The Milk Break
I popped the lid off my lunchbox with a delighted look. Whether it had just been packed or not, a gentle warmth still clung to it. I snapped my wooden chopsticks apart with a crisp crack and reached for one glistening piece of grilled short-rib patty.
"Hanaaa!"
"Hm?"
Jiyu and Yumi came over with their own lunchboxes in hand. I looked up at the two of them, utterly lost.
"We have to eat together!"
"Yeah, don't be stingy!"
I couldn't see the point of sharing a meal on a desk this small. But Jiyu and Yumi were so adamant that all I could do was stare blankly while they dragged their chairs over and set their lunchboxes down on mine.
Three lunchboxes now sat on the desktop. Thankfully, there was room enough for all of them. A glance around the classroom showed plenty of other kids clustered together the same way we were.
"Let's eat!"
"Yay!"
Jiyu and Yumi dug into the rice in their boxes, and I followed right after them.
"Whoa, this is good! It doesn't even compare to yesterday!"
"Right? With lunchboxes this delicious, eating that shriveled-up fish last time makes no sense at all!"
Between bites of rice and side dishes, the two of them launched into a heated debate over how our school's meals had ended up like this in the first place.
"It was fine through second grade..."
"I know. Still, they said our school's chairwoman changed, and she's going to fix the cafeteria too."
"Was her name Chairman Kim Sehee?"
"Hic!"
The moment the Boss came up, I couldn't stop the hiccup. Hearing a name I knew come out of Jiyu and Yumi's mouths had caught me off guard, and they both turned to look at me.
"Hana, did something go down the wrong way? Want me to get you some water?"
I shook my head from side to side, making it clear with my whole body that I didn't need any. Now that I thought about it, I had no idea why the Boss had become chairwoman of our school. Surely she hadn't taken the post just because she wanted to see me?
That didn't hold up. I already saw plenty of her. We lived in the same building, so these days I caught sight of her face at least once a day. I almost never went looking for her. Far more often, she came all the way to my room to play.
It had become a routine by now. I'd be staring blankly at the TV when she appeared behind me out of nowhere and covered my eyes with her hands. Whoever she'd picked that childish game up from, the Boss had a kid's side to her too.
"I wish every day could be a lunchbox like this..."
Jiyu and Yumi cleaned their boxes down to the last grain of rice and the last bite of the side dishes. I'd been talking with them the whole time, and before I knew it I'd finished everything in mine as well.
At the last school meal, most of us had left our food. The difference was enormous. I understood now why people paid for expensive lunchboxes. If they tasted like this, I'd gladly eat them instead of cafeteria food. Still, I knew the downside.
"You'd get sick of this if you ate it every day, you know. It only tastes this good because it's the first time."
Lunchboxes like these got old fast. They couldn't vary the side dishes much. It was the same standard set every time. Jiyu and Yumi made strange faces and stared at me.
They were looking at me as if I'd said something terribly wrong, so I hurried to ask.
"What?"
"You just sounded like an old person..."
"You sound like my dad."
"Ghk!"
I clutched my chest as if an arrow had struck me there. Kids were sharper than they looked. From Jiyu and Yumi's age, I really was old enough to be their father. I was younger than the parents of most third-graders, but to the two of them I was still some middle-aged man.
"Hana's like a kid, but she also feels weirdly old!"
"Right!"
I bit down on my innocent chopsticks. There wasn't much I could say to that. Talking about this subject was a losing game, so I tried to pull their attention somewhere else.
"The teacher's bringing something in."
I pointed at the front door with my chopsticks. Just as I'd said, the teacher was coming through it with something in her arms, and Jiyu and Yumi's heads turned on their own.
"It's milk! Milk!"
"I was thirsty. Perfect!"
Back in my day, the milk monitors had to haul it in themselves. This school was different. The teachers brought the milk themselves. You could feel the generation gap in a thing like that. Stacking the milk crates into towers used to be half the fun, and it was a shame I couldn't do it anymore.
"Ooh!"
The other odd thing was that in my day there'd only been plain white milk. Now there was chocolate, strawberry, all kinds. When I went to school, you needed a packet of chocolate powder if you wanted chocolate milk. These days you didn't need anything of the sort. Live long enough, and you really did see everything.
Going through elementary school twice meant I got to watch changes like this happen. It was an experience ordinary people would never have. Nobody went to elementary school twice—not unless they caught some movie disease that ran time backward.
I, of course, was the exception.
"Hana, you're having chocolate milk?"
"I want strawberry!"
We could each grab whichever milk suited our taste and drink it. Milk really was the best. Once we'd finished, we patted our swollen bellies and settled in, perfectly content.
When a gate tore open in a crowded city, you had to stop it no matter what. Out here in sparsely populated Africa, the response was simple.
You hid in a house and waited until the gate disappeared. Fortunately, monsters with a sharp sense of smell or any real intelligence were rare, so if you stayed indoors they usually failed to find you and just wandered.
A very few could tell you were inside even then, but this gate didn't seem to have produced any monsters that clever.
The trouble was that a gate like this took a long time to collapse on its own. What mattered was having the supplies to last. There was no way to feed ten soldiers on mission and about fifteen villagers the whole time, and they didn't even have the tools to cook. That was when one of the soldiers spoke up.
"Peter! Didn't you haul in a ton of combat rations earlier?"
The Black soldier called Peter broke into a wide grin. His straight white teeth gleamed in the dim house.
"I grabbed a bunch earlier. Figured something like this might happen."
He set down his combat pack and pulled the rations out. Even at a glance, there were several hundred cherry tomatoes. Soldiers burned enough calories that they needed about two a day to feel full, but an ordinary person could get by on just one.
"Anybody who yelled at me for taking a year's worth doesn't get any. Everybody else, rations!"
"Hahaha!"
Compared to the grim world outside the broken gate, the mood inside was warm and easy. An honest, manageable gate was far better than a fight against other human beings who might kill you at any moment.
You didn't have to worry about a sniper while you ate, or a bomb drone dropping in to explode, or mortar rounds whistling down. And because you weren't fighting other people, the fear of PTSD eased a little too. Illnesses like that tended to come from human beings killing one another.
There was even talk that fighting the monsters that came out of gates like this was easier.
Unlike the unhurried American soldiers, the villagers kept glancing around with worried eyes. They couldn't understand a word of what was being said.
One interpreter caught the look on their faces and kindly explained the situation, along with what to do and what to watch out for. Once he told them that if they simply stayed inside and waited, the monsters roaming outside would disappear on their own, the unease in their eyes finally settled.
Four weeks passed, and the American troops and the villagers were able to return safely to base. They'd stayed in contact with the unit the whole time, and nothing particularly dangerous had come up. If they hadn't brought enough combat rations, things could have turned ugly—but Peter's quick thinking in packing a year's supply kept that from happening.
"This stuff's a masterpiece, isn't it?"
"Seriously. Something that small putting out that many calories? They said it's Korean, right? The Korean military's been blessed. As far as combat rations go, they crush every other country."
The Korea enjoying that blessing, of course, rarely had any reason to eat combat rations at all. Even during training, they worked through stockpiles bought long ago rather than the Starlight cherry tomatoes being made now. The Ministry of National Defense's way was to clear out whatever was nearing its expiration date first.
The American troops on the front line, always the first to receive the newest gear, simply didn't know that.