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not sure if that’s very good or very bad. But it gets me thinking about how the word “very” has lost its mojo. It doesn’t make much sense to use that word because everything is “very” now, after the bombs. Very dangerous. Very different, for us, but I’ve read enough about history to know that there’s nothing new about it. Most generations get their time of war. This is mine. I just didn’t expect it to happen here in California.
    Dad stands the first watch while the rest of us crawl into our sleeping bags. My last bath was a month ago. I smell like a hobo. I pretend to sleep, but I hear faraway gunshots. I drift off listening to the very new, very old sounds of the world.

Bill Junior

    Some crazy bitch shot Ookie in the chest with a shotgun. A day has gone by since we sprung our last ambush, but I still can’t get used to the fact that my brother is dead. She shot him and he had his hands over it and he was saying, “She shot me, Billy; come see it,” like he’d just found a weird bug or an interesting plant. The other guys saw the blood coming from between his fingers and said, “Yep, he’s shot, all right,” and they watched me to see what I’d do about it.
    Ookie was bleeding all over the place and I could see that he was fucked, but the other guys were watching me, too, and that meant I had to be a certain way. I wanted to scream for a doctor. But there aren’t any doctors and I couldn’t sound like a pussy in front of the men.
    I’m in charge here. I’ve been the boss since the electricity went out and we escaped from juvie. I was the one to notice that most of the guards had hauled ass out of there, and I was the one who came up with the plan to escape, and I was the one who killed the first guard and led the attack against the others. I’ve only been alive for sixteen shit-ass years, but I’ve learned a lot in that time. The weight of leading people isn’t so heavy anymore, except that I hadn’t counted on losing Ookie.
    It seemed like I stood there for a long time, thinking, trying to put off going to him, like I was trapped in one of those shitty dreams that you can kind of control but kind of can’t. But I couldn’t have been standing still for very long because Ookie was only on his second sentence after getting shot. The guys were in a cluster-fuck in the middle of the road. I grabbed Luscious and told him to set up a perimeter with half the guys while the others searched the bodies. I said, Holy shit, dude, you know better than to let down our guard. Luscious has just about every kind of race in his blood, and he’s six foot five and almost as wide as he is tall, but he isn’t a schemer. He’s the kind who’ll take suggestions from a leader, as long as he respects the leader who makes them, but God help the man he doesn’t respect. He’s my second-in-command, and when I said that shit about letting down our guard, he looked embarrassed and then he was all action, giving his orders and the guys were moving like whipped dogs at the sound of his voice.
    I had a syringe of morphine from when we ambushed that last little National Guard convoy. We used to have lots of morphine, and we kind of had a party with it one night when we were bored, but I saved a few syringes for the bad times. I took a knee next to Ookie. I set my rifle on the ground and pulled out the morphine and held it up so he could see it, and he smiled his little-kid smile. He was only fourteen, but he was a moose of a kid, and only his smile made him look younger than me. I shot him up with the morphine and his eyes went far away and he laughed a little bit.
    “We were really pirates, weren’t we?” he said, and I said, “We still are.” The drug got to him right away and his lips were bloody and his mouth was like it was made of jelly. He mumbled something, but then he fought the morphine buzz and came hard awake.
    “I’m dying, bro.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You don’t need to blow sunshine up my