character :: Harley Gibeson
A little white-blonde haired girl looked up to her mother, her toy gun clacking in her clumsy hands. “Momma, when the baby gets here, will he go to boot camp with me?”
“No, Harley. You’ll be out of service by the time he goes to boot camp.” The woman continued scrubbing an old coil on their busted toaster, her swollen belly making the perfect crumb catcher below.
Harley seemed to chew on this knowledge for a moment before wiping her nose across her scratchy woolen sleeve. “But then how will I keep him safe? You said that’s gonna be my job!”
Angela considered this for a moment, her busy hands slowly receding to the table in front of her, toaster in tow. How do you answer this question to a five year old? She hated to admit it to herself, but her toddler’s constant barrage of questions wore thin on her nerves today. “Well, Harley, you’re just going to have to trust your people. They’ll keep us safe when you’re away, and then your little brother will keep us safe when you come back. It’s how it works.”
“So he’ll be okay?” Harley smiled, satisfied by the bullshit, her dangling left hand coming up to rest on the perfectly replicated handguard. She pulled her toy camouflage helmet down to her eyebrows in childlike determination before turning on her heel and bursting through the front door into the warm sunlight.
trust my people
Harley opened her eyes, the warmth of the yellow sun fading back to her memories, right where it belonged. Instead, a bitter blue wind stole the breath from her mouth as needles of ice pelted her stinging cheeks. Because, of course, she had graduated from those cheap plastic toys to the real deal as the years marched on: cold, hard metal in her hands and a tight helmet she was too stubborn to turn back in to the border patrol.
Harley was a good student, all things considered. Her parents, a field medic and a retired grunt who made a decent living as a helicopter mechanic, raised Harley to be the perfect all-American girl. She was obsessed with gun collecting, going to the Graveyard to rummage through rusted metal in the hopes of finding some stray bullets here or a jagged remnant of some assembly there. She excelled in little’s training as a child and on to boot camp when she had graduated high school at 16 – not the top of her class of course (books were never her thing), but a killing machine had been made.
When Harley’s conscription came to mature, at around 17, she lovingly packed her family up wearing her stiff new fatigues, just for her. She hoped it’d break them in. Her 10 year old brother was sad to leave his friends, but moving from their dangerous civilian town to the hyper-protection of a Guarded City was a welcome relief to Harley: after all, she would go off to do her country a service, and in return, they would provide safety for her family. Her parents didn’t cry when it came time for her to ship out, after all, both of them had done their own conscription around her age: it was the mark of becoming an adult, the most important milestone of her life.
Harley wanted adventure, so she signed up for the thick of the action: she wanted to be in the newest Russian territories, hard-fought areas that had once been rural villages on the outskirts of Siberia. Her first raid, about a year and a half into her 6 year term, would set the stage for the disappointment that comes to be the major theme of Harley’s life: she wasn’t who she thought she was. She didn’t get the Target, that honor belonged to her bunkmate. But at her feet, a hostile cowered in fear, his gun thrown from his hands. He looked at her with furrowed eyebrows, hate seeping from the corners of his mouth as he spit some curses at her in Russian. Even in his state, ready to die for his country, he hated her – and she felt nothing. All she saw was a man without a way out, about to die, who bled red just like she did. When the man reached for his black-handled knife strapped to his calf and plunged it into Harley’s ankle, she did what she had to do: and she had lots of time to think about it as she sat in the infirmary, waiting for her damn tendon to heal.
There were slurs for people like her, too soft to kill, lover of the enemy. Harley heard them every day, hurled at one private or another, never herself though. Once or twice when a squad member would get a beating, she’d even join in, frenzied by the loud shouts and smuggled alcohol. She seemed hard enough, taking a kill when someone was looking: but more often than not, when her friends were up to their necks in dead Russians, there’d be Harley sneaking children out the back door. Helping women through the window. Even battle-aged men who would probably full well come back to bite her in the ass weren’t safe from her detested kindness, one of which she dug a small hole in the snow to deposit him inside, whispering words forbidden to her. “Подождите, пока мы не уйдем. Затем запустите.”
I realized
Harley was in hell. She didn’t feel too sorry for herself, because just like everyone else here, she suffered. It was terrible, but all the same. Just as it should be. Just like the others in her bunk, the only thing that kept her going were the occasional ration token to spend on cheap vodka and a letter from her family. But, about five years into her service, Harley’s work got sloppy as something weighed on her mind: the letters have stopped, and not a word had reached her in at least a week. Life was surely getting busy with Travis’ conscription nearing, and it didn’t concern her…yet.
It was a bright morning, calm as ever as Harley shot the shit with some girls outside of her bunk when the tell-tale crunching of tires sent a wave of silence through the throngs of people. Cars in this neck of the woods were pretty rare, unless they were the Black Dick of Death; a long and comically phallic shaped vehicle used to cart upper division people around. Nothing good ever came from this car; usually they came to gather up servicemen who weren’t up to snuff and re-locate them somewhere awful.
Other times, they came to alert a grunt about a death in the immediate family. Sometimes, they just popped by to have the squad stand outside in the fucking snow to salute them – just because they could. But today, when the stiff-jointed man from the back seat approached the squad leader at the gate, his hat in hand, the eyes of everyone within earshot flew back to Harley. She didn’t have to wait for Simone to trumpet over the speakers for her, she turned on her heel to grab her bag and get out.
Harley didn’t say a word as she approached that terrible car, the taste of metal flooding her mouth from the side of her cheek that she’d been chewing on. He was either here to gather Harley for execution as guilty of treason or re-locate her to a work camp in order to toughen her up. Neither of these things on Harley’s mental list pleased her, but nonetheless, she steeled her gut and approached. She clicked her heels together and saluted, her own body feeling alien under her control.
“Colonel.” She spoke the word with slow deliberation, hoping not to waver.
As if a recording had just been activated, the Colonel whirred to life. “Harley, I regret to inform you that your mother, father and brother have been reported dead in Columbus, Ohio at 2100 hours on January 6th. There was an attack on Guarded City, Ohio and there were no survivors. They were transferred to Heritage Grace hospital in Columbus, but all three of them were dead on arrival. They all have been buried in the Hero’s Memorial hospital with full acclaim afforded to them. On the behalf of the Secretary of Defense, I extend to you and your family my deepest sympathy in your great loss.”
Harley’s life took a sharp downward tumble as soon as her boots touched the ground in Guarded City, Ohio, where her home once stood. Discharge papers clutched in her fingers did very little to ground her as she shifted through the rubbish pile that had once been the “safest home in America”, a luxury afforded to her family from her people in exchange for her service to the United States. She had trusted her people, and just like so many times before, she realized she had put her faith in the wrong hands.
After she spent as many nights as she wanted lamenting her family’s death, drinking herself into a stupor to get some sleep, Harley made the rash decision to move to Eureka, Montana. It was a major base now that Russian troops had moved into Canada, and border patrol was always willing to hire young recruits with a deathwish. It’d be perfect.
Unfortunately for Harley, her story is just beginning after she’s settled in to her new job. Political tensions are rising, ration tokens are becoming harder to earn, and the opportunity to help one more sad, wayward Russian arises. If there’s one thing that ever rings true for the entirety of Harley’s difficult life, it’s that if a decision can be made at any point: she will choose the wrong one.
