The work that Jus had taken on was intense and sometimes carried with it danger. He jumped in headfirst and immersed himself in it. When he did this, he could lie to himself and tell himself that the trouble building up ten thousand miles away was not real or going to affect him. But every morning, his coffee was tainted with poison images that told him otherwise, and he knew, last November, when he signed that contract, it was not ink that he signed it with, but blood.
It did not seem right. Jus was finally finding his rhythm. He had a full-time job and a side business that he was investing a significant amount of time in. A longtime friend had lost his mind and left his woman in the north without a plan, and even here, Jus did what he could to guide her in her next steps.
September came, and autumn had that beautiful freshness that Jus had fallen in love with just two years and 5 million miles ago. The planned bivouac weekend arrived, providing a little time for Jus and his comrades to play a game heavily influenced by the Second World War. The hardware was dark green, the equipment was heavy, and the atmosphere was surreal. This was because, without warning, the unit was diverted to the home station.
Mixed with the bitter morning news that a predator not seen since the early 1970s was moving across the land, tearing hundreds of thousands of people out of their lives and dropping them into an unknown world far, far away, and the tone of the great hall in which everyone was told nothing was going on, when the air was so heavy with the assurance that something was definitely going on.
It began to feel like incarceration. Jus knew, he had fallen into the trap that he protested only a decade ago. His days of revolution were traded for falling into the ranks that he said he would never be a part of. It was like the end of the movie Hair; he was caught in the vortex, and he knew that he could not escape it.
He and his comrades were lined up and sorted out in true processing center fashion as though they had all just joined this insane little endeavor. The General stood before them and repeatedly said, "Nothing is going on." But the more he said it, the more they knew something was definitely going on. All over the news, 600,000 people were plucked out of their lives and dropped in the eastern desert as though a spaceship was just beaming them out of their homes. Jus felt that before the weekend was over, they would be told they could not go home.
The heaviness in the great hall had a severe bitterness to it, like the host had just been beaten before coming out and smiling at the group. Later, the story was told. At 3:00 am Thursday morning, the commander's phone rang. "Get ready, you are on the list, you are going." It was then the detour was crafted, to get everyone ready so when the trigger was pulled and they were sucked out of their lives, they would be squared away. Then, like a twisted draft that the barrel stops on the empty chamber one click short of the bullet, nothing happened.
Sunday afternoon came, Jus and his friends all saddled up upon their fourteen-ton steel horses and rode home, finally able to exhale. They were safe. For now.
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