Collapsing World_Stolen Treasure_Book 3

by G. Allen Mercer

  "What's your mission?" Horn asked again, and for the third time, Ian translated.

  Wa Ming pivoted his eyes away from looking straight at the wall, and up to look at Colonel Horn. Horn narrowed his eyes; resolve on full display. Wa Ming also narrowed his eyes, but his demeanor showed intense anger. Clark knew that they were at a point where the man would break, or totally shut down.

  Wa Ming muttered something, this time in English. “Fuck you!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Jack, Lucy and Harper had been herded to the top-level of the cabin. An open loft overlooking the living room, it was not the place that they wanted to be. Even Penny was regulated to the living room, and she was only a year older than Jack.

  There was soft, nervous conversation emanating from the ladies in the kitchen. No one talked about what was happening downstairs in the bunker.

  "Hey," Penny asked, her head popped over the edge of the floor to the loft. She held onto the wooden ladder with one hand, and an arrow in the other.

  "Yeah?" Jack asked, his voice kind of warbled. He was a little nervous around her. He had heard the story about how her boyfriend and his father had died on the opening day of the attacks. He also knew about how she fought and survived two days earlier during the attack on the cabin. He thought she was a bad ass, in a good-looking kind of way.

  "I need to get out of here. Dad won't let me shoot guns right now, so, do you guys want to practice a little archery?" She waggled the arrow, as if to prove her point.

  Lucy jumped up at the offer. "Absolutely!"

  Harper's mother, Margaret, met her daughter at the bottom of the ladder. "Absolutely not," she shook her head at her daughter.

  "But, we haven't been outside in two days," Harper pleaded.

  "I don't care. There's a reason for that. It's for your own safety." She looked at the teens, half expecting them to acquiesce to the idea of going out and shoot. They didn't budge.

  "I'm armed," Penny said, patting the sidearm strapped to her waist, as if that was supposed to sooth the fears of mothers.

  "Me too," Jack lifted his shirt to show the military issue pistol in a canvas holster on his belt.

  "I'll have my bow," Lucy piled on.

  Margaret looked at the children, shaking her head. She bit her tongue from expressing the thought that wormed through her head. When did the world change so drastically that children needed to be armed to go outside?

  “Harper will be with us the entire time,” Lucy pleaded with Harper’s mother.

  Margaret looked back at the kitchen for support from the other women. Emma, although she felt a sense of responsibility for Jack and Lucy, she knew they could handle themselves. Especially after all of the events that had unfolded over the last week. She shrugged at Margaret and nodded slightly that it would be okay.

  “So, you’re going down to the range to shoot bows and arrows, not guns. Right?” Penny's mother asked.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "That's just on the other side of the barn; someone would have to pass the house in order to get to the range," she said, trying to ease the other woman's anxiety. This was her farm, and she needed to show that she felt safe; which she did.

  "But, we're at war," Margaret said, her voice just above a whisper. She said it to no one in particular.

  "We are," Emma agreed, and touched Margaret's elbow. "But, don't children still need to be children? Don't they still need to play?"

  "What, by playing at war?" Her voice was still soft.

  "By...by playing at war. If that's what it takes," Emma agreed. "Yes."

  Margaret breathed in deeply, and exhaled with a nod. "Okay," she relented. She faced Harper. "But you’ll need to take Cam with you," she demanded.

  The dog had been asleep on a rug in front of the fireplace, and perked up at the mention of his name. His brother, Dooley, was with Cooper guarding the prisoner.

  "Okay!" Emma said, happily. "Cam! Hey, boy, wake up! Cam, heal!"

  The dog jumped up, shook his ears, stretched and then trotted to her side; ready to go anywhere she went.

  "Okay, then," Penny said, without another word, and lead them out of the cabin headed towards the field beside the barn.

  Besides Penny, the others had not been outside to see what had happened during the engagement with the Chinese army. "Holy crap," Jack said, as they approached the barn. "What the hell happened?" He felt empowered to use the adult language without the presence of adults around.

  "We were friggin’ attacked by a shitload of Chinese soldiers," Penny snapped. "That's what happened." She had yet to process her own experience of killing people during combat, and sure as hell didn't want to play into any fantasy about what happened.

  "You're not the only one that’s had to kill people or see people die," Jack snapped, using the same tone. He had his own demons to deal with from killing people while rescuing Margaret. "If your dad had had another sniper box, I would have been it, just like you!"

  "Fine," Penny gave, not wanting to argue about who was more macho or who had killed more. She was unsure of where her outburst had just come from, and she mentally checked herself. Her father had talked about PTSD, and she wondered if her sudden mood swing had anything to do with the disorder. She shook the thought from her head, took a deep cleansing breath, and continued walking towards the barn.

  "What was it like?" Lucy asked from behind the group; her question little more than a whisper.

  "What? To kill people?" Penny asked over her shoulder. She tried to keep her tone in check as she kept her sights on the burned-out barn.

  "Well, yeah; what’s it like to kill people? Jack won't talk about it and..."

  "He's right, not to talk about it," her eyes looked over at him, and he was nodding. She had yet to turn around. "And you shouldn't, either," Penny said, squeezing her hands around the grip of her compound bow. She commanded herself to take another deep breath.

  “Why?" Harper asked, her innocence on full display.

  That was the question that broke the older girl's resolve to be calm. Penny rounded on the girls. "It sucked! Is that what you wanted to hear? It sucked beans more than anything I have ever done, but I'd do it again in a second if it meant the survival of me and my family. Do you hear me?" She paused to catch her breath, but it wasn't long enough for Lucy or Harper to respond. Jack faced the same direction as Penny, as if he were backing her up. He was nodding slowly. "Don't you get it? These assholes invaded our county; they nuked Atlanta, for God's sake. You of all people should respect that fact alone.” She looked at Lucy.

  "Just let it go," Jack said. He wasn't sure if he was speaking to Penny or the girls.

  “I do respect that,” Lucy squeaked, she felt tears pushing at the rims of her eyes.

  "I'd do it again," Penny concluded, her voice low and filled with resolve. "Now, are we going to shoot, or what?" She turned her back on them and started towards the barn.

  Jack put his arm around his sister for the briefest of seconds, and then put a hand on Harper’s shoulder. “I can’t explain it, but it’s tough to talk about. Okay?” He effectively nipped the Q and A session in the bud.

  The barn stood as a reflection of the battle that had happened there two days earlier. The structure looked more like a modern art piece than a barn. Half of it was burned, with the leaves and ground around the structure charred. The other half was worn and stressed like old barns should be.

  The front half of the structure looked like the high school welding shop and the modern art class got together and had one hell of a party. Metallic structural pieces from the doomed Chinese helicopter bent in ways that were not natural to support modern flight, mixed with black ash and timbers that hadn’t burned. At the center of the nest of ashes, metal and wood, was the main cabin of the chopper, a Phoenix that would never rise again.

  “Holy, shit," Jack commented, repeating his earlier amazement at seeing the destruction. He ran past the nesting skeleton of a beast, and to the back of the building that had not bee
n burned. "I'm going in," he said, not waiting for any approval. He sucked in his stomach unnecessarily, and slid in between two slats to access the back half of the barn. The others waited outside of the two slats.

  "What's he doing?" Penny asked. “The range is over there.”

  "He wanted to see how badly the Humvee was damaged," Lucy informed. "That's all he wanted to know about once we were saved, I mean...once you helped save us," she corrected, giving the older girl credit.

  "Oh."

  Cam whined at Harper, looking up at the girl. "Okay," she said, her voice commanding. The word released the dog from his standing command of, 'heal,' so that he could go explore. The dog moved away at a good clip, his nose to the ground. He was on the scent of something and it led him around the back of the barn.

  "Will he be okay?" Penny asked.

  "Yeah, he's fine, he's probably just got to go pee, or something," Harper informed.

  "Hey! It looks alright!" They heard Jack's excited voice from inside the barn. "Really, come in, and see," he called to the girls. "Come on!"

  "Is he always like this?" Penny asked.

  "Yeah," Lucy acknowledged. "It's kind of annoying sometimes."

  "Maybe," Penny responded, the corner of her mouth turned up, and she pushed her way between the slats to enter the barn.

  Lucy followed and Harper was last. She looked over her shoulder to see if Cam was coming, but he was still on the backside of the barn, chasing a scent.

  The inside of the barn smelled of sulfur, charcoal and hay. Lucy sneezed a half dozen times, adjusting to the overpowering smell. It was dark, except for the dusty rays of light that pierced the space between the slats on the side of the barn. The front portion of the collapsed tin roof blocked the area where the helicopter had crashed and where the bulk of the fire had been.

  "I think it deployed some kind of fire extinguisher stuff, or something!" Jack proclaimed, his hand resting on the dusty outside of the Humvee. "This thing is like seriously bad ass!"

  "You mean, it can think for itself?" Penny asked, she was skeptical. This was the first time that she had seen the fabled escape vehicle up close since the others had arrived.

  "No," it was Lucy's turn to be in the know. "It has automated systems that monitor the environment at all times, even when it's turned off. It's kind of like a self-preservation system."

  "So, what does that mean?" Penny touched the beast of a truck for the first time. She used only the tip of her finger, tracing a small circle in the white dust that had settled on the truck.

  "It was built to protect the President of the United States, the onboard systems can automatically detect threats, and then it can react. In this case, it must have sensed the proximity to the fire, and that it was not moving from the proximity of the fires, so I guess it did something."

  "Did something? Like what?" Penny tried looking through the tinted windows at what was in there, but she couldn’t see through the darkness. She wasn't ready to open the door, instead leaving that task to the others.

  "It looks like it deployed some type of anti-fire fog or something," Jack said, wiping his fingers through the white dust. "The whole place is covered in it." He looked back up at the rafters and the area where the roof had collapsed, separating them from the burned-out helicopter. "It had to be what really kept the fire from spreading."

  At that moment, Cam wedged himself through another set of slats on the other side of the barn, he looked agitated, and he wanted Harper to know it.

  "Hey, boy!" Harper said, before she caught onto the dog's agitation.

  "Something's wrong. I mean dogs don't act like that," Penny looked at the dog.

  "What?" Lucy asked.

  Cam looked from the back of the barn to the vehicle and back at Harper.

  "She's right," Jack said.

  "What is it, boy?" Harper asked, putting her hands on her knees, and her face down close to the excited dog. He kept looking at her and then the vehicle.

  Just then, the front doors on the Humvee flung open, and two Chinese soldiers burst out, driving their rifles into the faces of the teens.

  "Don't move!" One of the soldiers said, in accented English.

  Cam's movements were so quick that Harper didn't have time to issue a command. The dog leapt through the air, landing his open jaw on the outstretched arm on the soldier that had not spoken. Both tumbled to the hay covered ground and tussled. Cam growled, his mouth clamped onto the man’s arm.

  The man screamed, cursing in Mandarin.

  Harper screamed.

  Jack tried to reach for his pistol, but the second soldier put the muzzle of his rifle into the boy's cheek. Lucy stood still and Penny reached under her shirt to hold down the transmit button on the two-way radio attached to her belt.

  The dog snarled, ripping at the man's arm. The man yelled and flung the dog off, dropping his rifle and grabbing his knife. Cam leapt again, his mouth open, ready to protect his master, as only dogs know how to do.

  The snarl of the dog mixed with the guttural yells of the man. Harper yelled an order for Cam to stop, but it was too late. The soldier drove his knife deep into the dog; Cam yelped for one last time and fell to the floor.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ian listened to the interrogation of the Chinese prisoner on the radio, translated the words onto paper, and then spoke the Mandarin back into his microphone. Grace stood over his shoulder to validate her father’s interpretations.

  Since the radio signal was on a public frequency, Colonel Horn had ordered Dukes to work it out so that no identities would be revealed openly. Dukes and Bob took it so far that they even masked the identities of the participants from each other. The order made the task of translating a little more challenging for Ian, but nothing that he couldn’t work around. What Ian didn’t let on to was that he though he recognized the deep voice of the man doing the interrogation.

  "No, Dad, he said, how did you track us, not how did you seek us," Grace whispered into her father’s ear. She was wearing a set of headphones, listening to both sides of the same broadcast.

  Ian repeated the translation, relying on the skills of his daughter to fact check everything he was doing.

  Grace compartmentalized everything that she heard; the tones, the torture, the pain. She was angry at everything that had happened to her life; this interrogation was like a microcosm of the new norm of life after the invasion. Anger, deception, violence, fear, blood, pain, loss...it was all here in this radio transmission; and she did her best to move the emotions to a corner of her mind; it was something that she would deal with another day.

  Grace looked away from her task, her vision caught by the movement of the horses in the pasture. Her mind drifted, as she thought of a life before it all went to shit. She had a life before the EMP, before airplanes fell from the sky, before helicopters tried to kill her, before Americans tried to kill her because her Jeep worked, or tried to rape her because no one was looking. She had a life before the Chinese decided that her country was something that they desired. She watched the horses, with one thought rising to the surface; she wanted her life back.

  The radio crackled, bringing Grace back from her daydream about life in the day. She translated another line, whispering into her father's ear, and then tilted her head to look at the girl sitting on the couch; Tasha.

  Tasha caught Grace's eye when she looked over at her. She smiled at the other girl, and Grace smiled back. Tasha had no idea what was going on at the radio; they couldn’t hear the transmission. The only thing they could hear was the Chinese that Ian spoke into the microphone.

  "We should get going," David leaned into Tasha's ear and whispered. “There's some heavy stuff going on here, and we should bug out like we talked about. They don't need us for this."

  Tasha nodded like she understood, but something pinged at her, not a warning, more of an awareness. Regardless, she couldn’t put a finger on it, but something about this rag tag band of survivors intrigued her. She wasn't sure who or w
hat it was about them that gave her the feeling. Every one of the group seemed to have a story and a place in their existence. She looked from person to person, her own ideas and analytics summing them up in her mind.

  Ian and his daughter Grace seemed to be ultimate leaders. Grace's mother was something that she was still puzzling on. The Tillers, especially Joshua, the older brother, seemed to know what he was doing and was comfortable carrying out the commands. Anna, the girl that shared the same loss of her parents as Tasha, was a basket case. She had no idea where that girl would end up. She couldn’t get a bead on the other two women, Mary and Bob's wife Violet; they seemed to be in states of flux.

  Tasha observed that Violet seemed intent on keeping up with good graces and Southern charm. She appeared to be an organizer, and to Tasha, seemed to be the glue for the Tiller family.

  Tasha then turned her gaze towards Mary, and Mary caught her eye. They looked at each other for a few seconds before Tasha looked away. Mary was standing as close as possible to the room that Ian was in, without actually being in the room. Tasha had a feeling that the woman was somewhere between having a dependence issue and harboring a huge amount of rage.

  Bob was someone else that Tasha couldn’t get a bead on. He seemed like a good soldier with a big heart. His on-radio persona of Birmingham Bob had been invaluable to her and David’s existence, and possibly their sanity. From what she could tell, he seemed like a good man.

  That left Adam, the younger brother to Joshua, to be sized up. She really had no feeling for the boy, and hadn’t even had the opportunity to meet him. Adam had shown up between the last time they were at the Tiller farm and now; she felt he was probably a younger version of Joshua.

  So, at the end of her analysis, perhaps David was right, they weren’t needed here, and they should go back to the church. But, something about this group resonated with her; she had a crazy idea about wanting to stay. She opened her mouth to voice her idea to David, and then closed it, deciding that the idea was crazy. She decided instead to follow David’s original idea.