Come and Take Them-eARC by Tom Kratman Page B

older. The rations had been prepared by the camp cooks, themselves almost all discharged veterans, reservists, or militia. The boys had formed in line to pass through a field kitchen where the cooks had splashed the chow more or less randomly into the trays of their mess kits. Most of the alcohol would probably go into the cooks over the next couple of weeks.
    The boys sat on the ground or on fallen logs and upright stumps, wolfing their rations down before the setting sun released a horde of homicidal mosquitoes, some of whom would surely end up stuck in the gravy.
    There were eleven other boys in his section. They’d started with fourteen, total, but two were gone already, having left fairly early. The remainder, besides Ham, were Augustino, Belisario—named for Belisario Carrera—Francisco, Jorge, Jose, Oscar, Ramon, Raul—named for the president, though he hadn’t been president back then—Roger, Virgil, and Vladimiro.
    Ham knew that was the wrong order to alphabetize them into, but, Screw it. I’m twelve and I think in terms of first names. And it’s a little funny that none of them are named for my father. I would have thought…but maybe he knows what he’s doing by staying out of politics. He’s not the most charming guy on the planet, no matter what Mom may think.
    And, speaking of politics…
    “Pick one and beat his ass,” the centurion said. Sadly, Centurion Cruz has forgotten the code of honor of boys. I’m bigger than any of them. So it’s inherently unfair. But I’m not so big that I can handle two of them. At least, not for sure.
    So it’s number one, which is way harder than beating someone’s ass.
    So who can I get to talk about himself, and how do I start? I should know this, but I never had to learn, because everybody always treated me as special and different or, with my Pashtun, divine. I wonder what they’d say if they knew how much they fucked me over.
    Probably something like, “It’s for your own good, Lord.”
    Ah, well, I know they mean well. No…actually they mean the best.
    And now, which one to break the ice with…ah, Jorge’s always seemed fairly reasonable. Jorge, last name Rodrigues, sat alone with his back resting against a tree.
    Sitting down on the ground on the next quarter over from Jorge, Ham said, “I was actually in on the testing of this crap.”
    The boys talked between half chewed gulps.
    “Doesn’t seem like crap to me,” Jorge said.
    “Right now, it doesn’t to me, either,” Ham admitted. “At least it has a taste to it. But when the old man made us all, himself and my mom and sisters included, eat ration sancocho for a week straight to see how much we’d learn to hate it, I sure thought it was crap.”
    “He does that?”
    “Every time something in the menu changes,” Ham confirmed.
    “Must be nice.” Jorge said, wistfully. “Nice to always have enough to eat, I mean. That’s what’s so great about this place; if I get hungry it doesn’t last for long before they feed me.”
    Great? This place? What kind of suckiness do you come from? But…best to let that go for now. Besides, I knew there were poor people and poor areas, still.
    “Where are you from?” Ham asked.
    “Little town you never heard of by the sea. No road to it and the trails aren’t much. And, yes, before you ask, dirt poor. Not just my family, the whole town. We didn’t even have a full time teacher until the legion put one in about ten years ago. Not much electricity, still, except for some solar power the legion put in so a cell phone—just one in town, and that only for emergencies—a refrigerator, and a single small TV, in the school, could be powered.”
    Wow. That is poor. Doesn’t sound bitter though.
    “How did you…?”
    “End up here?” Jorge finished. “The teacher’s a medically retired corporal—missing one foot—who seems to do some recruiting on the side. We had one opening in a military academy allocated to the village, but it wasn’t going