The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “She’s going,” he said.

  “She’s been kicking all night.”

  John put his ear to her stomach. He could feel the pulses and twists of his daughter inside.

  “This is cool,” he said.

  “Yeah, well . . . next time it’s your turn.” She looked up and saw that John was holding back tears.

  “Hon . . .” she said. She touched his cheek.

  “Ah.” John wiped at his eyes; he didn’t like crying. “Sorry.”

  “What?”

  “I just never thought I’d have this.”

  “A wife who vomits all over the floor in the middle of the night?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t have to explain. He had come from nothing, not even love. The Army had been his way out.

  He put his head to her stomach again.

  “This is magic,” he said quietly. “This is you and me.” He looked up at her. Her black curly hair ran over her shoulders. Her dark skin and soulful brown eyes. She took his hand and kissed it.

  “I’m lucky I have you, John Raimey.”

  A bomb blast tore John back to reality. He pressed his eyes as tight as he could, chasing that memory, chasing that feeling. A siren bellowed. Men screamed orders, others in pain. A building exploded next his barracks.

  “Get up,” he heard. “You have to get up.”

  It was Tiffany. She was in the corner of the room with him. It wasn’t the Tiffany he had just left; this was the one who had died. “They’re attacking the base, John. GET UP!”

  “I don’t want to, Tiff. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Vanessa still needs you.”

  That opened his eyes.

  “She hates me.”

  Gunfire erupted outside. One of the technicians made it to the doorway before being ripped down in a stream of bullets.

  “Maybe someday things will be different. Maybe someday you can lead a normal life. But not if you don’t get up.”

  He did. And after that, she never completely left.

  = = =

  “John, are you there?” Razal hissed through the comm.

  Raimey snapped out of the memory and back to the mission. Tiffany stood on the mound of dead flesh, but the bottom of her white linen dress didn’t stain. Razal had moved ahead to see how many soldiers there were and their relation to the town.

  Raimey cleared his throat. “I’m here. How many?”

  “Eleven. We’re a quarter click from town. It’s quiet. There are some trucks on the other side that aren’t Coalition.”

  “No soldiers?”

  “None that I can see.”

  The wind carried the men’s laughter and the woman’s struggle. They had begun. John felt his wife wither. This would always happen before the darkness. Tiffany’s dress was no longer white, it was a ragged hospital gown from her last days on earth. A boney arm extended out, and with all her remaining strength she pointed toward the lone cry and laughter just over the hill. She didn’t have to say it. He knew. Only blood would make her new.

  “I love you, Tiffany,” Razal heard over the comm.

  = = =

  Deo laughed while two of the other men tore off the last of the girl’s clothes. She covered her chest and crotch with her hands, and that made the men that circled her laugh harder.

  Coming around the horn, a bottle of whiskey landed in Deo’s hands. He took a swig. One of the soldiers pushed the girl down. She whimpered, but didn’t fight. She had already fought in the village. Her right eye was swollen, and blood crusted her lips. Deo’s friend was on her.

  The violence always got him horny. It was hard to walk. It was hard to think. He shook with excitement. She was a spoil of war. Whether she lived or died was entirely up to him. Thus . . . she was his.

  “Let me. Let me!” he said. He pulled his brother off; pants around his ankles, the man lost his balance and fell backward. The others laughed.

  Deo handed over the bottle and took off his pants. He got on top and whispered in the girls’ ear, “We gonna chop you up.” Her vacant eyes dilated and she bucked and cried. “Yeah. You can still hear. We gonna fuck and chop. That order.”

  A hum filled the air. They had taken what they were told to and both the factory and mine were shut down, but the industrial noises were still in their heads, so the hum went unnoticed. Deo was in when a tree snapped near their position. It came from opposite the mine, in a thicket of trees. Lion, a few men thought. It would leave them alone; they had piled plenty of food for the wild creatures a week before.

  But then another tree snapped, and then another, and then crashing, and it sounded as if a bulldozer was charging them. Confusion turned to fear. One of the men reached for his rifle—and his head disappeared. Another fled, and his chest purged a red mist, and he collapsed. The others were frozen in horror as an electric whine filled the air and the earth growled and vibrated.

  And then a broad-shouldered silhouette tumbled through the last of the trees like a combine thresher through wheat.

  John didn’t bother with his hands: he just charged. Some of the men raised their own hands in surrender, but he had witnessed their guilt. He knocked them down and under, laying out a swath of broken, twitching limbs. Fifteen seconds of battle, and everyone there lay dead or dying.

  Deo was still on the woman, flinching with each thunderous blow as the giant euthanized the dying. The giant’s back was to him with its hand in the air. When the hand came down, the earth jumped. Deo heard the moan of a comrade. The giant followed the sound. Deo climbed off the woman and shoulder-crawled into the brush. Two boots stopped him. He looked up at a soldier holding a rifle, smiling down at him.

  “Where are you going?” Razal asked. A shadow eclipsed both of them. Razal looked up. “Yours?”

  Deo felt the grip as he rose into the air. He was turned over like a doll, face to face with the giant. He didn’t bother whimpering. He didn’t bother pleading for mercy. He knew he was dead. Behind the skull-shaped glass, the eyes staring back at him were quivering with rage. The man in the machine was insane.

  Razal started, “If he speaks English, we could ques—”

  Raimey reared back and threw Deo fifty yards over the edge of the mine. He spun in a cartwheel as he arced over, and his screams echoed out of the canyon as he fell to his death.

  Razal shook his head back and forth. “I would have done it differently, but . . .”

  Razal went to the girl and John followed. She shook under John’s visage. Razal put a hand on her shoulder. “Safe,” he said.

  She stared around her at the crushed remains of her abductors. Razal grabbed her torn clothes and gave them to her. She spoke.

  John and Razal looked at each other—no idea.

  “French?” Razal asked. John didn’t know. Sure.

  Razal gave the girl a thumbs-up. “Safe.”

  John spotted a canteen on the ground. He nudged it toward the girl with his foot. Razal handed it to her and she drank it down. Minutes passed, and she regained her wits. But instead of resting, she stood up and slung on her rags. A breast showed, but she didn’t seem to care. She grabbed Razal’s hand.

  “Go!” she said, pulling him in the direction of the town. She looked at John. “GO!” she yelled, agitated. She let go of Razal and ran toward the village. John and Razal followed. Something was going on they couldn’t see.

  Her adrenaline left her a hundred yards in, and John carried her the rest of the way. On the fringe of town, they stopped.

  “Child,” she said. Child? Children?

  Razal had already climbed up a tree, scope to his eye, scanning.

  “I still don’t see anything. Can you see thermal with your rovers?”

  “Yeah.”

  John stepped away from Razal and the girl, and the two hover-rover drones mounted on his shoulder blades boosted off his back and into the air. They whisked high into the sky.

  Within minutes, he understood what the woman was trying to say: the rebels had killed every
one but the children. On the far side of the town, the trucks idled. They were taking them away.

  “We have to move fast. Hop on,” Raimey said to Razal. Razal jumped from the branches onto his shoulders. John put the woman in the tree, thinking of the lions. He thrust out his open palm: “Stay!” And then he charged toward the town.

  At the town, Razal took to the rooftops, shadowing John as the giant charged. The town itself was abandoned. The only signs of life were past tense: congregated circles of dried blood from group assassinations.

  The hover-rovers fed intel to Razal, too. He could see the children in the people carriers—there were at least thirty. One of the trucks trundled away. The only road out led north.

  “I’ve got it,” Raimey growled. The truck was far away and shrinking.

  “I’m on the other one,” Razal said. He took to a higher building and slid down prone. They were still over a thousand yards away. He clicked his scope to 20x zoom.

  The most direct path was right through the buildings, and Raimey took it. The corrugated structures blasted outward as he sprinted through them. He could see the truck accelerating, groaning and grinding, plumes of blue smoke coughing from its tailpipe. It was slow. He entered an open field that circled the east side of the mine. He accelerated to his maximum speed of twenty-five miles per hour.

  The soldiers in the truck saw him. They slapped the truck cabin, screaming at the driver to go faster. They pulled out their guns and brought RPGs to their shoulders. John was a quarter mile away and closing.

  The RPGs whizzed by, leaving strings of smoke. One hit him in the chest and exploded in a fireball. He ran right through it. A normal Tank Major’s armor would hold against such an attack, and John’s was four times as dense. They had nothing that could defeat him, and then he was there.

  He slammed into the truck’s side, and the front wheels jumped as it skittered off the road into a gully. A few soldiers fired point-blank into his helmet, while others leaped out the other side and disappeared into the bush. John was a wolf in a chicken coop, tearing the soldiers from the roost, quickly crushing them, then grabbing some more. A dozen children were curled together on the truck’s bed, holding each other, crying.

  The truck was clear. John saw that the other one had crashed, too. The windshield was splintered and covered in red. Razal sprinted toward it with his rifle out. Bursts of gunfire came from the truck. There were still soldiers inside. Razal would need help. John turned to the field where a few of the men had fled. “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! IF ANY OF YOU MOTHERFUCKERS SHOW YOUR FACE, I’LL TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB!”

  The soldiers in the bush didn’t understand what he said, but they understood the tone. They ran as hard and as fast as they could.

  John left the children to assist Razal.

  = = =

  They lost two children in the gunfire. By then the woman had climbed down from the tree. She arrived in the aftermath, and when the young boys and girls saw her, they gripped her as if she were a lifeline. John watched from a distance. Using the hover-rovers, Razal had entered the bush to track down any soldiers still in the area.

  “You did well,” John’s wife said. She was next to him, just out of view, just kissing the corner of his eye. He could feel her health.

  “Two of the kids died,” John said.

  “But you saved the others,” she replied. “There are boys and girls.”

  “So?”

  “I thought the warlords only abducted boys.”

  That was true. Raimey looked at the howling pile of children around the woman. These girls were too young for . . . other things.

  Razal stepped out of the bush, covered in blood. He wiped his ceramic knife on his thigh and slid it back into its sheath. He had found the rest of the soldiers.

  = = =

  Razal stayed at the front of the town, checking the horizon with his rifle, and John went west to bury the dead. Tiffany was with him, sliding over the landscape without moving a leg. In bouts of stress she was always there. He carried the two children in one of his hands. Their eyes were open, and he could do nothing to close them. These little creatures, back to the soil. How cruel a world where children didn’t know play, and died shivering without a loving face to hold their hand. Add this to the mountain of proof that there was no God.

  At the mass grave, Raimey chased the lions and hyenas away. They were gorged, slow. It was a feast for the ages. The buzzards flew to the trees and watched John like silent judges.

  Next to the dead, Raimey started digging. His massive hands cleaved through the soil as effortlessly as an excavator, and within hours the hole was as deep and long as a pool.

  Raimey pushed the bodies into the pit and spread them out evenly. He covered them with five feet of dirt, then tamped down the earth with his mighty stomps.

  The children he couldn’t throw in. He dug them each their own grave. They had died on his watch.

  The town was a mess. Most of the buildings had been destroyed, and black smoke continued to pour from the smelt. With all of the adults dead except for Vana—that was the young woman’s name—they couldn’t wait for orders.

  Raimey found Razal at the Tank Majors’ quarters. Like everything else, it was badly damaged. Raimey was no computer whiz, but he figured out why the EU hadn’t received any updates: the transmission antenna and satellite dish had been sheared off the roof. He stepped around them and into the building.

  The room was ransacked. The artillery storage center was torn open and the hydraulshocks were gone. The drive chains around a Tank Major’s waist had to be replaced regularly—they incurred tremendous loads in battle as they swung the upper body back and forth during strikes—and the spares were gone as well.

  Razal was at a desk, fiddling with something that Raimey couldn’t see. But beside him, he recognized another piece of equipment: Razal had pulled the CB radio from one of the trucks. It was connected to a battery.

  “Weird, huh?” Razal said.

  John nodded. “They took everything.”

  “Whatever all this is,” Razal did a general twirl with a soldering iron, “it’s over. We’re too late.”

  “We can’t stay here with the kids. There’s barely any food.”

  “Matadi’s north of here.”

  “Coalition?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.” Razal bent over, and a whisk of smoke curled into the air.

  John came around and saw that Razal had an old computer in front of him, badly damaged. It was open, and John could see the wires and circuit boards. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “My comm’s still down. It’s a communication terminal.”

  “I’ve never seen one like that.”

  “It’s for places like this, far away, when nothing else works. They don’t use them much—they aren’t very secure. The dish is toast.”

  “Can you can get it to work?”

  Razal put the soldering iron down and rubbed his eyes. “If I can focus.”

  “Got it, I’ll go.” Raimey turned to leave.

  “John.”

  “What?”

  “That’s great about Vanessa.”

  The sick giant Razal was used to seeing vanished, and in his place was a concerned father. “I don’t know what to talk about,” Raimey said. “Everything I’ve heard, I don’t like. I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing, and I can’t say the wrong thing.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “She works with bionics. Did you know that?”

  Razal couldn’t imagine how he would. “No.”

  “For Evan, at the Derik Building. It’s always confused me. She’s around my life, but not in it. Why would she do that, but wait till now to talk to me?”

  “Sometimes people take a while to heal.” Razal tried to lighten the mood. “If you’re worried about what to say, my dad was in marketing. He said if you don’t know what to talk about, just ask questions.”

  John nodded. “That’s good. That’s good advice. I
don’t want to talk anyway, I just want her to. Do you have kids?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  Razal and Raimey stared at each other for a moment, no segue in sight.

  “I’ll check on the kids.”

  Razal went back to the circuit board.

  John found Vana. She and the children were asleep in what had been the school. One of the walls had crumbled from a mortar strike, and when Raimey peered in, Vana woke. She stretched and looked at the children. They were curled up together, finding warmth and solace in numbers. She came out, hugging herself against the night chill.

  “Are they okay?” John asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I get you anything?” He had brought her food and water earlier.

  “Blanket?”

  Raimey leaned in. Many of the children were shirtless. “Blankets? I’ll look.” He paused. “Tomorrow we’re leaving.” He gestured to the children and her, and then pointed north toward the lone road that serviced the mine.

  “Matadi?”

  “Yes.”

  It didn’t bring her comfort. “Stafford went Matadi.”

  Raimey recognized the name. He had fought with a Stafford in Israel. He pointed at himself, a Tank Major. “Stafford?”

  Vana nodded.

  Two Tank Majors had been on site. She was saying Stafford was alive.

  Raimey pointed to himself again. “Stafford.” And then he pointed next to him. “Another one? The other one?”

  “Lepai,” Vana said. Chinese.

  Vana pulled a fist back. “Stafford,” she hit her palm with the fist.

  “Stafford killed Lepai?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Yes! Killed. Stafford, ugh, eh . . .” She got frustrated trying to find the word. “Bad guy?”

  Black hair streaked John’s right eye. Something was far from right. “I’ll keep you safe.” He pointed to himself. “Good guy.”

  = = =

  John checked in on Razal. He had gotten the communication terminal back up. The screen was damaged—a lightning bolt zigzagged from one corner to the other—but it appeared to work.

  Razal heard John come in. “It’s voice recognition,” he sighed. “Makes sense: you guys aren’t great at typing.”