The truck jostled suddenly, and the sliver of skin I was picking at tore back from my cuticle. I flinched at the sudden sting and a small dot of blood began to form where the raw skin was exposed. With a quick movement, I ripped the strip of dead skin off completely and smudged the blood away. I flexed my fingers experimentally, watching the skin stretch over the framework of my hand. Under the red lights, the creases in my hands looked deeper. The dirt caught in every crack and crevice exaggerated their lines. My hands looked aged, like they belonged to an old man. I briefly wondered if that would be the way my hands looked when I was old, but I discarded the thought and replaced it with the reality that I probably wouldn’t live long enough to find out. I found another bit of nail to pick at that wasn’t already bit down to the nail bed. I always picked at my fingers when heading out on a retrieval. It usually resulted in the drawing of blood, but I didn’t care; it was a bitter reminder that I was still alive.
When I lost interest in destroying what was left of my nails, I turned my palms up to see the pads of my fingers. They were supposed to be soft and supple, but in the two years I had been in the Retrieval Program they had been reduced to mounds of hardened skin comprised of burns and scars. My fingerprints had burned away a long time ago in my first few retrievals. I had so many marks and burns riddled across my body. I stopped keeping track of when I got them within the first few months of being thrown into the program. Every time a new burn appeared, it was just another mark. There was only one I distinctly remembered getting, and it stretched across most of my back. A few of its tendrils reached up my neck, and every so often when I caught my reflection at a mirror I could see the flares reaching up past my shirt to the back of my right ear.
If my hair was longer I suppose I would have tried to hide the mark, but our hair was always kept short. Never more than a buzz cut. Hair caught fire easily. A buzz cut was the first thing I received after being sentenced to the Retrieval Program. A buzz cut, and a few blows to the head for asking stupid questions. The officer had told me to sit in the metal chair at the center of the room. I asked why. His response was to club me over the head with a metal baton and tell me to keep my mouth shut and do what I was told. That was the Retrieval Program: keep your mouth shut, and do what you’re told.
Another lurch of the truck brought me back to the present and I became aware of someone’s eyes on me. I looked up to see Evans sitting across from me with his arms folded across his chest, seemingly unimpressed with something. His eyes were deeply set in his skull and his mouth was curled into a faint smirk as he looked at me. I straightened from my leaning position and stared back at him. The smirk on his face didn’t falter despite my attempts at intimidation, and his smile grew into one of amusement. Annoyance flared up in me, so I leaned back and crossed my arms and legs mimicking his position. Evans scoffed and leaned his head back as he closed his eyes. Feeling a little smug that I had somehow won, I let my eyes pan over the other retrievers.
There were 16 of us, eight on each side of the truck. That was the standard number for a retrieval squad. Our squad leader sat towards the front of the door where we would be released from. Derosa. He was a little taller than me, but lankier. He had a burn mark on his forehead that stretched into his hairline. His head was buzzed like the rest of us, so I couldn’t tell the color of it. It was probably brown or black like most of us. Without hair on his head, the hook in his crooked nose was his most prominent feature along with the burn. He also had a voice that hurt your ears when he yelled, and he always yelled.
He was a hard-ass. Before him our squad leader had been Keefer, who was an even bigger hard-ass. All squad leaders were. They had to be. They were tasked with assembling the squad quickly. If a squad was late for roll call, or squad members were unaccounted for, or someone in the squad did something to piss off the officers, the squad leader would get reprimanded. Harshly. As a result, the squad leader was just as much of a hard-ass as the officers. This was Derosa’s second week as squad leader. Keefer had been transferred to another unit. The officers didn’t say why, but everyone knew. It was the same reason anyone gets transferred to a different unit: the other unit had been blazed.
Blazes weren’t uncommon. They were retrievals gone wrong. It was typical to lose a squad member or two every few weeks. It was to be expected when the cities made their convicted youths run into burning houses and bring out their valuables for the rich families. Squads taking bigger hits weren’t unheard of either. Sometimes four or five squad members were lost in a retrieval. Even then, the officers didn’t transfer retrievers from other units. They would just stack the squad with brand new retrievers that had just been sentenced to the program. Everyone called them Pinkies since they hadn’t received any burns yet and still had their baby soft pink skin. When a squad was blazed, it meant less than half of the squad had survived a retrieval. It was only then the officers transferred retrievers from other units to fill the vacant spots so the blazed squad didn’t have a majority of Pinkies.
Keefer was the only one who had transferred out of our squad, so Derosa was named squad leader and we had gotten a new retriever. The Pinkie was sitting a few guys down from me. I couldn’t see anything of him except for his dangling feet that swung with the movement of the truck. Boys as young as twelve could be sentenced to the Retrieval Program. I had a feeling the Pinkie had just made the cut-off.
He was short and baby-faced, which only added to his youth. He was new, but he was already starting to show the signs of a practiced retriever. When we had been loaded onto the truck, I had noticed the angry burn he had been sporting on the left side of his face. From what I had heard, his name was Fish. An unfortunate last name. I hadn’t spoken to him since he joined, not that I cared to. He mostly kept to himself and tried to dodge out of everyone’s way. When he walked down the hall he always skirted along the edge of the wall with his bug eyes shifting every which way.
The truck shuttered as the gears shifted down, and several boys shifted in anticipation as we all felt our journey coming to an end. Evans, who had seemingly been dosing across from me, was even alert. He was still in the relaxed position, but his eyes were open and looking towards our squad leader.
“Masks on!” Derosa yelled with his shrill voice. There was the steady shuffle of retrievers pulling out their bags from under their seats and grabbing the standard issued oxygen masks. The masks we all carried had a limited amount of oxygen in them. When the Retrieval Program first started, the retrievers were issued oxygen masks that filtered out the smoke which gave the wearer an endless supply of breathable air.
The masks were expensive however, and when retrievers started perishing in the fires so did the masks. Rather than having to constantly replace the expensive filtering masks, a cheaper one was issued that accepted two small canisters of oxygen. That was years ago. The masks we had now were secondhand and old. Most of them had leaky seals, or didn’t fit properly. I was fortunate enough to be issued a mask that was mostly operational. There was a crack in the frame of the mask, but it didn’t hinder its usability.
The truck made three or four slow sweeping turns as it pulled into wherever out destination was and Derosa stood as he yelled “On your feet!” through his mask. I rose to stand only to be met with Evan’s shoulder shoving me back down onto the bench. By back hit the wall hard and I looked up at Evans. His mouth was hidden by his mask, but I knew by the glint in his eyes he was smirking.
“Careful there, Alf. The truck’s still moving,” he taunted, his voice muffled by the mask. I stood ready to grab him, but another hand grabbed me first and I was spun to meet the masked face of Warner towering over me.
“You two hot-heads knock it off!” Warner glared down at the two of us. After a moment, he released my shirt and faced forward again. If it was anyone but Warner, I wouldn’t have just let him grab me like that. But Warner wasn’t some nobody retriever. He was something else. He was a man of few words, but when he spoke he had something to say. And with how huge Warner was, you were an idiot if you didn’t listen.
Everything about Warner was dangerous; his voice, his build, the look in his eyes. He had plenty of burns like the rest of us, if not more. Warner had entered the Retrieval Program when he was twelve, like Fish. This was his sixth and last year. The burns he accumulated had marred his dark skin on parts of his neck and parts of the hand that had gripped me. The burns only made him look more intimidating.
“Jeez, Warner.” Evans joked like Warner’s sheer size alone didn’t matter to him. “You sound a little tense. Worried you won’t come out this time?”
“Keep talking Evans, and you’ll be hoping I don’t,” Warner warned as the truck finally slowed and shuttered to a halt. The dull red lights above switched to a glaring white and I looked down to keep from getting blinded by them. The familiar buzzing sounded as the hatch on the other side of the cabin slowly came down and let in the pale light from outside along with the smell of smoke.
“Move it!” Derosa yelled from the front, and our squad jogged out of the truck. As soon as my feet made it down the ramp and hit pavement I broke into a sprint towards the blazing house in front of us.
