“They needed to be said, if any action is to be taken.” Kane returned the hug. “When did you arrive from the new world? I would’ve prepared a celebration if I’d known you were coming.”
“Just recently. And when I heard of a special visitor to tonight’s emergency session, I knew whom I would find here.” Benedictus started walking away from the parliament chambers.
“You must tell me everything you’ve learned in the new world. I have yet to have the time to go over and see it for myself. I have heard they are progressing quite well, now that they are out from under the heel of Britain.”
“Yes, they are creating their own identity, and it is quite an amazing thing to see. I now know why you have always been so involved whenever a society was on the rise. I didn’t come back, though, to talk of the new world. I wanted to notify my Neteru brothers that I have finally chosen a consort to replace one of the ones who betrayed us those many years back, and to tell you that I will be moving to America for the time being, to keep an eye on them as they grow into a nation.”
“Your news comes as a surprise,” Kane said. “But not in your choosing of a consort, but in your leaving. You have always loved your home in the south of France. I wouldn’t have thought you would want to leave it behind.”
“I’m going to leave it for Petrus to watch over until when, or if, I ever decide to return. I need some time to explore and see what this new land holds. The continent is vast, and has had only the slightest portion of it explored. With my new consort, we will set out to see the whole of the land before anybody else has a chance.
The pair reached the main doors of the building and exited into the night.
“Well, tell me more about this new consort. Are you sure he’s ready for the eternal life you’re offering?” Kane asked as he motioned for his carriage to come over to them.
“He’s already accepted and is adapting quite well,” Benedictus boldly stated.
“You have already turned him?” Kane snapped back.
“Yes, I have. And make no mistake about my position. You and I are of equal footing, the same as I am with the rest of our brothers, and I will not ask for permission anymore to do what is my right. I abided by your sentence on me, plus another two-score years. When I did start to search, I sought out someone who shared my affinity for science and technology, and I found him. In fact, his own passion for the hard sciences almost makes mine seem to pale. He was already searching for a means to prolong his life, and I feared that, coupled with his unsafe experiments to find it and his age, he would foul up and be gone before I could return to tell you about it. Therefore, I did what is my birthright.”
“I meant no disrespect, brother, and you’re right, we never stipulated you had to get our approval. All is right between us, I hope. Now, where is he, as I would love to meet this newest member of the family?” Kane moved to enter his carriage.
“He is inside, waiting,” Benedictus answered as he watched Kane enter. “Let me introduce Benjy to you.”
Kane was slightly startled by the stranger sitting in his carriage, but did a good job of hiding it as he slid into the seat across from the man, an older gentleman with a lined face, short, rotund, and with a bald head, with only the slightest of gray hair cut short around the sides and back, a man that carried with him the faint air of familiarity. “Have we met before?”
“I’ve come to France a few times in the past. So, we might have had a passing encounter.” The man started to extend his hand in greeting, but quickly withdrew it. “Pardon my excited nerves, the fault is my own, not my master’s.” He bowed his head. “Of a truth, it’s an honor to finally practice what I’ve learned of our customs and courtesies.”
Kane placed his hand on the back of the man’s head. “There’s a distinctive air about you. If I can recognize you, others can, too. Have you not chosen your new appearance yet?”
“I’ve had a little trouble with that, but will master it soon, sir.”
“We didn’t have the complete privacy I would’ve liked on the boat trip over here, but it is something we will have fixed before we depart back to America,” Benedictus interrupted. “It was a long trip, though, and we are both in need of nourishment. I assume you have the appropriate supplies to meet our need somewhere close?”
“Yes,” Kane said. “We will retire to my home and finish catching up until the dawn forces us to slumber. I would especially like to hear more of this new land, and I will catch you up on the wheels of revolution I have set into motion here in France.”
Chapter 18
It had been an hour since they left the airfield, and Hope was still wide-awake, recapping the encounter in her head and how she could have done things differently. The entire plane had been quiet, except for the occasional moan out of Trip about his leg hurting. She finally decided to close her eyes and get a little rest when Hunter blurted something out.
“Oh, this can’t be good.”
Hope turned. “What can’t be good?”
“We’re losing oil pressure somewhere. It has practically flatlined according to the gauge,” Hunter answered while pounding on the gauge with his fist.
“Beating on it isn’t going to help,” Morgan chimed in from the back.
“Yeah, well, it always works in the movies,” Hunter quipped back, but without the normal confidence and swagger in his voice. “Guys, y’all better buckle up. I’m going to have to find a place to put this thing down before the engine goes out on me.”
Almost as if the plane knew he was talking about it, an alarm went off on the panel, scaring the other passengers in the plane.
“What’s that?” Trip yelled out.
“The engine is starting to overheat. We have a minute at the most. Start looking for a place to land this thing,” Hunter said as he nosed the plane down and looked for a suitable spot to put in.
“Over there,” Hope yelled out, pointing at a school on her side of the plane. “The football field. Can you land there?”
“Going to have to. But a hundred yards isn’t enough to stop, so it could get rough.” Hunter nosed the plane down and towards the field.
He aimed the plane at one corner of the field, with the plan of landing across it diagonally, to give him as much extra dirt as possible to stop the aircraft. He kept the landing gear up and decided to try to do a belly skid. He knew all the custom additions to the craft Benjy had installed and figured it should hold together. “Hang on tight … here we go.”
The first bump was soft, and Hope started to think they would make it just fine. Then a much harder second bump came as the whole belly of the plane made contact with the ground. Hope kept her eyes open as they went into a slide across the football field. Nearing the fifty-yard line, it started to look like they were going to be okay. But suddenly the plane took a dip, and one of the wings dug into the dirt, sending them into a dizzying spin. The world outside the windshield went into a blur, and Hope’s head was slammed into the window. She fought blacking out, but quickly lost the battle. In her last second of consciousness, the plane straightened out, and the last thing she saw was the goalpost in the end zone coming straight at the plane.
Then nothing.
The plane slammed into the goal post and came to rest upside down on top of it. Smoke was pouring from the engine as the fluids inside it drained out and started smoldering on the hot exhaust manifold. For over a minute, there was no movement inside the plane from any of its passengers.
Then Trip started to stir.
He was still buckled into his seat, but was having a hard time getting the seatbelt to let go, what with all his weight on the buckle. He looked around and saw no movement out of the other three passengers. As he started to call out for them to wake up, smoke started to creep into the cabin and he panicked. He looked down at the roof and saw Hope’s knife had fallen out and was resting just below his head. He reached for it, but was a few inches short. As he started to cuss at the out-of-reach knife, a hand reached into the win
dow and grabbed the blade. He tried to get a look at whose hand it was, but couldn’t turn far enough to see. Suddenly, his seatbelt gave way, and he fell to the roof, hitting his already aching head once more.
“Here, cut them out,” a voice chimed to him as the knife was handed over. “You don’t have long.”
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, he immediately moved into action, carefully cutting the seatbelts off each of his friends and slowly dragging them away from the plane. He caught a couple glimpses of his savior, who was busy grabbing all their gear out of the back of the plane, but couldn’t get a good enough glimpse to tell if the person was male or female. As he got the last person out of the plane, which was Hope, he turned to see what his rescuer was up to.
The stranger turned out to be a young man not much older than Trip. He was dressed in military fatigues with a scarf wrapped around his head, barely allowing Trip to see the facial hair giving away his gender. The man was pointing a gun at Trip, but he could tell it was just a precautionary gesture, instead of a fully aggressive tactic.
“I’m sorry, but until I know more about you, I’ve got to be careful,” the man said as he dropped the last of the duffle bags just out of Trip’s reach.
“We need to get to shelter. There’s no telling who or what heard our crash,” Trip said as he looked around for a safe place to go.
“I’ve got a place in the school. Let me show you where, and then we can get your friends there,” the stranger said as he waved Trip to follow.
Trip looked at his unconscious friends and debated leaving them there unprotected, but decided he needed to see what the stranger had to offer for safety.
The stranger led Trip to a side door into the school, and showed him a boarded-up tornado shelter just inside the hallway. “Bring them here. It’ll allow you to work on their injuries in safety,” he said as he dropped the two duffle bags he was carrying into another room next door and then locked the door.
Trip nodded with approval and ran back to start bringing his friends into the building as the stranger kept watch for him from atop a small coach’s tower beside the field.
After three exhausting trips into the building, Trip got Hunter into the room last and collapsed onto the floor next to him, completely out of breath. He heard his rescuer coming into the building and was trying to catch his breath to thank him, when suddenly the door to the room was shut, and he heard a lock placed on the outside of the door. “Hey, what are you doing, man?” Trip yelled out.
“Can’t take any chances just yet. Give me a few minutes, and then I will come back and we can talk,” the stranger said before his footsteps were heard leaving and the door to the building shut.
Trip sat in fright, thinking about how bad out of the frying pan and into the fire they might have just been thrown. If not for a small window on the door letting some light in, he would have been in complete darkness, and completely unarmed except for Hope’s knife, that he had stashed in his boot when he’d gotten done cutting the others free from the plane. He checked the pulses and the breathing of his friends and found all three very stable at the moment. Satisfied they were okay, he started to look for a way out of the room that maybe his captor didn’t know about. Finding none, frustrated him to the point of actually screaming at the walls holding him in.
“Hey, keep it down. I want to die in peace,” a voice rang out.
“Hunter, is that you?” Trip asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah, where in the hell are we?” Hunter asked in a very groggy tone as he struggled to get the words out. “Where is my plane? And why the hell is my head ringing so badly?”
“It’s a long story,” Trip answered as he went over to help Hunter sit up.
“Well, from the looks of things, we have a little while,” Hunter replied as he saw the two unconscious bodies next to him. “Go ahead and catch me up.”
Trip started to catch Hunter up on everything that had happened since the landing, until he heard the doors to the school opening again. But this time he heard four distinct sets of footsteps coming down the hall. As the lock on their door started to turn, Trip reached down and pulled the knife out of his boot, not knowing what was about to come through the door. Whatever it was, though, he was ready to attack as soon as he saw his captors’ faces.
Chapter 19
President Miller quietly slipped into his old office and proceeded to make his way to Kane’s desk. Finding a folder sitting on top of it, he opened it to find a transcript from a computer conversation, and two maps with circles drawn around two locations. One map was of Northwest Florida, and had the words Tovas’s killer written on it, and the other was of Colorado, with the words Mercer’s cure written above the map. Not sure what he was looking at, he put the folder down and began searching the drawers of the desk.
After an almost unfruitful search, he opened the last drawer and found it had been fitted with an electric cooler. Intrigued by the new addition to his old desk, he quickly opened the drawer and found two sealed IV bags filled with blood. The discovery threw him off for a minute, until his mind screamed at him to get out of the office as it recalled a long-forgotten memory from before his turn to politics, a memory from way, way back, to his time in Special Forces. He quickly closed the drawer and sped out of the office, making sure that he left no trace of his visit.
Once safe inside the elevator, his mind raced through the memory of his time in Laos.
It was the summer of 1970, and the Vietnam Conflict was in full swing. Miller was with his squad on a mission in Laos to track down a North Vietnamese general, who was there to drum up support for their fight against the Americans. They had been trailing him for several days, but always one step behind. They were to capture him and bring him back to Saigon for interrogation and a trial.
They had finally caught a break and knew where he was going to be ahead of time. They had been hiding in the jungle for at least four hours, surrounding a small encampment, awaiting his arrival, when they finally heard an approaching helicopter. Miller looked through his binoculars and spotted a Soviet-made Mi-24 Hind helicopter. He motioned his team that their target was arriving. With nightfall coming soon, though, Miller decided to wait and use the cover of darkness to spring their attack.
Once the last glimmer of daylight had vanished, his team moved into position. Miller was about to give the signal when he heard the sound of another approaching helicopter. He stalled giving the order to proceed, wanting the chance to check out the new arrival. It was another Soviet Hind, but this one had completely blacked out windows and no markings on it. He and his team kept a close watch as it landed, and a team of well-armed soldiers disembarked to secure the area. Once they gave the all clear, a well-built man in a black coat with black hair exited the craft and made his way indoors. With the extra manpower now present, Miller told his guys to stand down while he reevaluated the situation. After about thirty minutes, he had come up with a new plan for infiltrating the base and was briefing his guys on it when gunfire erupted.
Looking down into the compound, he saw the new soldiers firing on their targets and killing them all. As the sound of gunfire stopped, the man in the black coat reemerged from the building he’d went into and boarded the helicopter. The blackened helicopter then took off and disappeared into the night.
Miller and his team watched for any survivors, but found none to offer any resistance, so they broke from cover and moved in to investigate. After a thorough search of the area, they moved into the building where they last saw their objective enter. As they did, they found the bodies of his four bodyguards lying in pools of blood. Miller walked over to inspect their target and found he had his throat ripped out, but not a single drop of blood on the wound or even in his body. He grabbed his RATELO and called it into higher. He finally got word back to burn the bodies and head for home. He told his guys to wire the building, and while they got to work, he examined the other bodies in the room. He found that all four of the bodyguards were
killed without the use of a weapon, as there were no gunshot or knife wounds, only what looked like claw marks on the throats of each of them. He also found one of them had, apparently, grabbed his assailant and tore something off from the clothes. It was a small piece of fabric, with only a small part of the design. It was the bottom point of a yellow design with something black running across the top of it. He pocketed the small piece of fabric and ordered his men to ignite the charges. As they left the burning encampment behind, Miller knew they had stumbled onto something bigger than what they were expecting.
Miller never showed the fabric to anyone else, and never saw anything again that even remotely resembled it. As for the mysterious man in the black coat, he forgot about him soon after, as the three tours of duty in The Land of Bad Things drove it from his memory.
That was until earlier, when he saw those bags of blood and the forgotten memories resurfaced. He still wasn’t convinced, though, that there was a connection to his memory and Kane, but he knew there was one thing that would tie it all together. He rushed into his apartment and grabbed his suitcase, flipping open the lid. As he sifted through the contents, he found a small pouch with a drawstring on it. He opened it up and out came the Purple Heart he’d earned during his last tour. Attached on the back of it, through the pin used to clip it onto a uniform, was the small piece of fabric he’d found those many years ago.
He pulled it off and held it up to the window overlooking the city of Miami. He slid it over to match it up against a banner that had recently been hung above the parking garage below him. The piece matched up perfectly to the symbol on it. A yellow star wrapped with a black serpent.
He remembered what Aldrick said to him about the Council before he took off on his mission, about how powerful and secretive they were, and that people would disappear from sight if they ever got too close to them. He now had no doubts of who or what he was dealing with. He knew he needed Aldrick to hurry up and get back if he was to have any hope of being able to defeat the foe that he’d worked so hard to prepare against after his return to the States in the seventies.
Humanity's Hope (Book 2): Juggernaut Page 9
