“Toothbrush?” He exploded.

I stiffened. “Toothbrush, Drill Sergeant !”

He smiled and sauntered around his desk to stand in front of me. “No. No, no, no. Trainee Wander, you gaze upon the Third Platoon Memorial Nocturnal Hygiene Implement”

“Silly me.” Had I lost my mind?

Ord just kept smiling. He held his hands apart so the brush dangled between them on the spread string loop. “Once every few training cycles, a very special trainee earns this.” He lifted his hands above my head and lowered the little necklace onto my shoulders. The brush passed my nose. Now I knew exactly where it had been.

It was midnight when I crabbed sideways across the latrine floor to the third of six toilets and continued to scrub and swear. Ord said it was going to be a nightly exercise.

He said I had to wear the brash at all times. He said the reason was to give me time to think about my future.

Right. Usually, if you weren’t on KP or CQ or taking your hour wandering the barracks as fire guard, you got to sleep. Ord was royally fucking me over to make me quit.

Well, fuck him instead. I scrubbed harder.

If fifty guys in an open platoon bay was a bit un-private, the latrine was a living, breathing rape of the Fourth Amendment. The toilets sat in an open line facing the sink row six feet away. You crapped counting the hairs on somebody else’s bare butt while he shaved. The showers were at the end of the room, just as open.

If they ran a prison like that, we’d all get released on grounds it was cruel and unusual punishment.

The first few weeks people were so intimidated that they got up in the middle of the night to crap in relative privacy. Gradually most of us got desensitized. Not everybody, though.

“I’m sorry you have to do that, Jason.”

I looked up. Walter shivered in his field jacket, bare, pale legs spindling below the hem. They ended in sock-blobbed feet, so he seemed to wobble on a pair of Q-tips.

“You here to crap or talk?”

“Do I really look like a toad, Jason?”

“No.” Of course he did. I stared at the floor so he couldn’t see me smile.

He smiled, then frowned. “It should be me down there scrubbing. I’m the platoon’s biggest fuck-up.”

“No.” Of course he was. “The army’s just not for you.”

“It has to be.”

I scuttled sideways and massaged the next ivory throne. “Why?”

“You remember I said my grandpa won the Medal of Honor? He saved a man’s life. Everybody in my family served. My mother won’t be proud of me unless I win a medal.”

“That’s crap, Walter. People get medals when things go bad. Medals are just ways that armies hide mistakes. Nobody in my family ever served. Now they can’t” Tears blurred my vision, and I scrubbed harder. Somebody’s army killed Mom, for the crime of taking a trip to Indianapolis. It killed everyone in Pittsburgh. It even killed Ord’s mother. “It never ends. It’s wrong. What’s the point, anyway?”

“My grandpa was a hundred when he died. He served in World War n. He said the point was to make it stop.”

He rocked from sock to sock, and his intestines gurgled. Walter needed his privacy. Soon. But he was still too shy to ask even me for it. I stood and arched my back. “I need a break. I’m going outside a minute.”

I stepped out into the cold dark and looked up. Beyond the dust, constellations still shone. Somewhere up there star pilots like Metzger waged the battle to save the human race. I’d watched a million people in Pittsburgh die today. Did I really want to be just a smart-ass scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush?

I didn’t know who or what took Mom and my life away. I didn’t really want revenge because that wouldn’t bring my old life back. But if I could help to make it stop, that would be worth everything.

Walter stuck his relieved head out the door into the cold and smiled. “Thanks, Jason. You’re okay.”

My breath curled out into the dark. No, I wasn’t. But I could be.

The next morning we drew our M-16s from the armorer and went straight to hell.

Not just Third Platoon, but the whole eight-hundred-man training battalion mounted an olive drab convoy of antique deuce-and-a-halfs, belching diesel soot in volumes unseen since cars went electric years ago. We rolled west toward Pittsburgh’s ruins beneath a drifting grit plume that a day before had been strip malls and skyscrapers and children. Exhaust soot seemed irrelevant.

We rocked and shivered on facing benches under our truck’s canvas top.

Somebody asked, “Why’d we draw weapons? Did the fuckin‘ aliens land this time?”

“Looters.”

“Fuck! I ain’t shootin‘ no brothers.”

“Brothers all gone, hombre! So’s the loot.”

“We’re gonna feed fuckin‘ civilians.”

Troop-truck discourse isn’t Question Time at the House of Lords.

Rural Pennsylvania unreeled beyond the open tailgate. At first, we saw the occasional cow trying to graze a frozen field. Closer to Pittsburgh the cows stumbled, deaf and disoriented even a day later from blast-wave overpressure.

The trucks slowed to a crawl in the gloom as we closed on the city. Civilians lined the roads, headed away from the grit plume. Cars were outbound, but also well-dressed people pushed shopping carts piled with plastic trash bags. Parents walked, pulling kids in coaster wagons and yard carts.

Some kids waved. Their parents shielded their eyes against our convoy’s headlights and stared at us like we were insane. Or they were.

It was dark by the time we got close enough to smell it

Burned buildings and flesh. “Dark” is inaccurate. Pittsburgh still burned, and red glow reflected from low clouds lit our faces. We dismounted the tracks, grateful for the leg stretch, and formed up.

The residential streets around us were a flat, tract-house neighborhood of undamaged two-story homes. They were old enough that the now-dead trees in the yards had grown to be as big around as my leg. Soot piled inches deep on everything and kept falling.

Captain Jacowicz addressed the company. Drifted soot grayed his hair and made him cough behind his government-issue paper mask.

He put hands on hips. “You know what happened here. They pulled us out of training to assist. We’ll search for survivors, secure property against looters, aid displaced civilians, and assist MI teams.”

Our back-of-the-truck brain trust had guessed right about most of our mission. But MI teams? MI was Military Intelligence Branch. What was that about?

We played hurry-up-and-wait for an hour in the cold while ash snowed down, and Jacowicz talked on the radio. Candles or lanterns lit the house windows around us. They silhouetted curious heads, grown-ups and kids peeking around curtains. These were the lucky survivors. But they had no power, no water, no heat, no groceries.

A smaller truck pulled up, dropped its tailgate, and we unloaded boxes. C-rations. The civilian population was about to learn why war was hell. At least if our mission was to distribute food back here, that was safer than going closer to the burning city core.

When the truck emptied, a drill motioned to me to climb in back.

“What’s up, Drill Sergeant?”

He shrugged. “The spooks need a warm body. You just volunteered, Wander.”

Spooks. Why would Military Intelligence need one half-baked trainee? I bounced against the truck’s canvas sides as it lurched away from Walter and the rest of Third Platoon. As they faded away in the ashfall my throat swelled. It wasn’t fair. They weren’t much family, but they were all I had, and now I was losing them.

I bounced along for minutes feeling sorry for myself before I realized that the light was redder, and I wasn’t shivering. The smell got worse and the fire’s roar louder.

I snatched up the canvas side flap. Toppled wooden power poles wrapped in black cable made the streets an obstacle course. Cars lay on their sides. House windows gaped black and shattered.