"Lanh, we got no time," a soldier behind him warned.
"Can you help me with their things, Johnny?"
The soldier nodded. Johnny grabbed the bags from the dirt floor of the house and ran them outside to the idling personnel carrier. Soldiers lined his path, their drawn weapons holding back a throng of people crying for help. Lanh set Magda down and spoke to Mei.
"They're evacuating soldiers to the carriers. Johnny got us authorization to go with them. My unit will take you both to a building top for a helicopter evac."
"Take us? You're coming, Lanh," Mei said. It was an order, not a question. But her son shook his head.
"I need to get something. But I'll meet you there. I promise, I'll meet you there."
"Papa?" said Magda.
He looked at his daughter and smiled. "I need you to be brave, girl. What I'm doing will help us all. We won't have to worry about anything after this."
"I don't understand," Magda said.
"Neither do I," Mei added.
Lanh looked at his mother and threw her a wink. In that moment, he was twelve years old again and stealing mangoes from the neighbors' yard.
"Trust me," he said.
He looked with visible hunger at the half-eaten bowls of soup on the table. He grabbed one, tipped it into his mouth while drinking and gobbling all at the same time. In a matter of minutes, he set the bowl down almost empty, then burped loudly. Magda giggled.
"You have no idea how good that tastes! Now let's go." He grabbed his daughter and headed to the door.
Mei paused to stare at the pictures lining the walls of her home, the bedroom she'd shared over thirty years with her now dead husband, then finally to the small kitchen and the still steaming pot of soup on the stove. She took a deep breath, nodded, then held her son's free hand and walked from her home to the waiting truck.
The back of the canopied vehicle came down. Mei and Magda were set on a bench surrounded by soldiers in dirty uniforms and haunted eyes. Her son grabbed an empty green military bag from the floor, threw it over his shoulder, and raised the truck gate with a slam. Mei and Magda looked down at him.
He grinned back up with a twinkle in his eyes. Sunlight winked off some of the metal on his uniform and he looked glorious to them.
"Smiles, girls. I always keep my promises, don't I? I'll see you there," he said.
The truck began to move down the road and away from Lanh. Magda waved at her father, and he waved back. Mei put an arm around her granddaughter, pulled her up to her lap and held her close. Lanh checked the pistol at his hip and began to run down the road away from them. Mei watched her son's retreating back until it disappeared from view.
The trek to the extraction point was a trip through hell. Sounds of fighting in the distance told them the Northern army was closing in. People flooded the streets. Some of them rushed their convoy in a vain attempt to board. In response, the American soldiers fired warning shots, and when those didn't work they fired into the crowds.
Mei pressed Magda's face to her chest so she couldn't see. Magda clung to her even tighter.
Johnny, the soldier who'd brought her belongings from the house, stood between the benches in the middle of the truck. He'd drawn his gun and loomed over them in a protective stance while scanning the road for signs of danger.
"Hell of a man, your son," Johnny said. "A lot of the local soldiers aren't worth a damn. But he worked harder than anyone else. No one ever worried about him falling asleep on watch, and there wasn't a better demo man in the unit. He could plant a mine and make it disappear like a magician."
"Where he go?" Mei asked in faltering English.
"I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. I ordered him to stay but he wasn't in the mood to listen." Johnny shook his head with a smile. "He's a great soldier, but can't take orders for shit."
Mei returned the smile. "He no listen me, either."
"You speak English well," he remarked.
"Husband teach at church. He make sure we all learn."
"Where's your husband now?"
She stared at the plumed smoke of an explosion in the distance. "He go jungle one day. Never come back." She fell silent and didn't speak again. Johnny nodded. It was a story he was all too familiar with.
The truck slammed to a sudden halt and he grabbed at a rope hanging from the retractable roof to keep from falling. Rising in front of them was a three-story building. It was one of the tallest in the small city.
A stone fence, topped with razor wire, surrounded it. A great crowd of people were pressed up against the fence, beating their hands and screaming to be let in. A helicopter rose from the roof of the building. It banked towards the sea and streaked to a carrier visible in the far distance. Another helicopter passed in the opposite direction heading down towards the roof.
Johnny's shouted a command to the soldiers. "We need to get to that gate!"
The men retracted the canvas covering the truck bed, stood and fired above the heads of the crowd. They screamed and parted in front of the truck. It rolled forward slowly, and two soldiers inside the building levered the gate open. The truck bucked and jumped. Mei didn't want to think about what they might be driving over.
Suddenly, a man's sweat-laden head popped up from outside the back of the truck. He wore wide-rimmed glasses, and his thinning hair stood up in crazy disarray. He grabbed at Magda and, in an instant, had dragged the girl to the edge of the truck.
"Please!" he yelled in Vietnamese. "My son! Take my son!" He pointed across the street. A boy roughly Magda's age, wearing a torn gray shirt and dark shorts, stood staring at his yelling father with wide, fearful eyes.
Magda screamed and tried to wrench herself away. The man gripped her arm harder and continued to yell in loud, panicked words. Mei scrambled to grab and pull the girl back but her strength was nothing in the face of the crazed man's desperation. Magda's feet left the truck bed and the man started to drag her over the edge. Johnny rushed forward, brought his pistol up, then struck down, hitting the man in the face again and again. The stricken father yelled even louder through his shattered nose and ripped open cheek.
The lieutenant wrapped an arm around Magda's waist and kept her from being dragged any further. Then he pointed the gun between the screaming man's eyes.
"Let her go, goddammit. Let her go!"
The crazed man looked back at Johnny. Blood dripped from his forehead down to his eyes.
"My son!" the crazed man yelled back.
Johnny paused for a moment. He glanced at the man's son across the street. In response, the small boy took a step toward the truck.
Johnny's gun jumped and the man's frantic screaming stopped. A hole stood in the middle of the man's glasses surrounded by a spider web of cracks. The grip released and the dead father fell back below the truck.
Magda rushed back crying to her grandmother. The building's gate began to close behind them. The dead man's son stared at them with wooden eyes. Then the gate slammed shut, and the crowd surrounded the fence again.
They couldn't see the bodies left in their wake.
Johnny and the soldiers surrounded Mei and Magda and rushed them into the building.
Piles of paper had been set to blaze in trash bins. Computer equipment shattered by hammers and small arms fire littered the ground. The American military would leave nothing for the enemy.
The group ran up the smoke-filled stairs towards the roof. Johnny supported Mei. The old woman moved as quickly as her aged legs could carry her. She, in turn, held tight to Magda, determined not to let loose from her grip again.
Finally, they burst out of the stairway into the sunlight. A helicopter waited on the roof. Under its slowly turning rotors, a man hung out the side handling a huge mounted machine gun. He waved at the group, ordering them to the aircraft. They sprinted and split to either side of the mounted gun and boarded the chopper two at a time. Mei and Magda were squeezed between soldiers directly opposite the side gunner. Johnny went forward to the pilot.
"We can't leave yet! We got one more coming," he said.
The pilot gave him a baffled look. "You're fucking crazy, Lieutenant. The VC are in the goddamn streets. If we don't leave now we're all gone. You don't wanna go, then get the fuck off!"
A burly sergeant with a dark beard reached over and grabbed Johnny. "Lieutenant, he's right. We got to leave Lanh."
"That what Lanh did when he pulled your ass out of that river, Steve?" Johnny yelled back.
The dark bearded soldier went quiet, and his eyes fell to the floor. Another soldier, a smaller one with glasses, spoke up in a soft voice.
"Lieutenant, we got his kid on board. Lanh wanted his family out and we got 'em here. We gotta get them out the rest of the way. Please sir, we can't stay."
Johnny looked around the chopper. All the soldiers were silent and refused to meet his gaze, leaving only the sound of the churning rotors. Johnny looked at Mei and Magda for a moment, and his face betrayed his struggle. Then, finally, he turned to the pilot.
"Take us up," he said.
"No—" Mei cried.
The rotors increased in noise and speed, and the chopper began to rise from the roof. Suddenly, Magda broke free of Mei's grasp and grabbed Johnny's leg. She pointed her hand towards the open chopper door.
"Papa! Look! It's Papa!" she yelled.
Johnny followed her finger and saw Lanh stepping onto the roof from the stairwell. He'd lost his uniform shirt somewhere, and his white undershirt was splattered with blood. Draped over his shoulder was the green military bag he'd taken from the truck earlier. It was filled to bulging. Whatever was inside, was heavy enough to make the soldier stagger under its weight.
"Set her back down!" Johnny ordered. The chopper touched down and Lanh reached them, handing Johnny the bag, then pulling himself on board.
"Christ, what's in this?" Johnny asked, holding what felt like a bag of weights.
Lanh ignored him and rushed to Magda and Mei. His daughter jumped into his arms. He hugged her tight, then quirked a smile.
"Kept my promise sweetheart. Told you I'd get here. I took care of you; I really did," said Lanh. He reached his hand out to Mei and she grabbed at it. They were all safe.
Johnny set the green bag down with a thump and yelled at the pilot.
"Go, go, go!"
The chopper rose again, this time reaching altitude and banking toward the water. The soldiers on board breathed a cry of relief. Unlike many of their brothers, they were alive and leaving a war they'd never wanted.
The rocket that stuck the building below them came from a tank trundling down the doomed city's main street. It blew out the ground floor with an explosion like thunder. Another rocket careened into the building's side. It ruptured a shockwave up through the roof.
The rising air smashed into the retreating helicopter like water ramming a buoy. The aircraft bucked to its side then tipped. The pilot yelled and cranked at the controls in a desperate attempt to regain stability. Lanh, with Magda in his arms, tripped back and fell toward the still-open helicopter door.
Mei screamed.
Johnny went for both in a desperate grab. His hands floundered for a moment, then latched onto the back of Magda's shirt. Lanh released his daughter and tried to stop his own fall by grabbing at the sides of the open door. His fingers swept the entryway. They curled against the patterned metal, and found a trembling grip.
But then, with a cry, his hands slipped.
He fell out of the helicopter and plummeted toward the damaged building below. The roof fell apart, opening like a hungry mouth to consume the falling man.
Magda hung from Johnny's grip and stared down at her falling father. Lanh's arms windmilled through the air. And somehow, over the noise of the helicopter and her own cries, Magda heard her father's last words as if he was speaking into her ear.
"Go!" he screamed. Lanh fell through the disintegrating roof and disappeared into the blackness of the demolished building.
The pilot roared with effort, and the chopper finally righted itself with a great jerk. He slammed the accelerator forward and rocketed them toward the sea and the waiting carrier.
Johnny fell to the floor and Magda dropped into his lap. The girl was making incoherent noises like an injured animal. Mei reached out a trembling arm, touched the girl's shoulder, then pulled her close and held her. Tears spilled out the old woman's eyes but no sobs would come. The soldiers stared at Mei and the girl, and no words were spoken within the cabin.
A knock at the front door brought Mei back to the present. She wiped her eyes and walked to the large pantry at the back of the kitchen. She pulled open the sliding doors and pushed her hands to the rear. Behind tins of flour and cans of food was the green military bag carried through war and time.
She unzipped it. Piled in the bag, peering back at her among some of Lanh's hastily grabbed personal items and some military equipment, were gleaming bars of gold, all in different shapes and sizes. She had no idea where her son had gotten it during those last moments, but it was with her now. Her son—the man who’d saved them all.
She looked over at the bubbling soup in its clean, silver pot, then around at her big kitchen with its gleaming chrome appliances. She missed her old home terribly.
Carefully, so as not to disturb the contents of the bag, she zipped it closed, then grabbed a cane leaning from a nearby wall and hobbled to the front door. Her hip had never recovered from the rigors of the escape.
A tall man in a button up black shirt and dark jeans stood in the hallway. His short hair was beginning to turn gray and his deep-set eyes were the foreboding color of heavy clouds just before rain. He cut a powerful figure that radiated a presence, dark and hard like obsidian.
He nodded his head to her in deference before speaking.
"Hello, ma'am. I'm Jebediah."
Chapter 8
Jebediah looked around at one of the nicest homes he'd ever been inside. It was a huge, two-level with a large, dramatic staircase leading down from the top floor. Crown molding and dark, hardwood floors in rooms with deep couches and throw blankets, created a sense of both luxury and comfort.
An older woman walking with the help of a cane came around one side of the staircase. He guessed she was coming from a kitchen given the smells wafting from the door behind her.
She was tiny, barely coming up to his waist. But her face was kind and he immediately liked her.
Another, much younger woman wearing a dark gray suit came around the other side of the staircase to join the older woman. When she moved, her suit jacket flipped open and revealed a holstered gun.
The other bodyguard, he guessed to himself.
The bodyguard was deeply tanned and when she spoke, he heard the hint of a Middle Eastern accent.
"You are Jebediah?" she asked.
He nodded.
"I am Ara. I also work for Mei." She indicated the older woman.
Jebediah thought about the best way to handle himself. He felt most comfortable when he was in charge, so it was probably best to set that tone now. The sooner they realized he knew what he was doing, the quicker they'd follow his instructions.
"I appreciate being here. Maybe we can set some ground rules about the best way for all of us to work together. My first thought is—"
"Take off shoe," Mei interrupted.
Jebediah stopped and stared. "I'm sorry, I was saying—"
This time, the old woman's cane rapped against his feet. "Take off shoe. Then come. We eat."
Mei didn't wait for him to reply. Instead, she turned and started to walk back to the kitchen.
Ara failed to suppress a smile. "She doesn't like shoes in her house," she shrugged. "Oh, we're having soup. It's really good."
Ara followed Mei to the kitchen, laughing a little.
Jebediah looked where the two women had gone, then down to his feet, then back up again. He sighed, slipped his shoes off, then put them next to the door, and walked to the kitchen.
Ara wa
s seated at a wood kitchen table with high backed chairs. Mei was bringing out bowls of some type of soup. She set them down on the table, one for each of them. He guessed he was supposed to sit and did so.
A bowl was slid over to him, and the smells of ginger, chicken broth and a few other things he couldn't identify wafted to his nose. Noodles, vegetables, and beef floated about.
Ara set to with obvious relish. Mei simply smiled at him, waiting for him to eat.
He took a sip. It was a little salty, a little sweet, and wonderfully comforting. Soup for a meal wasn't something he'd really considered before. If all her soups were like this, though, he'd change his thinking.
"How long here?" Mei asked.
"The Hinge?" he responded.
She nodded.
"I grew up here, but left a while ago. Then I came back to … do something." He let his reasons hang unexplained.
"You must know the place well," said Ara.
"As well as anyone, I suppose. It can be tough because things here change. I'm not sure how to explain it, but the island is bigger inside than on the outside. Different parts of the island have different weather, and the distance between them is sometimes just a step or two. And some places you'd swear were in one part of the island end up in another. But, most people find if they need to get somewhere, they start moving and eventually arrive. Sometimes the best you can do is trust in that."
"And the magic of the island? The abilities given to some?" prompted Ara.
Jebediah shrugged. "No one really knows anything about it, other than calling it the Flashpoint or just 'getting the Flash'. It appears to be completely random. And it won't work anywhere off the island."
"Monsters here?" asked Mei.
"People call them that, yes. Or demons. And some of them are both. Others are simply different but leave well enough alone. No one knows a lot about their history because they won't talk about it. But they've always been here. And then there's the things that happen to some regular people here," Jebediah said, thinking about the Rain addict.
Jebediah's Crime: A Heroic Supernatural Thriller (The Hinge Series Book 1) Page 8
