THE LAWRENCE DOCTRINE

I'd never done well at school, so perhaps that was the origin of my hatred of 'egg-heads'. As bad as our work was at the cages, all us grunts agreed, 'Please, God, don't let the egg-heads try to sort this out.' My buddy had said about me, 'Forget the egg-heads, it's you who can organize meatball work!' That was the truth.

Despite the stresses of working at the cages, at least so far we'd been spared the academics. Our work was fairly immediate. That was until one of the egg-head Commanders, in fact, got his oar into our water.

The two things we noticed?

One - the culling cages were rarely used. Now they were reserved for obviously non-fertile gender traitors, or true incorrigibles. Or those women who were truly pathetic. I hated pathetic.

And two - new job opportunities for guys like me were being advertised. They were off-loading 'triage', we here were only to deal with the 'raw material' of labour, as the egg-head had put it. 'Specialty Centres' were being built in areas as they were being pacified. The jobs required relocation even to places I'd once known as 'Middle America', now referred to as 'The Colonies'.

Also, each District was to have their own Red Centres based on the one in the old Boston, the one with who was increasingly being referred to as, 'The Founder Aunts'.

They were also opening up a second Guardians Academy. That one was at the old Air Force Academy, now in the Western Colonies District.

QUELLING INSURRECTION

It had taken most of a week, three days of armored vehicles and one air strike to quell the holding center riot. It had been quite the shit-show on-site, a place that I did not leave for the duration. When the 'all clear' had been sounded, me and a few of the guys toured what once had been the cages, now in a tangled ruin. Dead bodies, at least those women had fought. They weren't pathetic, I gave thek that.

The loading docks. Destroyed. Where'd women got dynamite? Women! None of it was recognizable. The makeshift infirmary was under a pile of rubble.

Bodies littered everywhere. Almost all women, with the occasional man, a guard who'd been mutilated. Periodically shots would ring out as live ones had been uncovered. The order had been that no woman was to leave the place alive. Once the male bodies had been removed, the rest would simply be hauled away in the giant waste bins, with the coming demolition of the ceiling structure.

That was when I'd seen Commander Lawrence for the first time, as he toured the wreckage. He'd been flanked by about a dozen very natty Guardians - professional soldiers. They were what I had imagined myself being. Not a collar out of place, boots and weapons with a shine. They effortlessly controlled the space around the Commander.

What stood out about Commander Lawrence? It was his anger seeing all the dead women. Not that they were dead, but that there was so much labor which had vanished with them.

Now unemployed, I actually did sit for an interview to be shipped off to The Colonies. I could see myself taking the family to far off Denver, even if it was still considered a Colony.

The interview was short and sweet, suffice it to say that I did not make the cut. Just as well. The interviewing officer said that now that even the Colonies were in the 'purview of Commander Lawrence', they were looking for someone other than your basic grunt. "We're looking for specialists out there, son," was the way he'd said it, as he sent me on my way.

THE ROAD TO CHICAGO - THROUGH THE DISPUTED AREA

I still had no job the day I'd returned home…. returned home to find the building behind 'crime-scene' tape. The whole row of econo-buildings were just cordoned off.

A group of men were gathered around a Guardian, he was the only one of a troop of them without a weapon, as there were a dozen armed Guardians behind him. He was very curtly fielding questions, mainly of the type, 'Where's my family?'

Let me stop for a minute. That day was the first day that I had applied what can only be called 'transferable skills'. Back at the old Cages, during breaks buddies and I used to kibitz about how the women organized themselves in the mob they'd been in, inside the cages. After working there for a while, a natural kind of 'organization' seemed to sort itself out with the women, amid the chaos.

There were the screamers and those who'd been hysterical. Before I dispatched them, I'd said, 'don't be pathetic'. Truly they had not lasted long. Like I said before, there were the pleaders. They had been pitiful. I'd been the one who wondered if they were the actual fertile ones, given that they pleaded about missing children.

Then there were the 'hang-backers'. The ones who made it their business not to stand out. They were the most difficult to assess. Cull or Colonies? Bilhah or Martha? Before the revolt, one of our bosses wanted us each day to round up two dozen of these 'hang-backers', and quiz them on their domestic skills. We got our best Marthas from that group.

But truly, it was difficult to spot the 'hang-backers', for precisely the reason that their goal was to blend in with the background.

Ok. That was then. There I was, now at our cordoned-off econo-apartments, me hanging back. Trying my best to glean as much information as possible from the spokesman-Guardian, without once being noticed.

It was frustrating, because as the econo-men were asking as to the whereabouts of their own families, I did not want to risk asking specifically about my own. I mean, up until a while ago, I had been that Guardian - my presence there would not have been to help the econo-men, it would have been with the agenda of discerning which of them needed a bullet in the head.

Women's desperation had its uses.

Me, I was desperate to find my wife and daughter. The way I coped? I tried to stay in the loop, with the guys whose job it was to round up women.

So instead of waiting for a meaningful job to appear, I volunteered for 'rabbit-work' in the northern, disputed area.

'Rabbit work' was shit work. It was tracking down women in the woods who were trying to make it to Quebec to the north. Gilead had not (yet) pacified everything up to the border, therefore the designation 'Disputed'.

Our job was to go in there, five or six of us, and root out the 'rabbits', the runners, the women making a break for it.

Once again, those with children were easily caught, meaning we caught a lot of fertile women.

I remember one specifically. She kept calling out for 'Hannah'. That was after my buddy had separated them, and had taken the brat to a waiting van.

True to form, the woman kept pleading with me, that's how I knew to send her directly to the Red Centre. I'd even been punched for my efforts with her. I'd told her, 'Quit being so pathetic.' She got a hand loose and punched me. A good one. I was about to dispatch her summarily, but I actually admired her spunk. She went straight to the Red Centre.

With the Holding Center now destroyed, and without the culling cages and infirmary, I showed my value by being able to make those triage-decisions in the field. Literally, in the woods.

I volunteered for two more tours in the Disputed area, chasing rabbits. All in the vain hope I would stumble upon my own family, themselves making a break for it. My star rose because of my experience, so maybe I would make Guardian after all.

It never once occurred to me, what I planned to do if during my 'work', I ran into them.

THE ROAD TO CHICAGO - NICK BLAINE

It's clear how I had got there - in Chicago. I'd got there by train, by troop-carrier. Whereas in the Disputed area, I'd been a somebody, in the military I was just another grunt.

What wasn't clear once there, was who the enemy was. Americans? Mayday? Nighthawks? Street thugs? It seemed like every gang who'd secured weapons and who'd hit Gilead had secured perhaps what was the most useful to them - a reputation. With their anti-Gilead bona fides, they could recruit. Recruits brought supplies - food, clothing, ordnance.

Every Gileaden unit of solders had a videographer attached to them and ours was no exception. Our sergeant, Nick Blaine, used to call out our advances, not by yelling, 'Charge!' or anything like that. He used to yell out, 'Smile for the cameras!'

So that was that - Chicago.

CHEWING THE FAT

Late one night, Blaine (the sergeant) asked me where I was from, and who I'd 'pissed off' to get assigned to Chicago. I told him I'd volunteered. I told him about my wife and daughter going missing. How two days after joining the mob of other men at our old econo-apartments, that the apartments themselves were razed. Dynamited to the ground. Without so much as a how-do-you-do.

Where did one look for one's family? When one's only skill was triage-ing women for Gilead?

I told Blaine, before the riot at the cages, that the Holding Centre would have been the logical place to start. I worked there, so had a better than even chance of freeing them, if they were ever rounded up. Especially if there had been a capture-in-number, usually more than a truck-load, the mucky-mucks would occasionally do a favour for a grunt like me - just to relieve the pressure of numbers.

But the riot had taken care of that. I told Blaine that even my multiple tours in the Disputed Area had returned no luck.

Blaine sighed, "Well, you're certainly not going to find them out here in Chicago."

BLAINE THE HERO

As sergeant, Blaine's job was to give us our orders - as passed to him from the lieutenant. I had many times heard Blaine chewing out the lieutenant, which made me wonder about his loyalty to the chain of command.

Every time, though, when Blaine came to give us our duties for the day, you wouldn't have known that the two of them had ever been at odds.

Like the last day our unit had existed. The lieutenant had ordered us into a frontal assault on a Nighthawks-held series of otherwise abandoned industrial buildings. I'd heard Blaine and the lieutenant really getting into it, yelling at each other.

Then Blaine came out, ordered us to get our gear, and to otherwise, 'saddle-up'. This one had no videographer.

I asked him if it was wise to make such an assault, with no element of surprise. He looked at me and said, "If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you."

Me and Blaine, we were one of three survivors of our unit that day. Blaine had saved the operation. The lieutenant's death left Blaine in command, he's saved things by calling in an air-strike on our own position. As it was, we were pretty much dead anyway.

As such, Blaine's action became big news in Gilead. As such, he got a call from one of the High Commanders, one back in Boston.

Nick Blaine, he wanted me to go with him. That would take me closer to finding my family.

And it would get me out of Chicago.