Life After

Chapter 15: The Days in the Revolution

AJ shrugged. "We'll just have to keep an eye out for any soldiers that might seem unhappy with the way things are."

Anna leaned back in her chair and eyed AJ. "Alright, we'll do that then. Next week we'll be meeting at Aaron's place. We're growing in numbers and I'm worried the soldiers will start getting suspicious if we keep meeting up like this every week."

The rest of the evening AJ and I played along with everyone else having fun and making noise so Anna could discuss plans with others. We did genuinely have fun, but there was this underlying tone of "act as normal and loud as possible" that made it a bit stressful. Once everyone had had a chance to talk with Anna, we put out the fire and headed home.

On the walk home, AJ and I talked some more about his suggestion to find a soldier who would be willing to help our cause. We realized that we didn't really know any of the soldiers and that would make it hard to find someone. I had never really bothered talking to the soldiers much because they all seemed very no nonsense and when I had tried to have a conversation, they had either cut it short or flat out ignored me.

We agreed that we needed to talk to some soldiers and make some friends.

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Over the next week, I tried to make conversation with soldiers that came by work or when I was walking on the street. To count, 3 had completely ignored me when I tried to talk, 4 had said hi back to me but hadn't bothered responding when I continued on the conversation, and 1 had talked to me for a bit but ended the conversation before I could really talk about anything. I had started to become disheartened.

I walked into work on that Monday morning and sat down with a sigh. I looked at the papers, but they were the same from the week before, so the new ones hadn't been dropped off yet. Anna came in and I greeted her like we always did. She sighed when she saw that she also did not have the weekly paperwork on her desk either.

We sat down and began talking as we normally did, mostly about our weekend and any news with our respective partners. We made an effort to keep things as "business as usual" as we could to keep things from being suspicious. This mostly meant carrying on with our jokes and talking about our personal life at home.

About 15 minutes after we arrived a disgruntled looking soldier came into the room carrying a pile of papers. I recognized him as the soldier that had escorted AJ and I on the first day we arrived on base. I remembered how friendly he had been with Nurse Sarah.

"Hey, we were wondering when those would get here," Anna said, taking the papers from him.

"Yeah, sorry about that. They got held up in the main office," he responded with a sheepish smile.

I said a silent prayer to the universe in my head. "They always seem to be screwing things up," I said with a chuckle. "It's Dave, right? I remember you from my first day."

"Yep, that's me. I remember you. You guys came in with that dog."

I nodded and glanced at Anna, who received my look and knew exactly what I was asking her to do. She dramatically looked through the papers and handed me mine saying, "Jeez, the numbers are different again this week. I don't know what to believe anymore."

I did my best to look sad as I took the papers and said, "Yeah, tell me about it." I turned back to Dave who was awkwardly shuffling his hands. "Dave, can I ask you something?"

He looked a little stunned, but nodded. "Do you know how many people aren't being counted on the list?"

Dave looked down at his feet. "I really don't know. I honestly thought everyone was being counted until that gathering..." He trailed off. It was obvious he had some inner turmoil about the subject.