Deadly Wands

by Brent Reilly

CHAPTER 64

  After his troops left, with thousands of Mongols on their tail, Billy -- still in his Mongol commander uniform -- landed in the training facility and pretended to help the wounded. In actuality, he covertly killed as many as possible, even as he levitated some to triage centers, where he got to kill doctors as well as wounded. He worked his way to the high-altitude unit, most of whom left to chase Grandma.

  As he hoped, only the sick and wounded remained in their barracks.

  Billy killed them, then blasted open their chests to take their backup wands, starting with the battalion commander, who had the most sets.

  Once he exhausted those barracks, he made his way to the marathoners, stopping at the medical stations, who were easy prey. As he took the wands from those he killed, he slew those bringing in more wounded.

  Billy moved from building to building, slaughtering everyone within, until surprised by suspicious veterans who torched his stolen armor, his pants, and his bony booty. He beat the three of them, but had to throw himself in a water trough to cool his burning butt.

  Having filled his backpack with thousands of good wand sets, Billy relaxed there for so long he may even have slept. The wand juice flowing to his wounds released so much tension that he peed without knowing it. Then a tender hand on his shoulder woke him up and who should pass by but Genghis Khan himself, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Billy’s first reaction was to escape, but then Genghis did something rare: he hugged one of the wounded, relief showing on his face like pimples. The two talked like old war buddies, and the warrior showed his familiarity by patting the Khan on the shoulder.

  Genghis really liked this guy, so Billy decided he must die. Billy wanted the man who sent his mother’s rapists to know what absolute hatred felt like. He remembered his father saying, “Genghis can’t suffer once you kill him.” So Billy was always on the lookout for opportunities to make the Immortal suffer.

  Slipping out of the water like an eel, he put on his backpack and wished he had time to steal some pants. His backside exposed to cold air and silent ridicule, Billy limped along a path that took him near the Khan. Until then, he hadn’t realized his leg hurt. It surprised Billy to find a deep cut in his calf. The bleeding stopped, but the pain continued.

  Several quads watched him warily. He stopped twenty meters from Genghis and turned. When his nemesis finally looked up, Billy launched wands and blasted the Khan’s friend. Genghis, assuming he was the target, threw himself to one side. His quads fired as one, but Billy popped into the air laterally, before escaping. Billy paused a few hundred meters up to laugh directly at Genghis, which sounded sinister with his vocal cords augmented.

  Billy crossed Siberia to the Bering Strait. As he was told, Genghis pulled his best one hundred thousand quads from India -- half of them marathoners -- to guard the Strait with fifty thousand Mongol quads and fifty thousand two-wanders. Billy heard the rebels in India declared independence as soon as the marathoners cleared the Himalayas. The Mongols may be mediocre, but the Indians represented a real threat. Billy was so glad he ordered the Americans to not cross into Siberia without him.

  “Dad,” Billy asked out loud, “how am I gonna beat fifty thousand marathoners?” It may have been early dementia, but he thought he heard his fathering laughing as an idea formed.

  Billy called up the maps his father made years ago that showed a chain of islands, called the Aleutians, that jutted out from Alaska towards the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. That winter the Americans had pre-deployed literally tons of supplies along their raiding route, so Billy searched for the closest supply ship. He had it load up on potable water, sent messages to the other ships farther down the coast, and asked them to position themselves equidistant between the coast and the nearest Aleutian islet. Using the first ship as a stepping stone, he island hopped to Alaska, bypassing the heavily patrolled Strait.

  At Global Bank in Anchorage, Billy found the bright red suit that he asked George to send him. It had been a long time since the Red Baron actually wore red.

  He assembled the armada that Jack promised him and had video taken of him flashing his four wands -- with 250,000 cheering quads in the background. Because he had sent so many great wands, the University graduated twelve marathon battalions this time, rather than ten.

  Who had to defeat fifty.

  While the rest broke camp, Billy had two marathon battalions island-hop to the supply ships. They carried sleeping gear, stoves, and supplies, with instructions to cook enough fish for a division.

  The best marathoners he took to the camp closest to the enemy. After a good sleep, they packed food kits and water sacks, then attacked at midnight. By morning they pretended to tire quickly, lost formation easily, and looked scared to death. The Khan rewarded victories, so the fifty thousand marathoners, who had not eaten breakfast, took the bait and tried running them down.

  The marathoners from India chased the Americans several hundred clicks down the island chain until exhaustion stopped them. By now they knew they had been duped. They had no food, water, or blankets. All the Baron had to do was block the only way home and dehydration would do the rest. They basically killed themselves.

  Sure enough, the Red Baron himself flew from that direction and dropped several hundred video wands of him speaking bad Hindu.

  “We poisoned the watering hole that you passed two islands ago and now block your only route back home. Our ship has the only drinkable water within a thousand clicks. Those who don’t freeze to death tonight will soon die of dehydration.

  “Or I’ll triple your salary if you switch sides. I promise you can return home if you fight for me this summer. But you must first kill everyone pro-Mongolian and lay them on the beach so I can see their corpses at dawn.”

  As the sun rose, Billy saw several thousand dead bodies. It was more than he expected, which meant the pro-Mongolian Indians went down fighting. The living looked tired, hungry, and dehydrated. Nothing destroys morale faster than killing your own. Caesar famously threatened to decimate the 9th Legion, where one out of ten randomly selected men are clubbed to death by the other nine. But he only threatened. His friend Marcus Crassus actually did it when Roman troops fled before Spartacus.

  Billy wondered if they’d rush him when he landed. They sure looked beaten, though. Trapped. If they knew his Americans had already reached the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Siberian coast -- instead of blocking their only way home -- they’d kill him for sure. They backed up as he descended, more scared of him than he was of them.

  Billy called them by squad, such as first squad of the first company of the first battalion. He recorded them identifying themselves, swearing fealty to the Red Baron, insulting Genghis Khan, then beheading a pro-Mongol corpse.

  After making them give him their backup wands, Billy sent them to the island with potable water that he had not, in fact, poisoned. Billy repeated this all day with the other survivors, except they pissed on the corpses when they ran out of heads to cut off.

  All good quads carry backups, but really good quads often have backups for their backups, so Billy netted over one hundred thousand sets of super wands to give his new Asian allies. Plus those he took from the Khan’s flight school.

  The relieved Indians found more instructions at the watering hole: return to camp, recruit the other Indians, kill the Mongols, then act as the vanguard of the invading American armada.

  Using the fleet as a stepping stone to the coast, Billy had already sent his marathoners to Korea. Being much faster, Billy would catch up before they got there.

  Back at the Strait, the Indians lied their asses off, telling everyone they destroyed the Americans who attacked them. Then, that night, they got the cooperation of the other Indians, killed those pro-Mongolian, then turned on their Mongol comrades while they slept.

  Billy thus killed one hundred thousand Mongols and fifteen thousand pro-Mongolian Indians wit
hout firing a shot.

  The next day, American scouts found over eighty thousand scared Indians eager to obey. They emptied the vast Mongol camp of food, filled the bunkers with dead Mongols, then set out to depopulate Mongolia.

  Meanwhile, Billy introduced himself to the Koreans by pouncing on the main Mongol unit opposing the rebels. After destroying a force several times his size, Billy then thrilled the rebels with his video showing a quarter million Americans about to raid Mongolia.

  The grateful Koreans agreed to lend Billy the marathoners that his father funded years before. In fact, every quad wanted to join the Red Baron, so he invited everyone to a Grand Raid the next full moon.

  Billy and the marathoners then flew to Japan and his proposal electrified the nation. Genghis started an economic blockade two centuries ago after typhoons destroyed his third attempt to invade them, so they really wanted payback. The emperor mobilized his entire military and militia.

  Billy now had thirty-two marathon battalions to take down the Chinese coast before island hopping to Taiwan. The Taiwanese gave him a hero’s welcome for saving China’s cultural treasures. Everyone loved his proposal and the nation organized for war. With six Taiwanese marathon battalions, they flew south to Hainan, a mountainous island a five minute flight from the southern Chinese mainland.

  Billy met with the leader of the Chinese rebellion, and former governor of the island, Kung-ti, and sold him on the Grand Raid. On all three islands, the most powerful female quads took advantage of him as if their nation’s independence depended upon them siring offspring as powerful as the Red Baron.

  Like in India, the Chinese rebelling against the Empire had some of Jack’s trainers. But because they could draw from a much larger population, they had trained up twelve marathon battalions with the gold and wands that Billy sent them.

  While the Chinese prepared, Billy led his fifty thousand marathoners to Hanoi, where he spent a few weeks defeating the Mongol units in Indochina: Annam in Vietnam, the Khmer in Cambodia, Chiangmai and Sukhotai in Thailand, the Majapahit Empire in Java, and the Burmese Empire. By then, everyone in Asia knew of his proposal and the new Siam government lent him their entire air force.

  The idea of the legendary Red Baron leading American, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Siamese, and Burmese quads to raid Mongol businesses inspired a frenzy of greed. Everyone with a wand and a grudge flew to China. Experts later estimated a million foreign civilian quads crossed the border before the raid even started.

  Billy remembered, years before, trying to hide his astonishment when his father first outlined his plan for a multinational Grand Raid. Now Billy didn’t know what was harder to believe: that a million quads would have the balls to plunder Mongol wealth, or that he was about to fulfill his father’s dream.