Androne by Dwain Worrell EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Dwain Worrell
- Language: English
- Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
“Sergeant Paxton Victor Arés.” He whispered his own name as if it were a
secret to him now, reading through enlistment papers, through his rank,
race, religion, reminding himself of who he was. It all dribbled off his lips
in incoherent mumbles: “Staff sergeant, single, twenty-nine years old.” But
as the vocabulary swelled beyond twelve years of public education with
“proprietaries,” “NDAs,” and “confidentiality agreements,” he went quiet.
He surrendered to the pen, ending up right back where he had started—his
name, now on a dotted line: Paxton V. Arés.
It was 5:39 a.m. First light twinkled through window grime. A dirty
dew melted out of the windowpane, squiggling down the glass as if the
night itself were melting away. He saw himself vaguely reflected there,
ghostly against the glass, and fading into the Oakland suburbs outside as
sunlight glossed the window. There was a metaphor there, he thought,
something about him leaving Oakland to return to active duty or the drones
he piloted and their images on glass screens. Somewhere in there was a
metaphor but one that he wasn’t smart enough to parse.
Now it was 5:40, and Paxton eyed the clock with contempt; he’d leave
for deployment in just over an hour. He laid his documents onto the glass
bed of a scanner and listened as the purr of his enlistment papers dissolved
into digital. His fingers tap-danced across the touch screen display,
delivering the email to its virtual post.
DRONE PILOT, it read on-screen, but that wasn’t completely
accurate.
“Landrone,” Paxton corrected, amending the nondescript category of
drone. Not the aerial drones, with their glossy, streamlined designs and
billion-dollar budgets, but the grunts—the remote-controlled cavalry,
crawling across Iraqi and Afghan dirt. “Fucking landrones.”
He flipped his laptop shut and eased back onto the squealing spring
mattress where Callie was still asleep. As he tiptoed into his socks and
slippers, he felt her breathing ebb and flow on the blanket beneath him. He
heard her, a soft sniffle crackling at her nostrils. Her scent was ever present;
the taste of her lips still hung on the tip of his tongue, but of all his senses,
Paxton’s eyes spurned her. Callie hung in his peripherals, his lover, eclipsed
by the crescent of her six-month-pregnant belly.
He tried not to wake her and kept his toes tipped as he eased down the
stairway’s wooden planks. The curtains drawn over the window squeezed
out any hints of sunrise, and he left it that way. He sat in the dark and eyed
the bowl of oatmeal stewing in his lap. When he did open a window, the
sunlight shrapneled off the old man’s military plaques on the wall, like
lighthouses bringing back memories of base camp, back to made beds and
the sirs and ma’ams suffixing every sentence.
The old man never discussed his decade in the Marines but provoked
hearsay with the medals and ribbons, the framed pistols, the pressed
uniforms, and the nickname WULF tattooed along his wrinkled arm. And
because he never discussed them, hearsay became rumor, became myth,
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