I was fourteen when the Aryan Brotherhood snatched me up off the streets. I didn’t quite grasp what they were, at first. They talked about unity, honor, social structure, that kind of thing. They sell it to you that way. And mostly, all they did was kill zombies. I never saw the other stuff.
Then they dragged in Joan, only I didn’t know her then. Hands down, she was the most interesting person I’d ever seen. A woman—a woman—wearing military clothes, braids torn, face bruised. She walked like a queen, and when a man spit on her, she smiled like it debased him.
They shut her in a cage and set me to guarding her. She screamed for the first few hours, but she stopped once her voice started to crack. I snuck her water, and after a couple days, we got to talking. Zombies, the bombings, the outside world—didn't matter what. It was talk or go crazy.
My superiors told me that women were either nice and or bitchy. Virgins or whores. Joan was everything. She always had something sensible to say, and she listened when I talked, got patient with me when I was wrong. She was smart, too. A military engineer.
Then one day one of my superiors came by with the key. Told me to get her out and take her to the other guys. I asked why, and he said
stress relief with a big, stretched-out grin.
I’ll never forget the look on Joan’s face right then. Just went all slack. My superiors always said that it was important to protect women because women were weak. That wasn’t true at all. I wanted to protect Joan because right then, she mattered to me more than anything else in the world.
So I shot my superior in the face.
___
When I finished telling my story, Salem looked at me funny. “Jesus, Dane. Did he die?”
“What do you mean, did he die?" I said. "I shot him in the goddamn face.”
