Covered head to toe in black leather, their wide-brimmed hats looked out of place as if even the moon’s glow would be a light too harsh.
They moved quickly without hurrying. They were alone and unafraid.
They were Forsaken.
They stopped and one turned to the other…
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some serious heartburn,” Andrew grumbled.
“How is that possible?” Joseph replied.
Andrew shrugged and smirked. “I guess I just need to eat better. I’m getting the cravings,” Andrew shared.
“You learn to live with that, and it is about living. Seeing the terror in a person’s eyes as you’re getting ready to feast on their life’s blood isn’t something you want to relive,” Joseph confided.
“I’ve only had one human. Although I crave it, the look on her face will haunt me forever,” Andrew said slowly and softly as he looked at the ground.
The silence went on so long it became uncomfortable. Joseph decided to change the subject.
“I don’t sense anything,” he said.
“Me neither,” Andrew agreed as he looked up. “How do you think that transmitter got on the roof?”
“When Kirkus had his pod, I expect he flew all over the world dropping those things off. He didn’t even have to charge them. Sunny days took care of that for them. Without the pod, I don’t see anything like that again,” Joseph replied.
“What if they make more, the New Schwabenland gang?” Andrew wondered.
“Then that would be a problem. I’ll share a secret with you. Akio has a few fighters that are always ready to fly, just in case aliens return. If the NS gang reappears with technology, then I expect Akio will make short work of them,” Joseph said plainly, as if it were fact.
In his mind, it was.
“I guess so. I’m glad he didn’t kill me,” Andrew replied.
“First time for everything, Andrew,” Joseph told him, stopping to make sure that his fellow Forsaken understood that he wasn’t joking. “I was saved by Terry Henry Walton. Back then, I think Akio would have killed me, but Terry vouched for me. You should have seen Gene get his ass kicked by Akio on that day. He gave me the hairy eyeball and brain scan, but Gene got the old one-two and was out cold.”
“I have you to thank for Akio’s hesitation?” Andrew wondered.
Joseph screwed up his face as he thought about it. “In a way, I guess I made it possible for Akio to believe that not all Forsaken were bad.”
“Only the bad ones, right?” Andrew quipped and started to chuckle. Joseph slapped the younger Forsaken on the back and joined him, laughing, as they continued their trip through Chicago.
North Chicago
Cory waited for Lacy to show up. “I saw him, you know.”
“Who?” Cory asked.
“Ramses. Down the road about ten miles. He’ll be here tonight with his squad. You know he’s a really bad liar, which is probably an enviable trait for a boyfriend,” Lacy supposed.
“I know. He doesn’t try it very often and comes clean as soon as I give him the look!” Cory stated.
“Show me,” Lacy requested.
Cory tilted her head slightly to the side, presenting her silver streak of hair and raising her eyebrows.
Lacy looked down and lifted the bill of her cap to show her eyes wide in disbelief.
“That’s a good one,” Cordelia laughed.
A man kicked his boots off and walked into the small house. “I promised not to tell who I saw out there,” he announced.
“We have some work to do. Let’s go hunt us some warriors,” Lacy relayed, nodding toward the door.
Cory joined her as they went outside to walk the farm’s perimeter first, and then beyond, looking for areas from where someone could observe the farm and its people.
The Caribbean
Char stood at the wheel while Terry was in the captain’s cabin. The boat was running with half its sails deployed to move slowly enough that they could get lines in the water before they left a school of fish behind.
Not only did the captain have a rudder, he had high-tech gear stashed. When the sailboat ran at speed, a small device below the hull spun and charged the batteries. From a GPS to a depth gauge and fish finder, the captain had everything he needed to move about the western Caribbean and look like a fishing god. Terry was watching the screen intently, when the depth went from three hundred feet, to two hundred, to one-fifty.
He saw a school of large fish at the drop off from the shallow water. “Right here! Depth one hundred and twenty-five feet!” Terry yelled through the open hatch.
The deckhands dutifully dropped their lines, large chunks of fish dangled from multiple hooks along the last five feet of steel leader triple tied to the fishing line. They dialed down what they thought was the right depth based on how much line came off the bail, and they waited.
Soon, they were both reeling like madmen, struggling to bring up their catches. Terry ran on deck and dumped the line from the third pole in the water. Char joined him and soon, they were dragging large tuna into the boat.
The tied-up man looked astonished. “Captain rarely caught anything like that. Untie me!” he demanded. “I need to get a pole in the water!”
Terry brained his tuna by smacking its head against the mast. He pulled his trusty silver-bladed knife from within his shorts and cut the man free. He nodded once and grabbed a pole, checking the rig, baiting the hook, and hiking it overboard. He looked at the others, saw their poles bend in half from exuberant bites.
The two deckhands called out simultaneously, “Fish on!”
Terry ditched his pole and helped land and prep the fish.
One hour later, tuna filled the boat’s storage tanks. “Back to port!” the three hands called.
“To celebrate our catch. Sell-a-brate! Get it?” the formerly tied-up man called out merrily.
“Unfurl the sails, Mister Christian! Put your backs into it,” Terry called out, having no idea what the man’s real name was. “We run before the wind, straight home where our fortune awaits!”
***
Shonna and Merrit looked at the new hires. Two were much shorter than the others. “First thing. You two get step stools. You can’t work holding your hands over your heads,” Shonna exaggerated.
“Then, we talk technique, then we get down to business. We’ll completely clean out this new load in four hours! That’s all the time we get. We work. We take short breaks, then we work again. At the end, we celebrate. Every shift, every day, because if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right, and it’s worth recognizing that it’s been done right,” Merrit told them.
They jury-rigged a platform for the two shorter people. The indoctrination and training started with how to sharpen the knife, hold it, and make the cuts necessary for the quickest cleaning of the fish. The newbies were turned loose, observed for a few minutes, corrected a couple times, and declared satisfactory fish processors.
Shonna and Merrit grabbed their knives and got to work, leading from the front by ripping through the mounds of slimy fish. They splashed water over them for a final clean before depositing the meat in clean, sanitized stainless steel pans that looked like they’d seen better days, probably before the WWDE.
Merrit started to sing. Shonna liked her music, too, but one thing that Terry Henry Walton didn’t do was sing. He wasn’t musical at all, just like the alpha. They didn’t discourage music, but without their support, things had a tendency to fall by the wayside.
Cancun believed in music. It reminded Shonna and Merrit of their vacation to New Orleans in the before time. After a couple stanzas, Merrit turned the floor over to one of the shorter women. She started to sing and the others joined her.
Before long, the fish processing kitchen was filled with song and the tapping of knife handles in rhythmic percussion. Beauregard watched without joining in, as he internalized the lesson that the two strangers were teaching.
Hap
py people work better. They took pride in what they were doing.
Even if it was something as simple as cleaning fish.
As they worked their way toward the end of the morning’s catch, five people rolled huge carts into the receiving area. Beauregard was smitten and watched dumbfounded as the stunning purple-eyed woman wearing nothing but a bikini pushed the lead cart.
“Char!” Shonna called, putting her knife down and hurrying to greet her friend. Merrit joined her, waving the others over. Beauregard was going to say something about the people leaving their work stations, but stopped himself and settled for watching.
Terry brought up the rear.
Tuna filled the carts, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of the best fish that could be had.
“You look right at home,” Terry joked.
“It’s the first step toward world domination,” Merrit replied, casting a quick glance at Blow-hard. The large man only had eyes for Char. Merrit shook his head, but he understood.
They finally took stock of the haul. “Holy crap!” Merrit waved the crew back to their stations as he, Terry, Shonna, and Char moved the massive fish to the cleaning tables.
The three deckhands pitched in.
“Well?” Shonna asked, looking at Beauregard. “Pay them!”
He became flustered as Char sauntered to him, smiling graciously. Shonna watched closely to make sure the man didn’t try to rip them off. After seeing a number of transactions, she expected that he was shorting the fishermen, but they went away, happily carrying their vouchers.
But Char was different, and after he thumbed out a small stack of the vouchers that served as currency in Cancun, she looked at him sideways and put her hands on her hips.
He mumbled an apology and then doubled the size of the stack, smiling and nodding hopefully.
“You are too kind!” she told him, as she took the stack and turned away. “Come and get it, boys! It’s payday.”
The deckhands rushed into a group around her. She counted the total, divided by five, and handed each of them an equal stack.
They looked confused. Terry took his stack and shoved it into a pocket before heading to the cleaning tables and asking each of the workers about their jobs, thanking them for sharing and turning the day’s catch into what would be the evening’s perfect meal.
“What?” Char wondered, looking from face to face.
“Why so much? You found the fish,” the man who they had to tie up asked.
“It’s how we do things. Everyone gets an equal cut because I think we did equal work. Don’t spend it all in one place, boys. Tomorrow, meet at the docks at dawn. We sail as soon as the sun is up and plan to be at sea for a few days,” Char told them, waving the men away.
They whooped as they ran out the backdoors.
“We’ll set aside some tuna steaks for dinner,” Shonna offered.
Terry leaned close, “We ate like kings on the way in. I’m not sure I could eat one more bite of tuna steak,” he whispered.
“Sometimes, TH, it isn’t about you. We’re having a bit of this gorgeousness tonight, my treat. We’ll even get the mai tais flowing and then all will be well,” Merrit replied. They all knew that the enhanced couldn’t get drunk, but they liked the fact that they could get mai tais. Some of the moonshine that had shown up in North Chicago had been total rot gut.
Terry missed his beer. Pepe and Maria were long passed away, but the couple they’d given their farm to continued to grow wheat, adding hops from plants available in Wisconsin. Hops grew on a tall trellis structure that bordered a side of the farmhouse. It also helped provide shade in the summer. It wasn’t completely self-serving on Terry’s part.
He expected that the couple would brew the beer without him, just in case. As they said, rank has its privileges and people did things for Terry and Char to thank them, not because they felt like they had to. Terry would pay them somehow for the beer. He always did.
The world that he and Char had created was changing, from a communal society to one of free trade. They were leaving the era of shared resources behind. Some would call it communism. Terry called it group survival, but was happy to see the evolution to a society that supported self-determination. People were finally seeing a future where they could become what they wanted and not what they had to be.
He looked forward to dinner to find out what Shonna and Merrit saw for their future. Char’s pack was still loyal, but with Terry’s expansion to a worldwide strategic engagement, the Were folk were turned loose. They’d been given their freedom.
“We look forward to it. Until then, I think the beach is calling us.” Terry slapped Merrit on the back and with Char, they walked through the door to the hotel and dropped off two vouchers at the front desk to pay for their room for the day.
“We’ll be checking out tomorrow morning and we thank you for your hospitality. Our stay has been lovely!” Char told the man behind the counter, the same one who was always there.
As they walked away, Terry looked at Char. They hadn’t discussed moving out. “I guess we’re going to live on the yacht, huh?”
“Who wouldn’t?” Char smiled and leaned close to her husband. “Maybe you can help me out of this thing. It’s starting to chafe.”
“Any day of the week and twice on Sunday,” Terry replied happily.
CHAPTER NINE
Wisconsin
“Bring it in!” Lacy bellowed with her hands funneled around her mouth. She walked around the target farmhouse, continuing to yell.
She waited for her order to filter through the ranks. People stood up from within bushes, heavy grasses, a couple dropped out of trees. Lacy heard a rustling behind her. Camilla appeared from under the small porch.
“Nice!” Lacy exclaimed, nodding and high-fiving the diminutive warrior.
Members of the four recon teams walked to the farmhouse, many with their heads down. They mobbed around the gunny after she pumped a fist in the air and waved vigorously.
“Team leaders, head count,” she ordered. She was quickly rewarded by four calls of “all present.”
“How did we do, Corporal Kaeden?” Lacy asked
Kae held his head high. “Overall, we did well, until I got too aggressive and tried to recon the site on my own. After that, we settled in well and don’t believe we were seen,” Kae said, not painting a rosier picture than warranted.
“And?” Lacy tried to draw the rest from him.
“I haven’t fully debriefed my team yet, but our consolidation of information after the first day suggests there are thirteen people living and working here, in addition to you. We haven’t discussed patterns yet, but the observers were looking for them. Anyone see anything distinct?” Kae looked for his people, pointing out the ones who raised their hands.
“A group of four worked one area of the field both days, starting just after dawn, breaking in place at lunch, and returning to the barn before dark. We estimate that they’ll be working in that field three more days before they are finished. We won’t guess what they’ll do after that.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Lacy replied, excited to see the translation of information into actionable intelligence, turning what they saw into what it meant.
The other squads followed suit—Corporal Ramses and Corporal Marcie. They filled in various holes to paint a nearly complete picture.
Lacy congratulated them all before tearing into them. “We saw at least thirty-five of you! Moving during the day? Sloppy. Fidgeting within a bush when there’s no wind? Trying to get too close? What the hell were you thinking?”
She stood there and glared at the results of how she crushed the four recon teams’ spirits.
“You need to plan better, but you know whose fault it was? Mine, that’s who, because we put an artificially short timeframe with a long movement to contact. We would have dropped you closer under with such a tight schedule. Live and learn, eh? My compliments to Corporal Marcie on getting here the first night and getting into
position unobserved. Unfortunately, all your people were sound asleep when one of the hands strolled through your position on that first morning. Even you were sound asleep.”
Marcie threw her head back and sighed.
“It’s called exhaustion and is something every leader needs to deal with. You’re special. You’re faster and stronger than the rest of us, but even you aren’t invincible. It’s okay to be human,” Lacy said encouragingly. Marcie’s squad nodded.
“The reason I pulled you in early was because I’ve heard from the colonel and all of you are being deployed on a real mission. Two squads will deploy to a place called Guantanamo Bay, which is on the island of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea.” The squads were instantly excited. Kaeden and Marcie looked at each other, grinning.
“The second two squads will deploy to Kingston, on the island of Jamaica, not far from Cuba. The colonel has a sailing vessel of some sort and will ship out from Cancun. He figures it’ll take him a week to make landfall. He’ll call when he gets close to arrange a rendezvous. After that, he and the major will go to Kingston Town,” Lacy continued, making eye contact with Kim and Ramses.
“You’ll have to do better remaining hidden when you’re out there,” Lacy said, waving widely with one arm. “If you were unaware, Cory has been training in the background. You stumbled past her in the night. You felt a whisk of her breeze as you tried to remain hidden. If you thought someone was watching you, that was her.”
Cory looked at them from the porch and shrugged when they looked back.
“But her eyes…” Kae started.
Cory removed a pair of sunglasses from a pocket and put them on. The glow disappeared. “An acquisition on my last trip to San Fran,” she explained. “Since I have no intention of fighting, I figured stealth had to be my weapon.”
Marcie and Kaeden looked at each other and rolled their eyes. They’d both been on the wrong end of a Cory beatdown during hand-to-hand training. Cory was every bit as fast and strong as they were and as well-practiced in the martial arts. Time with Akio had further refined that. After more than a year training with the master himself, she was extremely deadly, with or without weapons.
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