Chapter 7
After finishing dinner and helping his mom with the cleanup, Greg went back into the sanctuary of his bedroom. He added a few more items to his list for the next day, then went over to the corner and took up the guitar case that leaned against the wall. He laid the case on the floor and opened it, revealing a guitar with a deep brown finish that he had bought the previous summer with money he had saved. It was one of the few possessions he had that didn't fit into the locker box on the floor at the foot of his bed, and he often spent hours practicing and teaching himself new techniques. Greg loved to get lost in the music even as he struggled with many of the chord changes. He still thought it sounded like shit much of the time, but there was a part of him that loved listening to it just the same. Some days he played for so long his fingertips would split and bleed on the steel strings, but that hadn't happened nearly as often since he'd finally started to develop calluses.
Greg sat on the edge of the bed with his guitar and began to play, mostly random chords that seemed to fit together. His brain felt free to wander as his fingers played along the fretboard; he was getting better at playing without looking to see where his fingers were. He switched from strumming to picking, which required more concentration while he tried to figure out how to hit each individual string in order to make it sound just right.
After several minutes Greg stopped, sighing. He was feeling distracted again, excited about the next day's adventure in the mountains. He gently put the guitar away in the case and placed it back in the corner, then went into the kitchen and dialed the number Declan had given him for his family's residence at the Embassy. It took a few minutes of the phone call being transferred from one extension to another, but finally Declan was on the line and the boys got down to solidifying their plans for the morning.
They decided to get an early start. The weather was supposed to be clear and mild, which made both boys quite happy. Declan had pulled out the climbing ropes from his dad's old box of gear, along with a few other things he thought might come in handy. Declan's dad had been a serious climber in his younger days, and it was a running joke in their family that one day they would wake up to find that he had left them on a whim to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The boys talked for several minutes, mostly about music. Declan played the violin and viola at near-prodigy levels, and while that usually kept him anchored in the classical music world there was nothing he liked more than to break from tedium and play around with some of the jazz fusion music he liked to listen to on the radio.
After getting off the phone with Declan, Greg went out to the small garage and rummaged around some of the boxes where his dad kept his old gear and extra supplies. He gathered up several packages of comrats (combat rations), food that under normal circumstances tasted like cardboard and paste - but they were compact and full of the protein, carbs and fats that could keep a Marine going for days. If things happened to go south and they had to spend the night, the peanut butter sandwiches Mom had made for them were not going to last very long.
Greg continued to rummage through boxes, adding a couple of shiny mylar space blankets that had been developed by NASA and had recently started to make their way into the equipment packs of Marines. He added a couple of first aid kits and a couple of compact survival kits to the pile, just in case. After grabbing several canteens, Greg put the boxes back the way he'd found them and pulled out an old metal-framed M-1956 Load-Carrying Equipment (LCE) pack his dad had used during his days as an enlisted Marine before he went to the Naval Academy and Officer Candidate School. He packed their supplies, leaving room for an extra sweater and jacket, and took the pack with him into the house. He carried it into his room, where he added a few extra items from the locker box at the foot of his bed and reorganized everything so the pack settled evenly on his back. Finally satisfied, Greg took the pack off and leaned it against the wall. He grabbed a t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants and headed into the bathroom to shower. Crawling under the covers after he was finished, Greg was so excited he didn't think he'd be able to sleep. He lay there, going over everything several times in his mind, trying to plan for every contingency until his brain finally shut down.