by Schow, Ryan
Chapter Eighteen
When Stephani let Felicity into Clay’s home, she wasn’t sure where to sleep. She plopped down on the couch. Stephani returned a moment later with the medical kit. Inside were sutures.
“Take off your pants,” she said.
The twenty-two year old had a good figure, but she was not clean, and this woman was a stranger. Still, she told herself this was necessary.
She pulled off the pants, unwrapped the bandage and showed Stephani what she had done to herself.
To her relief, Stephani didn’t say anything. She just went to work. When she was done, the woman looked up and said, “This is going to hurt a lot.”
“It’s been hurting a lot.”
She gave her a small bottle of antibiotics and said, “Finish the bottle, but make sure this stays as clean as possible. In these times, an infection can kill you.”
“I will.”
She thanked the woman and said, “Good-bye” after she was set up, but then she was there alone. This wasn’t her house, her town, her couch.
At least it was clean.
She checked the pantry for food, found netted meat curing and some dried goods. She was hungry, but she didn’t want to be a rude houseguest, so she left his food alone and instead found a blanket and pillow and laid down on the couch.
As she drifted off to sleep, one thought occurred to her: at least she wasn’t in a bloody sleeping bag.
When Clay got home, she was already passed out on the couch, having nightmares. He touched her shoulder and immediately she punched what she thought was the violator. The smack of her fist on his face was like a rubber mallet striking wet meat. Clay reeled back, her ferocious little fist popping him in the mouth just right.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” she said, sitting up as he backed away. Her body was heavy with fatigue, her face practically asleep. It was dark in the living room, but he had several candles going for light.
“It’s okay,” he said, rubbing his mouth. “It’s fine.”
She shrugged off the blanket on the couch and got up, even though her back and torso hurt from the trip, and from laying there. She had that look in her eye, the apologetic, embarrassed, can I do anything to make up for this look. That’s when he looked at her leg. Rather her bare legs. And her panties. She turned and snatched the blanket off the couch, then she covered herself and apologized.
He held up a hand and said, “Honestly, it’s okay.” He licked the inside of his lip, opened his mouth and touched his finger to his tongue. In the candlelight, he looked at the bloodspot on his finger and said, “Good God, Felicity. Nice jab.”
His tone wasn’t one of happiness.
“Are we going to Roseburg?” she asked, even though the draw of sleep felt like a wet blanket on her fatigued body. She sat back down on the couch.
“I need to sleep,” he said, “then I’m thinking we can go first thing in the morning.”
She wanted to press the issue, but she couldn’t. Exhaustion was pulling at her so hard she wanted only to crawl back on the couch and fall headlong into a self-induced coma.
“Okay,” was all she said.
She listened to him go into his bedroom, undress and get into bed. Sometime in the middle of the night she found herself jolting this way and that, dreaming of wild pigs, her father and mother, the Chicoms.
It was all a mixed frenzy that had her thrashing in her sleep.
Finally a hand came to rest on her, the hand laying gently on her shoulder. She felt herself swimming up through the dark restless waters of the nightmare, the awareness of the real world helping to slough off some of the madness.
For a second, she thought she was alone on the couch, but the mattress beneath her didn’t feel like the couch. Complete awareness set in. She’d either sleep walked to his bed, or he’d taken her to it without waking her.
Turning, she saw the shadow of him in the darkness. In that moment, she started crying over everything. The well had broken in her. He scooted close to her, pulled her against his body, then wrapped his arms around her. She knew there was nothing to this. He was intimately aware of heartache, loss, pain. The crippling loss of self was a pain in and of itself.
When she fell back to sleep, her dreams settled and she was able to finally rest. She didn’t even stir until she felt him moving out of their cocoon. She opened her eyes to the stab of daylight. He was awake, and now she was embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face.
“For what?” he asked.
She didn’t know what to be sorry for. For being terrified of this new world? For having a head full of horrors? For needing someone to be close to through all this?
“I don’t know,” she said. “For not being strong enough, I guess.”
He stood there in his pajama bottoms and t-shirt, his body solid looking, strong. She lowered her eyes, turned away. New sensations cut through her. What followed the blush of attraction was a sting in her heart knowing she’d been in bed with a stranger while her parents were locked up in a prison camp enduring God knows what.
Her body shook once more under a soft sob, but then all that emotion just rose to the surface and soon she was breaking down again. She expected him to scold her and tell her to suck it up, but instead, he went to her, folded her into his arms and held her.
He kissed the top of her head and said, “No one expects you to be strong when it’s not required. Sometimes you need to let this emotion go. It needs an outlet, Felicity. It’s okay to do this here, to do this with me.”
She held him tighter, turning her face and resting the side of her head on his chest. “Thank you for being here for me,” she said.
“Of course,” he replied.
Just then the front door opened and someone came in.
“Clay,” the familiar voice called out. He let go of her and she composed herself. That’s when Stephani saw her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t…”
Her eyes went to Clay, but then they drifted down to Felicity and stayed there. She was used to women looking at her like that. The young brown girl who was cute and innocent and somehow managed to get all the right attention from boys. But it wasn’t like that.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Felicity wiped her eyes and said, “I’m just sad. And I’m thinking I need to get home, see if there’s a way to liberate my parents and Roseburg from the Chicoms.”
“Is that even possible?” Stephani asked.
“I’m going to amass a team in a moment here,” Clay said.
“And leave Five Falls defenseless?” she asked, taken aback. “That would be stupid and irresponsible.”
“Boone can handle it,” he said.
“Boone’s a wreck,” she said. “He can’t even handle a razor, much less lead this town into war, if needed.”
“He’s money when he needs to be,” Clay said. “Don’t count him out. Besides, we haven’t seen traffic from California for a long time. This is an in-and-out job. A rescue mission.”
“Can you at least wait until Logan and Skylar get back?” she asked.
“We can’t wait,” Felicity said, the very idea of it streaking her face with panic.
“Yeah, I don’t think we can wait either,” Clay said. “When I chatted with Longwei last night about the possibility of this, he said he’d get his guys together. Like I said, we can be in-and-out in a couple of hours, and back here by mid-day.”
“Half the city is being held in the cage,” Felicity said. “It’s not like a dog pen. The chain link fence surrounds the entire airport.”
“If most of the city is in a camp, then this isn’t an in-and-out mission at all,” Stephani said. “You’re talking about waging war on the southernmost Chicom occupation.”
Felicity knew she was right. When she looked at Clay, the man hadn’t said anything. But the smile that crept on his face seemed to surprise even him.
“They won’t see us coming,” he sa
id. Stephani started to react, but he held up a finger and said, “This is what I’m good at. This was my specialty in Afghanistan.”
“You also died twice there,” Stephani said, hands now on her hips.
“Yet here I stand.”
Chapter Nineteen
Quan didn’t plan on leaving Five Falls early, but he and his new team were anxious to go. Rather than traveling first thing the next morning, they loaded up their gear, said their good-byes and got on the road.
The trip to Yale was long and could very well be fraught with difficulty, this Quan knew, but he’d seen Longwei’s team in action and knew they could handle more than he imagined.
That was, until Roseburg. Who knew the interstate would actually be blocked?
He didn’t.
He glanced over at the passengers, then radioed back to the Jeep behind him. “Just follow my lead.”
They were driving Chicom Jeeps and dressed in Chicom uniforms. He pulled forward to the blocked off interstate. Several Chicom gatekeepers were there with guns. One of the men approached him with a less than warm welcome.
“What’s going on?” Quan asked in Chinese.
“Dissident uprising,” the man said. “ID please.”
Quan handed the man his card; he left to call it in. This sent a bolt of fear right down through the center of him. He quietly spoke into his Uniden.
“Be ready.”
Within a few minutes, once the man was done, he approached from farther back. He was accompanied by a dozen other soldiers, all of them looking extra alert, their weapons at the ready.
“Oh, boy,” he muttered under his breath.
The man walked calmly to the Jeep, handed Quan his ID card and then said, “You are a deserter, sir.”
“I didn’t desert anything,” he said, offended. “What is the meaning of this?” He looked in his rear view mirror and said, “Those men are with me and we’re on our way to Yale.”
The second he laid his eyes on the man at his door, he saw the gun in his face. “Da Xiao Zheng is going to be happy to meet you,” the soldier said. “Get out of the Jeep before I save him the trip and mail pieces of your body to Yale instead.”
Quan looked at his passengers, helpless.
How had this happened?
At gunpoint, the seven of them were pulled out of the Jeeps and shoved violently toward the huge chain link fence.
“What is the meaning of this?!” Quan bellowed again.
Someone struck him in the back of the head with the stock of a rifle, momentarily causing a sharp wave of dizziness.
Without another word, they were perp walked first through the general population, then back to a specific hangar. The five men and one woman were herded into a makeshift cage inside the hangar then told to strip. Lihwa Vòng looked at the men holding guns on her. Her fellow soldiers did what they were told.
“If you don’t do what I say,” the soldier told Lihwa, who was not stripping, “you’ll get the first bullet.”
Reluctantly, she began to disrobe.
“Good,” he said. “My name is Na Huang and I’m going to be your best friend or your worst nightmare. I think in the end, if you do what you’re told, your stay here will be relatively unobtrusive. Everyone on your knees facing that wall, hands behind your backs.”
They did as they were told.
Plastic cuffs were slapped on their wrists, all of them cinched too tight.
“The first thing that begins to hurt is your knees. It’s the weight of you pressing down on the concrete floor. After that, your back will fatigue and the fronts of your feet will begin to ache. That’s when you will slump forward, further straining your neck.” With a smile in his voice, Huang said, “I didn’t say it wouldn’t be painful. Just unobtrusive.”
He let out a self-satisfied snicker.
No one said a word.
“If you can stay this way through the night, we won’t shave your head. If you can go two days like this, then the third day you may lay down. We’ll see how you feel through the night. If there’s anything you require, feel free to ask one of our guards. They might not reply, but you are free to ask. If you need to go to the bathroom, you may do so where you sit. It will be hosed down every other day. Does anyone have any questions?”
No one said anything.
“Very well then,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty
Huang locked up the prisoners, radioed the Curator and told him everything he’d done, and then he set out into the runway to get a sense of both the mood and the atmosphere. He was accompanied by his guards, who managed to incite fear in their guests, but not enough to stop a haggard older woman from reaching out and grabbing his arm.
“Why are you doing this to us?” she asked, desperate, her face dirty, her clothes smelling of urine.
He stopped, looked down at her. Then he looked at her hand, as if his eyes were doing the deeds of his mouth in telling her to get her hand off of him. But her hand was still there, the grip tight for a woman of her age and disposition.
When he glanced up, and around, there were some eyes on her, and everyone else’s eyes on him. In a single, swift move, he peeled her hand off him, twisted it over, snapped her wrist and several fingers. She dropped to her knees shrieking in pain. He held onto that arm, locked her elbow and drove it down to the ground, the shoulder dislocating, the muscle and tendons straining, ripping.
“You do NOT ask us questions!” he shouted over her screeching. “You do NOT put your hands on us! You do NOT even so much as look in our direction!”
He snapped his fingers and the nearest soldier handed him a blade. The Curator told him to make an example of them, so he would. He’d said Huang needed to use one grisly act to control the masses, and this would be it. Fear, he’d said, was the great neutralizer. The reason they did what they did.
To be one man controlling a thousand men, or ten men controlling ten thousand, you must keep people in a steady state of fear. Huang understood this. He knew a true tyrant must defy reason and rationale by overwhelming his prisoners’ senses. That was how governments maintained control, how dictators could rule without an uprising by the people.
First the stick becomes fear, then fear becomes the stick.
With the sharp blade tucked in his hand, he carved a line around her neck, slicing through skin and muscle, cartilage and sinew.
Everyone stood in horror, the woman no longer screaming, her eyes vacant and wide. He stood, reached over her head and hooked two fingers hooked into her nostrils to control her. Then, like some kind of savage, he began cutting her head off before the masses.
To do something so sick and inhuman, Huang refused to see her as a human being, or a person. She was a symbol of disobedience. Taking care of her this way was how he stopped this place from turning on him, how he made sure what happened there—the small insurrection—did not become a movement.
As he did this, no one did anything, or said anything.
But then there was a man, looking at him from the front of the crowd, his eyes hard, wet, his fists clenched. Huang’s guards turned their guns on the man, awaiting his orders.
“What kind of a demon are you?” the Hispanic man asked.
He slid the blade around the woman’s neck one more time, really working the edge under a vertebra, twisted and cutting his way between it, making the final slice. Standing up, the woman’s severed head in his hand, he said, “Do you know this woman?”
“She merely asked you a question,” the man said, horrified. His arms were trembling with an indignant rage Huang knew all too well.
A woman came to this dissident, put her hands on his arm, weeping, begging him to let the man do his job. She just kept saying, “Think of Felicity, think of me.”
But the dissenter had that look in his eyes, like he couldn’t hear her, or see anything other than red. He shook her arm off of him and stepped forward, almost as if the guns pointed on him didn’t matter.
> “You people came to this country uninvited, and you’ve done nothing but spread your poison everywhere,” he said, his voice shaking with rage. “SHE DID NOTHING TO YOU!”
“Filiberto, please,” the woman sobbed. “Please.”
“Yes, Filiberto, please,” Huang mocked.
He dropped the head at the man’s feet. It made a squishy thud when it hit the asphalt, and then it slowly rolled over on its side. Both men looked down. They were looking at her ear, at her bloodstained hair.
“Do you think she can hear us?” Huang asked. “I read once that a human head was still alive for something like eight seconds after it came off the body. Personally I think that was just someone’s overactive imagination. Would you like to ask her something? Like whether or not she regrets defying me?”
One of his guards pressed the barrel of his rifle into this man’s head. He didn’t blink. He just stood there, seemingly unfazed.
Huang reached out to push the guard’s gun away, and that’s when the man named Filiberto struck. He head-butted Huang on the nose and grabbed the gun that was just pushed away. Ripping the weapon loose, he spun it around, fired at the man holding it, then ducked as retaliatory gunfire came in heavy.
The man’s hand was shot in the volley, the rifle falling to the ground, but that didn’t stop him from charging Huang. He hit the Chicom officer harder than expected, slamming him to the ground.
The man named Filiberto was a Tasmanian Devil the way he worked, beating on Huang relentlessly, the look on his face ferocious and enraged, like he’d taken every angry thought he’d ever had and turned it into a bomb he was now detonating.
The gunshot saved him.
One of his men got Filiberto in the back of his head.
Na Huang heard the uprising happening, but he was powerless to do anything about it with this dead man lying on him. One of his guys pulled the assailant off him, then helped Huang up.
A solid burst of gunfire silenced everyone.
Standing up, hurt and embarrassed, this temporary defeat morphed into outrage and all he wanted to do was punish.
