We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3) (24 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Pablo shivered as Kent loomed over him, the M16 he carried almost poking him in the chest. The guards were all glaring at Hong-gi.

He had failed. He had tried to protect his friend and now they were caught.

Kent looked at Pablo. “Don’t worry, kid, we won’t hurt you. Annette will see it our way once the ship is taken care of and we return you to her safe and sound. You just sit tight and behave and you’ll be home soon.”

“I don’t want to go home.”

“Sitting tight means shutting the hell up,” Kent snapped. He turned to Hong-gi. “OK, you little shit, you’re going to do exactly as I say and maybe I’ll let you live. Now answer me and answer me truthfully. You called the ship, right? You’re a spy for them.”

“Yes,” Hong-gi said.

“No, I called the ship,” Pablo said.

Kent frowned at him. “I told you to shut up. Stop protecting your mongrel friend.”

The guard named Norton looked nervous. “Look, Kent. I don’t feel right about this.”

“Nobody asked you,” Kent dismissed him.

“They’re kids.”

Kent turned to him. Norton looked at his feet. Kent turned back to Hong-gi. “OK, so here’s where we stand, kid. Our boss told us a drone buzzed New City earlier today, spying on us.”

“What’s a drone?” Pablo asked, then tensed when he realized he had spoken again.

One of the guards snorted and pointed at Hong-gi. “Ask your friend. It’s a little flying machine with a camera. The ship sent it to find out our weaknesses in preparation for an attack.”

Kent nodded. “It saw all the Asians camping inside the walls. The soldiers on the ship probably think they’re being held prisoner.”

Pablo and Hong-gi looked at each other, confused.

“They’re not?” Hong-gi asked.

“They should be,” the snorting guard said, snorting again. “The sheriff brought them inside the walls to protect them from getting what they deserve and The Doctor was dumb enough to let her.”

Pablo’s jaw dropped. Mom hadn’t arrested all the Asians? He thought back at the riot he had seen. Mom had been herding all the Asians into New City like they were goats, shouting something about “arrest.” But what if she wasn’t arresting them? What if she had been threatening to arrest the people who were trying to hurt them? Mom and her sheriffs had been trying to protect them!

He had gotten it all wrong.

“My mom was saving the Asians!” he cried.

“Not for long,” Kent said, still looking at Hong-gi. “Now here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call your friends on the ship and say the Asians have all been released and The Doctor wants to talk. Try to get them to come back into the bay. They’ll be suspicious, so you got to convince them. They’re sure to send the drone back to check on what we’re saying, so we’re going to let all the Asians back into the Burbs.”

“They’ll get beaten up,” Hong-gi said.

“We won’t let that happen,” Kent said with a smile that seemed to add the words
for now
.

“Then what are you going to do?” Hong-gi asked.

“We’re going to have a little talk with your friends on the ship,” Kent said, still smiling.

The two boys looked at each other again. Pablo knew what his friend was thinking. They’d heard the men talking about some sort of bomb that was too far away to set off. They wanted to get the ship back close enough to blow it up.

Hong-gi squared his shoulders and stood tall. He couldn’t stop trembling as he uttered a single word.

“No.”

Kent grabbed him by the shirt front. “You’re not getting me, boy. If you don’t do this I’ll—”

“For crissake, Kent, he’s a kid!” Norton objected.

“Stay out of this,” another guard said, pushing Norton back a step.

“I won’t do it!” Hong-gi shouted.

Pablo stared at the ground, frozen. He felt like he had back when that guy was hitting Hong-gi in the market—helpless and scared. His hand grasped the clasp knife in his pocket but knew it wouldn’t save them this time. In the market there had only been one guy and plenty of places to run. Now they were surrounded by six guys with guns.

There was nothing he could do. Hong-gi was going to be killed. All the Asians were going to be killed.

The radio lay out of reach. He could see it behind a pair of camouflaged legs, sitting on the ground next to a pile of old bricks.

He jerked at the sound of a slap.

“Kent!”

“Shut up Norton!”

“No, Kent.”

“Get his gun.”

“Stop!”

“Got it.”

“Damn it, kid…”

“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!”

Pablo kept staring at the radio. It had been the best thing in his life ever and look at what it had done.

“I’ll cut you in pieces, you little mongrel.”

“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!”

Pablo took a deep breath and shouted, “I’ll do it!”

Everyone stared at him. Pablo stepped up to Kent. He didn’t dare look at Hong-gi. He didn’t want to see the expression on his face.

“I’ll do it. We called the ship together. Hong-gi promised me a lot of cool stuff if I helped him spy for the…Chinks.”

Kent’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Pablo went on. “You got to unspool the antenna. It’s best to put it on a slope so that it gets better range and a clearer signal. The radio waves run out along the sea then instead of up into the sky. That pile of rubble will work. You turn on the power, connect the microphone, make sure it’s tuned to 8.505 Megahertz, and then just push the microphone button and talk.”

“Shit, the kid really does know how to use a radio,” one of the guards said.

Pablo nodded, and in a voice he hoped sounded convincing said, “I’ll call them for you, but you got to let me and my friend go. You can do what you want to the rest of the Asians.”

He winced as he heard his friend sob. He kept his eyes on Kent.

The guard nodded slowly. “All right, kid, but no funny stuff. It’s better to have someone speaking in English anyway. I was worried about this kid pulling some trick.”

The men moved aside, one taking Hong-gi and dragging him several meters away. Kent and Pablo went up to the radio.

Pablo knelt in front of it, pushing aside some old bricks that were in the way.

“You need to unspool the antenna,” he told Kent.

Kent motioned to one of the guards. As Kent stayed close to Pablo, the guard walked slowly up a nearby pile of rubble, laying out the wire behind him.

Pablo stared at the radio, heart beating fast. He watched his own hand reach out like it was separate from his body and turn on the power. The dials lit up and the speaker let out a low crackle.

Kent’s voice came to him like he was hearing him from a long way off.

“All right, kid, you’re on. Tell them what I told you.”

Pablo pointed at the antenna. “He needs to lay it out straight.”

Kent turned to look.

As soon as he did, Pablo grabbed a brick and with all his strength brought it down on the radio. The side crunched in and sparks flew in his face. Pablo smashed it again and more sparks flew. All the dials went dead.

“You little shit!” Kent grabbed him by the shoulders and flung him away.

The world spun. Pablo was on his back, Kent approaching him, teeth bared, a knife in his hand.

“Hooooo!”

A weird, long howl echoed across the ruins. Not twenty meters away, a shabby figure popped up from behind a pile of rubble, waving its hands over its head.

Mr. Cooper.

“Tweakers!” one of the guards shouted, putting his gun to his shoulder and firing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Shots rang out to the west, a series of pops that sounded like an assault rifle, although Yu-jin knew too little about guns to be sure. Annette whipped out her shotgun as Yu-jin readied her bow, nocking an arrow and half-drawing the string.

“Maybe the ship came back?” Yu-jin suggested.

“Could it have come back so quickly?” Annette asked.

Yu-jin shrugged. “Let’s go check it out.”

They hurried through the ruins, more gunshots showing them the way. By unspoken agreement they split up, staying well apart from one another but within sight. Both had been in enough fights to know what to do.

The shots died away. A shout, closer than they anticipated, told them they were almost upon whoever they were stalking.

Both women slowed. Yu-jin glanced at Annette, uncertain. Just what were they doing, anyway? They crept through the rubble, hunting whoever was out there like they were going to shoot them, but they didn’t even know who. Everyone had gotten too trigger happy.

“Did you get them?” someone called out.

The voice came from not far off. Another voice replied.

“I only saw one tweaker. Hit him. The kids are out of sight.”

Annette ran towards the sound of the voice. “Hey, have you found my son?”

Yu-jin hurried to follow her. For a moment she lost sight of the sheriff.

Around another shattered building and over a heap of bricks, and she stopped short.

Annette stood about fifty meters away, and only about ten meters in front of a pair of guards who faced off with her. Both the guards and the sheriff had their guns half raised, looking at each other warily. A little further behind the guards stood three more, one of whom, strangely, wasn’t holding a weapon, while one of the others had a spare M16 slung over his shoulder.

The two lead guards glanced at each other.

“What do we do?” one asked the other.

“What’s going on? Where’s my son?” Annette demanded.

Then one of the guards glanced to his right and spotted Yu-jin.

And everything went insane.

The two lead guards half turned and raised their assault rifles at Yu-jin. The rear two guards shouted something Yu-jin couldn’t catch. She was far too focused on the lead two.

Yu-jin loosed her arrow. It sailed through the air and implanted its red shaft feather-deep into the nearest man’s chest. As he bent double, his assault rifle spat bullets, tearing the air centimeters from Yu-jin’s head. The guard next to him aimed his assault rifle, Yu-jin desperately drawing another arrow, knowing it would be too late. She sent up a quick prayer to her ancestors and Jesus as a shot hammered her ears.

The guard flew to the side, half his head blown away by a barrel of Annette’s shotgun.

Yu-jin went to one knee, nocked her arrow, and aimed at the other three guards. The one with no weapon was screaming and waiving his hands in the air. The other two aimed at Annette.

Both got to fire before Yi-jin could. Each sent a three-round semiautomatic burst in the sheriff’s direction before one took an arrow in his side.

The other, seeing his comrade fall, turned and fired at Yu-jin.

She was already rolling away. Grit and bits of concrete flew in the air as the bullets stitched the ground, following her until she got behind a slab of marble. A final round cracked the edge of the white stone, followed by silence.

Yu-jin glanced at the nearby terrain. The marble was big enough to keep her covered, but the area all around was open for at least three or four meters. If the guard was covering her, there would be no way to get free, and no way for her to raise herself enough to take a shot without fatally exposing herself.

“I surrender! I surrender! Don’t shoot!” one of the guards shouted.

This shouting was mingled with a groan, then stopped by the thud of Annette’s shotgun and the
crack crack crack
of an assault rifle.

Yu-jin dared a peek over the edge of the marble just in time to see the lone remaining armed guard fleeing out of sight to the north. The unarmed guard remained jumping up and down, holding his hands in the air and screaming at Annette, who lay behind a rock not far off, blood flowing freely from her leg. The two closest guards lay dead, while the one near the screamer writhed on the ground, Yu-jin’s arrow lodged in his side.

“I surrender!” the unarmed guard repeated unnecessarily.

Yu-jin raised up and covered him with her bow.

“Back away from your friends,” she ordered. “Make a move towards any of those guns and I’ll stick this in your throat.”

The man cringed. Yu-jin edged over to Annette.

“You OK?” she asked.

“I’ve had worse. Ah, shit, this hurts.”

Annette had torn a strip of cloth from her shirt and was winding it around her leg.

“Is it bad?” Yu-jin asked, not daring to take her eyes off her prisoner long enough to check.

“Clean shot through the calf, missed the artery. Hey, Surrender Man! What the fuck is going on?”

“I didn’t want to do it!”

“Do what?” Annette asked.

The man went silent. Yu-jin drew her bowstring back.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Blow the ship. We set a bomb last night but it sailed out of reach of the radio detonator.”

“Who has that?”

The fellow hesitated. A groan from the man at his feet and another look at the gleaming arrowhead pointing at his chest convinced him to speak.

“Kent. He’s probably headed for New City now.”

“What about my son?” Annette asked.

“And the other boy?” Yu-jin added.

“They were the ones who brought the ship! We found them here with a radio. Kent wanted to make them bring the ship back but your kid smashed it.”

“Yu-jin, I got him covered now. Get up on a hill and try to spot them.”

She glanced at the sheriff and saw she had sat up, her wounded leg propped on a stone and her pistol aimed at the guard.

Yu-jin nodded, put the arrow back in its quiver, and climbed up the sloping concrete roof of what had once been a building. It got her about five meters above the surrounding area. Some distance to the north, she spotted Kent running in the direction of New City. She saw no sign of the boys.

She hurried back and reported to Annette.

“You got to get them,” the sheriff said. “Gather up the assault rifles and bring them to me. Search Norton here, and then find my son and Hong-gi.”

“We have to get Kent first, he’ll blow the ship!”

“My boy is alone in the wildlands, find him!”

“All right, all right,” Yu-jin reassured her as she collected the assault rifles. Norton busied himself giving first aid to the wounded guard.

No, I’m going to hunt down Kent and stop World War Five. The boys are just going to have to fend for themselves until then.

She glanced at the first man she’d hit. The arrow had transfixed his heart. Yu-jin winced. At least it had been quick. She turned to Norton and indicated the man he was tending.

“How is he?”

“He’ll live, no thanks to you,” Norton growled.

“Thank God,” Yu-jin sighed. Norton’s frown turned to a shocked stare.

She went to Annette’s side and dumped the assault rifles within reach, gave Norton a pat down once he’d finished with his friend, tied him up with pieces of his friends’ uniform, and turned to Annette.

“You sure you’re OK?”

“Go!”