Unity

One: Recruited (Being Edited)

My brother would listen to classical music as he killed. He always kept his headphones on and a loaded music player attached to his uniform as he worked. He always said there was nothing like drowning out the melody of a rain of bullets to the sound of Beethoven's Fifth. Although he didn't always have to wear it during training, he always listened during the critical points of missions, especially when he was ordered to eliminate his target. His superiors didn't approve at first but as his performance was the highest in the Facility, they let it slide.

I pulled my own player out of my pocket and cranked up the volume by sliding my finger across the square glass surface, promising myself destroyed hearing in the future as the buds in my ears pumped the loud orchestral sound of Symphony 9 by Dvorak directly into my head. Ever since my brother had started doing it, I had listened to classical music while training as well. Although I never felt quite the same rush from dozens of violinists shredding their bows on the strings as my brother, it still managed to get my blood pumping. Of all days, that was when I needed it the most.

As I felt a pounding rush of energy surge to tips of my toes, I watched the Recruiter stand at the head of the seven columns of kids. Everyone was in between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, within the restricted age for new Recruits. I stood in the fourth line from the left, behind a perky blonde girl who nervously applied lipstick so often I ended up counting it to be roughly every fifty-five seconds. I anxiously longed for the spot in the front. The leader of the line would be on open display for the Recruiter to observe. There were seventy kids here, exactly. We had already gone through a routine behavioral and health check beforehand, which weeded out several hundreds of wannabe Recruits from the crowd that tried for our Region's facility every year. After all of the testing, only five ever moved on to the Facility. I needed to be one of those five.

Letting the speeding string section dull my nerves and drown out my restless thoughts, I observed the competition. This year didn't appear have any hyper-trained applicants, thank goodness. There weren't any crazy kids whose parents had pumped them full of performance enhancers and trained them for years this time. Last year there were three kids like that. In an usual fashion, more than half the applicants were girls this year, a large percentage of them fully equipped with a veritable arsenal. One girl had on a skin-tight black suit that confirmed she wasn't carrying a gun but her nails were almost three inches long and sharpened to green points. My guess was they were tipped with poison.

I took a look at the other boys around me and found that they had similar ideas. One had sharpened his teeth to razor points and he grimaced, like a shark. I winced at the thought of biting your tongue with those things. Another boy near him carried only a huge chainsaw strapped to his back. His shirt had a red skull with pits of swirling darkness for eyes. In his eyes, I saw a glint of madness. I knew right away that the chainsaw wasn't just for show and he was itching to use it.

I pushed my earbuds further in my ears and checked my weapons. As usual, I had two holstered pistols under my belt. A Beretta 87 and a Beretta 92, my lucky guns. Even after all my training and preparation, it suddenly didn't feel like enough. I felt bare with only a fitted but breathable blue tshirt and dark gray cargo pants. The clothes were my brother's. They didn't quite fit right as I had put on more muscle than he ever had but they felt like a good luck charm and I wouldn't wear anything else. I dug one of my fireproof black combat boots into the dirt and pulled my player out again to crank the volume further.

Breathing deeply, I looked straight ahead. The Recruiter was walking past each row, staring down each applicant with the same blank-faced disinterest. The first part of the Recruitment involves the Recruiter checking each applicant for any unwanted characteristics. I knew I would ace this part and I secretly hoped some of the scarier kids would get booted, like the chainsaw boy or the nail girl. He pointed to one somewhat chubby kid who was sweating nervously in the second line. He was out. The poor kid walked shamefully out of the line and was escorted off the gray field, behind the barbed wire fence and back to his embarrassed parents. Kids who were recruited were instantly rewarded with a monthly salary, enough to feed a small town; his parents probably needed the money. It was almost cruel that the families were permitted to watch this stage of the exam. They got to see as their children were thrown out before even being able to try. I knew that my own mother and father were watching from behind that fence, as I had done for my brother so many years prior. I felt their gazes trained on me but I didn't dare to look for them.