“You’re a forty-eight, ain’t you?” one of them asked.
I exhaled heavily, “yes.”
“So am I,” he said, “I still need to get more in order to finish the treatment, but I started it anyway.”
“That’s good,” I panted, “I hope you can finish it.”
“You’re comin’ from the Wichita riots?” the other kid asked.
I grunted in response, seeing the Wichita police cruiser in the parking lot of the burger joint, Mikasi laying on the pavement outside it, Ellen knelt down. Darren stood next to his car with Tory Goodwin, the girls still sitting in the back. Several more spectators were gathered. Rosy’s car pulled into the parking lot, the sides dented in, windshield a spider web of cracks.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” the teenager asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “get your friends to come out and start a demonstration.”
“Like…like the other ones?”
“Yeah, sure” I said, shambling into the grass, heading toward the car.
“Uh, sure,” the kid said, “we’ll see what we can do.”
Both of them trotted off, back in the direction they came. The spectators in the McDonalds parking lot looked toward me, seeing the large machine gun in my hands. Some ran off, others backing away slowly.
“Is he going to pull through?” I asked, stopping a few feet from Mikasi as Rosy’s car pulled to a stop next to him.
“I think so,” Ellen said, “I’ve stopped the bleeding, but he’s already lost quite a bit.”
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Major Rosaline Riviera asked, eyes on me as she got out of the car, the door falling off when she slammed it behind her.
“Something needed to be done,” I said, pain gripping my body as I bent over to set the .50 cal down.
“It was pretty fucking stupid,” Major Riviera said, “haven’t we lost enough people tonight?”
“You’re not gettin’ outta here,” another voice said, Alvin Coolidge climbing shakily out of the car behind Darren, “not with me and Goodwin with you. They’re tracking our RFID chips.”
“Why would they be tracking yours?” Tory Goodwin asked. His face was smudged in dirt, curly gray hair sticking off in every direction.
“I’m PRA, aren’t I?” he said, “they were gonna trade me back to the PRA.”
“For who?” I rasped.
Coolidge looked to me with a smirk but said nothing.
“What’s the plan here, fellas?” Darren asked, scanning over everyone as if someone would have a suggestion.
“You might have a slightly better chance of gettin’ out if you leave us behind,” Coolidge said, “just continue on without-”
Coolidge yelled as Major Riviera grabbed his arm, bringing a combat knife to his RFID chip bulge.
“The Colonel didn’t die for nothing,” she said, gouging the blade into the man’s flesh and prying the chip out. Coolidge bellowed as the tiny piece of tech sluiced out with a stream of blood, falling to the pavement. Riviera let go of Coolidge’s arm, allowing him to hug it close to his chest, blood spreading over his ruffled suit. Major Riviera then stomped on the tech.
Goodwin started slowly backing up as Riviera walked toward him. He stumbled into the side of the car, holding his arm to himself. Major Riviera was too strong, grabbing his wrist and holding his arm out, performing the same crude procedure. He stifled a cry of pain as the tip of the knife sliced the tech out, dropping to the ground where she stomped on it.
“Let’s get a fucking move on,” Riviera said, “We’re combining vehicles. I’ll take over driving the cruiser. Someone help me with the Colonel’s body.”
Darren helped her. Mikasi and Laura were squeezed into the backseat between Ellen on the passenger side and me and the driver’s, Tory Goodwin sitting up front with Riviera. Being the ever practical one, Major Riviera had Colonel Reynolds corpse stuffed into the trunk of the car, a move that brought grimaces to the faces of some of the others. Darren took his car carrying Carmen, Tea, and Coolidge.
Laura’s unresponsive body sat leaning up against mine, her bandaged right arm dangling down into my lap. The .50 cal sat across both our laps. Mikasi sat to her left, his injured left arm still being worked on by Ellen.
“How bad’s his arm?” I asked.
“His ulna’s completely shattered,” she said, “bullet went halfway down it,” she shook her head, “he might be better off gettin’ a prosthetic.”
I glanced up at Tory Goodwin, his head turned to see us out of the corner of his eye. “I guess I shouldn’t complain about my forearm then,” he said, “on the upside, the officer’s wound took out his own RFID chip.”
It was completely dark out by the time we reached Pratt, only the street lights illuminating our way. We were able to drive through the town without seeing the two surviving cruisers. People had started wandering the streets, lit by the flashes of fireworks, some holding hastily put together signs against the CSA. In parking lots and driveways, people were gathered to blow up firecrackers. Multicolored lights strobed in through the car windows from fountains shooting sparks upward.
“Internet’s abuzz with everythin’ goin’ on,” Darren said over the earpiece, “demonstrations poppin’ up all over Kansas.”
Nobody responded as we blew past the last of the densely grouped houses, back out onto the rural Kansas highway. Rosy kept us under cruising speed for some time, worried that the two CSA cruisers she’d lost in town might start following us again.
“It was too easy losing ‘em,” she said, “I don’t have a good feeling about it.”
I sunk back into the seat, trying to relax myself. My right hand throbbed from the burn, the skin on my palm jet black and cherry red. The shrapnel wound in my stomach pulsated in pain with every rapid heartbeat, giving me a nauseous feeling. There was still a ringing in my ears from the bomb that killed Regina and Tanya. Every bone was sore, some of my ribs most likely bruised from jumping onto the APC:B-021.
I could hear Laura’s voice in my head asking if I was sufficiently distracted now. It gave me a mixed feeling of anger and sadness. Laura was likely to die, and Colonel Reynolds, Regina, and Tanya had already died for this.
Is all this just a waste of time? Is this a lot of trouble just to occupy my time? Why can’t I just start a goddamn stamp collection?
I reached my unburned left hand over, laying it gently on the top of her left hand where it sat in her lap. Her left forearm had burns and cuts over it, yet somehow the hand seemed to have escaped injury. Her scrawny fingers were still supple and smooth, not even a nick to the fingernails.
My eyes focused when another soft, incoherent utterance came from her. Laura’s eyes searched around blindly, not focusing on anything, but still unable to fall asleep. Ellen had cleaned the burns on her face. Laura’s hair was singed, blisters pocking mostly on the right half. Her eyes fell on me and for a second I thought there was recognition in her glance, but then-
“Oh, fuck!” Riviera shouted just as a loud humming surged.
Before I had time to register, the explosion behind us lifted the back of the car off the road, a moment of weightlessness coming before crashing back down as we swerved, sliding off into a field.
When I looked back, Darren’s car was in the middle of the road, sitting on its side. Riviera kept cursing, trying to accelerate the car, but it was dead. Chunks of pavement and soil rained down around us in the night. I clenched my teeth, grabbing the door handle and pushed it open, climbing out onto the field, pulling the .50 cal with me.
I didn’t bother looking back, holding the machine gun in both arms, dragging the belt of bullets behind me as I strode towards Darren’s car. Riviera yelled something. I ignored her. The UAV was coming back around again, hidden in the night sky.
“Come on, you motherfucker!” I screamed into the night, “fucking shoot me!”
Soft whirring sounded overhead. I stopped, pointing the machine gun in the direction of the sound, and started
firing. The belt fed into the gun, recoil thrashing back, almost knocking me over, but I continued firing bursts into the air.
It didn’t even matter that I hit it anymore. Even if I could, it might not be enough. It was pure catharsis. I allowed rage to wash over me like a tsunami. The same rage I’d felt when kicking the CSA officer to death. The same rage I’d felt at war in so many lifetimes.
The rage of my right hemisphere.
I want to be that hemisphere.
“I’m right fucking here!” I shouted, “fucking shoot me you motherfuckers!”
The surging hum responded. I held the trigger down, letting bullets spray as I blindly swept back and forth into the night sky. The hum grew louder, almost blotting out the machine gun fire. I roared, the belt running out, gun clicking. I threw it to the ground and continued staggering forward, bellowing in fury, beating my good hand against my chest.
And then a fireball erupted in the sky above me. In the light of the fire I could see wreckage from the UAV hurtling toward the ground like a meteor. The entire field shook as it crashed, tossing dirt and flaming debris forward a hundred feet to my left. I fell to my knees, looking up at the dying fireball, seeing another UAV come flying through it. And then a second one. And a third.
Major Riviera shouted, running toward me. She grabbed me under the arms, pulling me to my feet, but all I could do was fall back to my knees as she continued forward, reaching Darren’s car.
The whirring of the UAVs grew again as they came back around. I kept my gaze on the sky, lost in confusion and despair. Ellen ran past me to join the Major, saying something I didn’t hear.
When I finally turned my gaze to Darren’s car, I could see Alvin Coolidge already sitting on the ground near the exposed underside of the vehicle, using his arms to shield himself from Major Riviera as she pointed a pistol at him. She lowered her aim and fired, the PRA spy screaming as his kneecap exploded.
Major Riviera then climbed deftly up the underside of the car, reaching in and helping Carmen climb out of the door, pulling her up through the side. Tea, already sitting on the road a few feet from Coolidge, was bawling as Ellen examined the little girls left thigh, the upper leg bent in an unnatural direction. When Riviera set Carmen down, the little girl ran to her friend, leaning over, trying to comfort her.
Where’s Darren?
The question didn’t have time to register as three APC:B-021s came screeching to a halt around the sideways vehicle. Despair took me, knowing we were caught. Everyone was going to die. I was going to be reborn again, coming back with nothing, the way it had always been before. No friends. No cause. No distraction. Nothing.
“Who the fuck are you?” Major Riviera hollered.
Our captors piled out around us. One of them climbed onto the side of Darren’s car, reaching into the driver’s side door. The figure easily pulled Darren up out of the seat, handing his limp body down to two of the other captors.
I slowly stood up and staggered forward, keeping my eyes on the three strangers. They had Darren laid out on the road, one of them examining his arm. And then I heard soft laughter. Darren’s laughter.
“He’ll live,” a familiar voice said, his face coming into view as he looked at Tea and Carmen, the two frightened girls hugging close to Major Riviera as she stared perplexed at Darren.
“I dunno who ya’ll are,” Darren rasped, “but I’m mighty fuckin’ glad to see ya.”
“No problem dude,” his rescuer said, “but we gotta get all’uh ya to a hospital.”
The figure looked back to me and I stopped in my tracks. Rocky. I immediately recognized one of the other figures, too. Markus. The woman working on Masaru’s broken arm I didn’t recognize, but I knew she was with them. They were Sachi’s people, come to rescue us.
“Who are you?” Major Riviera repeated, less forceful this time.
“They’re my people,” I said as I limped toward them, “the ones I worked with in Mexico.”
Riviera glanced at me, but said nothing.
“Damn dude,” Rocky said, “seems like every time I see ya yer gettin’ yerself hurt,” Rocky grinned, walking toward me. He was about to slap a hand on my shoulder, but stopped when he saw the burns.
“The UAVs…”
Rocky’s grin widened, “those’re ours,” he said, “We upped our shit like a motherfucker.” He glanced over my shoulder at the car in the field and then said, “How bout we go get yer buddies and get the fuck outta this fuckin’ place, eh?”
Everything the arrival of Sachi’s people implied didn’t matter to me at that moment. I couldn’t agree more with Rocky’s sentiment. It was time to get outta this fuckin’ place.
Chapter 31
May 20, 1645 C.E.
The foul stench of slag and blood hissed through Yangzhou with noxious fury. My eyes stung with tears from smoke and pain as I stumbled wearily down the road, feet slick with mud and gore up to my knees. I could still feel where my mother had clasped my hand before being dragged away from me. Soot and ash clung to the air, obscuring the other nobleman’s children being marched toward the town square alongside me. Nothing but silhouettes in the vulgar haze.
Everywhere the soldiers moved us, I spotted wailing mothers, bound together by their necks with rope, driven down the streets like bleating sheep. A woman was pulled out from under a cart, her infant torn from her arms like useless luggage. The howling bundle was hurled to the ground, soft flesh packing sickeningly into the turf. The horses leading the obscene procession of desperate children slipped in mangled intestines and blood-soaked limbs littering the road. Screams echoed through the streets.
The sound of roaring flames accompanied the heat on my skin from nearby stables, horses whinnying pitifully as they cooked alive in their hellish prison. Blackened carcasses lay unrecognizable in the doorway, flames licking over their intertwined bodies.
I looked away from the flames, seeing the gutter opposite the inferno engorged with corpses. Arms and legs stuck out from where the bloody, profane masses of flesh had been callously hurled, bent and grasping in petrified agony.
Something like a wan smile crept over my lips. Not out of sadistic pleasure for the fate of the Ming loyalists, or masochism at my own fate, but a sense of irony. It had only been fourteen years earlier, near the end of my previous life, that I had been one of the invaders helping perpetrate a massacre…
“Please, all our stores have already been confiscated,” the peasant man said, “even our seeds for this year’s crop.”
I stood in front of the nine other Hajduk mercenaries in the farm house, all training their flintlock muskets on the quivering family. I was the only one in our band of irregulars who fluently spoke German, so it was my duty to exact taxes on the locals.
“Then what have you been living on?” I asked, adjusting my weight as my injured leg panged.
“We’ve been eating what we can find,” he said, “my sons have been catching field mice.”
“Bring that to us,” I demanded, one hand on the hilt of my saber, trying not to show the pain my right leg was in.
“We’ll die,” he pleaded.
I pulled the saber from my scabbard, the other men in my band adjusting themselves, ready to shoot.
“We’ll give you whatever you want tomorrow!” the man’s wife said, “we just don’t have it today!”
“My men are hungry today,” I said, plunging my saber into the patriarch’s abdomen, “lets see what you’ve been hiding from us.”
The onlooking children screamed, the wife running forward. Howls of pain escaped the farmer’s mouth as I pulled the blade from his gushing stomach and thrust it again. The farmhouse roared with musket fire. Two of the boys reeled backwards onto the floor, the wife stumbling forward, running into the back of her bleeding husband, pushing my saber further into him. One of the girls screamed, paralyzed with fear as the other Hajduk men growled in anger, drawing their sabers. I let the husband and wife fall onto each other in front of me as my fellow irregu
lars went about slaughtering the rest of the children.
I looked down at my blade, seeing blood drip from it onto the dirty wooden floor. The frightened screams of children faded into the background. I had killed plenty of people in all my lifetimes and it often brought up different feelings. Anger. Regret. Apathy. Sorrow. But it had been a long time since it gave me pleasure. It took me a moment to realize that was what I was feeling now.
The politics and religion of what would come to be called the Thirty Years War didn’t interest me much. Neither did plunder. Joining the Hajduk irregulars to fight for the Holy Roman Empire had been little more than a way to distract myself this lifetime. But camping out in the German countryside, living off pillaged food and treasure from the locals, had brought me a sense of…happiness wouldn’t describe it well, but gratification.
Seeing the blood of the farmer dripping onto the floor as he gave his final death rattles reminded me that life was a useless passion. I brought God’s loving hand to the throats of the meek. It was interesting to me that people believed in the love of their deities most when signs of those deity’s compassion was most hidden behind blood and steel. Its when the rewards of heaven were most plentiful that religious institutions grew rife with corruption and followers paid little heed to their beliefs and practices.
I could see it now as the starving and wounded wife mumbled prayers to God while my own people, weighed down by loot taken from the neighbors, prayed only to mammon. But the blood dripping off my saber was a reminder that they were only human. The blood looked the same as the blood spilt by Emperors, Sultans, Chiefs, clergyman, peasants, merchants, sons, and daughters alike. As well as their dogs and asses. There was nothing special about-
“Frigyes,” a voice pulled me from my reverie.
I looked up from my sword, seeing Móric staring back at me.
“What?” I asked, wiping my saber on the sleeve of the farmer’s wife as she tried crawling for the exit, a trail of red behind her.
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