The Haven Hotel

Pigeons

The next two weeks make up what is perhaps the most monotonous period in my life. Each day I receive one or two condolences from other officers and people coming through the officers' quarters. For the first two days I wonder how they identify me, then I realize that I'm pretty easily identified. 

Yusuf starts his training in my second week back. He's a year too young, officially, but he's not the youngest. Nor is he the weakest; some of the kids are underfed and others manage to be obese in spite of having grown up after the Collapse. I watch them run laps through the streets and use the dilapidated playground as training equipment. It's only now, while watching it from the outside and completely detached from any officer's duties, that I realize how pathetic the training truly is. 

The recruits use air rifles that make only a hissing noise when they're fired so as not to attract attention from anyone who strays too close to the Haven. The air rifles have no recoil and their switches and triggers are maddeningly simple; those are children's toys, analogous to the real thing but nothing like it in an actual fight. Watching the teenagers run around with those playthings as if they're preparing for war physically hurts me now that I've seen first hand how useful this training is. 

"Everything hurts." Yusuf says on his second day. He's lying on the floor at my feet while I sit on the same park bench as we were sitting on the other day. Two friends of his sit on either side of him. They're older than he is, but with very similar builds. He introduced them but I don't care what their names are. 

"Copperface is such an asshole." Friend One says. The two of them are comfortable talking about their superiors like this, around me, because that's how Yusuf talks, minus the swearing. "He makes us run all kinds of laps."

"You need to run laps to keep fit." I'm barely keeping track of their conversation; instead I'm watching a group of pigeons roosting on the playground while the recruits rest around the park.  I wonder if the vermin living in and around the city noticed the Collapse, and if they did, how long did it take them? Those things run on pure instinct and instinct tells them to eat whatever they find on the ground. They only look up when something is in their path so the politics of the apocalypse don't interest them. Come to think of it, politics of anything don't interest most humans either. 

"Who needs fitness when you have a gun?" Friend Two asks the rhetorical question and smiles at Yusuf and Friend One. That's probably the smartest thing he's said all day. 

"It's not about being out in the field." I reply, still staring at the pigeons. They never complain, nor do they say silly one liners. They don't worry about becoming useless and they definitely don't hunt one another. "It's about right now. If Copperface wants you running laps, you're gonna run laps. You need fitness for the laps. You can worry about the field later."

"Did you need fitness?" Friend One asks after some seconds of quiet. Yusuf shoots him a disapproving glance but he powers through. "Or did the gun do everything for you?"

I consider telling the three boys that the gun won't do a solitary thing for them if they accidentally leave the safety on, or if they run out of ammunition, or if they're simply too scared and too hurt to point it in the right direction. But I have neither the heart nor the energy to tell them that. Instead I throw a rock at the birds and watch them fly into the surrounding trees. 

"Most cases aren't like mine." I say eventually. "Most of the time you just need your gun as a way of saying 'fuck off' to anyone who wants to start shit, you know? It's only zero point one percent of the time that something actually happens."

Yusuf is lying face down now, picking at the yellow grass and tearing the blades to pieces between his fingers. Friends One and Two have their heads to the ground in silent contemplation. I guess that with the stories they've heard about me, they're expecting more, some kind of practical advice. Although I'm not going to come right out and tell them that I shouldn't have survived, I'm not going out of my way to keep their illusion alive, either.