Goldman winced as he took cover. Eda guessed the old man’s expression was one of frustration rather than pain. Watching the two soldiers square off it was apparent to Eda that Mr. China was faster and that so far at least, all his shots were closer to hitting the target.
If Eda could see that much, an old warhorse like Goldman wasn’t going to miss it.
The old man looked over at Eda during a lull in the shooting. “When I cover you,” he said, speaking as quietly as he could, “you get the hell out of here.”
“No,” she mouthed back at him.
“Please,” Goldman said.
Mr. China sprang back to his feet. He ran around to the hood of the station wagon to get a better lock on Goldman.
Goldman fell backwards, his reflexes hanging on by a thread. He pushed his back up tight against the barrel while Mr. China unleashed a torrent of gunfire, giving the old man no chance to let off a round of counter-fire.
The sweat poured down Goldman’s face.
Mr. China didn’t retreat behind the car. Not this time. He came closer, edging off the highway and stepping onto the narrow incline that led down to the old work site. He let out a deep, terrifying roar that sent a shiver down Eda’s spine. To Eda’s surprise however, Mr. China slid his rifle strap over his shoulder. He marched towards Goldman, his face like stone. He looked like a man who believed he was invincible. Shooting wasn’t enough for him. He wanted something more. Something slower, that he could enjoy.
Eda watched him from the dirt patch. Mr. China didn’t seem to know she was there or if he did he didn’t care. As quietly as she could, Eda grabbed a hold of the rifle lying beside her. She was still flat on her belly, slithering forward, trying to get closer to the man without being seen.
But it was too late.
Mr. China saw the movement on the dirt. There was a hint of confusion on his stern face. He tilted his head, like he was trying to solve a puzzle.
Eda froze, paralyzed by fear.
Mr. China’s face softened a little. It was a sudden turn of mood that flipped a switch, making him appear like a different man.
He suddenly glanced over his shoulder as if he’d heard something at his back. Eda lifted her head up off the soggy dirt to take a look.
A procession of light and noise came speeding down the highway. Engines roared, forcing the earth to tremble.
Mr. China grunted in the direction of the disturbance. He turned and ran up the incline back towards the road. He was sprinting with all the intensity of a man half his age, no doubt trying to get back to the fence he’d climbed earlier. It was the only way out. Eda and Goldman watched him go, but it was obvious from the start it was too late.
Five dark green military jeeps took the final curve in the road. A chorus of excited male voices hollered and jeered over the deafening engines.
The jeeps screeched to a halt, forming a long barricade in front of Mr. China.
All hope of escape was gone.
9
About twelve men, all dressed in dark khaki green uniforms leapt out of the jeeps. They were well armed, wielding a combination of semi-automatic rifles, machine guns and handguns. Somebody yelled something at Mr. China, who was standing on the highway, a solitary figure trapped in the white headlights that cut through the gloomy day.
Some of the invaders ran over to the Chinaman and barked out a series of commands. Upon first impression, Eda found their language a harsh one that sounded more like hissing and spitting, than talking.
Mr. China placed his rifle down on the road and then very slowly, he unbuckled his weapons belt and threw it to the ground.
Two of the men, rake thin and robot-eyed, hurried over and patted Mr. China down, searching for any hidden weapons. When they didn’t find anything they pushed the soldier towards one of the jeeps.
The other invaders turned their attention to Eda and Goldman. Since the arrival of the jeeps, the two Americans had been standing with their hands up about fifteen feet away from the road. The foreigners edged off the highway, stepping onto the old work site. Eda got a good look at them as they came closer. They looked young, most of them – late teens, early twenties at most. Skinny, wiry frames. Their skin was a light yellowish-brown color, their expressions uniformly fierce and impatient. And perhaps a little frightened too.
They were grunts. Foot soldiers of the invasion.
They talked to each other while the rain began to pick up again.
One of the grunts walked over to Goldman, muttering something under his breath. The old soldier was patted down and searched for weapons. After a brief examination, they took his belt and the dagger strapped to his lower leg. One of the grunts began pushing Goldman back towards the highway. To the old man’s horror, he was thrown into the backseat of the first jeep next to Mr. China.
The two old enemies didn’t even look at one another.
Several of the grunts approached Eda. She saw the hesitation in their eyes, spreading like a virus amongst them. Maybe they thought she was a foreign witch that would bedazzle them with magic spells if they got too close.
If only, she thought.
Eventually one of them, a tall skin and bones soldier with a pencil thin mustache, leapt forward and snatched Eda’s sword out of the hilt with a loud gasp. He laughed wildly, then reached down and picked her gun up off the dirt. After he’d disarmed her, the grunt did a clumsy victory dance that went around in dizzying circles for about ten seconds. He held the gun and sword aloft throughout the celebration. When it was done he gave the weapons to another grunt, turned back to Eda and berated her in an outraged tone of voice, spitting out words in a machine gun, rat-a-tat rhythm. His breath was foul, like something was dead at the back of his throat.
Eda kept her hands up at all times.
The grunt came closer, examining her from head to toe. Slowly, he licked his lips. His skin was the color of jaundice. The lean, sinewy muscles on his forearm stood on end and Eda noticed a small faded tattoo on the right arm – the outline of a dark blue dagger with a single drop of blood falling from the tip.
When he was done, he pointed towards the huddle of military jeeps waiting at the side of the road, their engines still humming. Goldman and Mr. China were ignoring one another in the backseat of the leading jeep. They were as stiff as two planks of wood.
“You want me to go over there?” Eda said.
The grunt pointed again.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to walk over to the cars.”
Another grunt jumped down from the road and escorted Eda towards the second jeep. As she walked past the first car, Goldman glanced at her briefly. His stoic expression folded, just for a second.
She nodded briefly.
Eda climbed into the backseat. The jeep reeked of piss and chemicals. One of the invaders jumped in the back with her – another underfed boy who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. He laughed, a grating, obnoxious laugh like an unusual birdcall. For someone so young, he had surprisingly few teeth left.
The other grunts began to file back into the convoy of jeeps, shouting at one another in self-congratulatory tones. Seconds later, they set off, making a U-turn and traveling back on the 93 towards South Boston. Eda felt dizzy. She hadn’t been in a moving car for at least twenty-five years and it didn’t help that the soldiers were speed junkies. The engines screamed as they hurtled along the three-mile stretch of sandy beaches that lined the coast. Eda saw Goldman’s apartment block go past in a split-second blur. Goldman didn’t so much as glance in its direction.
Eda stared at the ocean, ignoring the crazy kid with the pistol sitting beside her. She saw past his toothless grin, her attention drawn to the water. Its shimmering surface was familiar. The water had been a part of her at some point. Still, home was a puzzle, one she might never solve. It was the same for a lot of people her age who’d been exposed as children to the traumatic aftermath of war. Faulty memories were not unusual.
The back of Goldman’s head bobbed up and down as the
lead jeep hit a bump on the road.
With each corner they turned, Eda expected to see the monster ships sitting on the horizon – the big ones, the kind of boats that were vast enough to transport airplanes and land vehicles thousands of miles across the ocean. If she saw them, Eda might understand what they were up against. But there was nothing except sea and sky out there. She wondered if the main fleet was elsewhere on the east coast. New York perhaps?
Eda didn’t want to know.
At last the jeeps came off the winding coastal road, pulling into a large car park located a few miles northeast of Carson Beach. As the cars slowed, Eda’s heart pumped faster. There were dozens of military vehicles in the car park – jeeps, vans, trucks – most of them drenched in a variety of badly faded camouflage tones.
Dozens of brown-skinned men and women dressed in khaki uniforms hurried back and forth across the car park. Quiet chatter filled the air like birdsong.
The gap-mouthed grunt sitting beside Eda said something. He spoke in a voice that sounded like it was in the midst of breaking. It was funny, almost. Eda guessed in his own charming way that the grunt was telling her to get out of the jeep. Eda pulled the handle, then pushed the door open. She stepped outside. With a soft groan, she stretched her legs on the concrete and felt the blood flowing reluctantly. Her body was still hurting from the fall she’d taken after the blast.
She stood in between the white lines of an empty parking spot. There was an ugly, dilapidated reddish-brown building up ahead. A faded sign hung over the building’s sheltered entrance, the words once printed there now a mystery. Next to the building a paved pathway led uphill, cutting through a stretch of grass and trees – an oasis of overgrown forestland and a sight for sore eyes in the otherwise urban setting.
“What is this place?” Eda asked the scrawny youth who stood beside her now. Her personal guard, how lucky she was.
His answer was to start laughing again.
The three captives were led towards the large building. They were met by a man and woman standing outside the front door with clipboards in their hands. Some of the grunts started a conversation with the clipboard people, who were remarkably well groomed and clean in comparison to the scruffy, hungry-looking grunts. As she stood to the side, Eda felt wandering eyes all over her. The clipboard people would talk to the grunts, then write something down, then look at her like she was a cockroach on the dining room table.
After a brief discussion the grunts led the three prisoners towards the concrete path that continued uphill towards the greenery. The rain was starting to ease off and it was getting cooler. Goldman and Mr. China walked a few paces ahead, side-by-side. Eda thought it was weird that the enemies were walking together like that but then she thought it was probably because neither one of them wanted to go out front, to have their back facing the other.
Armed escorts surrounded the prisoners.
“Where are we?” Eda called out, hoping that Goldman would hear her.
Goldman twisted his head back and offered a brief smile of encouragement, which Eda appreciated.
“Fort Independence,” he said. “On Castle Island.”
“Castle Island?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Goldman said. “It’s not really an island.”
One of the guards growled in Goldman’s ear. The conversation ended there. Eda watched the old man shuffle ahead of her in slow motion, breathing heavier as the incline got steeper. Meanwhile Mr. China walked in silence, chin thrust outwards. His short body was as stiff as a board.
Fort Independence was a five-bastioned enclosure built of granite. As they approached the structure, Eda saw the walls of the garrison first, at least thirty feet tall, towering over the three prisoners as they were escorted towards the entrance. Eda stole a glance up at the top of the fort walls. The dark outline of countless soldiers stood in scattered locations, watching everything unfold in silence.
The Boston skyline was a distant, shadowy backdrop to the fort. Eda could see a few dark specks flying over the city, the pilots inside those specks picking at the aftermath with a fine-tooth comb and almost certainly finding nothing in a once major American city that had at one point housed hundreds of thousands of people.
Eda noticed several silvery-black aluminum speedboats sitting out in the harbor, bobbing gently on the surface of the water.
The captives were led through a tall entrance cut into the fort wall. Going through this, they emerged onto a large grassy courtyard. There was no roof here and therefore no shelter from the rain.
Goldman coughed into the back of his hand, clearly struggling with the pace.
The small group approached a large white tent that had been erected in the center of the enclosure. It was the size of a small house with two stumpy turrets poking out of an otherwise flat roof. There were a lot of people inside the enclosure, rushing back and forth at a furious speed. Their voices were hushed, their eyes focused. Everybody was in a hurry, eager to stay busy. Eda couldn’t help but think of the people here as machines, as robots that couldn’t operate at anything other than full power.
The procession stopped outside the entrance of the white tent.
A handful of the grunts who’d escorted them from the highway to the garrison pushed back the tent flaps and disappeared inside. The others stayed out in the enclosure, their guns pointing at Eda, Goldman and Mr. China.
The toothless youngster was still at Eda’s side, like a stray dog she couldn’t shake off. But he wasn’t laughing anymore. He kept shifting on his feet nervously as if he’d rather be anywhere but outside the tent.
After about five minutes, two of the grunts came back outside. There was an older man with them now, lean and bespectacled. He was tall and dressed in the same uniform as the others, although as with the clipboard people down the hill, he was well polished in comparison to the grunts. A red, white and green patch pinned to the breast of the man’s shirt suggested that he was of a high rank.
“Welcome,” he said in a soft, almost feminine voice. “My name is Walter Santos. I trust you have not been mistreated so far?”
Goldman cleared his throat.
“Yes we have sir,” he said. “We’ve been brought here against our will for starters. Not to mention stripped of our arms. I’d call that a form of mistreatment wouldn’t you? Now with that in mind, would you mind telling us why we’re here? What do you want with us?”
Santos bowed his head.
“The Commander will explain everything to you,” he said to Goldman. “I’m just here to personally escort you to her. If you’re ready?”
With that, Santos turned back towards the tent. Before he opened the flaps however, Eda caught sight of a half-smile creeping onto the man’s face. His sharp cheekbones poked out, knifelike. His was a sinister outline that sent a cold shiver down Eda’s spine.
“This way,” Santos said, walking inside.
10
They walked through a tall, arch-shaped entrance into the tent.
The air was warm inside. For a moment, Goldman abandoned the role of disgruntled prisoner and sighed, drinking in the comfort and shelter like a thirsty man who’d stumbled upon an oasis. Daylight trickled into the tent, sneaking past a set of white transparent curtains that swayed along to the breeze.
As Eda walked forward, raindrops fell off her cloak, dripping onto the groundsheet.
Commander Torres was waiting for the prisoners on a wooden platform, raised about twelve inches off the ground. Three narrow steps had been carved into the center of the platform, each one with a small and exotic mural depicting some kind of jungle scene with wild animals. Torres was sprawled on a bright orange and red couch, like a grand queen of ancient times. She was a fierce-looking young woman, somewhere in between twenty and thirty, with cropped black hair. Her military uniform, peppered with brightly colored badges, clung to her lean and muscular frame like an extra layer of skin. Underneath the medals, a metal dagger pin was fastened to her shirt.
There were four other people gathered around her on the platform – a tight-knit circle of high-ranked officers, two men and two women, standing on either side of the luxury couch. One of the men and both women were much older than Torres, in their fifties or sixties at least. The other male officer however, was younger and he bore a striking resemblance to Torres, so much so that Eda suspected they might even be twins.
All eyes were on the captives as Santos, the delivery boy, brought them closer.
They stopped short of the platform and stood in a neat line. Santos nodded to the platform, then quickly made his retreat.
Torres signaled to one of the guards standing by the platform. The guard executed a swift, flawless salute and hurried over to where a row of spare folding chairs was stacked up against the tent wall. The guard brought back three of the chairs, unfolded them and set them down behind the line of captives one at a time.
When it was done, Torres gestured for them to sit.
Goldman and Mr. China jumped on the outside seats, making sure there was a gap in between them. Eda frowned, then sat down in the middle.
“Welcome to Fort Independence,” Torres said. “I’m so happy to see you all today.” She spoke English effortlessly, like someone who’d been around the language her entire life.
“What do you want with us?” Goldman said.
Torres looked at Mr. China for a second, then turned back to Goldman.
“Both of these uniforms I know well,” she said. “So you are both veterans of the old war yes? American and Chinese foot soldiers. Yes?”
Torres adjusted her position on the couch, sitting forward as if on the brink of getting up.
“You understand my words okay?”
“I understand your words,” Goldman said. He suppressed a cough and then pointed at Mr. China. “And yes we’re soldiers of the old war, which by the way we were trying to finish when your goons came along and interrupted us. What’s the world coming to when two men can’t settle a score in peace anymore?”
After the End Trilogy Box Set Page 38