by J. J. Holden
The large rock outcropping loomed ahead of them, rising up from the field seemingly at random. It was about thirty feet tall, made of large boulders jutting from the earth. All around it, the field was flat in every direction. From there, he might be able to hold off the cavalry for at least a little while. Long enough for his men to escape, and for him to do his duty.
Just before the line of Korean cyclists drew parallel to the outcropping, one of the men shouted, “You honor your ancestors.” The other two shouted a hurrah in agreement.
The line of bikes curved around so that the outcropping stood between them and their pursuers’ rifles, and his men kept riding for their lives, obeying his final orders.
Jwa, however, veered sharply left and dumped his bike at the foot of the hill. He unslung his rifle and scrambled up the outcropping until he reached the top. He flopped onto his belly, nearly knocking the wind out of himself, and drew aim. He drew in one deep breath, began to exhale, and halfway through letting it out, he held his breath long enough to gently squeeze the trigger. His AK-47 bucked, and one of the pursuing riders fell from his horse.
The others scattered and rode for cover. He had time to snap-fire one more round at one of their horses, lacking time to aim at the smaller targets riding them, and the horse fell. It skidded to a halt in the dirt, kicking up a cloud of dust, and its rider scrambled for cover behind a bush. Jwa cursed, lacking time to aim for another shot to drop the briefly-exposed man.
Two tufts of dirt and gravel flew up into his face from two feet in front of Jwa, and he ducked down as more shots were fired. He counted to three, then rose up long enough to snap off a shot, but he didn’t have time to aim. He remembered where his pursuers were and had to rely on his reflexes to try to aim in someone’s direction in order to fire off a burst. Then he dropped down, and just in time, too, as more ricochets fell around him.
Jwa smiled. His men would escape, and his ancestors would be proud of him. He would likely join them soon. An incongruous thought streaked through his mind, looking forward to sitting by his grandfather’s side again and listening to one of his old tales of legend. Jwa had loved those stories, growing up.
He rose up long enough to snap off another burst of fire, immediately ducking down again to avoid the inevitable return fire. His heart raced as he made peace with the idea that he was about to die.
* * *
By the time they had crossed through the Maywood neighborhood, Choony sported two new bruises over his cheek and jaw and a limp from where Jack had kicked him in his thigh one time, after Choony had fallen. His shoulder hurt, too, since they had yanked him roughly back to his feet by his arms, still bound behind his back with a ziptie.
Eventually, they came to a street—the street, according to the sign—and he saw that the nearby addresses were in the 1900s. They turned down that street, and ten minutes later came to a small warehouse. Address: 1701. Choony felt his heartbeat accelerate at the thought that perhaps Jaz was within.
Just outside the door, Jack stopped and spun Choony to face him again. “Your eyes are all dilated, dude. I can see your adrenaline pumping. You know what’s inside, don’t you?”
Choony didn’t answer. He figured it was a rhetorical question.
Jack shrugged. “You don’t need to answer. I can see it in your eyes.” Jack grinned in his face, as malevolent an expression as Choony had ever seen.
Chump threw open the door, and Choony saw an office on the other side. Jack shoved him firmly through the doorway and in the sudden darkness inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. It must’ve taken them a moment as well, because they both simply stood beside him in the dark, not moving except to get a firmer grip on his jacket.
About ten seconds later, from behind him, Jack’s voice said, “All she needed was the touch of a real man to open her up. You should hear the way she goes nuts when I’m giving it to her. Straight porn-star status.”
Chump said with a grin, “She’s always talking about how you got that short little Chinese cock.”
Jack’s hand lashed out in a blur, smacking the other man upside his head. “Not Chinese, dumbass. He’s Korean. There’s all different kinds of slant-eyes,” Jack said. He then looked at Choony and said, “I apologize for my friend’s racist remarks, but you gotta admit, you all do kinda look the same.”
Choony felt rising anger, but quickly allowed it to pass. Not only did he refuse to give them the satisfaction of displaying his impotent rage, but anger would also not solve his problem. Nothing he could do right now would save him, so his best option was to follow the Buddha’s teachings and simply accept his circumstances. After all, not accepting them would change nothing, it would only disturb his own harmony and darken his Karma.
His two captors stared at him for what seemed like a couple of minutes, but was probably only a few seconds, obviously expecting a reaction from him. He simply looked back, passively. No, he must wait patiently for the right opportunity.
Jack rolled his eyes and said, “This guy is so damn stupid, he don’t even know when he’s being insulted.”
Chump laughed and said, “Maybe, but I bet he reacts to what you got planned. I don’t figure he can ignore that, eh?”
Jack barked out a laugh, then walked toward the door leading to the warehouse bay, dragging Choony behind him. As the doorway loomed closer, Choony’s heartbeat sped up. On the other side of that doorway, he would surely see Jaz. He hoped she wasn’t completely damaged or, at the very least, he hoped she was still alive.
* * *
The sound of the front door closing woke Jaz with a start. Her heart raced, palms sweaty, before she was alert enough to comprehend what had woken her. The jackal and his pet hyena must have returned.
Once she realized it had been the door, she rushed to cover herself with the blanket as she plopped back down on the dirty mattress, pretending to be asleep. It was difficult, because she totally felt the urgent need to gasp for more air. As her heart continued to race, adrenaline pumped. Then she heard Jack laughing, and her blood ran cold. He only laughed when he was hurting her, or thinking about doing it. Like, relishing the thought. Jack was evil.
As they came through the doorway from the office, Jaz cracked one eye.
Choony. He was with them!
She nearly gasped, nearly clamped her hand over her mouth, but they would see or hear that. It took all her willpower to stay silent and still. Every little part of her wanted to jump up and rush to him, but she wouldn’t dare. She imagined what she might look like, bruised from head to toe. She couldn’t let Choony see her like that. It would crush him, and if he flinched away from her in any way, that would destroy what little soul she had left. She couldn’t avoid it forever, but please, God, just a little longer, she begged. She wanted time enough to build up her resolve. She only hoped she could show herself to him on her timeline, not Jack’s.
“…that lump of fine ass on the bed over there, that’s your boo,” Jack was saying, his voice carrying to her from across the warehouse bay. “She don’t look as good as she did the last time you saw her, I bet. She has more miles on her now, you know?”
Through the tiny gap she’d left between the blanket over her head and the pillow beneath it, she saw Choony turn his head to stare at her, but he didn’t move. He didn’t cry out. Thank God, because if he had freaked out, those two assholes would have fallen on him like sharks on chum.
Choony said, “Whatever you have done to her, you also do to yourselves. Your Karma is stained, Jack. You dishonor your ancestors.”
No, no, no… Was he trying to get himself killed?
Jack laughed—a high-pitched, crazed laugh that sent shivers down her spine—then replied, “My parents dishonored themselves, shithead. They made me what I am, so whatever I’ve done to that hot piece of ass, well, that just stains my parents’ Karma. Loophole, bitch!”
He tossed his head toward Jaz’s covered, apparently-sleeping form, and his little crony nodded and headed toward her
bed. She braced herself for whatever they had in store for her. It was never good, and now with a captive audience, it would surely be the worst yet.
“Let’s see what’s behind door number one,” Jack said, rubbing his hands together as if bracing himself for the big reveal.
* * *
Choony stood passively as Chump walked toward Jaz. He could do nothing to stop this, and struggling would only give Jack pleasure. He resolved himself to simply await his fate or his first opportunity to save Jaz, whichever came first.
Chump strode to the bed. He paused and said, “Wakey, wakey.” With a sudden burst of movement, he ripped the blanket off with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning, revealing Jaz, nude except for the cuffs around her wrists and the collar padlocked around her neck. Those bindings were all chained to a larger single chain that ran somewhere under the bed, coils of it visible on the concrete floor.
And she looked terrible. His heart broke to see her. Her once-beautiful, lustrous hair was matted and dull, and something like dried blood had crusted clumps of it to the left side of her face. Half of her body was covered in the fading yellows and grays of healing bruises, large enough to see even from his distance. The bruises on her inner upper thighs were fresh, as was the bruise under her left eye.
Chump grabbed her by the hair and yanked the sleeping woman to her feet. She cried out in pain and surprise, complying frantically with his shouted order to get the hell up. As she struggled to ease the pain of her hair being pulled, she saw Choony and locked eyes with him, but he saw no sign of recognition in those eyes. There was no light in them. She looked like a zombie.
Beside him, Jack chuckled. “You like my artwork, Choony? Chump and I had a couple little blue party pills, and your woman here was the party favor.”
Choony refused to react. He could do nothing about what had happened to Jaz, but if he got the opportunity to make things right, he wouldn’t hesitate. He decided that, although he wouldn’t go out of his way to kill Jack, he wouldn’t hesitate to if he got the chance and saw hope he could capitalize on it to let Jaz escape. The stain to his Karma would be offset by the goodness restored to the world with Jack’s killing.
After a couple seconds, Jack shrugged and said, “No comment, eh? I bet you didn’t know she was such a slut. Hey, Chump, come tie the gook to a chair, yeah? I’ve always wanted an audience.”
Choony felt his stomach churn, but not from fear of the rope Chump used to bind him to a metal office chair. He kept his eyes locked on Jaz the whole time, willing her to take strength and Chi from him. He was here for her, and he wouldn’t look away no matter how it hurt to see what he suspected Jack was about to do. Choony would let her see his eyes and the love they contained, so that she might lose herself in his gaze instead of in what was to come.
- 17 -
0900 HOURS - ZERO DAY +636
DOWN IN THE bunker, Cassy sat at Ethan’s computer desk, looking at the monitor. It was still blank, the black screen’s slightly off hue its only sign of being turned on. Frustrated, she turned to Ethan sitting next to her and frowned. “You said they wanted to talk to me, but where are they? Is it a technical glitch?”
Ethan shook his head as she drummed her fingers on his desk impatiently. “No, sorry. I got an urgent query about a report I had sent, with a message that only said they had to talk to you on a top priority. Then I came and got you so you could respond right away, and when we got back, they weren’t on the monitor anymore. I’ve got it set to auto ping them for a call response every three minutes.”
Cassy took a sip of hot apple cider infused with hazelnuts. Since almost all the coffee was gone now, it had become the Clan’s favored morning drink. The infused cider took a bit of getting used to, but she had forced herself to learn to like it. If that’s what everyone else drank, then it was what she had to drink, too. Still, it would’ve been nice to have some real coffee down there in the bunker, where the rest of the Clan couldn’t see.
A couple of minutes later, an icon appeared on the monitor that looked a lot like an old-style telephone. Ethan muttered, “Here they are.” Without getting up, he reached across her to tap on one of the keyboard’s function keys, and the chat window expanded to full-screen mode.
She saw a tired, ragged-looking man on the other end. It was Tony all right, the new Ephrata leader, but in the months since he had taken over he seemed to have aged several years. She gave him a cheerful smile and said, “Good morning. You look as handsome as ever.”
The man in the monitor chuckled. He said, “Always the flatterer, Cassy.”
Her smile faded a bit and she said, “What’s going on?”
At her comment, he grimaced. She felt her stomach lurch. That expression couldn’t bode well. He replied, “Well, I appreciate that. In fact, that’s why I asked to speak to you like this, securely and in private.”
Cassy stared at the screen, waiting for him to say something more. He obviously had a point, and was taking a long time to get to it.
After a few seconds, Tony coughed, looking physically uncomfortable. He was pale enough that even through the video conference screen, he looked ill. At last, he said, “The thing is, we’ve been getting hit by the ’vaders a lot, lately. We think they’re from the Northern Cantonment, groups of raiders penetrating the empty area east of us in order to hit us from the south and southeast where our walls are thinnest. It has happened enough in the last few weeks that everything here has been brought more or less to a standstill. I’m really glad most of our planting was already in, because it’s not even safe out in our fields. It’s like our own little Bosnia situation.”
She shook her head, fairly sure he had the wrong Intel. “Actually, our scouts tell us the raider groups have been coming from the Maryland invaders. They’re raiding deep into Confed territory and focusing on Ephrata, although we don’t know why.”
He shrugged back at her. “I don’t know about that, but it could be true. It doesn’t really matter, though. Wherever they come from, we need Confed support. We need battle cars, cavalry, you name it. We need to be able to keep our work parties safe outside our walls while they tend our remaining crops, you know? If we don’t get backup from you and the Confederation, we’re not going to be able to help out in other areas, which we hear are also heating up.”
Dammit. This was what she had been afraid of. While it pissed her off that a key member of the Confederation was telling her they couldn’t meet their duties, couldn’t loan troops to fight the Maryland invaders, she also understood their position. The Clan had been in that position before, after all.
Biting her tongue, she said, “I understand the gravity of your situation. But we need those contingents of troops that Ephrata has promised to the Confederation. We need them so we can fight off the southern invaders. Once we fight them off, the situation gets easier for you and we can divert other troops to you. You know that, right? Holing up and circling the wagons isn’t in your best interest.”
Tony shook his head again. He looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, audible even through the webcam connection. “It’s not going to happen, Cassy. I don’t think you understand how bad it is here. Just this morning, we got hit by a full company of raiders, Korean and ISNA both. They got through our walls.”
“How bad did it get?” she asked, imagining the worst. No, the worst would have been if Ephrata got overran, but obviously they hadn’t.
“They almost raided one of our main supply depots, and they would have blown it up afterward if we hadn’t had a scout report back through one of those handheld Raspberry Pi short range radios that Ethan hooked up. Thank God we had all our mortar batteries supplied with coordinates to deal with an attack from that direction, since so many of the raids have been coming from there. We pretty much wiped them out, although we lost a lot of buildings that could’ve been useful down the road. We only lost a couple of people, and we decimated that company, but they’ll be back. They were part of a battalion.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t see the problem then, Tony. The raiders were wiped out, more or less, and they aren’t going to send another battalion at you unless we go to actual war with the invaders again.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t like having to tell you this, but I have to order our troops to stay here in town. We need to be ready for the next raid, because I promise you, it’s coming.”
Cassy’s eyes went wide. She had known about the raids, but not about the extent of them, nor about how close the raid this morning had come to destroying much of Ephrata’s supply stockpiles.
She scrambled frantically for a solution. There had to be a way to alleviate the pressure on Ephrata and still be in a position to defend against the Maryland invaders, where the real raiders had been coming from as far as her intelligence sources could tell.
Then an idea struck her. Clan scouts were continually reporting on the movements of a growing army from Maryland, a huge force comprised mostly of American citizens pressed into service, the rest mostly ISNA fighters. Only a few of the raiders were actually Korean. What if, instead of hitting them hard before they got deep into Confederation territory like she had planned, she just let the next company of raiders slide through Confederation defenses?
They would march on Ephrata again, which Maryland had apparently decided was the easiest, weakest link in the Confederation. Then the Clan and other Confed forces could sweep around behind the raiders as they engaged Ephrata. They could hammer the attackers on the anvil of those town walls. If she could arrange for allies’ forces to demolish the attackers, Ephrata would have to realize that their raids were indeed coming from Maryland and not from up north. It would prove that the Confederation stood strongest when it stood together.
Plus, by eliminating so many enemies at once, before the full war began, it would free up Ephrata defenders for other operations that were just as important… Which was maybe even more important, in the long run. After all, the Confederation had to get that southern border under control before the war or they would all be overrun.
