Burning Nation

by Trent Reedy

  “Wright! They hit Jo!” Cal yelled.

  I turned and saw blood gush between JoBell’s fingers as her hand pressed to her side. She fell to the snowy street.

  I screamed. Then I swung my legs over the side of the roof and dropped down into the snow. While Cal and Sweeney opened fire on Fed soldiers all over the whole area, I ran out and slid to my knees next to JoBell.

  “Jo! Jo!” I rolled her onto her back. “Hey, talk to me! Come on!”

  She opened her eyes and smiled. “Hey, babe.”

  “Thank God! Come on.” I slipped an arm under her shoulders and helped her to sit up. “Damn.” Any second we would be shot. A soldier was sighting us with his rifle, but someone shot him in the back. I tried to lift JoBell, but she winced in pain. I yanked off her scarf and set to work tying it around her body to stop the bleeding. Oh, God, don’t let the wound be deep. Please, God, take me instead. Please don’t let JoBell die. “Cal! Cal! Sweeney, I need some help!”

  Someone was running up to me. I almost shot him, but at the last second I saw it was Cal. Sweeney was right behind him. Cal shoved me aside, almost knocking me down. “This is gonna hurt, Jo!” He grabbed her by one arm, lifted her to a sitting position, then hoisted her up over his shoulder as easily as he might carry a tackling dummy in football practice. He looked like a pissed-off bull in the arena. He held his AR15 in one hand with the stock under his arm and fired six rounds downrange at the Fed. “Let’s go!”

  Sweeney and me ran after Cal, but even though he had JoBell over his shoulder, a rifle in his hand, and his sword dangling at his side, we could hardly keep up with him. More shots went off behind us. Any second now, I’d take the bullet that would end me. Would I even feel it? I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to JoBell. To anyone.

  Cal turned the corner and cut through some yards to the next block. The sound of engines rumbled after us. They were coming in Humvees. They’d open up with machine guns and that would be it.

  Then three snowmobiles whipped around the corner. Kemp drove the lead. “Get on! Let’s move!”

  Luchen pulled up next to him. “This snowmobile’s the biggest! Put her on here!” Cal put JoBell down behind Luchen and climbed on with them. Kemp moved out of the way so Sweeney could drive Silver Bullet, and I got on behind Sparrow.

  “Follow me!” Sweeney yelled. “The way we’re going, it’s full throttle or you’re dead!” He sped off just as a Fed Humvee fishtailed around the corner. Luchen followed Sweeney, slapping the side of his snowmobile like it was a horse he was trying to speed up.

  Sparrow took off, and I twisted in my seat to fire at the Humvee’s turret gunner. It was an awkward-as-hell way to shoot. Sweeney tore through the streets and backyards toward the creek. His snowmobile hit a steep snowy embankment and launched into the air.

  “Oh shit!” Luchen yelled. “We’re too heavy! Ain’t gonna make it!”

  “Just gun it, Luchen!” Cal yelled.

  “Hold her down!” In the next instant they hit the bump and were in the air. Cal held JoBell tight as they slammed down on the other side of the creek.

  The crack-crack-crack-crack-crack of a .50-cal machine gun fired behind us. Limbs fell from the trees around the stream. We wouldn’t last with those guys shooting us.

  “Speed up, Sparrow!” I turned and fired back again. We hit something, and I reached for the rear handle. I missed. Then my world was cold snow and ice as I face-planted and slid to a stop.

  “Wright!” Sparrow screamed as her snowmobile hit the bump and jumped the stream.

  “Oh shit!” I stumbled up, ran for cover behind a tree, and fired blindly toward the turret gunner. When they pulled up, all those soldiers would dismount and it would be me against a whole firing line.

  “Danny!” Becca’s voice came from behind me. She rode Lightning at full gallop toward the creek. Leaning low in the saddle and holding the saddle horn with her left hand, she held her M4 with her right, the stock wedged in her armpit. Lightning whinnied as she leapt across the creek and Becca fired wildly. I’m not gonna lie. It was kind of awesome.

  That horse would be dead in seconds if I didn’t make a move. With the turret gunner distracted, I ran out from behind my tree, heading straight for him, firing at least ten rounds on the way. The turret soldier slumped over his machine gun. Becca never stopped shooting, keeping the Feds pinned inside their vehicle. She slowed Lightning long enough for me to use her stirrup to climb up behind her. It was a tight fit with my ass up on the back of the saddle, but it would have to do.

  “Something we stole from that convoy.” Becca whipped out a grenade. She kicked Lightning and we rode straight at the Humvee. Then she pulled the pin and chucked the grenade down the turret as we rode by. Two seconds later, an explosion painted the inside of the Humvee windows red.

  “Geez, Becca —”

  “Hold on!” Becca yelled. She patted Lightning’s neck. “Come on. One more time, girl. We’re almost there. Ha!” She kicked the horse and Lightning sped up to a full gallop.

  “You can’t ride her this hard on the snow. If she slips by the creek—”

  “She won’t slip. The trees have kept most of the snow off the ground there.” She spoke to Lightning again. “Come on, girl.” To me, she added, “Lightning won’t let you down. Neither will I.”

  I held Becca and my rifle tight as the horse made the jump, slipping just a little as she landed. Becca didn’t let Lightning slow down much as she caught up with the snowmobiles. We sped on as the sun dipped behind Silver Mountain, twisting around again and again to throw off the Fed as we headed back to base.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt my friends!” Cal paced back and forth in the upstairs bedroom where we’d put JoBell. He’d ditched his coat and kept running his hands back through his hair, flexing his giant biceps until they looked like they’d rip his T-shirt. “They come after you guys again, I’ll kill ’em.” He swung his fist hard in a low punch that smashed through the bedroom wall.

  “Damn, that’s three-quarter-inch drywall,” Sweeney whispered to me.

  Becca put her hands on Cal’s shoulders. “Cal, honey, this isn’t helping. You’re okay. She’s okay.”

  Cal pulled his hand out of the wall, flexing his fingers as white flakes fell around them. “I mean it. I’ll shoot ’em all up again.” He finally sat down on the bed next to JoBell. He wiped his eyes as he looked down at her. “Dad always on the road. My brother Jimmy in and out of juvie. You guys are all I got. I ain’t losing you. You be okay, Jo. You be okay.” He looked up. “No shit. That goes for all y’all.”

  “Cal.” JoBell reached up and touched the big guy’s face. “I’m all right. Just … Not now, okay. I need to get … to a hospital.”

  “You were at an illegal protest or riot or whatever, Jo,” said Sweeney.

  “I was trying to get people to leave,” she said.

  “But think about it,” Sweeney said. “You were there. The Feds were attacked. And your boyfriend, America’s most wanted, was there as well. If you go to a hospital, they’ll think that’s all a little too convenient. They’ll arrest you, and this time they won’t let you go.”

  “You don’t … know that,” JoBell groaned.

  “We can’t take the risk,” said Becca. “Anyway, there’s not really a good way to get you to a hospital right now.”

  Kemp and Sparrow came into the room, Sparrow carrying a proper white sterile bandage and the little that was left of that bottle of Drambuie.

  “Riccon, Sweeney, Wells,” said Kemp. “I need you three to grab a rifle and stand guard. We need to be extra careful in case the Fed were able to track us.”

  “Come on, Cal,” Becca said. She and Sweeney both put their arms around the big guy and led him out of the room.

  “Crocker’s been covering the radio,” said Kemp. “Shortwave bursts. Someone talking about the Brotherhood attacking the Fed at that protest.”

  “Idiots,” I said. “Who the hell are these Brotherhood guys?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” Kemp said. “But they’re getting a lot more active.”

  “They could have at least waited until all the protestors were clear.”

  Sparrow had a flashlight pointed at JoBell’s wound. “Can we hold off on that political shit until we get this taken care of?” She leaned down to JoBell’s side and looked carefully. “It didn’t cut her deep. Might have buzzed a rib a little.” To me she added, “What do you want to do? We could stitch it up, but we also stitched up Danning and …” I wished she hadn’t mentioned him. She shook the bottle around. “Maybe it’s better to sterilize the wound, bandage it up, and hope for the best.”

  Tears welled up in JoBell’s eyes. “Come on, guys. I need a real doctor.”

  “The only real doctors are with the Fed.” Sparrow raised her eyebrows. “Is that where you want to go?”

  JoBell stared Sparrow down. “I am not working with them.”

  “Didn’t say you were,” Sparrow said. “Interesting that you did. Now are we going to do this or not?”

  I looked to JoBell, who bit her lip and nodded at me. “Okay,” I said.

  “You two are gonna need to hold her down,” Sparrow said. Kemp held her legs while I pinned down her upper arms.

  “You’ll be okay, Jo,” I said. “It won’t be so bad.”

  Sparrow took the cap off the bottle of liquor. Was that a little smile creeping onto her face? “Actually, JoBell, this is going to hurt a lot.” She lowered the bottle near the bloody slash in JoBell’s flesh and dumped on the booze.

  JoBell screamed and arched her back, struggling against me and Kemp. She shook her head and then smashed it back hard into her pillow as she cried. Before Sparrow was done, JoBell had passed out.

  “What? What?” Cal shouted, pounding up the stairs. I stopped him at the bedroom door. Sparrow was applying a clean bandage to JoBell’s wound.

  “It’s okay, buddy. She’s alive. She’s resting. She’s going to be fine.” I looked at my girlfriend and prayed that I was right. I met Sparrow’s eyes as she stood up from the side of the bed. “Thank you, Specialist, for helping with this, and for coming to get me today.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t do anything, since you couldn’t hold on to the sled. You really ought to be thanking the cowgirl. She’s the one who saved you.” She knocked back a swig of Drambuie and walked past me, grabbing Cal by the shirt and pulling him out of the room.

  The door closed behind them, and I carefully crawled into bed next to JoBell. She woke up a few hours later. “Danny?” she said sleepily.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I whispered to her. “So glad we’re together again.” I kissed the top of her head, and we lay like that in silence. Nothing more needed to be said.

  * * *

  The next couple days were relatively peaceful. JoBell looked a lot better, and besides guard duty and a little working out, we took some time to rest. Luchen contacted TJ, who promised to let Mr. Linder know his daughter was safe. That helped JoBell relax. We made a rule that she’d never be alone, that we’d pull shifts so someone would always be with her. Becca took the most shifts.

  “Bad news,” Sweeney said the following Tuesday night. “The tracks on the Silver Bullet are busted. No place to get replacement parts. Three snowmobiles left, and we have barely enough gas to run two of them.”

  Him and me were taking turns on the hand pump to fill the snowmobiles for future missions. I was the one cranking the lever this time. “You’ve lost a snowmobile. Your dad’s Corvette, Jet Skis, and four-wheeler were probably destroyed when we exploded those two Fed Humvees. Who knows where your Mustang is. Doesn’t it bother you that you’ve lost so much stuff?”

  Sweeney lay down on the seat of Silver Bullet. “If you’d asked me that question last year, I would have said hell to the yeah. But life is different now. Now all that stuff that seemed so important just seems like … stuff.” He laughed. “Don’t know if my old man will see it that way, though. He’s lost a fortune, and he was even interrogated by the FBI in Florida once or twice, but compared to what we’ve been up against, those are just kind of minor inconveniences. Basically he left his son in the middle of a war zone while he takes an extended vacation in Florida.”

  I stopped cranking the pump for a second. “You know that wasn’t his choice, right? He’d be back here in a second if he could.”

  “Intellectually, I understand that. But it doesn’t feel right, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m an orphan, remember?”

  “Shit. Sorry, dude.” Nobody spoke for a while, and the only sound was the squeak of the pump as I cranked it. Sweeney took a big breath. “Speaking of feelings. You want to tell me what’s up with you and Becca?”

  I kept cranking the pump like everything was normal. “What do you mean?”

  “Dude, seriously? You think I can’t tell something is going on between you two? First, I’m the Great Asian Lovemaster. Second, I’ve been friends with the two of you for as long as I can remember. I’ve had the sense that she was into you for a while, like before this whole war even started, and you two got closer for a bit. Then suddenly you hardly talk to each other and there’s a high level of weirdness. So do you want to tell me what’s up, or are you going to leave it to my substantial imagination?”

  I sighed, stopped cranking the fuel pump, and told him about the kiss under fire and making out in the igloo. “So now what? I’m in one of those dumb love triangles like from those Nightfall books?”

  “Hmm,” said Sweeney. “So is JoBell the vampire, and Becca the werewolf? I’m hoping Becca is the werewolf because in the movies the werewolf’s shirt always comes off in the first three minutes, and Becca’s got better —”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “This sucks.”

  He sat up. “I know you’re serious. I think that’s part of your problem. You’re way too serious. Dude, nobody dates just one person his whole life.”

  “I’m not like you,” I said. “I can’t get with a million different girls.”

  “You could if you wanted to. You were a popular guy. But my point is, you’re seventeen and you’ve only ever dated one girl. You already asked her to marry you. If you do get married, aren’t you ever going to wonder what it would be like to at least hold another girl’s hand? To kiss a different girl?” I started to say something, but Sweeney shook his head. “Becca’s great. She’s beautiful and really nice. And now you’ve been through life-and-death situations together. That’s only going to bring you closer.”

  I leaned toward Sweeney and spoke quietly. “I cheated on my girlfriend, I hurt Becca, and I feel terrible about it. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Yeah,” said Sweeney. “I get it. You made a mistake, and now you can move on.”

  “But I still feel like …” I didn’t know how to explain the way I felt about Becca. “It’s not right to have feelings like this for two girls. That makes me such an asshole.”

  “It makes you human, dude. How are you supposed to control your emotions? Go ahead. Tell yourself to stop being attracted to Becca, to stop caring for her. Did it work? Hell no. You can’t turn these things on and off like a switch.”

  “I shouldn’t have kissed Becca,” I said. “Okay, maybe when we thought we were going to die next to that bus, because it’s a goodbye kiss or whatever, but not after that.”

  “Well, if you’re not going to give Becca a serious chance to be your girlfriend, then yeah, you’re right. You shouldn’t make out anymore. She’s a really great girl, dude. Don’t hurt her.”

  I nodded and started cranking the fuel pump again. “I don’t know how you do it, man. All those girls.”

  “Seriously? I really envy what you and JoBell have. You have someone to be with you, someone to support you through this whole mess.”

  I thought about it, and I’m not gonna lie, but Becca had really been the one who had helped me through this war the most. I wasn’t about to bring that up now, though.

  Sw
eeney looked down. “I wish I had something good like that. Something real.” He smiled at me. “So you kissed Becca. If that’s the only mistake you ever make in your relationship with JoBell, you’re heading for greatness. Just, you know, be cool with Becca. This awkwardness is driving me nuts.”

  * * *

  A couple days later, with everybody else busy or sleeping off guard duty, Becca asked me to help her with Lightning, so the two of us went to the stable in the late afternoon. For about the thousandth time, I petted that horse and thanked her for saving my life. Shoveling her manure was still a stinky job, but I didn’t mind it as much. Plus it gave me something to do so I could avoid talking about what I knew me and Becca needed to talk about.

  “How long are you going to be weird with me?” Becca said after a few minutes.

  I stopped working. So much for not talking about it. “What?”

  “How long are you going to keep ignoring me?”

  I stood the shovel on end in the manure and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt a little tighter. It was one thing to talk about this with Sweeney, but a lot harder to get into with Becca. “I haven’t been ignoring you.”

  She pushed my hood aside a little so that I could see her close to me, even though it was dark. “We used to have fun taking care of Lightning. Now, when you’re not with JoBell, you spend as much time on guard duty and as far away from me as you can.”

  “I do not.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Danny.” She rubbed her purple butterfly hair clip.

  “I …” What did she want me to say?

  Becca turned away from me and rested her head on Lightning’s, rubbing the horse’s neck. I was about to go back to shoveling when I heard her sniffle and saw her wipe her eye.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No,” she whispered evenly.