The War Game (6 page)

             
“Yeah, look at the sign. ‘Adventure Golf.’ I told you I was taking you on an adventure.”

             
I let him see me roll my eyes as he laughed.

             
The golf park wasn’t as cheesy as I imagined it would be. There were lots of big rocks, big as buildings (in fact, one was a building), a waterfall (the water must have stopped falling a long time ago), trees, shrubs, and bushes. Some of it was fake but still in pretty good condition.

             
“The way that people play golf is that whoever gets the least amount of strokes win. Um,” he started looking around, “let’s find some clubs and a ball to start with.”

             
We looked around and spotted a rusty club in the grass. We looked for a second club but we decided on sharing the one since it didn’t really matter. John fished out a golf ball from a small pond filled with green rainwater.

             
“Look! I found a pearl, Pearl,” he said with a stupid grin on his face.

             
I tried to hide a smile but was unsuccessful. I took the ball out of his hands and walked back to the first hole.

             
I went first. It took me nine embarrassing strokes to get the ball in. He took three very precise shots. Each time he took a swing, he made a big show about lining the ball just right with his club, and hitting it with the exact amount of pressure to enable it on its destination.

             
We hit that little ball over a bridge, over hills and a small stream of muddy water, through tunnels, and through a windmill.

             
We were about to approach the seventh hole (beside a ten-foot tiki face) when we noticed something half-buried in the dirt. Something I recognized from my anatomy book.

             
My brain told my legs to move but they couldn’t. I happened to glance over to the next couple of holes on the course and saw several large patches of dug-up grass with dried flowers thrown on top.  Then I notice how bumpy the ground was underneath me.

             
John slowly dug a little in the dirt with the golf club. Part of a scapula bone (a shoulder blade) was hidden underneath.

             
“Looks like he or she has been dead here for quite a while,” John said rather calmly. No matter how many dead bodies I see, it freaked me out inside. But not as much as it used to.

             
“Let’s go now,” I said, leading the way out.

             
Some big-nosed guy with a waistline hanging over his belt caught up to us as we were exiting the miniature golf park. Any hint of a jelly roll or muffin top was a tell-tale sign of a newbie. A newbie is one of those who were recently outed and sent packing for camp. Also, the fact that he had a real belt and not a piece of rope was also a giveaway.

             
When he saw our faces, pure white I’m sure, he frowned. “Hey, yeah, I was just going to warn you about that.”

             
“It’s all right, man,” John said calmly.

             
The man dug around in his pockets and pulled out a couple of strips of arcade tickets from his pants. “I was also going to give you these.”

             
“For what?” John and I were clueless.

             
“Some of the people here are setting up a store. You use these tickets like money to buy things. It’s the one that’s near the front gates, next to the big water fountain.”

             
“All right, cool. Thanks.”

             
“You’re welcome.” The big-nosed man took off.

             
John was awfully calm for having just uprooted a dead human being. I felt tingly all over, like when I saw that guy’s intestines a while back. 

             
“How many tickets did he give us?” I said, in an attempt to shift the mood hanging over us to a lighter one.

             
John counted the tickets by two and came up with the answer really fast. “Forty tickets. So we each get twenty.”

             
“How did you do that?”

             
“Do what?”

             
“Know how many tickets there were without counting them all?”

             
“Multiplication. You have four strips of ten, so that’s forty.”

             
“Yeah, I don’t get it. I didn’t get to go to school for very long.”

             
“Maybe I can teach it to you sometime.”

             
“Do you want to go check the store out now?”

             
“Sure,” he nodded in agreement.

~~~

             
The store still wasn’t ready to go. All that was there to eat were ketchup sandwiches, pretzel salt, and tart lemonade. The pickles were gone.

             
So John and I were sitting on the swings, waiting for people to make their way to the theater for the night. Then we, as silently as possible, made our way over to the octopus.

             
“It’s up there,” I pointed.

             
John stared at the dead woman sitting in the cart where my stuff was hidden. “Which one did you hide it in?”

             
“Take one guess,” I said coyly.

             
“You surprise me sometimes, you really do.” John shook his head.

             
John, instead of shimmying up the tentacle like I would, hopped into one of the cars that was off the ground by a foot. Then he hopped into the next highest cart beside that one. He kept jumping from car to car until he was just one jump away from getting my stuff. There was a considerable amount of space between his car and the woman’s car, not to mention the thirty or so feet of space below him.

             
“Do you think I’m gonna make it?” he asked me, probably scared and just teasing me so I wouldn’t notice him hesitating.

             
“I think you’re gonna miss, fall, and land on your chin,” I assured him.

             
“How much are you willing to bet?” he asked, like anyone here had money.

             
Then I thought of something, “I’ll bet you five tickets that you won’t make it!”

             
“All right, then. You’re going to go down,” he squatted into a jumping position.

             
“No, you are!” I yelled as he leaped and crashed his arm into the side of the door. Then he pulled himself up like it was nothing.

             
I remembered what he told me earlier about Camp Z. He must have developed about a million different survival skills just to stay away from the hunters. Jumping was probably the same to him as tying a shoe was to me.

             
He started looking around in the cart and gave me a puzzled look. Then he disappeared for a few seconds and came right back up.

             
“Um, are you sure you hid it in this one?

             
“I’m positive.” I started freaking out inside. The thought of ketchup sandwiches made my stomach turn. Then I realized someone must have been watching me closely earlier. “Damn it!” I found myself saying out loud.

             
“Don’t worry, we’ll find it and get it back.” He stood on top of the cart and turned around to jump.

             
“Don’t!” I screamed. I was no longer afraid of someone hearing us. Obviously, they (whoever they were) could hear and see everything. He landed on his feet, just like a cat.

             
“And I’ll kick their ass for you. Okay?”

             
“Okay,” I said, not that I really thought he would. He seemed like to the type to steal it back, no doubt.

             
“And you owe me five of your tickets,” he sneered.

             
“Go ahead, take ’em.”

             
“Nah, I was just kidding. You keep them,” he insisted.

             
“What could I possibly get with them? A key chain or some stupid snow globe?”

             
“Don’t knock snow globes, they’re cool,” he laughed.

             
We walked around, snooping and half-hoping we would come upon someone’s stashed goods. We found absolutely nothing. Not even a smear of ketchup.

             
“Fuck,” he loudly lamented. “I’m hungry. I’m gonna kill that bastard that took our stuff.”

             
Our stuff? Were we together now, like a team? Or was he just mad that he couldn’t get to it before the thief did?

             
“Well, we could always check out that store people are setting up. If it’s done now.”

             
So we went inside and I came upon the key chains that I saw that one little kid playing with during the second day. They were by the front door, in a box marked “Free.” John pocketed a handful.

             
We went through the aisles slowly, all three of them. There were T-shirts, ceramic mugs, inflatable animals, baseball caps, and some sunglasses. Most of those had broken lenses but a sign said, “Buy 1 get 1 free.” So I imagined that the idea would be that the buyer would pop the lens out of one and put it in the other. I grabbed two pairs of sunglasses and John grabbed a men’s T-shirt in Large. It had a dorky dolphin on it and I told him so.

             
He said, “Shut up, dolphins have super powers, don’t you know? They even speak their own language and each gang has different dialects.”

             
“How do you know all of that?”

             
“I watched a show on television once. It wasn’t live, though. Not that anything was shown live for the past several years.”

             
“Oh, you and your fancy television. Did you have a DVD player too?”

             
“Nah. I’ve only seen a few television shows. You?”

             
“No, I’ve only seen broken sets.” If I knew how to fix things, I would have definitely fixed a television. If I could have found a television that wasn’t kicked in and destroyed to the point of no return. What really irked me was that when soldiers took away things like that, they realized how much work it was to haul and destroy and bury televisions and other junk. Or they stole it for themselves. Especially considering that at one point in America, every household had at least two or three of them. So they just kicked the screens in or gutted them out so they couldn’t be fixed. I didn’t even know anybody with one of them. I think some stations still broadcasted stuff.

             
“So you had a television but only watched a couple of shows. Why?”

             
“Well, it wasn’t mine. This super-nerdy guy fixed one of the broken sets back at another camp. He would have people pay him to watch it. Well, pay him in trades, to watch it. He wanted only good stuff but luckily I had a couple of cigarettes I could give him. I was only able to watch a couple of shows, though.”

             
“That was smart of him. I bet he got a lot of great stuff that way.”

             
“In the end, it wasn’t. It got him killed. He declined someone’s offer of a case of super glue. Because what could he use a tube of super glue for? Especially an entire case of it? The guy who got rejected killed him. And super-glued the remote to his hand. All over a stupid box with little people moving around in it.”

             
I didn’t see a whole lot of anything I needed at the moment. It was unlikely that they would have a book on human anatomy at an amusement park’s gift shop. They did have some large lollipops, the ones that looked like a unicorn’s horn. We both picked up a few of those.

             
As we “paid,” we noticed a sign taped up by the cash register. “Mandatory Meeting Tonight. Place: Theater. Time: Sun Down.”

             
John exchanged five tickets for the merchandise while I asked one of the women who was helping run the store what the meeting tonight was all about.

             
“Oh, odds and ends, mostly I think. Make sure you tell the others,” she said. She had blonde hair that was neatly combed and even shiny. And not that greasy shine most people here have. She must be hoarding a few trial-size shampoo bottles. She seemed to be the type who volunteered at her kids’ elementary school. I made sure not to make small talk like that, though. You didn’t ask people about their kids because they might break down and cry and you’d have to hold their hands for an hour or two. I learned my lesson about that a year back. Yes, it was sad that parents couldn’t be with their kids but I really shouldn’t be the one to try and comfort them about it. I’m not good at that stuff. I don’t like dealing with a flood of emotions.