We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3) (19 page)

They climbed over a low rise and saw fallow fields standing directly in front of them. A farmhouse stood nearby, its shutters closed tight.

The boys crouched.

“I forgot that the farms stretch more to the east than they do to the north,” Hong-gi said.

“We’ll have to go further east,” Pablo replied.

They walked for most of the morning while the sun rose higher and took the chill off the air. Twice they turned south only to see more signs of civilization. The third time, they came out on a stretch of barren land, just a mere stubble of grass and rocky soil.

“Looks like we made it,” Pablo said.

“Yeah, no farmer is going to try to plant a crop in this stuff,” Hong-gi replied, kicking at the gritty earth.

They stopped for lunch and ate some more oat cakes and nuts. Pablo saw they’d gone through half their food already and most of their water.

“We need to be careful with our provisions,” he said, feeling cool for using a scavenger word.

“Don’t worry. We’ll have dinner on the ship,” Hong-gi replied.

They started smelling the faint tang of Toxic Bay in the distance. The soil got worse, and they came across the crumbled concrete foundations of homes from the Old Times. Pablo kept his eye out for cool stuff to scavenge. He didn’t see anything, though. This place must have been scavenged out years ago.

The ruins became closer together and a few walls stood as high as their waists. They stopped and sat on one to rest.

“Almost there,” Hong-gi said. He sounded excited.

“Do you have a gas mask?”

“No.”

“It’s stinky over at the bay. I have a gas mask I got from Zach. Put some cloth around your face when we get closer. You’ll need it.”

“Not for long. The sailors will give me a mask.”

“A job and good food too!” Pablo said. They gave each other a high-five.

Hong-gi made a face. “I hope we don’t have to eat fish too much. Living on a ship I bet they eat fish.”

“Eeew.”

Hong-gi shrugged. “At least we’ll be away from this place.”

“Yeah.” Pablo’s heart beat faster in his chest.

Hong-gi looked over Pablo’s shoulder and his eyes widened. “Who’s that?”

A man in ragged clothing stumbled their direction. His hair was matted and stuck out in all directions. He stopped, held a can to his face, and took a deep breath. He staggered once, and then started walking again, weaving so much he bashed into the foundations of one of the walls.

“It’s Mr. Cooper,” Pablo said. “His wife got killed in the attack and he turned into a tweaker.”

“Has he seen us?” Hong-gi asked, hopping off the wall.

“I don’t think so. Let’s go.”

Just as Pablo got to his feet, Tom Cooper looked up. Mucus hung from his nostrils in long tendrils. His slack-jawed stare turned into a stupid smile. He pointed at the two boys and laughed.

“Haw haw. HAW! HawhawhawhawhawHAW!”

Pablo and Hong-gi bolted, scrambling over the remains of old houses and weaving around heaps of rubble too big to climb. They could still hear him laughing and they didn’t dare look back to see if he was following.

They ran until their lungs burned and their legs felt wobbly. Finally they stopped behind a pile of crumbling bricks.

The air stank here. The sun, now directly overhead, made the bare concrete and white grit shine bright. Pablo tried to shade his eyes and hold his nose at the same time. He put on the cloth mask. Hong-gi pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and wrapped that around his nose and mouth.

“Do you think we lost him?” Pablo asked once he had caught his breath.

“I don’t know.”

Pablo peeked around the pile of bricks and didn’t see anyone.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The way got rougher. They had entered the edge of what Pablo guessed was the city, or some area for factories. Blackened heaps of rubble lay everywhere. Here and there were old craters filled with foul-smelling water. Pablo imagined there had been some bombings here. Missiles or airplanes, he didn’t know. Maybe both. A lot of the buildings looked like they’d been blown up. Others had simply fallen down. Nothing stood higher than his shoulder except the piles of debris.

The way was a maze of rubble, skittering slopes of tiles, bricks, and chunks of concrete that slid loudly from under their feet as they walked. More than once they tripped over frayed old cables or rusting rebars.

Hong-gi stopped. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“A crumbly sound like someone walking on all this stuff.”

“You probably heard yourself.”

Hong-gi shook his head. All was deathly silent. Pablo realized he hadn’t seen a bird in an hour. Not too many bugs, either.

They started walking again, the ruins crunching and clattering underfoot.

This time Pablo heard it. A crunch of shifting rubble behind them and off to their right.

Both boys froze, halfway up a pile of rubble.

From the other side of the pile they heard a stone shift.

Then off to their left the crunch of a weathered brick being ground to dust under the weight of…something.

“Hoooooooo.”

A dark figure swathed in rags came loping over the ruins from behind them.

The boys scurried up the slope, only to stop when another figure, so filthy that its skin was as black as an oil spill, appeared at the top above them.

The tweaker gave them a gap-toothed grin and lunged for them. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Yu-jin had just drifted off when the knocking woke her. She had buried herself under the blankets The Doctor had laid down for her on the couch before he had retired to his room. She turned over. Hopefully whoever it was would go away.

The knocking came again, louder, insistent. Yu-jin stumbled to her feet.

The door to The Doctor’s room banged open and he stomped into the front room wearing a set of pajamas from the Old Times.

“What the hell is it now?” he growled, opening the door.

Yu-jin saw a thin, bespectacled man in his middle years. He looked over The Doctor’s shoulder and his mouth dropped when he saw Yu-jin.

“No, Philip, I haven’t turned straight,” The Doctor snapped. “I kept her here last night because it was the only way to assure her safety. Now why are you here?”

“Because they weren’t going to wake you.”

“Who? What happened?”

Philip let out a deep sigh and told them. He had gotten the whole story from the guards on the wall, and from bits and pieces he heard from witnesses.

It happened close to midnight. Nguyen Phan, a Vietnamese resident of the Burbs who had gone with Sheriff Cruz to hunt down the Pure One, who had taken two wounds when the attempt when sour, a longtime resident of the Burbs who had volunteered to patrol the shoreline with Clyde Devon’s guards because he hated the Chinese as much as anyone, had been coming back to his shack after getting off patrol.

Nguyen said goodbye to his buddies in the city guard, including one citizen who planned to bring him up for associate status at the next Citizens Council, and trudged wearily home for some well-earned sleep, his QBZ-95-1 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. All the gun nuts in town knew about that piece because it was a rare Chinese model.

The crowd came out of the shadows. They’d already been at Joe’s Chicken Shack screaming that Joe had been feeding the enemy. His customers had driven them away. Then the mob had gone to $87,953, only to find it closed for the first time they could ever remember. After painting “Traitors Out” on the wall, they’d wandered off, their frustration only growing for having nothing to take it out on.

Then they’d spotted a lone Asian walking through the dark.

Many of them recognized Nguyen. He was well-known. Two days before he’d still been a hero, a regular at $87,953, and the guy you went to if you needed small repairs on mechanical equipment for less trade and faster turnaround than the New City blacksmith.

Now he was one of those secret Chinese.

Before Nguyen had realized what was going on they’d surrounded him. He got his gun up at the last instant or it would have been over right then and there.

They backed off a little, knowing he was good with it but none of them wanting to show too much fear in front of the rest. They started taunting him, calling him every name they could think of, while he swore back at them, looking like he was angrier at being called Chinese than scared at being threatened by a mob. Some witnesses said they got the impression that Nguyen wasn’t fully aware of the situation, that as a hero of the fight against the cult and as a soon-to-be associate member, this simply couldn’t happen to him.

The wakeup call came with the first rock. It glanced off his shoulder and Nguyen cried out, more from surprise than pain. He snapped off the safety to his assault rifle and leveled it at his attacker, only to get a rock between the shoulder blades from someone else. Nguyen stumbled forward, swung around, and aimed again. The crowd backed off a little, still taunting him. More people picked up rocks. Nguyen snarled and fired a warning shot in the air.

The crowd flew back like grains of sand being blown off a table.

Then Nguyen made a mistake—he ran. He bolted for New City gate and what he assumed would be safety. The guards were his friends, one was his sponsor, and even though the gates never opened at night he must have thought they’d open for him.

The fear he’d instilled in the crowd a moment before switched to triumphant bloodlust. They roared after him, fists upraised. He led them straight along the main street of the Burbs, through the empty marketplace and past the astonished clientele of Joe’s Chicken Shack, who did nothing, and all the way to New City gate.

As the guards saw him coming they could hear him shouting at the crowd, “I’m Vietnamese, you fucking idiots!”

When he got closer he called out for the guards to open the gate. They stood on the walls, unsure of themselves. Someone ran to wake Clyde.

Nguyen stopped with his back pressed against the gate. The crowd closed in, mocking him now that he was trapped. One of the guards shouted a command to move back but no one listened.

Nguyen fired another warning shot. The crowd responded with half a dozen rocks.

One took Nguyen right in the mouth. His head whipped back, blood and fragments of teeth spurting from between slashed lips. He brought his head forward with a bloody snarl and fired another warning shot.

That only made the crowd laugh.

“He’s probably running out of ammo!”

“Must be yellow on the inside too.”

More rocks came, hitting him in the chest, knee, and cheek.

Nguyen snapped his assault rifle to full automatic and emptied it into the thickest part of the crowd. Five people died instantly and eight more fell bleeding on the ground. Shouting obscenities, Nguyen pulled another clip from his belt and snapped it into his gun.

The slaughter was cut short by one of the guards on the wall putting a bullet through Nguyen’s head.

After a minute’s stunned silence, the scattered crowd reformed its surviving hard core and rushed up to Nguyen’s body. They kicked it, crushed it with stones, and dragged it off into the Burbs. Someone stole his gun. Another took his boots. The crowd carried Nguyen’s battered corpse to a fire a few scavengers had stoked at the center of their circle of tents. As the scavengers bolted or stayed to cheer, Nguyen’s body was dumped on the flames, sending up a flurry of sparks into the night sky.

The crowd heaped wood onto the flames, helped by a growing number of Burbs residents coming out of their tents and shacks, coming out of the shadows to the warm glow of the fire and the victory dance.

Jackson Andrews and some other deputies, who had been busy dispersing a crowd of thugs who had broken into the prayer space of the settlement’s tiny Muslim community to shit on the rugs, showed up and tried to disperse this crowd too.

They were too numerous and the law had to beat a hasty retreat under a hail of rocks. It wasn’t until Jackson came back with reinforcements that they could recover what was left and give it a decent burial outside of town.

The Doctor and Yu-jin had been oblivious of all this. Inside the warehouse they couldn’t hear the shots or see the flames, and no one bothered to knock on the door and tell them.

When Philip finished the story, Yu-jin slumped on the sofa, feeling ill. The Doctor’s face was red, his eyes flashing.

“Philip, go to the wall. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Once the engineer left, The Doctor went into the examination room. Yu-jin peeked around the corner and saw him take a pill out of one of the bottles and pop it in his mouth. She scurried back to the sofa before he saw her.

Within a minute they were dressed and headed for the wall.

Clyde cut them off halfway there. “Doc, you should—”

“Why the hell didn’t you wake me?” The Doctor bellowed.

The Head of the Watch shrugged and struck a brave pose in his camo. “Nobody important got killed. Just a bunch of rabble rousers.”

“And Nguyen?” The Doctor growled.

Clyde glanced at Yu-jin, gave out a little laugh, and turned away.

The Doctor stomped off to the wall and began climbing the stairs. Yu-jin hurried to follow. He frightened her, but the idea of being alone with Clyde and the others frightened her even more.

They got to the top of the wall and found Philip, Marcus, and a few guards posted there.

The Doctor turned to Philip. “Go down to the relay box next to the gate and switch off the electricity running to the Burbs.”

Philip gaped at him.

“Was I not speaking English?” The Doctor snapped.

Philip hurried off to obey.

The Doctor climbed up onto the parapet, right under one of the floodlights that illuminated the wall.

“Aw geez, I hate it when he does this,” Marcus grumbled. “Thinks he looks cool. He’ll fall and break his neck one of these days.”

Yu-jin peered over the wall. The Burbs lay spread out before her, broad patches of darkness broken by a few lamps casting yellow puddles of light on the main street, electric bulbs shining in a few windows and a shop or two. She looked to where Roy’s bar stood, where usually the brightly colored lights glowed like some festival from an old movie. Tonight she couldn’t find it.

Suddenly, without a sound, all those lights switched off at once. All that remained were a few scattered campfires. It was late, and besides Joe’s Chicken Shack and the fish fry, almost all the cooking fires had burned out. The Burbs plunged in darkness.

There were a few shouts. The breeze carried the murmur of surprised conversation to her ears.

The Doctor waited. Everyone waited.

At the edge of the light cast by the floodlights on the wall, a few faces emerged. They looked curiously up at The Doctor standing atop the parapet, inches from the edge.

One of the watchers ran back into the darkness, shouting something.

More faces emerged. Within a minute a crowd had gathered, pushing into the light, growing. Yu-jin felt the urge to back away out of the lamplight, but decided it was best to be seen with The Doctor. Hiding hadn’t solved anything anyway.

The Doctor didn’t move.

“What happened to the lights?” a woman shouted up at him.

The Doctor said nothing.

The crowd pushed forward into the open area between the two settlements, like moths attracted by the light. It grew and grew until Yu-jin thought the entire Burbs had gathered. Her heart beat fast.

“What happened to the lights?” the woman shouted up again. Her call was taken up by others, their voices rising to a sustained, demanding babble. It carried an edge of panic.

The Doctor snapped up a hand, palm out. The noise of the crowd cut off sharp. Yu-jin’s breath caught.

The silence drew out for several seconds.

“I turned your lights off,” The Doctor shouted. “You don’t deserve them.”

A confused murmur came from the crowd.

“Electricity is a sign of civilization, something for civilized people. When we founded this place forty years ago we maintained the last tidal generator anywhere. We assembled every wind turbine and photovoltaic cell we could scrounge. We defended it against the ghosts of the old armies, the militia claiming to represent the Fifth Republic, a division from General Paulson’s old place in Southaven, and yes, the remnants of the Chinese army too.”

Yu-jin gulped. Out of the corner of her eye he saw Marcus looking at her. The Doctor went on.

“We defeated them all and saved our electricity, saved civilization. Then came the bandits. We defeated them too. Over the years fewer and fewer came. The wildlands couldn’t support big groups anymore. Then came the Righteous Horde. Too big to survive off scavenging, they picked the land clean so that decent people couldn’t live on it. They came here, attracted by the light, attracted by the only civilization that could sustain them. We defeated them too.

“Every time someone has come to take our light they’ve come as conquerors. We’ve never started a war. Anyone who wants to enjoy civilization is welcome here if they come as a civilized person. Anyone who comes as a barbarian gets cast back into the darkness, like General Paulson’s men, like the Chinese army, like the Righteous Horde…

“…like you.”

The Doctor paused. The crowd shifted uncomfortably. No shouts came from it.

“Yes, you. You killed three of your neighbors, beat up dozens more, and for what? For having ancestors who came from the same country as that ship? Most of the people you attacked weren’t even Chinese, you barbarians, but even if they were that doesn’t matter. They didn’t start the old wars. They’re just trying to survive, like you.”

Yu-jin tensed as The Doctor pointed at her.

“For years you welcomed this scavenger into your town, thinking she was Korean. And the instant you find out her ancestors came from China
three hundred years ago
you turn on her? Barbarians. She’s done more for this community than any ten of you. We almost had a battle with the ship, one we would have lost, and she stepped up and at the risk of her life offered to help. For that, I am using my power as a citizen to elevate her to associate status. I’ll bring up her name for full citizenship at the next Citizens Council.”

The crowd shifted and murmured. Out of the corner of her eyes she could see Marcus still staring at her.

“She has always been a peaceful resident of the Burbs, like the other Asians. And what did you do? Attack them, drive them out of their homes, take everything they had. You even killed Nguyen Phan, who put his life on the line for this community just like she did. You pissed on a graveyard and attacked the Muslims. The Muslims aren’t even Chinese, but there weren’t enough Asians to attack so you had to go for the next visible group, right? You even burned two Asian homes to the ground. You burned shelter! I thought only the Righteous Horde did that. Well, it looks like I was wrong. I thought the people of the Burbs were civilized folk. But you’re not, you’re barbarians. And if there’s one thing New City has always stood for, it’s ‘no shelter for barbarians,’ because they’re the ones who destroyed civilization. You want someone to Blame? Blame them. It wasn’t the Chinese or the rich people or the blacks or whoever else you want to Blame, it was the idiots who couldn’t tolerate anyone different and so they tore them apart.