Free Talker 25 by Joshua McCune

entire species for the actions of a few.”
    “A few?”
    He waves his hands at the reds. “Once the war started, were they supposed to just sit back and hope the military knew who the good ones were?”
    “I don’t know, James.” I gesture toward a nearby pallet of weapons: machine guns, rocket launchers, and several objects I don’t recognize. “I’m just tired of all this.”
    “It’s not war for them. It’s survival.”
    “Protect the children,” I whisper. Old Man Blue and her army were trying to stop the military from murdering the children. But how many people did they kill in the process? I shake my head. “You can’t do it this way, James.”
    “We have no choice.”
    I bite my lip before I say something I’ll regret, which happened all too often in my arguments with Mom. She believed there were no bad guys, only victims. I believed she was crazy, told her so more than once. Then she died, and I didn’t care about being right anymore.
    We finally reach the campfire. After a whirlwind of introductions, James grabs MREs from a storage container and we sit on folding chairs beside a heavy guy with a friendlyface who’s busy examining a long, narrow bullet. I think his name’s Howard.
    “Tracker?” James asks.
    “New model.” He points at a microscopic hole in the casing. “They put the tracer in there. Pulled it out of Myra. We found two dozen more in the others.”
    “Deactivated?” James asks.
    “For sure,” Howard says. He grins. “We sent some out with the morning crew.”
    “We run sentry shifts to secure our perimeter,” James says to me.
    “Except this time they’re going to go a bit farther,” Howard says. “Activate these suckers and drop some false trails. Enough shop talk. We have more important matters to discuss.”
    “No, Howard. We talked about this,” James says.
    “You talked. I did not listen.” Howard raises his voice. “Grunts, may I please have your attention.” Everybody quiets. “As you know, we have a newbie in our ranks. And all newb Grunts must play our game.”
    “Loki run! Loki run!” the crowd chants.
    “She’s a guest, not a recruit,” James says.
    Ignoring him, Howard holds up three fingers. “It’s simple, Melissa. You must tell us three things about yourself. Two must be the truth, and the third must be a lie.” He wavesan arm at the others gathered about the fire. “If we choose correctly, you make a lap around the cave in your skivvies.”
    “She’s not doing this,” James says. “She’s injured.”
    Jeers answer him. Three quarters of the people around the fire are wounded. Across the way, a guy with a prosthetic left leg hobbles to his feet, strips off his shirt, and makes a loop around the fire. He plops back onto his rock to vivacious applause.
    Everyone turns to me. Take away the dragons, the crazy outfits, the slings and bandages, and we could be off at summer camp somewhere. Or at one of Trish’s parties.
    It’s normal wrapped in ridiculous, or maybe ridiculous wrapped in normal. Maybe that’s the way of it, the way to stay sane in this insane world. Or maybe it’s just a way to get a girl to take off her clothes.
    “You don’t have to do this,” James says as the silence intensifies.
    I look around the cave, at the unfamiliar faces of these riders—many of them my age—at the dozen Reds who sure as hell seem like monsters, and at the Silver hunkered behind us, who seems nothing like a monster at all.
    Whether I like it or not, this could be home for a while.
    “What do I get if I win?” I ask. The crowd cheers.
    “You get to make one of us do a Loki run,” Howard says.
    “I don’t think so. If I win, everybody has to.”
    After a discussion, they grudgingly agree.
    Before I give my answers, Howard has me write them down on a piece of paper, indicating which is the lie. He tucks it in his pocket and opens the floor to me.
    “Truth number one: when I was ten, I won the Northern Virginia tae kwon do