Partials by Dan Wells Page A

but at least they both get a few swings in. What we call the Partial War was mankind gettin’ mugged in an alley.”
    “I remember the Isolation War,” said Gianna. “We’re not all plague babies here.”
    “Not my place to speculate on a lady’s age,” said Tovar, sitting down by the fire. He looked relaxed, but Kira noticed that he was still in quick, easy reach of his shotgun. Jayden sat across from him, but most of the soldiers stayed standing. Kira sat by Marcus, pulling his arm over her shoulders. He was warm and reassuring.
    “Doesn’t matter which war it was, I guess,” said Tovar. “I lost four toes, left the marines on medical leave, and went home to Georgia to play hockey.”
    “They couldn’t have played hockey in Georgia,” said Sparks. “That was one of the southern ones, right? Georgia? Hockey was an ice sport.”
    “Hockey was ice-skating,” said Jayden, nodding, “and there’s no way you could do that in Georgia. Especially with no toes.”
    Tovar smiled. “This is where you plague babies start to show your ignorance.” He turned to Gianna. “You remember ice rinks?”
    A small grin crept into her face. “I do.”
    “An ice rink,” said Tovar, “was a giant room, like a whole basketball court, inside of a refrigerator. Just imagine—a whole building so cold the ice stays frozen. And then you fill it up with people, hundreds of people sometimes—we were only the minor leagues—and they’d all start cheering and yelling and getting worked up, and that room would heat up like this one is now, all those bodies packed in there like logs in a fire, and that giant refrigerator would keep chugging away and cooling it down and that ice would stay so frozen that all they had to do was spray it with water between periods, and a few minutes later it was as smooth and as flat as a Tiger Sharks cheerleader.” He grinned maliciously. “I beg your pardon. Old rivalries.”
    “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Sparks. “You could power a whole city for a year with the kind of electricity you’re talking about.”
    “A little place like East Meadow, sure,” said Tovar, “you could power that town on a good-size corporate air conditioner. For the old cities, and the old ways, even a tiny little place like Macon could swallow East Meadow whole, and with all those hundreds of thousands of people driving cars and watching movies and surfing the Internet eighty-seven hours a day, we still had enough juice left over to run an ice rink in the state of Georgia—one of the hot ones, like you said, where we didn’t have no business freezing anything at all.”
    “I still don’t believe it,” muttered Sparks.
    “We’re talking about minor league hockey in Macon, Georgia,” said Tovar. “I didn’t rightly believe it myself. You know what we called the team? If you’re not believing anything else, you’re sure not gonna believe me on this one: We called our team the Macon Whoopee.” He cackled with laughter. “That sounds like the biggest lie yet, but it’s true, the Macon Whoopee.” He slapped his knee; several of the soldiers were laughing, and even Kira couldn’t help but chuckle. “We were a minor league team that didn’t feed into any majors, in a town that loved just about every sport but ours. We were going nowhere and we knew it, so why not have fun? In the forties, when I was playing, we were officially the most violent team in the country, and that means probably the whole world, and by the way, that’s why I could skate with no toes. A figure skater, a speed skater, an NHL forward, sure, you need your toes for control, but all that finesse takes a backseat when all you’re trying to do is slam somebody into a wall and break all his teeth.”
    “Hockey,” mused Marcus. “The sport of kings.”
    Tovar paused, his eyes focused on a distant memory. “Sometimes I think that’s what I miss most about the old days. The old times. We had so much of just