When the slide show ended, Matt stood silently. He wasn’t going to say anything. He was going to stand there until one of the kids spoke up, even if it took an hour. It never took that long. Rob, the hockey player, raised his hand. “Yes, Rob?” Matt asked.
“So which one did it?”
“Which one did what?” Matt asked. He knew what Rob was asking but he wanted Rob to say the words. He wanted every kid in that room to hear Rob say the words.
“Which one killed my mom?” Rob asked. Then he swallowed so hard I could hear it in the back of the room.
“They all did.” Matt turned the lights back on. He walked slowly to the front of the room. We actually knew who had killed Rob’s mom. He was still alive. He lived in St. Louis. They chose not to use the pictures of the people who’d actually killed the kids’ family members. They didn’t just want to show them one killer. They wanted to make these kids hate them all. “They’re all complicit. Do you guys know what complicit means?” Each of the kids nodded. Smart group. Matt had their full attention. “They all killed them. They worked together. The scary part is that’s only a small portion of them. And they’re not done. They’ll never be done. They’ll stop only when we stop them. They are bloodthirsty killers. They are evil. They are the enemy. This is a war. It’s been going on for generations. If you’re lucky, it will be your generation that ends it.” I had heard this part of the speech enough times that it had begun to turn my stomach each time I heard it. The propaganda wasn’t my style. I always thought that it was unnecessary. I looked at Rob. He was staring at Matt. He had a slight twitch in his left eye and was flexing and unflexing his right fist. I couldn’t help but think to myself, just tell the poor kid who killed his mom and send him on his way. You won’t have to tell him which side is good and which is bad. As far as he’s concerned, he already knew. Matt continued. “Two years from now, when each of you turns eighteen, you, too, will be a part of this War. There is no way out of it, no escape. These people”—Matt spoke the word people with disgust, as if it really shouldn’t apply, then continued with more confidence, his voice growing louder with each word—“will come after you too. They want you dead. Make no mistake about it—each of you was born into this world with a special destiny. Each of you can work to make this world a better place. Once you turn eighteen you will be a target. You can be killed, just like your parents or your aunts or uncles were killed. You can be murdered, in cold blood, by the enemy. As Joseph here . . .” Matt pointed to me, acknowledging my presence for the first time. All of the kids turned in their seats to look at me. I simply sat there and nodded. Matt continued. “As Joseph will explain later, there are things that you can do about that. Once you turn eighteen, you can be killed, but you can also act to stop the killing. You can stop the violence. You can get revenge.” Now I was interesting. The kids all turned to look at me again. Matt went on unfazed. “There are lots of things you can do to help us defeat the enemy—but more on that later.
“For now, you all deserve to know more about our enemy. They want to kill you simply because of who your parents are. They want to kill you and they want to kill your family. They will stop at nothing to accomplish this. They are corrupt, relentless, and immoral.” Matt paused again. “And we must defeat them.
“There have been countless times in history when people have been slow to recognize that evil exists. Each time, people have been passive. They sat around while others died, only acting when it was nearly too late.” At this point, a cadence developed in Matt’s voice. “Well, I want you all to recognize that evil exists and that you must fight it. We know who they are. We have to fight our enemy head-on.” Matt pointed at the pimply-faced kids in the room. “You will fight them head-on. We will attack them and defeat them before the evil grows too large to be defeated. They’ve already killed members of your family. They will kill again. They’ll stop at nothing, unless we stop them. They are filled with hate. You don’t have to hate them back. You just need to realize what they are capable of.”
With that, Matt turned off the lights again. He turned his computer back on. This time, projected on the wall was the picture of two bloody bodies, covered in white blankets. It looked just like the picture in the New York Post I had seen the day before, the picture of Jared’s victims. Matt clicked the button on his computer. The new picture was of a car burning, the flames reaching high into the air. I could just barely make out the shape of two charred bodies in the car. Matt clicked the button on his keyboard. The next picture was of an older man, roughly sixty, slumped in a chair. His eyes were glazed over and his mouth hanging open. He was dead. Another atrocity. Matt clicked and clicked. Another murdered man, another murdered woman. And on and on. I remember the first time I saw the slide show. It reminded me of the video I was shown in high school with all the graphic pictures of victims of drunk driving. That movie was supposed to make you afraid to drive drunk. It was supposed to make you afraid. Matt’s slide show had a different purpose. It was meant to elicit that other primal emotion—hate. No matter what Matt said, I knew that we could only defeat them if we hated them. Even if the propaganda turned my stomach, I knew that this was true. Sitting in the back of the room watching these kids, I could tell that they were afraid. I could also see that they were beginning to hate. I’ll be honest, Maria, at the time, their hate gave me hope.
“This is a lot to take,” Matt said, as he flicked through a few more images of strewn, lifeless bodies. Again, we could have shown them video but we had to be careful. Too much too soon wouldn’t help these kids turn into fighters. We had to ease them into it. We had two years. “But I have a few more slides to show you. You’ve seen our enemies. Now . . .” Matt’s voice lightened. A smile broke out on his face. He continued. “Let me show you pictures of your friends.” Matt clicked on his keyboard and a new image appeared. This picture was brighter than the rest. The room began to glow. The first picture was of a white man. He had an athletic build. He was standing in a large field of grass. He was smiling. Matt moved to the next slide. It showed a blond woman. She was standing in front of a skyscraper on a city street. The next slide was of a black man in scrubs, then an Indian woman working at a computer, then a Hispanic man in a business suit, and on and on. Each slide showed another face, another pose, another race, religion, ethnicity. Each slide showed a new person, each one attractive, attentive, serious yet smiling. These pictures were the same at every lecture I’d attended. These slides were meant to represent hope. Hope for these kids, that they could manage this life, hope that they could survive. Hope because they weren’t alone. I remember how much that had meant to me.
When I was a kid, I remember walking into a room full of adults, only to have the room suddenly grow quiet. I knew they had been talking about something, something important, but they left me in the dark. Matt led those kids through a whole cycle of emotions, from fear to anger, from anger to hate, from hate to hope. It was somewhat sanitized, somewhat canned and rehearsed, but it was marketing genius. I knew how to kill people. Matt knew how to convince people to want to kill. I’m pretty sure that there’s more blood on his hands than on mine. I remember leaving the meeting when I was sixteen—frothing at the mouth, ready to start killing. The meeting gave me a purpose. I was sixteen. All I wanted was a purpose. Now, I sat watching Matt’s little presentation and felt nothing. Now I had my own reasons for hating the enemy. I didn’t need the slide show anymore. War will do that to you.
“Any questions?” Matt asked as he flipped the lights back on. He said it just like that, too, like he’d just taught the kids how to operate a washer-dryer. From here, the class could go in two directions, depending on who asked the first question. Ryan raised his hand. It was his house. I knew what he was going to ask before he asked it. I’d heard kids like him lead off with the same question dozens of times before. He wanted to be brave. “Yes, Ryan?”
“When do we get started?” Ryan asked. Only when the words finished coming out of his mouth did Ryan realiz
e how afraid they made him. The words scared the shit out of all of them. There was no answer that Matt could give that wouldn’t be too soon. Yet that was the question that was usually asked, burying the other question—the question that we needed to answer—under a heap of peer-pressure-induced bravado. I guess the when is the question that’s usually asked because when somebody punches you in the nose your first instinct isn’t to ask why, it’s to feel pain and anger and to want to punch back. Eventually, you’ll ask yourself why. The why always comes. It’s unavoidable. That’s why we try to answer that question here, in the first class, because if you give these kids a why, they might not try to find their own. We finessed it, though. We tried not to force it because it worked better if they asked first. That way, they felt like it came from them. So we’d only bring it up ourselves at the very end and only if no one asked.
“Joseph?” Matt looked toward me. I wasn’t ready. I never was. “Perhaps you can answer that?” Ready or not, I was up. I really only had one job: tell these kids about the rules of engagement. After that, I was just there to answer their questions.
I walked to the front of the room. “You’ll get started soon enough, Ryan,” I answered him. “In fact, I’m going to tell you guys about all of the rules of this War. Once that’s covered, Ryan, your question should be answered.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. When I talked to these kids, I always thought I sounded like someone else. “The rules are simple. They are simple but they are inflexible and the penalties for breaking these rules are severe. So listen closely.”
One of the kids raised her hand. I motioned to her so that she could speak. “How can a war have rules?” she asked. They all looked skeptical. It made sense. They’ve just spent over two hours being told that their enemy is evil. How their enemy must be defeated at all costs. Now I was going to come in and tell them that there were rules.
I was ready for the question. I’d heard the answer when I was sixteen. Since then, I’d delivered the answer many times. “All wars have rules,” I responded. “I know it seems counterintuitive. Why should we follow rules when we’re fighting people who killed our families?” The kids nodded along. “The thing is, without rules, there’s chaos. In chaos, nobody can win. We follow the rules because the rules will help us win.”
“Then why do they follow them?” one of the kids asked.
“For the same reason,” I answered. “Because they think that the rules will help them win, but we know better.” I did not tell them the real reason why I followed the rules. I followed the rules because they were the only thing keeping me sane. Even if they didn’t make sense, at least there were rules. They existed, islands of sanity in this absurd ocean. I continued with my explanation. “Rule number one: No killing innocent bystanders. The large majority of this world does not know that this War is raging on beneath their noses. Those people are to be protected at all costs. No collateral damage. The penalty for killing an innocent bystander is death, whether administered by our side or theirs. No excuses. No extenuating circumstances.”
“What if it’s an accident?” asked one of the kids.
“There are no accidents,” I responded quickly, and then moved on. “Rule number two: No killing anyone under the age of eighteen no matter what side they’re on. Until you turn eighteen you’re considered an innocent bystander. Therefore, the penalty for killing anyone who is under eighteen, including one of the enemy, is death. The corollary to this rule is that no one, on either side, can play a role in this War until they turn eighteen. So, Ryan”—I addressed him directly for a moment—“you wanted to know when you can get started. Well, you will get started the day you turn eighteen.” I paused for a second, debating whether or not to continue, whether or not to pile it on. I decided that I should, that they should hear it. So I added, “You’ll get started when you turn eighteen whether you want to or not. Until then, over the next two years, you will be trained. You will be readied for the transition. Your free pass is almost over.” Eighteen years wasn’t long enough. No amount of time would ever be long enough. The next two years will be hell for these kids. They will have to endure physical training and emotional training. They will be taught how to kill and how to defend themselves from being killed. They’ll see things they can’t even imagine, things they’ll wish they never saw. These kids weren’t ready for that yet, but it would come.
“Those are the two key rules. Every other rule flows from those two. There is a third rule that is important for you guys to know.” The third rule. I never really thought too much about the third rule. I never really stopped to contemplate the cruel practicality of its punishment. My mistake. “The third rule is necessary because of how the first two rules impact the War. It’s really quite simple. You can’t have kids until you turn eighteen. Can anyone see why this rule might be necessary?” One of the girls raised her hand. I motioned for her to speak.
“Because if you can have kids before you turn eighteen, no one will ever win the War.”
Perceptive. “Why’s that?” I asked.
“Well, if you can’t kill someone until they turn eighteen, and they keep having children before they turn eighteen, how could you ever stop them? They could just keep growing.”
“Exactly. That’s why we need the third rule. So, if anyone on either side has a child before they turn eighteen, that child must be turned over to the other side.”
“Do they kill them?” the perceptive girl asked.
“No, they don’t kill them. We don’t kill them. The other side simply adopts them. They raise them as one of their own. So, by violating this rule, instead of increasing the population of our side, you increase the population of theirs. Instead of making our side stronger, you make their side stronger. Eventually, that child will grow up. It will grow up and it will join this War and it will fight. It will grow up to fight its own parents, fight its brothers, fight its sisters.” I looked around the room at the shocked faces. It was clear that already they viewed this punishment as more cruel than death. I let it sink in before I went on. “So, those are the rules. That’s it. Three rules that you cannot ignore. Three rules that you cannot forget. Three rules that you must obey. Everything else that I tell you today is simply procedure. So, who here has guessed what it is I do for a living?”
A few hands raised and I called on one of them at random. “You kill people.”
“That’s right,” I replied. “I’m a soldier.” A soldier. That’s what they called us. Me, Michael, Jared, we were soldiers. We were supposed to be proud of the title. I went on to explain to the kids the different roles they might one day grow up into. They didn’t have to follow in my footsteps. We organized our side into three basic categories. Which category you joined depended on your desires and your aptitude for any one specific role. Frequently, as people aged, they could shift from one category to another. The first category was the soldiers. I had expressed a desire to be a soldier shortly after I went through my age sixteen information session. I thought it would be cool. Soldiers are the front line in the War. The soldiers are the offense. The soldiers meet the enemy head-on and are responsible for beating them. Like the kid said, we kill people.
Of course, the killing is never as simple as it seems. I couldn’t just go out, find the enemy and kill them. A game plan is needed. First you have to know who among the masses is part of the enemy. Figuring that out isn’t so easy. They come in all shapes and sizes, all ethnic groups, all religions. It’s only if you trace their genealogy back far enough that you’ll find they are all related. It was a strategy at one point in this War’s history, effectively executed by both sides, to try to hide members by diversifying their gene pools. So what do they have in common? A few genes and a common enemy—me, my friends, my family, these kids. So how do we find them? That’s the job of the second group: Intelligence. The Intel group includes guys like Matt. There are lots of different jobs in Intelligence: genealogists, translators, education experts, marketing gurus, military planners, compute
r experts. The list goes on. The Intel group is the biggest group. They’re the ones who tell me, Michael, and Jared who to kill. Sometimes they tell us why. Sometimes that stays secret. They also work on the training and education. They teach us to kill and then they tell us who to practice on.
The third group are the deep cover guys. We simply refer to them as breeders. It’s their job to assimilate completely into everyday life, to lay low and to try as hard as they can to raise normal families. They’re the ones who make sure that our ranks are not depleted. The danger for them, of course, is that their defenses will be down, that they will grow soft from years undercover and they will be discovered. If discovered, they’ll be killed. Their defenses are limited. Most breeders spend at least some time in another role. They may start as soldiers or in Intelligence. Then they either burn out, or meet someone they want to settle down with. Then they go deep cover.