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The Last Blue Mile
Chapter One
The cold crept through her soles and the sand spattered the sides of her shoes. Brook Searcy leaned forward, suspended on the balls of her feet, and facing the shorn scalp of the cadet standing thirty inches in front of her, waited for the command. Thumbs pressed downward, pinching the seams of her trousers, she sensed the training officer strolling among them with his head cocked, eyeing their shoes, their chins tucked like goose bills into the folds of their scarves, their zippers buried in the lips of their coats. The wind whipped a moistness into her eyes. She stood poised, listening for his words, ready to spring.
Horaard, harch!
At once, the flight moved forward in a single, fluid procession. Their pale, clenched knuckles swung in unison. Brook, fourth down in the right-hand column, looked over the shoulders of the cadets preceding her. It was late morning. The training officer, Bregs, was somewhere off to the side, no doubt watching them with his ritual surliness. She closed her fingers together and affected a natural swing to the arms. Despite the wind, it felt better to be marching than to be standing still.
Ahead lay a thick, high wall, a kind of bastion separating the main cadet area from the rest of the Air Force Academy. What they'd been doing out here all morning, marching around the perimeter, was anyone's guess. Perhaps Bregs considered it one of his last opportunities to offer them the bittersweet lessons of absolute command. This was the day before Recognition, the end of Hell Week, capping eight months of humiliation and struggle. Tomorrow, the remaining nine hundred and ninety-eight freshmansmacks would be welcomed, finally, into the ranks of the upper classes, acknowledged as legitimate cadets and not smacks or doolies or bitches or wops or faggots or whatever other terms the upperclassmen had inflicted upon them daily, at random, and with malicious pleasure. Tomorrow. But at the moment, the smacks were still subject to the whims of their training officers. And twenty-one of them, including Brook, from the Thirty-second Squadron "Hogs" were marching toward a giant ramp tunneling upward, through the bastion, and leading to the broad terrace—The Terrazzo—at the center of campus. Now she knew. They were headed toward the grand midday assembly, the noon meal parade.
Mounted in burnished steel on the wall above the tunnel stood the words Integrity First. Service Before Self. Excellence in All We Do. A recent sign, replacing the words Bring Me Men . . . , which had greeted new classes of cadets for forty years until last spring, when a rape scandal had sent the Academy reeling. Brook, in her final months of high school, had watched the news in her father's woodsy den, a fear igniting in her belly—what was she getting herself into?—as the Academy leadership was sacked, and the relics of the old guard hastily dismantled. At the time, she'd been relieved. But now, she saw what could happen when too many changes were enforced too quickly. The Culture of Transformation, a sort of social desexing, a reprogramming of the old code, had been rammed down their throats. Resentment grew. A general sense of distrust hung over the female cadets. Brook had felt it immediately, as though the whole scandal had been her fault. Now, marching under the new slogan, she yearned to have the old words back. She didn't want to be held responsible.
Through the broad mouth of the tunnel, a gray light filtered down from the Terrazzo. The walls resounded with the echoes of their shoes, the admonishment of old heroes. Sun Tzu. Clausewitz. Machiavelli. Billy Mitchell. None of those men—paradigms quoted at length in their first-year primers—had bent under the political will of a civilian populace pressing a democratic equality even upon its most undemocratic institution. Was all this her fault? She didn't think so. She hadn't asked the military to bend to her level. Rather, she'd proposed to hoist herself up to its standards. She wanted favors from no one.
On the Terrazzo, the ice and crusted snow lay glimmering in pockets on the cement. Bregs led them to the southwest quadrant to stand in formation until the rest of the cadet wing arrived for the noon meal parade. He wore a thin line of silver etching on his epaulets, the lowest kind of rank bestowed at the Academy, and it was treated as such by the two-degrees and firsties, who bore superior markings. But the three-degrees' rank was new and the memory of their own subjugation fresh. The line of silver thread on Bregs's epaulets, so subtly setting him off from the smacks with their plain blue epaulets, meant the most severe kind of authority, one they feared more than the random humiliation of the more senior cadets.
Halt!
They stood shivering in rows of three, facing the chapel with its seventeen prickly spires fixed defensively at the sky. Above that, the mountains, supine and majestic, led the eye upward, to the promise of triumph.
Mac Cherry, a smack, had lost his glove.
Bregs had given them an option while they assembled in the alcove. They could all march without gloves or march, gloved, without Cherry, while Cherry waited in the warmth of the squadron, after which time, Cherry could march tours on the Terrazzo all afternoon as a reprimand for inattention to detail. The commandant had put out a notice that tours were not to be assigned on days when the wind chill exceeded zero, and the smacks thought about that while they removed their gloves and folded them in their pockets, but no one mentioned it or even spoke to Mac Cherry, who looked at the ground, loathing himself, as they assembled and marched out.
In the broad view, it didn't matter. They'd marched for months, in heat and cold, through rain and snow, across the mountains and in their sleep. Brook sometimes marched in her dreams. She awoke tired, thirsty. And then she rose and marched again, and the marching was like a continuation of the dream, where the destination was irrelevant and all that mattered was the procession itself.
The Last Blue Mile. Copyright © by Kim Ponders. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
