by Schow, Ryan
Barde was the first man to join the Resistance with Longwei. Seeing how much Longwei hated President Hu and the Communist Party, Barde recruited both Jin and Ning, his closest friends, guys who fled Hong Kong for America in the early ‘20s. No one hated the Chicoms as badly as Jin and Ning, which was why joining the SoCal chapter of the Resistance was such an easy decision for them.
“So you live here alone?” Longwei asked.
“It was me, my wife and kid,” Zeke said, a little softer, solemn. “They killed Nancy, and my kid…I haven’t seen him since this started. I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”
“How old was he?” Jin asked.
“Twelve.”
“I was twelve when the Chicoms shot my mother,” Jin said. “Shotgun, right to the face.”
“How long ago was that?” Zeke asked, his face paled by the disclosure.
“Eight years ago,” Jin replied. “He could have shot her in the stomach, or the back, but he made her face him and then he shot her that way.”
Ning looked down. Jin didn’t talk about this often. Instead, he used the hate he felt as fuel. They all did. Longwei wondered if Zeke had enough animosity in him to join the Resistance one day. Lord knew they’d need as many men as they could get their hands on when they made their final stand.
“I’m going to start a fire in the pit out back,” Zeke said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “C’mon guys, I’ll show you the root cellar. You can each grab a potato and a beer.”
The meat was great, the beer cool, but not stale, and the company fine. Night fell quickly, leaving them stuffed and lightly buzzed. Longwei was grateful for the alcohol. It took the edge off, which was exactly what he needed. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but the war was getting to him, as was all the killing. At first, he was anxious for vengeance, but lately it was starting to remind him of the oppression he fought so hard to escape from when he left Shanghai. He forced a smile, not expecting the clipped laugh that escaped him.
“What?” Zeke asked, surprised.
“I was thinking of how Felicity threw dynamite inside the Department of Transportation building like it was nothing. She didn’t even have to think about it.”
He fell silent, the backs of his eyes prickling. For a second, he was sure he was losing it. He was the first person to understand you don’t have emotions in war. Yet there they were. From the rickety lawn chair he was sitting on, he looked up into the night sky, hoped his eyes would dry out. He couldn’t lose it in front of his guys, let alone Zeke.
The moment quickly passed. He lowered his head, looked at his men: Barde, Jin and Ning. They were all proficient fighters, all seasoned Resistance, each of them willing and able to put their lives on the line for the chance to kill these commie rats.
“How many men do you think you can gather?” Longwei finally asked Zeke.
Zeke looked across the campfire at Longwei, considering his question. Longwei held his gaze until the man drained the rest of his beer, polished the rim of the bottle with his shirt, then sat up.
“Half a dozen maybe,” Zeke said, “but like I said, these will be hardened men, guys who aren’t afraid to kill in cold blood.”
“If they don’t have families,” Ning said, “that would be important.”
“They don’t,” Zeke said. “What are you guys thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Longwei said, scratching his head behind his ear. “Same thing I’m always thinking.”
“Which is?” Zeke pressed, stoking the fire and brushing off a mosquito.
“Body count,” Barde said, a bit tipsy. “The more we kill, the better we feel, so kill your commies with every meal.”
A few of the guys laughed, but Zeke’s eyes focused on Barde and his head started a very slow, very affirmative nod. “I like your thinking,” the Roseburg native said.
As the fire began to die out, no one had anything of consequence left to say. It was clear they were in dire need of some shut-eye. Longwei and the guys thanked Zeke for the meal, the company and the beds, and then they turned in for the night.
When Longwei finally fell asleep, he did so dreaming of Felicity. In his dreams, she wouldn’t stop screaming.
Chapter Two
Longwei woke to the rising sun. Daylight cut through the drapes, roused him from a restless slumber. He turned over, pulled the blankets around him, then tried but failed to go back to sleep. Had Quan and his team reached Portland yet? Hopefully they didn’t encounter any trouble. He didn’t like that more than half his men were headed in the opposite direction, but he knew they’d need reinforcements in Yale if Quan’s contact felt it was time for an insurgency.
The fact that Quan was going to Yale meant they had Da Xiao Zheng in their sights, maybe even a direct line to President Hu. The cowardly President would probably never leave the mainland, at least not while the United States was under siege, but he might have scheduled a visit. Longwei wished he knew what Quan knew. Then again, Quan told him the name of his contact inside Yale, which was significant, certainly not lost on him. His name was Tong Lim, he was a Chicom, and he outranked Quan Li.
He rolled over, sloughed off the blankets, sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He heard movement downstairs, the sounds of someone going outside. Pretty soon, he heard an axe hitting wood, and with that he knew he had to get up and get back home. As he trudged down the stairs, two things occurred to him. One, he was rested, which felt strange and mentally euphoric. And two, there was no way it was daybreak. It felt much later than that. Downstairs, the guys were shaking off sleep, same as him.
“What time is it?” Ning asked.
“Who cares?” Jin replied. “I actually slept the entire night through.”
Barde gave a half-assed laugh, one that didn’t require a smile, then he said, “It’s almost noon. Me and Zeke have been working for a few hours now.”
“Doing what?” Longwei asked, sitting down at the kitchen table and wishing for a cup of coffee, or at least something to kick off the remnants of sleep.
“Gathering up wood,” Barde said.
Barde was a big man for being Chinese. Tall and muscular. He ate a lot of meat, punched harder than everyone else, barked out smellier farts and burped louder than them all. He was a man’s man, a brute, and funny when he wasn’t strategizing over this war, which was to say, he hadn’t been funny in months. The only guy close to him in physical stature was Chang, but he was soft compared to Barde’s hard. Him and his younger brother, Gang.
Barde said, “It was the least I could do for eating his cow and drinking his beer.”
“We should help,” Ning said.
Ning was the smallest of all of them, but he was also the fastest. Plus he knew martial arts, which meant he was hard to catch and even harder to hit. When he got you though, he took out things you needed in life, things like your balls, the use of your eyes, the functionality of your joints. He was as ferocious as he was small.
“I did enough work for everyone,” Barde said. “I think he’s ready for us to leave. He’s pretty serious about putting together a crew. The Roseburg Rebels. That’s what he said he’d call them.”
“I like it,” Jin said.
Longwei yawned and said, “The Chicoms killed half of Roseburg before and during the round up that put him in the airport, Barde. That’s what Zeke told me. He said if you drive through town, you’ll find bodies everywhere.”
“That’s a hard pass,” Jin said, still tired. “I don’t want to see anymore dead people, let alone those we can’t save.”
“It’s time to go,” Ning said. Looking around, he said, “This place creeps me out.”
“Why?” Longwei asked, surprised.
“You can tell white people lived here,” he said under his breath, cautious.
Barde started to laugh, then said, “You’re stupid, Ning.”
Jin pushed him in jest; everyone knew Ning was scared of big white guys like Zeke. He wasn’t a quarter inch more than five six, and not one pound
over a buck thirty-five. Size and fear started out as his weakness, but now it was the source of his viciousness.
Zeke pushed through the back door, saw them sitting together and said, “How’d y’all sleep?”
Ning was the first to speak. “Fantastic, thank you. We were just saying how we enjoyed last night, and how we appreciate your hospitality.”
Seeing Ning change so quickly sent Barde into a fit of laughter.
“What?” Zeke asked.
“Ning is scared of white people,” Barde said, his voice still full of humor. “Sleeping here freaked him out.”
Ning’s cheeks flushed as he tried to explain, but his protestations were drowned out by the sounds of laughter. Even Longwei found himself grinning. But Zeke? He let out the heartiest of laughs, then clapped the boy on the back. When they were getting ready to leave, Zeke made Ning give him a hug, which all but made the man family, as far as Barde was concerned.
“Get your whiteness all over him,” Jin told Zeke when Ning relented.
“Planning on it, little man.”
After that, Longwei and his guys headed out in better spirits than they arrived in. Felicity was still on his mind, but the startling memories of the decapitation and the murders before that were already losing their bite.
About an hour into their trip home, they ran into a bit of trouble, but they were able to get off the interstate and hide out for an hour or so, avoiding confrontations from both the Chicoms and a gathering of Americans in the freeway. Closer to Five Falls, when they were flagged down by a Chicom Jeep on the side of the road, Barde said, “Should we?”
Longwei nodded, pulling over and asked the man if he was okay.
“Yeah, but the engine died,” he replied.
Jin shot him with his pistol, they took what they could from the man and his Jeep, and then they siphoned off the rest of his gas and pitched his dead body into the grass.
“Do you think they made it through okay?” Barde asked about Quan and the gang. He was sitting up front with Longwei. Longwei was driving.
“Probably.”
“What about Clay and the girl?” he asked.
Barde called all women “girls.” As in The Girl, That Girl, or A Girl. Barde’s parents had no respect for his two sisters back home. In China, it was often said that girls had far less value than boys. Barde wasn’t like that, but to someone who didn’t know him, it would seem as though he shared China’s low opinion of women. He most certainly didn’t.
“Her name is Felicity, and you saw her taking care of herself just fine,” Longwei said. “Clay, too.” The old ugliness of the decapitation crept back into his thoughts at the mention of her.
“I can’t believe the fire in that girl’s soul,” Barde said.
“I said her name is Felicity, and no, she didn’t hesitate,” Longwei responded. “Not when it mattered most.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Could you have done that?” Longwei asked his friend.
“Without hesitation,” Barde replied. “She gave me some ideas for the future. Like if I ever get my hands around Hu’s neck, I won’t choke him to death, I’ll take his head for myself.”
“And do what with it?” Longwei asked.
“Scoop it out and use it as a toilet bowl,” Barde said. He was staring straight ahead, not a glint of humor in his eye. “Maybe I’ll let the girl use it, too.”
“Actually,” Longwei said, thinking it over, “that’s a pretty good idea.”
Looking over at him, the air whipping around inside the Jeep’s cabin, he said, “I thought so myself. You want to run it by the girl when we see her next? It’ll probably cheer her up.”
Ignoring Barde’s refusal to use Felicity’s name, Longwei said, “If we can somehow pull it off, then when we call Hu shit for brains, that would actually be true.”
Barde chuckled, but the laugh was hollow. It was one thing to dream of doing bad things to the leader of the Communist Party, but Barde was really plumbing deep into his creative coffers for this one. Longwei tried to remember back to a time when he was not driven by hate, or the need to punish the Chicoms, but he could not remember such a day. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself if he was ever truly set free.
“What the hell is that?” Jin asked in a panic, thrusting his head to the front of the Jeep, right in between Longwei’s and Barde’s shoulders.
“Hold on!” Longwei yelled.
Longwei slammed on the brakes and slid off the side of the interstate, adjusting his course to an off-road trail. Crashing through the edges of the forest just outside Five Falls, they shook and shimmied their way around the huge trench they’d blown open and dug out on I5. He left any semblance of a trail and navigated through the trees around it. But that wasn’t what worried him. Where the sky opened up through the trees, they saw several huge pillars of smoke overhead. Plus, there were two helicopters circling over the area.
“They’re directly over the town,” Barde said.
“And the bug out location,” Jin added.
They got closer to town, close enough to see the choppers firing off rockets and razing the ground with machine gun fire.
“We need to get in there,” Barde said, eyes wild. Longwei was having palpitations in his chest, the onset of an anxiety attack.
Barde looked at him and shouted, “Go, man! GO!”
Longwei broke free of the panic attack. The thing that spurred him into action was the thought of Felicity. If she survived her parents’ death only to suffer at the hands of these…wait a minute.
“Those are SAA choppers,” he heard himself say.
“No kidding!” Barde growled. “Five Falls is under attack by the SAA!”
Longwei stashed the Jeep deep in the woods and the four of them piled out, armed to the hilt, ready to join the fight. But when they got to the edge of town, this wasn’t a fight, this was a massacre by the SAA forces.
“Good God,” Ning mumbled, chilled.
While they were sleeping off a beef and beer hangover, Five Falls was fighting for their lives. Before, he felt a powerful and immediate sickness over what Felicity had been subjected to. Now he felt the deepest of shame for not being there.
“This is really bad,” Barde said, tromping off into the woods in the direction of the conflict.
Longwei and the guys took off after him, cutting through the uneven forest landscape. When they reached the edge of Five Falls, they found the entire town engulfed in flames. Most of the SAA were in their vehicles, or close to them, but a handful had spread out and were combing the trees for survivors.
Barde held out a hand, stopped behind a thicket of brush and knelt down. Longwei pulled up behind him; Jin and Ning fell in line quickly.
“We can’t use guns,” Barde warned. “Does everyone have their knives?”
“I don’t,” Jin said.
“Improvise,” Barde told him. If there was anyone who could, it would be Jin. He looked to Longwei for orders, but Longwei was having a moment. Barde smacked the top of his head and said, “Whatever it is that has you rattled, get over it!”
The hit on the top of his head jarred him, brought him back to reality.
Barde turned and said, “No guns if you can help it.” Barde looked at Longwei and said, “You, too, Boss.”
“I’m good,” Longwei barked, acting offended. “You just worry about yourself.”
“We all worry about each other,” Ning said.
Longwei moved into the trees first. They came upon a group of six well armed SAA soldiers. They were moving through the dense forest, alert, but not on high alert. There was no way to take these guys out with knives and hand-to-hand combat. Longwei took out his gun; the others followed his lead, even Barde. Using the tree trunks for cover, waiting for Longwei’s signal, the men lined up their shots, Barde and Longwei each committing to two shots.
“On my count,” Longwei whispered, eyes on his men. He held up three fingers, then lowered one, lined up the shot, then sai
d, “Two, one, fire.”
Six shots were fired, but only five men fell.
Knowing he let the team down, Ning grabbed his knife and burst from his hiding place, quickly covering the ground between him and the last man standing, the SAA soldier he missed. But the guy had gone for cover behind a large outcropping of rocks. Presumably, he didn’t hear Ning crossing the pine needle-covered forest floor, for he snuck a look only to have Ning foot-stomp his head as he jumped over him. Skidding to a stop against another vein of rocks, Ning scrambled back to the man, stabbing him seven or eight times before standing up and giving Longwei a thumb’s up. Another shot rang out. Ning ducked, then rushed for cover.
“I see him,” Barde said, setting out in a wide arc.
When the SAA soldier came into view, Longwei saw the man tracking Ning and lined up a shot. His finger slid over the trigger and he slowed his breath. That’s when Barde hit the soldier from behind, taking him face-first to the ground. Wasting no time, and looking back to see if there were others coming, Barde began to do the unthinkable. He started sawing his way around the man’s neck. Flashbacks of Felicity hit Longwei hard. He turned around, dropped down, felt himself start to hyperventilate. Gun shots peppered the hills, but Longwei sat there, shaking, his body not his, his thoughts erratic. The shouting sounds of men closing in on them must have interrupted Barde, for the man came thundering through the forest, Ning fast on his heels.
“Longwei, Jin, let’s go,” Barde said, sprinting past their hiding spots.
The four of them ran deep into the forest, over the hills and into a ravine where they each found places to hide. There they waited the SAA out. Before long, however, a lone soldier appeared. He carried his gun, and he seemed to be on the hunt, but mentally, he seemed preoccupied, as if he were lost in thought and his body was on autopilot. Without warning, Jin stood and hurled a fist-sized rock into his face.
The rock found it’s target, a hollow thumping sound. The man dropped to his knees, crying out as he held his bloody face. Jin was already sprinting toward him. He drove a flying knee into the man’s head, knocking him over on his back. He then picked up the rock he’d thrown and began beating him in the face with it.
