We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3) (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Pablo and Hong-gi screamed as they scrabbled back down the mound of rubble. The tweaker let out a triumphant howl and ran after them. Just as they made it to the bottom of the mound, another tweaker came around a pile of concrete and blocked off their escape.

The boys cut to the right. Pablo felt himself jerk backwards as one of the tweakers grabbed his pack. As he landed on the jagged rubble he caught a glimpse of Hong-gi running away, one of the tweakers hot on his tail. His friend glanced over his shoulder.

“Pablo!”

“Keep running!”

Hong-gi hesitated just for a moment too long. With a cackle the tweaker grabbed him.

Pablo looked up at the chem addict who loomed over him. He wasn’t sure if it was a man or a woman. The thing was caked with grime and stank worse than the outhouse behind Uncle Roy’s bar. Despite the cold it only wore a tattered homespun shirt and an old pair of camo pants torn halfway down one leg. Its feet were bare, with cracked nails and open sores all over.

The tweaker grabbed Pablo by the shirt and hauled him up, lifting him into the air. With its other hand it grabbed Pablo’s spare bag.

The other one returned carrying Hong-gi under his arm. The boy kept punching the tweaker in the head. It didn’t seem to notice.

Pablo yelped as the tweaker who had caught him gripped him hard by the wrist and yanked him forward. Pablo stumbled to keep up.

“What do we do?” Hong-gi cried. Both tweakers let out mindless laughs.

They took the boys to a large pile of rubble with a hole in the side of it like a cave. Pablo struggled even harder when the tweaker who had a hold on him led him towards the entrance. The top of the cave was propped up with a big slab of concrete and the sides were piles of bricks and chunks of concrete and old rebar. Pablo wasn’t sure if it had been made by someone or had just turned out that way when the building collapsed, but he sure knew he didn’t want to go in there.

Then he remembered the clasp knife in his pocket. He pulled it out with his free hand and tried to open it with his thumb.

The tweaker stopped and stared at him dumbly. Pablo winced as he tried again to open the knife and tore his thumbnail.

The tweaker frowned. “Tryntocutmehuh?”

He hit Pablo over the head with the emergency bag, making him drop the knife.

“Letsbagettintabizniz,” the other burped, still holding Hong-gi and still taking punches to the side of the head.

They carried and dragged the boys inside the cave. Pablo blinked in the dim light inside. There was a slab of concrete to the side covered with filthy shreds of cloth that could have been a bed. The floor was littered with rusted cans, puddles of half-dried pee, and a few turds. Pablo retched.

They threw Pablo and Hong-gi onto the bed. One squatted grinning by the entrance while the other rummaged through the bags, tossing everything around. The food landed in a puddle of pee. The tweaker opened up the canteen, sniffed it, and poured it out in disgust. The blankets were thrown onto the bed.

The chem addict roared in frustration and tore the bag to pieces. Pablo and Hong-gi huddled close together, pushing themselves into the far corner of the cave.

The tweaker squatting by the door laughed and pulled a rusted can out of his pocket. The top was covered with a cloth. When he pulled this off a sharp chemical stench filled the cave, making both boys gag.

The tweaker held the can up to his nose and breathed in deep. Then he flung his head back and howled.

“Hooooo!”

The other tweaker stopped tearing apart the emergency bag and grabbed the can from him. He inhaled, his head jerking back like he’d been punched. A big grin spread across his face.

The tweaker held out the can to the boys. The smell of toxins was so strong both of them covered their noses and mouths.

“Wantsum?”

The tweaker frowned and jabbed the can forward again. Pablo shook his head.

An iron grip dug into his arm and Pablo was yanked forward. He didn’t understand how these guys could be half dead from the stuff they breathed and still be so strong. The tweaker held the can to Pablo’s face. Pablo turned away, holding his hand over his nose and mouth.

“Urrrrgh!” the tweaker growled, shaking him back and forth. The other tweaker came over and pulled Pablo’s hand away. Pablo held his breath. The can was right below his nose now. He closed his eyes tight as the fumes stung them.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Pablo’s lungs burned. He needed to take a breath right now.

A shout from the doorway made everyone turn. A raggedy form burst into the cave and knocked over both tweakers, slamming Pablo into the back wall. The tin of chemicals fell to the floor with a clank.

Pablo looked on wide-eyed as a third tweaker fought the two who had captured them. The three creatures in rags snarled and bit and tore, rolling around on the floor. In a minute the newcomer had knocked one tweaker’s head against the wall and stunned him. Then he got on top of the other one and started slamming his head against the floor. The guy looked familiar.

“It’s Mr. Cooper!” Hong-gi said.

Mr. Cooper smacked the tweaker’s head against the floor, the chem addict’s skull making a cracking sound that turned Pablo’s stomach.

The boys’ other captor picked himself up from the floor, shaking his head. His bloodshot eyes fixed on Mr. Cooper and he let out a snarl. Mr. Cooper didn’t even notice as he kept slamming the dead tweaker’s head against the floor.

In an instant the fight started again. Mr. Cooper let out a yelp as the tweaker leapt on him and knocked him almost out of the cave. They flailed around, hitting, kicking, biting. Pablo took a wild swing to the side of his head and got knocked down. As his vision cleared, he saw Mr. Cooper on top of the tweaker’s back, his teeth sunk in a filthy ear.

Mr. Cooper yanked his head back. There was a disgusting tearing sound as the tweaker’s ear came free.

The tweaker howled and knocked Mr. Cooper off him. Holding his hand to the bloody wound, he ran out of the cave and across the ruined city, his howls fading into the distance.

The boys stared at Mr. Cooper, who sat on the floor amid all the blood and pee and squashed turds, looking confused and battered with an ear hanging out his mouth.

Pablo didn’t dare speak. He glanced at Hong-gi, who looked just as scared as he felt.

Mr. Cooper turned to the boys. A stupid grin spread across his face and the ear dropped from his lips, landing on the floor with a splat. He got on his hands and knees and crawled around the cave sniffing like a dog in some movie from the Old Times. After a moment he found the can and brought it to his nose.

Mr. Cooper cackled, swaying back and forth.

“Let’s get out of here,” Pablo whispered.

“Wait,” Hong-gi said. He reached down, grabbed something from the floor, and put it in his pocket.

Pablo grabbed a blanket.

“Gee, thanks Mr. Cooper,” he said.

Mr. Cooper looked over the rim of the can. Snot dangled from his nose. His bloodshot eyes tried to focus.

“Um, could you help us get to the ship?” Pablo asked.

Mr. Cooper grunted and waved his arm, signaling them to go away.

Hong-gi and Pablo stepped over the dead body of the tweaker and edged toward the door.

“Mr. Cooper, if you just—”

Mr. Cooper snarled and leapt to his feet. Hong-gi and Pablo fled out of the cave. Pablo looked over his shoulder and saw that Mr. Cooper had turned his back on them and was hunched over the can, sniffing.

The boys hurried away, only stopping for a moment for Pablo to grab the clasp knife that the tweaker had knocked out of his hand. The air was fresher outside the cave but their nostrils and eyes still stung from the sharp tang of toxins. Both had lost their masks.

“At least we have a blanket,” Pablo sighed.

“We have this too,” Hong-gi said with a smile. He held up a bag of oat cakes.

“Good job!”

They walked on in silence, munching on the last of their food and listening for any sign of the tweakers. Once a distant howl froze them in their tracks. The sound wasn’t repeated, and they continued on.

“We must be getting close,” Hong-gi whispered.

“I hope so, I’m hungry,” Pablo replied.

A flash of light between two heaps of old concrete made them stop. They crept forward, crouching low, and a sliver of the bay came into view.

“We’ve made it!” Pablo said. The friends gave each other a high five.

They hurried on, too excited to be careful. As they ran between the two piles of concrete the whole bay came into view before them. To their left stood the ruins of the petrochemical works, closer than Pablo had thought it would be. Beyond that stood the crumpled old cranes standing at the port, and in front of them, across the sparkling water, the gutted buildings of the city. Pablo looked to the right, out across the water, and could see the entire bay to where it opened up to the sea.

Pablo came to a dead stop. Hong-gi stopped beside him, letting out a sharp cry.

The ship had gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Yu-jin yawned and stretched, coming out of the deepest sleep she had enjoyed in a long time. This sofa from the Old Times was the most comfortable thing she’d ever slept on. She wondered why people back then even had beds.

She rubbed her eyes and looked around at The Doctor’s living room. The whiskey bottle and two empty glasses sat on the table in front of her. At one wall stood a little desk and that wonderful computer. She was tempted to turn it back on and look at more photos of the taikonauts, but she didn’t know how and was afraid she might break it.

Along the walls hung pictures from the Old Times. Like everyone else, The Doctor liked to decorate his shelter with old pictures. The difference with these was that instead of pages torn out of magazines, they were mostly old paintings—landscapes and images of buildings she supposed were famous back then. Another wall was taken up by a bookshelf filled with old tomes.

It was a lovely room. The only thing missing were windows. The warehouse had none. She suspected The Doctor liked it that way.

Funny how she hadn’t really taken a close look at her surroundings last night. Too much had gone on, and her mind had been in a whirl.

And there would be more trouble today. The Doctor had never slapped an embargo on the Burbs before. She’d come here to find peace and now look at how things had turned out.

Sighing, she sat up.

“Hello?” she called out.

Silence.

“Doctor, are you awake?”

Still no answer.

Yu-jin got up and tiptoed to the bedroom. The door was ajar. She peeked in and saw a smaller room. Like the living room, all the wall space was taken up by bookshelves and pictures, this time mostly photographs. The bed lay unmade and empty.

He must have gone out without waking me. I better go find out what’s going on.

She was about to turn to leave when something on the bedside table caught her eye.

A small wooden pipe. It jogged her memory of the night before. As she had been drifting off the sleep for the second time, the worries of the day finally succumbing to her exhaustion, she could have sworn she had smelled pot smoke.

“No way,” she whispered.

She couldn’t help but go in the room and check. The pipe was still half full. From the looks of it, The Doctor had a line on some very fine weed.

Yu-jin chuckled. She didn’t smoke much, only now and then with Randy. It made him silly and her sleepy, so she didn’t see much of a point.

What would smoking with The Doctor be like?

Suddenly she felt guilty about being in his room. She put the pipe down in the same position she had found it and turned to go.

This time she was stopped by one of the photos on the wall.

It showed two young men arm in arm. One was kissing the other on the cheek. The man getting kissed was smiling at the camera. Yu-jin took in a sharp breath as she recognized him as The Doctor. He looked so different! Not only was he young, looking in his early twenties like Yu-jin, but he appeared carefree, happy. The smile was real, without a trace of bitterness or sarcasm, which were the only types of smiles she’d ever seen the old Doctor make.

The photo was framed in a tidy, handmade wooden frame and covered with glass. It hung slightly apart from the other photos. Some of these showed the young man in the first picture—sitting at a bar that looked ten times nicer than $87,953, lying on a blanket by a riverside, and standing with a serious look in those white medical clothes doctors wore in the Old Times. This last one was taken in front of a tent with a sign in front emblazoned with the symbol of the Red Cross, Crescent, and Star and the words “Emergency Mobile Unit, Southaven.”

Yu-jin’s hand went to her mouth. He’d already told her he had been there, but seeing the photo brought it home to her. She wondered if he had ever met Grandfather and Grandmother.

She looked again over the photos. The Doctor and Lucas wore factory-made clothes from the Old Times. Her grandparents had told her that even in the last days of the City-States you could still get manufactured goods, either from the few factories still working or the big warehouses from earlier, more plentiful times that were still stuffed with goods to supply a land that had once had so many more people.

Fascinated, she studied another group of pictures further along the wall. These seemed to date to a bit later. One showed a crowd standing in front of the warehouse that was the nucleus of New City. She recognized The Doctor—looking to be in his thirties and more careworn—as well as a young and thin Roy, an even younger and thinner Clyde, a couple who might have been Marcus and Rosie, along with some people she didn’t know. Various others she didn’t recognize featured in photos setting up solar cells and building the city wall.

The Doctor wasn’t the only one who looked more serious, all of them did. And many wore homespun. The factory-made clothing some still wore looked faded and patched, although still better than what you could find today even in a lucky scavenge.

She stared, fascinated. This was some of the history she had never learned. It was almost as interesting as seeing the photos of the taikonauts, and more tangible. Some of these people were still alive.

Yu-jin glanced at the door. Where was he, anyway? Should she go look for him? She was afraid to go out, though. She wished he had left her a note. Perhaps he thought she couldn’t read.

The photos drew her attention back. She studied them again, and a feeling that had been bothering her in the back of her mind came to the fore. It was something she was sure he had never noticed in the photos but that she did.

Everyone except for Roy was an Anglo. All those founders and leaders of New City were white people, the same people who had been in power in the old Republics and in most city-states, the same people who rallied around General Paulson at Southaven when he decided to scapegoat the Chinese. Their power had endured even after civilization had fallen.

She leaned closer to the one photo that showed Roy. He looked about thirty, a wiry, tough-looking man who had left his youth behind but was still in the prime of life. There was an angry, defiant glint in his eye she had never seen in the old Roy.

“How did you get into this crowd?” she whispered. “And why do you live in the Burbs now?”

She got the feeling that if she asked him, he would be as silent as this old photograph.

Yu-jin took a step back and studied all the photos again. The Doctor’s wall was covered with scenes from thirty or forty years ago, a timeline of his last days before the fall of North Cape and the first days of the founding of New City, and then the story stopped.

Sadness washed over her. It was like her own family, her own people, everything ending. The Doctor lived in the past like her own parents and grandparents had, telling the same old stories of an old China they had never seen while huddling around a fire in a cave.

Yu-jin shook her head. Who could fault them for preferring to talk about the Ming Empire or the taikonaut moon base? It wasn’t like the present was any better to live in, especially for people who were old enough to remember cities with factories and vehicles and populations in the tens of thousands.

But living in the past never helped anyone. Oh, those stories certainly entertained her as a girl, had made the cave seem a little warmer, had made the firelight on the walls glow like gold, but it hadn’t filled her stomach or kept one of her family from having to stand watch against bandits out in the cold night. It was like going to movie night at $87,953, when Roy used his precious current of electricity from New City to turn on an old screen, slip in one of those shiny discs that scavengers used for signaling, and suddenly the whole crowd would be treated to some story from the Old Times, full of flashy images of crowded cities and planes flying through the air and people who all looked well-fed and clean despite all their fictional problems. Like everyone else, Yu-jin loved movie nights even if she didn’t understand everything she saw. She and the rest of the crowd would cheer or ooooh and aaaah at the action and the amazing sights, or make comments about what they’d like to do with those impossibly good-looking people in the films. It was fun to fantasize that you lived back then breathing clean air and having pure water come out of a little pipe in your house. It made you feel that if those things had been possible once that maybe, just maybe, they could be like that again.

At the end, though, when the film ended and the lights came back on, the audience always grew quiet. Even though $87,953 was the best bar anywhere, with tables and chairs and lights and even a stereo playing Old Times music, it all looked a bit shabby after what they’d seen in the movies. The wooden floor was scuffed and worn, not all shiny like in the movies, and the chairs were handmade and creaky. The walls were covered in tattered old posters and pages ripped from magazines, more old images that seemed to mock their current surroundings.

Looking at the people was worse. All those thin, careworn people in their patchy clothes, so many with rashes or tumors or eye infections or missing fingers or bent limbs. After seeing all those beautiful people in the movies, you couldn’t help but feel a bit ashamed of your friends, and even more ashamed of yourself.

Even Roy always looked a bit downcast, giving one last longing look at the dark screen before sweeping his gaze over the bar and its ragged denizens. Then he’d put on that broad smile of his, clap his hands and announce, “Next round, half price!”

That always got the party going again. Everyone needed a drink. With enough of them, the bar started looking better, and the people too.

But Yu-jin had never been much of a drinker, and she’d never been much of a fantasizer either. Scavengers had to see the world for what it is, they couldn’t afford to do otherwise. They couldn’t dwell too much on the past, and they couldn’t dwell on any future more remote than surviving the next winter.

That had changed for her, Yu-jin realized. She wasn’t a scavenger anymore. She had achieved her dream. She lived in the Burbs now. Or did she live in New City? Wherever her place was, it wasn’t in the wildlands, and that meant that she had the luxury of thinking of a future. At first she thought her future lay with Randy, although it had always troubled her that he couldn’t have children. A sneaking part of her mind, one she silenced when she was with her boyfriend, told her she could always find someone else to settle down with, that she could have the Burbs and children too. But that temptation that she knew would have eventually grown in her had been cut short by the events of the past few days.

Yes, it had only been a few days since she had gotten back, hadn’t it? Just a few short days and suddenly she was one of the most important people in New City, a bridge between ship and shore. Many people hated her for it, but everyone acknowledged that she had a power no one else had.

And here she was, in the private quarters of the most powerful person in New City, sneaking a look at his private things and wondering what her next move should be.

Just what did The Doctor think of her, anyway? He was a practical man, despite the pot pipe by his bed. He knew he needed her and tried to protect her. It went beyond that, though. It was like he assumed she was going to become some sort of leader. From what she’d heard, they’d been cropping up a lot lately. Everyone breaking into different factions—Burb Council, Weissman’s group, scavengers group, the cult refugees, now even a Burbs militia that didn’t answer to the council.

She supposed he was right. She had become a spokesperson for the Asians just as much as Susanna had become a spokesperson for the refugees. What puzzled her was The Doctor’s quick acceptance. She’d seen that first look of fear and suspicion when she had told him she was Chinese. It was as obvious as it was unsurprising. What did surprise her was how quickly it faded. Once they had made the deal it was like he had lost all doubts about where her loyalties lay. Not even the riot had shaken his easy confidence in her. Electing her for associate status hadn’t just been to shut up the critics; he had meant it as a message. He was banking on the assumption that if he showed her trust, he would gain loyalty in return.

A great man, but a fragile one. That frustrated look he got when he didn’t understand a conversation, that resentment at his own limitations, and now this windowless retreat with its music and alcohol and drugs. She had always looked up to The Doctor as someone almost superhuman, everyone did, but now he had revealed a very different side.

She wondered about that too. They barely knew each other and yet this comfortable trust he showed in her had extended to sleeping in his private chambers, no doubt causing all sorts of rumors to fly around the building.

What were his intentions, anyway? While she knew they weren’t what the talkers would assume, they remained unclear. As much as he needed her at the moment, he didn’t need to treat her so well.

The sound of an opening door made her spin around. She flushed with guilt and hurried out into the front room.

He was just closing the door as she entered, his back to her. He slumped his shoulders and leaned his forehead against the door. After one or two deep breaths, he turned.

She almost cried out to see the look of despair on his broken face.

An instant later it was gone, replaced by the stony features he presented to the world. The transformation was so quick, so complete, she started doubting what she had seen.