The Leftovers

peace offering. What the hell, Tom thought. He took a small sip, wincing as the liquor ignited in his throat.
    “There you go,” Henning said. “It’s a long way to Omaha. Might as well enjoy ourselves.”
    “Mark was telling me about the war,” Christine explained.
    “The war?” Tom shuddered as a bourbon aftershock traveled through his body. All at once he felt clearheaded, wide awake. “Which one?”
    “Yemen,” he said. “Fucking hellhole.”
    *   *   *
    CHRISTINE DOZED off, but Tom and Henning kept talking softly, trading the bottle back and forth across the aisle.
    “I ship out in ten days.” Henning sounded like he didn’t quite believe it. “Twelve-month deployment.”
    He said he came from a military family. His father served; so had two uncles and an aunt. Henning and his older brother, Adam, had made a pact to enlist right after October 14th. He came from a small rural town full of Bible-believing Christians, and back then just about everyone he knew believed that the End Times were upon them. They were expecting a major war to break out in the Middle East, the battle foretold in the Book of Revelation. The opponent would be nothing less than the army of the Antichrist, the honey-tongued leader who would unite the forces of evil under a single banner and invade the Holy Land.
    So far, though, none of that had happened. The world was full of corrupt and despicable tyrants, but in the past three years, none of them had emerged as a plausible Antichrist, and no one had invaded Israel. Instead of one big new war, there was just the usual bunch of crappy little ones. Afghanistan was mostly over, but Somalia was still a mess, and Yemen was getting worse. A few months ago, the President had announced a big troop escalation.
    “I talked to a guy who just got back,” Henning told him. “He said it’s like the Stone Age over there, just sand and rubble and I.E.D.’s.”
    “Damn.” Tom took another hit of bourbon. He was starting to feel pretty loose. “You scared?”
    “Fuck, yeah.” Henning tugged on his earlobe like he was trying to yank it off. “I’m nineteen years old. I don’t wanna wake up in Germany with one of my legs cut off.”
    “That’s not gonna happen.”
    “Did to my brother.” Henning spoke matter-of-factly, his voice flat and distant. “Fucking car bomb.”
    “Oh, man. That sucks.”
    “I’m gonna see him tomorrow. First time since it happened.”
    “How’s he doing?”
    “Okay, I guess. They got him in a wheelchair, but he’s gonna get a new leg pretty soon. One of those high-tech ones.”
    “Those are pretty cool.”
    “Maybe he’ll be one of those bionic sprinters. I saw an article about this one guy, he’s actually faster now than he used to be.” Henning swallowed the last few drops of bourbon, then shoved the empty bottle into the seat pocket in front of him. “It’s gonna be weird seeing him like that. My big brother.”
    Henning leaned back and closed his eyes. Tom thought he was drifting off to sleep, but then he gave a soft grunt, as if something interesting had just occurred to him.
    “You got it right, Pigpen. Just go wherever you want, do whatever you want. Nobody ordering you around or trying to blow your head off.” He looked at Tom. “That’s the deal, right? You just wander around, looking for the party?”
    “It’s our duty to enjoy ourselves,” Tom explained. He was pretty familiar with the theology; a lot of the teachers he’d been training in San Francisco had gone through a Barefoot phase before becoming Holy Wayners. “We believe that pleasure is the creator’s gift, and that we glorify the creator whenever we have a good time. The only sin is misery. For us, that’s Rule Number One.”
    Henning grinned. “That’s my kinda religion.”
    “It sounds simple, but it’s not as easy as you think. It’s like the human race has been programmed for misery.”
    “I hear that,” Henning said, with surprising conviction. “How long you been doing it?”
    “About a year.” Tom and Christine had been honing their cover stories in preparation for exactly this sort of interrogation, and he was glad they had—he was a little too drunk to be improvising. “I was in college, but it all felt so pointless. Like, the world’s coming to an end, and I’m getting a degree in Accounting. What good’s that gonna do me?”
    Henning tapped his forehead. “What’s with the circle thing?”
    “It’s a bullseye. A target.