maybe we could even get a ride or two up and running. As long as we’re here, may as well try to have a little fun, right?”

             
We took off to a nearby deserted restaurant. There were broken records shattered on the linoleum floor and black and white pictures of vintage cars still hung on the walls. We climbed over a metal counter, where they would bring out the food to the waiters who’d then bring it out to the customers, and found ourselves in a kitchen. I set my bag down and started scavenging.