Excerpt: Happy Hunting Grounds

"I love it here!" She yelled into the musty air. "I fuckin love it here!" She was Jenn. She was an ex-beauty queen. She used to be a lover. She used to cradle herself in a boy's arms. She used to go out on Friday nights with her girlfriends. To places like this. Life had been more real for her before the bombs and before the deaths started to climb. Life used to actually mean something for Jenn. She was a sad little shell, but she knew that scene, so she was dancing her heart away with a bottle of burbin in her fist.
Life had never really been all that real to me. I was an insect, acting totally on instinct. I reacted to what came before me, and from there I moved on to the next incident. I watched for what the hairs on the back of my neck told me to look out for. The world told me what was dangerous. The head of the pin told me that the point was sharp. The government grinned at me. The soldiers looked at me forlornly. They looked to their superiors, the patches on their uniforms. They look like goddamn NASCAR racers with those sponsors on them, my father would yell. The patches told me who to look out for. The patches told my hair on the back of my neck who to fear. The soldiers with their sad eyes and their drooping guns told me matter of factly, Happy hunting to you. Kill or be killed, an animal knows. So it went. I was a insect at heart. Go figure.

The music was louder. Lily was far away and I could not see her, but I knew now that somewhere deep in her was a hate for me. It made me not want to look at her. So I started to dance again. Jenn dropped her arm from around my neck and took a swig. She hung onto Frasier, with his skinny ass and his bony collar bones and his thin neck. His adam's apple moved the most out of all of his frame. His face was visibly red in the hazy light.

People around us were smoking. We had not seen cigarettes in over a year. It smelled delicious, like park benches and danger. I felt Morm's hand slip around my waist. The hairs on my neck stood up, but it was good rather than bad. I grinned and forgot for a second that my sister was bored with me, when she was really the only thing that I was alive for anymore. I knew that I loved Morm, just like I knew I loved every male that looked at me with something courageous in their eyes. I knew that we loved each other but that that did not matter because in the morning that love would be gone and we would be companions in a war again and we would not have to feel like humans any longer.