“Just sleep on the cot,” Wolfgang said in frustration. He said it every night. But his ‘wife’, Leah, stubbornly slept on the ground on the other side of it.
When she felt like talking, she would reply, “You sleep on it. You need the comfort more than I do.”
Most evenings she said nothing.
The girl never left Wolfgang’s side, even accompanying him to the German training camp in Western Austria. With aliens from another star system attacking, borders no longer mattered, and German-speaking Swiss soldiers worked with Austrian soldiers to train the new conscripts.
The Austrians disguised the training base as a refugee camp and, given the state of its residents, it was not difficult to maintain the illusion. The recruits were not soldiers. They wore no uniforms. Most did not have their own arms and the rest used the ones provided in training sparingly. They had little discipline.
But the soldiers that ran the camp did the best they could to teach the new conscripts skills and tactics necessary for guerrilla warfare. No one deluded themselves that they could fight the aliens head on. Guerrilla warfare, the savior of many technologically inferior armies, would be the only thing that might save the Earth.
Yet Wolfgang had little hope in his fellow conscripts as he saw them try to learn to set fuses, aim wooden rifles, scale fences, and most of all, try to get in shape by running. One did not get in shape without proper nutrition, and the camp lived on daily rations that were less than a quarter of what Wolfgang would normally eat.
When he complained, Leah gave him some of her share, so he never complained again.
They exercised, drilled, and worked. Many complained, but the soldiers kept everyone so busy, no one had time to sit around and foster discontent. Wolfgang had occasionally looked on the military with disdain but now acknowledged they knew what they were doing. They knew how to train recruits and keep malcontents from causing problems.
But, and this by their own admission, they didn’t know how to fight the aliens.
Wolfgang exercised and drilled and trained and worked with everyone else.
And for some reason, on the firing range, he found peace.
He didn’t know why. He’d never fired rifles much before, only as a boy scout and a scout leader, but when he was on the range, he focused on the weapon, he focused on the target, and while he would never forget the loss of his wife and child, the focus allowed him to compartmentalize the anguish he experienced the rest of the time, to push it away and not feel it. It was simply him and a rifle and a target.
He looked forward to the time on the range, did everything there that was asked of him, and his scores reflected positively. Soon his and Leah’s schedule included more time on the range than other recruits.
He enjoyed the extra time and the extra challenges the instructors gave him. They had him fire in different positions. Prone, standing, kneeling, sitting, both on a stool and on the ground, and once they even brought out a moveable stairway and had him shoot between the open steps. It seemed strange to him and Leah, and they joked about it at times, but Wolfgang faced the challenges and continued to score well.
Two weeks into their training, they had a visitor.