Starts with a Match

Playing the Game

They do it alphabetically. Luckily, there's not that many of us 'heroes' still alive for them to reward. Award. Never learned the difference between those two words.

Both are stupid and useless and misplaced right now. I get up on stage, and I get a special emblem pinned to my chest. It's not like Jim's—he got an artistic RRU with a sharp red line behind the letters put on his uniform. He brought pride and honor to Red Rover Unit. He got to shake everyone's hand, and Seya even saluted him.

I get an O, with red, black, and white lines behind them. I frown as Seya pins it to me, above my other accomplishments and participation awards. "What's this symbol mean?" I whisper to Seya, keeping my voice below the mic a foot away.

He stares me down, standing three inches taller than me. "For being the one and only blood man, Kooper," he says softly back. His voice may be gentle, but his eyes are furious. "Find me after. We need to talk." Seya shakes my hand, salutes me,, and I go back to stand at attention with the others as Medrano gets her pin for tech and weapon excellence. Sweat slips into my collar from my hair.

—

I don't go toward my spouse like the other soldiers do after we're dismissed. I lurch for Seya before he even makes it three feet away from the stage. Forgetting decorum, I grab him round the elbow. "Seya, hold up—"

I get a hard hand on the back of my wet neck, and he's shoving me through the curtains behind the stage. "Alright, listen—"

"Fuck, Seya, let go—"

"You will listen, Kooper," he growls, ripping his mask off to gnash his teeth inches from my face. He stands over me. I nod in silence. Seya looks up, to the side, spits a curse and faces me again.

"Okay, you and Medrano and Cliffer were right. Shit's a lot shiftier than I thought, that's on me. I've been pushing to get her plan sent upline and I'm hitting dead ends at every fucking turn; no one will let us move on with the tracking, no one's putting a BOLO out on Taylors. Further, you were not the only blood man left alive in the six units. There were others in blue, some in yellow, shit even Mellow turns out was a fucking O neg man, could've been donating right alongside you, lied on his papers."

My pulse spikes and his fingers press harder into my neck. Stone's face flashes so fast through my mind I'm scared I'm gonna have a fucking seizure. Seya knows this is a bad spot to be grabbing me, he knows about my PTSD, probably written in red in Doctor Nole's notes.

"The reason you got saddled with the keg job the most was because those others that coulda stepped in were getting paid to pass off blood and intel."

"Intel?" I near whimper. Teeth on my throat. No, just Seya. Seya and Stone. Shit. Seya then starts talking so fast that spit slips down his chin, and I'm suffocating and smaller than ever with him hunching over me in the dark.

"Bout how to build explosives, see if there was a way to lure in more gluts and set them on soldiers using them as hungry weapons, how to make the bombs bigger. It's not even the fucking Russians like Mellow was bullshitting,

"It might be spies in our own fucking government, people who think the new president isn't doing enough. No one in the fucking world yet has figured out how to use the blood for cherry bombs like blessed Medrano has. Instead of trying to kidnap her, cause that would've been a bitch, and you know she wouldn't have given up shit, they went for the grunts who were missing home, missing sanity, easier targets, pull at those already losing their minds and eyeballin' their guns. Made promises. Give us blood, and details, work for us from within and help us make bombs of our own, we'll help you go home to family.

"Fucking unlikely, we were finding bodies of our soldiers without a drop of blood in them all over Russia. Not just ours either, some of their own who were O neg. Corpses in black military uniforms. Teeth missing, faces and fingerprints destroyed, so no way to know who they were or who they're working for. A lot of them were even missing arms and legs, bone marrow sucked dry."