by Schow, Ryan
Cracking his knuckles, the big man’s biceps bulged. Whatever was tattooed on his arms, Quan couldn’t make it out in the low light. He just saw a lot of ink and didn’t quite know what to make of it.
Looking at Gang and Chang, the beast said, “You’re a pair of big boys. You brothers?”
“Yeah,” Chang said, glaring at him.
He looked at Lienna and said, “I hoped you’d be prettier in the light.”
“So did my father,” she said.
Back to Quan. “You’re either the part of the problem or part of the solution,” he said. “So which is it? Problem or solution?”
“Solution,” Quan said.
He grabbed a wooden chair, dragged it up before Quan, spun it around and sat down, leaning on his forearms on the back of the chair. “You have two minutes to tell me how.”
“I only need about half of that,” Quan said. The man laughed, but said nothing to stop him. “The SAA is about to wipe its dirty ass all over this city, but before that happens, or perhaps afterwards, we’ve got to point them in the direction of the new Chicom stronghold.”
If his captor was surprised by Quan’s direct, no BS response, he didn’t show it. “Which is where, exactly?” the man asked, curious.
“Yale, Washington,” Quan answered.
“And how do you know this?” one of their abductors asked.
Turning, Quan looked at a bearded man around his size and said, “I have a contact inside.” Then, back to the group’s leader, Quan continued. “He says Da Xiao Zheng is running the facility right now. It’s an eyes-on confirmation. Do you know who Da Xiao Zheng is?”
“You’re about to make me care,” the big man said.
“He’s the highest ranking Chicom officer in the former United States,” Quan said. “He answers directly to President Hu.”
Normally Quan wouldn’t give up this kind of intel, but they needed help. If there was a way to be allies rather than enemies, this rough and rowdy group just might fight side-by-side with them.
“What else have you got?” the man said.
Quan glanced down at his captor’s hands. He didn’t want to get hit by them. It would be like getting smashed in the face with a sledge hammer. He didn’t want to be shot or tortured either. So what choice did he have? Quan had to take a chance on co-opting them, because this was twice now he and his team had been grabbed and imprisoned. If he didn’t find a way out right then, he knew the team would lose confidence in him, if they hadn’t already.
“My contact in Yale gave me a port location and arrival times for the next shipments of supplies coming from mainland China,” Quan said. “We’re going to intercept them. Then we’re going to use those weapons to take them down.”
The truth was, Tong Lim had given him no such location, but they’d talked about an interception, saying it would be vital to their success.
His captor sat up, drew a deep breath, then grabbed a light and aimed it on Quan’s face, blinding him.
“I don’t know what to make of you, son,” he said, standing up fast. He didn’t take the light off Quan’s face. “Should I believe you? I’m not sure. I mean, I didn’t even have to torture you to get you to tell me these things. That’s why I think you might be lying.”
“I can’t have you torture me because my fight with the Chicoms and the SAA will be worse than my fight with you,” Quan said. “I need to be at my best. As does my team.”
“So you just want out?” he asked with artificial humor in his voice. “That’s it? We’re going to be heroes of the world, can you please just let us go? I don’t think so.”
“No,” he replied, stern. “I want you to join us.”
He wasn’t laughing now. Instead he walked behind Quan, causing the man to brace himself, just in case the beatings were about to commence. The man did not touch him. Not yet.
“So if you know where the weapons and supplies are coming in,” he said to Quan, “you can tell us and we can attack Yale.”
He said this casually, not serious at all. Deep down, this pissed Quan off. “Are you thick?” he asked, deeply disturbed that the brawn was short on brains.
The big man with hulking hands and tattooed arms circled around the front of him, then raised his chin in appraisal of Quan and the others. Looking down his nose at Quan, he said, “You and your friends are going to do this? All alone? Because that’s what’s really laughable here. It’s not your intel that’s funny. It’s your disconnect from reality.”
“Think about it, man!” Quan pushed. “Why do the work of an army when the army is ready and willing to do the work for us? We don’t want to be there to fight the SAA or the Chicoms. We are trying to get there for the mop-up.”
“You and your six toy soldiers?”
“No, not just us. Help is coming, but they’re between us and the SAA. They tried to take them out, but they only took out a quarter mile of them. There’s a good mile and a quarter more in a convoy heading our way.”
The big man started laughing, looking around at his guys who were also snickering. Quan looked around, hated them all.
“As scared of them as everyone is, they’re the best chance we have in destroying the Chicoms,” Quan said, unamused. “If we can somehow advance the war between them, covertly of course, we bait one with the other.”
“Let them kill each other,” the leader said. “Just like that?”
“It’s a game as old as time, one that never tires. Yet because of its obviousness, it needs to be worked out and delivered just right.”
“And after that?” he asked.
“When they kill each other, when the dust finally clears and there’s but one battered army still standing, we come in guns blazing, making sure there’s not a single beating heart left between them,” Quan said. “I can’t believe you’re the leader of these clowns and you haven’t even figured that out yet.”
“Watch it,” one of the guys said, the dour warning not lost on Quan.
“What’s your name?” Quan asked the big guy.
“Brandon,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Quan Li.”
“What do we get out of all this, Quan Li?” Brandon asked.
“How about your freedom you moron,” Steve growled under his breath.
“Excuse me?” one of Brandon’s guys said, the same guy who told Quan to watch it.
Steve had no fear of these guys. Or if he did, it was concealed behind a surge of hostility.
“What my colleague was so eloquently trying to say,” Steve said, “was that—when this is over—you can play Lord of the Flies to your heart’s content, but you can do it knowing the coast is ours again. Not the Chicoms’, and not the SAA’s.”
The bearded man was staring at Steve, then he looked up at Brandon. Quan wanted to tell Steve to shut up, that they needed these men, that they needed them all, but he held his tongue instead.
“I don’t know,” Brandon said, scratching his face and pulling up a pair of jeans that were riding a bit too low on his hips.
That milquetoast response wiped out the last of Quan’s patience. “Maybe you should just wait and see, you impossible dummy. But by then it will be too late.”
Brandon’s number one shot forward and slapped Quan hard enough to rattle him. The impact rocked his head sideways. The room fell into complete silence.
Brandon then clapped his hands and laughed. “Wow! WOW! That was hard man. Maybe the hardest bitch slap I’ve ever seen!”
A snide look overtook Quan, a slow smile creeping onto his face. He turned his head, leveled the slapper with a vicious stare.
“I’ll let that one go,” Quan hissed. “But if you touch me again, it won’t matter if you’re part of the solution, you’ll be what’s left of the problem.”
“Yeah?” he challenged.
“Yeah.”
The man rose up and slapped him again. Quan gritted his teeth, but Brandon put up his hands and said, “That’s enough.” Back to Quan, he said, “Are you
for real right now? This isn’t a joke? You’re really going to take these monsters on?”
The bearded man who hit Quan, Brandon’s number one, he said, “This guy could be a plant. He’s Chinese. I don’t trust any of these guys.”
“I am Chinese,” Quan said, “but did we put up a fight?”
“Not hardly,” the bearded man mused.
“Yet we got here, all the way from LA, through all of these Chicom morons, with intel about the SAA and the Chicom stronghold.”
“All the more reason to suspect you are part of those Chicom cretins,” Brandon said.
“I say we off them here and now boss, and take our chances with whatever’s coming,” one of the other guys said. This was a big black guy with bad skin and an earring.
“I once was a Chicom,” Quan admitted. “My story is interesting, but longer than two minutes. It involves the enslavement, torture and eventual genocide of the Chinese people by their communist government and how we want to gut them like the swine that they are.”
“You hate your own government?” Brandon chuckled. “How cliché. We all hate our governments.”
“Yours at least worked on the precept of freedom,” Quan said. “Mine never hid their tyranny, or their intent to keep us smashed under their boot until the day they killed us or we died. You think hating our government is a cliché? No, man. It’s our every waking thought.”
“So now we’re the bad guys here?” Brandon asked.
“Do you think we are?” Gang said, unable to hold his tongue.
Brandon studied Quan a long time. He let out a small huff, then he looked slowly over the others, his stern gaze landing back on Quan.
“Before our last President—the idiot who let all this happen—the Constitution made a comeback,” Brandon said. “As did national sovereignty. But our new Commander in Chief was already compromised by your people, and our Constitution became nothing more than a roadblock to smash through on his way to a communist agenda.”
“That’s ancient history,” Quan said.
“Not for us,” Brandon countered. “We’ve never lived in a tyrannical society, no matter the assertions in the Chicom-owned media. Then you people came in.”
“Not Chinese people,” Quan growled. “Chicoms.”
“Same difference,” the bearded slapper said.
“No it’s not,” Lienna argued, correcting him. “It’s nothing like that. We revile communism and the people who wield it like a sword.”
Quan looked right into his eyes and said, “Your president is in China hanging dead for the world to see. But I didn’t do this, and my people didn’t do this. The regime of China did this. And they are not us, nor do they represent us. They are no different to us than a plantation owner was to his slaves. You understand that part of your history, I’m assuming.”
“I don’t believe them,” the bearded slapper announced.
To him, Lienna said, “It’s true whether you want to believe it or not. We fight for you, not for them.”
Brandon waved the comment off.
Quan said, “Those words do not ring hollow. This is both the battlefield and the war by which your people and our people are trying to take these monsters out.”
“We aren’t trying to fight that war,” Brandon said. “We’re survivors.”
“Then you’re less patriotic about your country than we are,” Lienna said, staring right at Brandon, more angry than afraid.
“What did they do to you?” Brandon finally asked Quan.
“How much time do you have?” he asked.
“All the time in the world.”
So Quan told his abductors what happened to him, and after that, Brandon decided to cut them loose. When he was done clipping the zip-ties, he said, “If you’re not one hundred percent to your word, we won’t ask questions. Do you understand? We’ll just shoot you and be done with it.”
Quan nodded and said, “You have my word.” Then he turned and punched the bearded man who slapped him twice. The guy dropped like a heap on the floor, startling everyone.
Brandon’s people whipped out their guns, but Quan’s men stood there, indifferent.
“I made that man a promise, albeit a veiled one,” Quan explained, rubbing his knuckles where he’d caught the man’s chin. “So when you drag that reprimanded dog up off the floor, let’s figure out how we can steer this war in our favor.”
Chapter Nine
To Longwei, the Madigan’s barn smelled like burned wood. The structural support beams had been hit, and a small fire that started had burned itself out quickly. To his complete surprise, the ordnance hadn’t exploded on impact. Then again, it didn’t need to in order to do substantial damage. He walked out the barn’s back door, stood over the crushed rocket, staring at it. Ryker joined him a moment later, both men weighing the odds.
“What do you want to do with it?” Longwei finally asked.
Ryker shrugged his shoulders and said, “Don’t know. Get it off the property as soon as we can, in case it has a bitch fit and decides to go BOOM.”
“Yeah,” Longwei said.
“We’re meeting on the other side of the barn. The girls brought a table out by the garden and everything.”
“What for?”
“To figure out what’s next,” Ryker said. “It’s a meeting of the Round Table, or something like that.”
“Have you talked to Clay or Felicity about Roseburg?” Longwei asked. “What went down there…it was…”
Longwei felt himself drift off, his expression becoming blank, his eyes flat and emotionless. For a moment, it was like he was back in Roseburg, unable to break free of the memories.
Ryker broke the uncomfortable silence, rousing the man. “I heard what happened, but we didn’t get a chance to discuss the attack in depth.”
Longwei snapped out of it, sucked in some of the fresh forest air, looked everywhere but at Ryker.
“That bad?” Ryker asked.
Longwei ran a hand through his hair, then inhaled through his nose and exhaled slowly out of his mouth. At that point, he was unwilling to discuss it. Standing in the tall shade of the sagging side of the barn, the air was cool, cold even. He tried focusing on things other than the airport.
“All I can say is we liberated a Chicom detention camp,” Longwei said, finally looking at him. “There are good people in Roseburg. Patriots. You’ll need them. And after what Quan said about the East Coast victories, I think you can use that good news to mobilize a few of them.”
“Why are you talking to me like I’m going to be the one who does this?” Ryker asked, suddenly looking concerned about his friend.
“We’ll make Roseburg base camp to this assault,” Longwei said, his eyes getting distant again. He was gone, but not all the way gone. Not yet. “I’m thinking we can run our own assault, one that’s a combination of the East Coast war and the current Texas initiative.”
“You talking about what we discussed earlier?” Ryker asked. “Pitting two armies against each other, then taking out the victor? Because I’ve been thinking the same thing all night and I’m curious about your ideas.”
“It’s a jumping off point, is what I’m saying,” Longwei said.
“You were part of the LA Resistance chapter that waged war to defend America,” Ryker said. “When I said I wanted to hear your ideas, I wasn’t asking for headlines.”
Longwei felt himself stand a little taller, his back a little straighter.
He was Resistance.
“We steer the SAA to Yale,” Longwei said, somewhat renewed. “Quan and his contact will try to weaken the Chicoms from inside Yale and get out before they’re taken out. Then, when the two armies destroy themselves, we mount the mother of all assaults on anyone left. That means we’ll need armed assault forces, supplies and a stranglehold on the Chicom ports.”
“Quan told me he stole a bunch of weaponry from the Port of Long Beach. He said it was crowded. I know the ports in Washington aren’t that big, but I’m sur
e there will be a ton of people there, especially for offloading and transportation.”
“I would imagine so.”
“And you still want to do it?” Ryker asked.
“Do we have a choice?”
“I wonder if we can do this ourselves,” Ryker said. “But we won’t know the landscape or the enemies until we’re on site.”
“You may not have to be there at all,” Longwei said, his eyes clearing. He looked at Ryker and in that moment, he felt like maybe he was all done with this war. “But either way, you’ll need a small militia, extra guns and bodies. Because if you don’t get these weapons and supplies, there’s no way you can win this war, even if all you’re doing is mop up.”
“Stop talking like you’re not part of this,” Ryker said.
“You already have the Five Falls Militia, but you’ll need more,” Longwei said stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Lots more.”
“I agree,” Ryker said. “But you’re going to be there with us.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. Longwei took a deep breath, for he had something uncomfortable on his mind, something he could no longer hold back in spite of his nervousness over saying it. “I think I’m going to hang back at Roseburg, hold the fort down there.”
“Spare me that quitter bullshit,” Ryker said, turning to anger on a dime. He took a moment to get a hold of himself. Then: “C’mon, the others are waiting.”
Longwei took one last look at the rocket that didn’t explode and gave it a little kick. It didn’t explode. He was kind of hoping it would have.
At the table set up outside the barn, right next to the garden, Ryker and Longwei sat down. Longwei was uncomfortable.
“Tell them what you told me,” Ryker said to Longwei. He glared at Ryker, but Ryker sat back in his chair, folded his arms and said, “Go on, tell them.”
“When we get to Roseburg,” Longwei said, “I’m going to stay there while you move on to Yale.”
“You’re not coming with us?” Logan asked, sitting down at the table next to them.
