Free Foreign Enemies and Traitors by Matthew Bracken Page A

inside; we’ve got to check everything.” 
    “You already checked it,” Carson complained, but he did as he was told, entering the tent and setting down his load.  The medic put on rubber gloves, opened the top and side flaps of the pack, and dumped the contents out on the white plastic table in the center of the tent.  He lifted the basket holding Carson’s clothes and dumped them out as well, and then felt the pockets with his gloved hands.  He paid no particular attention to the seemingly ordinary one-inch-wide leather belt looped into the khaki pants.
    “This all your stuff?” asked the driver.  “Everything here is yours?”
    “Yeah, I think so.  My memory is…” 
    “Well…look at what we have here!”  The driver picked up a large one-time peanut butter jar filled with a dark brown powder.  He unscrewed the red lid and took a deep breath through his mask.  “Coffee— real coffee!  Man, it’s been like forever since I smelled real coffee…” 
    The medic joined his coworker at breathing in the aroma of ground coffee, going so far as to lift the bottom edge of his filter mask.  Their attitudes reflexively softened, they seemed to lose interest in checking the rest of his belongings: sweater, poncho, extra water bottles and so on.  The reason for the second search in the tent was obvious to Carson.  They had seen the jar of coffee back at the checkpoint, but they had not wanted to draw attention to it around the other soldiers:  they might have had to share its contents.  The pockmarked sergeant said, “Okay, mister, we’ll just take this little present here, and you can keep the rest of your stuff.  After the doctor sees you, after your blood work is done, you should be cleared.”
    “You mean I’ll be able to leave this place?”
    “I don’t know—that’s way above my pay grade.  I mean you’ll most likely be medically cleared.  What happens to you after that, I don’t know.” 
    The black medic removed a rubber tourniquet and a syringe from the green service pack hanging at his side.  “Okay now, sit down and stick out your left arm, and let’s see what kind of veins you’ve got.”
    “What about this cut?”  Carson pointed to his forehead as the medic put the tourniquet around his arm just above his elbow.
    “What about it?”
    “Will I get to see a doctor or something?  It might be infected.”
    The medic laughed through his filter mask.  “What’s the matter, princess, you think this is the emergency room?  Don’t worry: it’s not bleeding.  I’ll give you a little Betadine.  You’ll live.  You’ll see a doctor eventually, when the lab results are back.  Ask him what he thinks.”  He lowered his voice, nodding over his shoulder at the white driver with his ravaged face, standing a few yards behind.  “We don’t worry too much about scars anymore.  Especially not for…older folks.  They’ll put in nice stitches for kids sometimes, but not…you know.  I mean, it’s a matter of priorities.”
    “Priorities?”
    “Right, priorities.   Age triage, they call it.  And, well, let’s face it—you’ve aged out.  You’re in the third category, agewise.  Anyway, I’ll be back in a little while with your vaccination shots: they have to be kept refrigerated.  For Cameroon fever, what everybody calls the monkey pox, and the avian flu.  Plus a few more.  Then you’ll be good to go, assuming you don’t get sick in the next week, and you pass your background check.  Speaking of which, the MPs will be by to collect your fingerprints later on.  Somebody from the camp staff will bring you a sleeping bag, and you’ll get fed around six.  They’ll bring chow around to the tents in a cart.  You have to stay in your tent or right by it.  No wandering around, okay?  Curfew is curfew, even here on base.  If you’re out after dark, you might get shot, and I’m not joking.  We’re not trying to be hard-asses—that’s just the way it