The Scarlet Empress

by Susan Grant

  At the same time, despite her sporadic tenancy here and Cam’s moments of doubt, Zhurihe remained an emotional anchor, and had been ever since Cam had been set adrift in this world she no longer recognized. Zhurihe was a Mongol name that translated to heart in English, a fitting label for this teenager who was, bless her heart, equal parts instructor, guide, cheerleader, and a shoulder to cry on. That Zhurihe—and everyone else in Mongolia—spoke perfect English was a mystery in itself, something about a long-dead king who’d unified all of Asia under one flag and one language before the war. But English? In Asia? It was hard to believe that any one person could have had that much power, charisma—and trust. Cam had thought the modern world incapable of producing leaders like that anymore. A tragedy that that the extraordinary man was now dead. His successors, too.

  Cam reached across the space dividing their two small beds and gave the girl’s hand a welcome-home squeeze. “It’s good to see you back. I missed your company. And you’re right—I was thinking about the past. Bree, specifically.”

  “Surely she wasn’t as good a friend as me!”

  Cam smirked at the ceiling. Zhurihe seemed at times to have the simple mind of a child. And yet Cam had witnessed too many examples of her feisty cleverness to believe it to be true. She was an enigma. “We couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. It didn’t matter. Bree was the sister I always wished I had.”

  “You had five brothers.”

  “Five older, overprotective brothers.” Zhurihe never seemed to tire of Cam’s descriptions of her family. “I miss them.” A persistent ache, much faded now, clutched at her chest. She let her hand drop. “They’re dead now, all of them, and no matter how much I think of them, they’re not coming back. I know that. I’ve accepted that. But not when it comes to Bree.” Cam searched Zhurihe’s shadowed, earnest face. “She could be alive, you know. She’s the one person who could have followed me into the future. I’m going to find out what happened to her, Zhurihe.” It was why she battled her clumsy, aching body every day, desperate to be strong again, so she could take charge of her fate—and Bree’s.

  Zhurihe pursed her lips and shook her head. “It’s too dangerous outside of the valley.”

  “All my life people have been telling me to give up. I’m used to it.”

  “Listen to me, Cam. Do not try. You won’t get far. Maybe not even past these mountains.”

  It was always the same story. Zhurihe underestimated her. Everyone did. Even when dressed in a flight suit and combat boots, a .45 strapped to her thigh and an againstthe-regulations switchblade wedged in her pocket, Cam knew her blond rich-girl looks and bred-in grace screamed that she was something else, that she was a woman like her mother, a Southern belle from a wealthy Georgia family, raised in a world of old money, cotillions, and rigid expectations. No one could believe it when she pursued an appointment to the Air Force Academy, and that she actually graduated. No one had thought she could do it. They never said it aloud, though, they were too well mannered for that, but she’d seen it in their faces. It made her victories all the sweeter. Defying expectations every step of the way, she was one of the few females accepted into Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, finishing as a distinguished graduate, and at F-16 training, too. One by one by one she’d shut the cynics up. But there were always more of them, fixing to doubt her wherever she went, even after she’d received the coveted Gabreski Award for being the top air-to-air student in the USAF. It seemed if you were shapely, blond, and soft-spoken, no one figured you could kick ass. But not Bree Maguire. Never Bree. When Cam had gotten to her assignment in Korea, the infamous Banzai had, after flying a single mission with her, told the squadron at the bar that night that “If Chuck Yeager had made a kid with Scarlett O’Hara, it would have been Cam.”

  It was the finest compliment anyone had ever given her.

  The roosters crowed some more. Outside, the tinkling of cowbells rang in the morning calm. Cam pushed to a sitting position. “Enough lolling around in bed. I can hear the goats calling my name.” She grabbed for one of the two crutches leaning against the wall by the bed and used it to push off the mattress. The floor was icy cold under her bare feet. “Want me to fix you breakfast?”

  Zhurihe shook her head. She was never very hungry after coming home from her absences.

  “How about I take the goats up to the pasture this morning? Then you can stay in bed.”

  “Oh, would you, Cam? How can I make it up to you?”

  “Tell me you’re staying around for a while this time.”

  Zhurihe looked coy. “I would like that.”

  A typically vague answer. It saddened Cam more than angered her. She enjoyed Zhurihe’s company, and missed her when she was gone. She had so little else to cling to in this world.

  Zhurihe threw a blanket over her head and disappeared from sight, only a muffled squeak of a sneeze giving away who lay under the lump of brown wool. Cam wished she could stay in bed, too, but the ladies awaited her, udders filled to bursting.

  The first challenge of the day was not stumbling and falling into the hole outside in the dirt that served as a toilet. If that meant sacrificing her pride and completing the task with the help of a crutch, that was fine with her.

  Cam rinsed her face and brushed her teeth using a bowl of cold water. Then she fixed her wheat-colored hair in the same style as Zhurihe’s, but her braids were mere stubs no longer than the back of her neck. Cam studied herself critically in the small mirror. Somehow the style didn’t have the hoped-for youthful effect it did on Zhurihe. She was only twenty-five, but her eyes were prematurely old. Hollow, they reflected her devastating loss. While she no longer wept big buckets of tears when she pondered what she’d lost, grief had left a permanent stain.

  Cam turned away from the sad face in the mirror. After stripping and changing into soft layers of brightly colored wool and a pair of cowhide boots lined with the wooly undercoat of a yak, she fixed herself a plate of bread and goat cheese and ate standing up in the kitchen. Her leg muscles were so stiff and painful today that she feared not being able to leave a chair once she sat in it.

  She was wiping her hands clean of crumbs when she heard a strange noise from outside. The sound wavered, as if it were traveling from a great distance. In a city she wouldn’t have noticed the sound, and it wouldn’t have woken her if she were sleeping, but in the utter quiet of the countryside the rumble stood out.

  Cam ran to the window. Her heart hammered, threatening to drown out the distant roar, and the aches in her muscles were no longer noticeable. She knew that sound!

  She shambled to the front door, throwing it open. Cold, dry air slapped her in the face. The sky looked like steel wool. And yet she knew what was behind the clouds.

  It was an airplane, too high to see any detail, only a sliver of metal at the tip of a contrail. It was high and moving fast.

  She jumped up, thrusting her fist in the air. “Oh, baby, oh, yeah!” Somewhere, someone still had the technological knowledge to maintain and fly a plane!

  Before Cam realized what she was doing, she was running, lurching along in an unsteady gait out past the pens of animals and piles of manure, past a few early-riser locals heading out into the fields. Ahead, there was an opening where the strands of clouds had separated. Cam limped to a halt on the rutted dirt road, her face turned to the sky. Where was the aircraft? Then she saw it: a minuscule sliver, glinting high up in the rarified, raw sunshine that only pilots and eagles knew.

  Every cell in her body seemed to soar skyward, taking her trampled spirit with them. “Y’all, I’m here. Don’t go. . . .”

  Even without knowing who sat behind the controls, friend or foe, she knew she was calling out to one of her own kind—another pilot.

  Just then, a ray of sunlight hit her square in the face, and she laughed, truly laughed, for the first time since crash-landing in the year 2176.

  Something slammed into her from behind. A wool blan
ket fell over her as the ground rushed up to meet her. All she had to break her fall was a long, thin arm she’d sprained once already during her endless, ongoing recovery. Her ankle twisted, sending a spear of pain up her calf, but she rolled her weight to the side, landing on her back in a cold puddle of mud, but saving her leg from another injury. The question wasn’t what hurt, but what didn’t hurt; her body had turned into a war zone with the enemy winning. Blindly she threw a fist, bringing up a knee. It impacted something solid, and she heard a muffled, “Oomph.”

  “Ow! Cam! Be still!”

  Cam stopped fighting. “Zhurihe?” She tried to throw off the blanket, but the girl kept it in place over her head. “God almighty,” Cam mumbled, tasting sour wool. “Will you tell me what’s going on? I’m fixing to suffocate in here!”

  The blanket moved back slightly. Zhurihe sat on top of her, straddling her hips. “This,” Cam told her in a tight voice, “does not feel good.”

  But the girl was not listening to her. Her head was tipped and she was peering at the sky. Cam listened, too, but she no longer heard the distant, droning noise of the aircraft. It took everything she had not to let disappointment overwhelm her. “Did you hear it, Zhurihe? It was an aircraft. An aircraft!”

  Zhurihe’s dark eyes were wild with alarm. “You ran outside to see it.”

  “Of course I did.” Cam hesitated at the girl’s obvious alarm. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because you do not know about anything!” Zhurihe’s small fists grabbed the blanket draped around Cam’s shoulder and tugged, half raising Cam’s head off the dirt. For such a petite person, Zhurihe had amazing strength. “If you see it, it may have seen you. Never let them see you. Never! It’s why I have told you always to wear a veil when outside.” She took Cam by the shoulders and shook her.

  Teeth chattering, Cam grabbed her hands and stopped her. “I thought it was local custom, the veil.”

  “It was for your protection! To keep you safe here.” Her expression grew even more intense. Her apprehension was contagious. Although Cam didn’t understand the threat, the very real fear Zhurihe felt launched straight into her gut and turned it cold. “Zhurihe, how did you find me? Did you by chance steal me from someone?”

  For the first time, the girl broke eye contact. “I told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “It was far to the north, a remote place few know.”

  “You were picking mushrooms and tripped over my pod.” The story was becoming harder and harder to believe, especially now with the bolt from the blue of seeing the airplane. And if the story of her discovery was a lie, what else was, too? The nuclear war? The lack of technology? Bree’s whereabouts? “You asked your family for help, and they brought me here on an oxcart.”

  “Yes.” Zhurihe’s wild eyes swung back to Cam. “Promise me that you will never go with them if they come for you. Promise me!”

  The girl, it seemed, had but one thing on her mind. “If who comes for me?”

  “Anyone!”

  “Can we be a little more specific?”

  “The emperor’s Rim Riders.”

  Ah, so that was it. The vicious barbarian warlord whose stronghold was thousands of miles away. The monster who, according to Zhurihe, ate peasants alive and made overcoats from their dried flesh. He sounded a little like Genghis Khan crossed with Count Dracula, but since neither he nor his minions had ever been seen in this remote place, she hadn’t much worried about it. “He has jet aircraft, Zhurihe. Do you know what that means? He has computers. And if he has computers . . .” The possibilities were mind-boggling. Suddenly Cam was extremely interested in the emperor, despite his rather gross-sounding wardrobe and eating habits.

  But Zhurihe didn’t share her enthusiasm at all. “Promise me. Please.”

  “Okay, okay. I won’t go with him.”

  “The Rim Riders!”

  “I promise I won’t go with them. What are Rim Riders, anyway?”

  “They’re the emperor’s bounty hunters. You’ll know them when you see them. They wear only black. Even their horses are black.”

  The image that came to mind was something resembling Grim Reapers on coal-black steeds. Not pretty.

  “If they come here, you must run to the springs. Do you understand? Hide there, under the water. Remain there until they go. Do you understand?”

  “Run. Springs. Hide. Got it.”

  The girl bounded to her feet, checking the sky once more. “I’ll be leaving for a while.”

  “What? You just got here.” Cam sat up, slowly and painfully. Speech was impossible until the spasm in her back passed. “I thought you weren’t going off again right away.”

  But Zhurihe was already running back down the road toward the farmhouse, her long braids spinning.

  Promise me, Cam!

  Sitting, legs sprawled on the dirt road, Cam watched Zhurihe go, an oddly terrifying mix of dread and fear and hope filling her. The world she’d thought she was beginning to understand had just taken a 180-degree turn.

  Chapter Six

  General Armstrong’s black sedan skidded to a stop in front of the rear entrance to the White House. Neither its VIP passenger nor the driver said anything for a few moments.

  Finally the sergeant shifted her gaze to the rearview mirror. “Hell of a ride, sir.”

  It was that, thought the general. “Are you injured, Merrick?”

  “No, sir.”

  She answered a little too quickly. Pride, he decided. Too many females on the military staff wanted to be seen as invincible. Didn’t she know? No one was. Not even him.

  “And you, sir?” Suddenly worried eyes gazed back at him. “Are you hurt?”

  “It’ll take far more than that to put down this old warhorse, Sergeant.” General Armstrong shoved on his hat and pushed open the rear passenger door. Wet, fluorescent orange paint splashed down onto the toe of his shiny black boot. Drawing his trenchcoat around him, he stalked around to the front of the vehicle. In the slanting light of late afternoon, the pieces of eggshell littering the windshield looked like golden confetti. More goo pooled in fist-sized dents on the hood. The rocks had done their damage. A shallower, wider indentation resembled a mold of a human torso where one of the protestors had rolled over the bumper. A smear of blood was almost indistinguishable from the stains left from the hurled rubbish.

  Standing quietly at his side, the driver pondered the sight. Then, taking off her cap, she dragged the back of her arm across her forehead. “I’ll put a call in to dispatch for another vehicle, sir.”

  “Consider yourself off duty, Merrick.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll take a heli-jet from now on.” He retrieved an attaché case from the backseat. The loaded weapon he’d stuffed deep in the pocket of his trench coat thumped against his thigh.

  “General. A question, sir.”

  The driver looked shaken; he noticed that now. She hadn’t uttered a sound after striking down the protester who’d thrown himself at the moving car, hadn’t said anything at all until now, when they’d pulled up to the White House. But then, he expected—required—the soldiers he maintained as personal aides to be stalwart creatures. “What is it, Merrick?”

  “Do you think it will get worse?” The driver cleared her throat. “Sir.”

  She was worried, perhaps even frightened. And she had every right to be. He turned his attention back to the damaged car. Gusts of wind swept in the from the east, where the original Washington, DC, lay, abandoned after rising seas had rendered it too often flooded. The breeze brought the smell of salt and the equally muted roar of the demonstrations, cordoned off some five city blocks away. “Do you hear them, Merrick?”

  The woman fell quiet for a moment. “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “Remember the sound,” he said tersely, “for soon it will be a thing of the past. I know so, especially after some news I received today. Soon, very soon now, all will be as it once was. The government will restore order.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, sir. Of course. Thank you, sir.”

  The general left the driver behind, his leather trench coat whipping around his boots. At the security checkpoint, he handed over his attaché case for inspection and submitted to retinal and DNA scans before beginning the trek across the marble foyer to the Unity Office.

  The door slammed shut behind him. His eardrums popped. A pressure seal. The air he breathed was now from a separate source from that in the rest of the White House. Clasping his hands behind his back, he watched a circle of the carpet waver and open. A platform in the same shape as the cutout rose slowly from the depths beneath the floor, accompanied by a faint whirring noise. Armstrong stepped onto it and rode down to President Beauchamp’s briefing room.

  It was several degrees warmer there than the upper limit of the general’s comfort level. He preferred the chill of the north; the president, the cloying heat of the Central colony’s Louisiana district. Rich velvet wallpaper and similarly upholstered seating added to the thick, choking atmosphere. Armstrong smelled cigar smoke in the air—and leather?

  He whirled around as a soldier clad in body armor emerged from the shadows. The young man wore new boots; that explained the leather smell. “Who are you?”

  “Lt. Col. Christian Bow. Presidential Special Ops,” he answered at the same time Beauchamp said, “For God’s sake, don’t frighten the boy with that scowl, Aaron.”

  Armstrong swerved his glare to Beauchamp, sitting, hands folded, at his massive desk. “It’s better to be safe than sorry, Aaron. You know that.”

  “Your weapon, General.” Bow held out a gloved hand. “Please.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Armstrong growled.

  “We continue to be in a state of national emergency. I cannot take any chances, not even with my most trusted associates.”