CHAPTER SIX
China
The four friends stayed close together, as much as they could during the march.
“How come,” Bai asked, “we are in the front hacking at plants again?”
“You aren’t holding the machete correctly, Bai,” Zhu told him. “You are going to tire your arm out too fast.”
“That is because those of us born in the cities, don’t have to learn how to use a machete to get to work!” Bai snapped, hacking a second time to clear out the vine in front of him.
Second Lt. Zi Shun turned around and spoke to his two men. “Bai, Zhu is just trying to help. Don’t let your frustration cause you to dishonor his help. And everybody,” he spoke a touch louder, making sure to get their attention. “Keep your eyes open for anything above us,” punctuating his command by using the machete to point up. He turned around and continued working his way through the undergrowth.
Bai looked up as he pulled out his canteen and took a drink of water. “Have I mentioned how much I hate jungles?”
Zhu answered, “I stopped counting at thirty-two.”
—
The army men were loud. Geming twitched his tail in annoyance at the poor sport. From the four Kings came the command to eradicate those trailing their people. The Army had tried to use air power, but it was fruitless in the deep of the forests and the dark of the nights. So the Army’s plan switched to tracking the clan through the forest.
Now, he and eleven others were waiting to cause as much damage as they could to this group following their King.
Another soldier’s voice reached his sensitive ears, another irritated twitch of his tail.
They had already scouted the men and knew there were two trackers in this group. Those two were the first targets. Two of his clan brothers lay in the undergrowth, waiting. Three more were hiding behind the trackers, along the path they had hacked from the jungle. First, those in the back would attack. Swift, lightning strikes to get the group focused on the rear so that those in the front might turn and not see the killing hits so close to the guards up front.
Otherwise, healing was going to be a pain.
They had heard the talk, the whispers, the prayers even as the army men kept checking their guns and their silver ammunition. A concern, to be sure, and pushed this from easy to at least challenging and potentially deadly for a few. However, the Kings needed the time to hide the four treasures. It was decided the best of their people, the smartest, would eventually bring the pieces together and work to continue the prophecies.
Because the Sacred Clan was patient if nothing else.
—
Shun’s arm, tired as it was, swung hard to chop down the limb in front of him. The trees were small and thin but still took up space as their branches connected, making it very difficult to walk.
He slid his sword into the scabbard and pulled around his canteen. While he was drinking, he looked up into the canopy above them and noticed two yellow eyes looking down at them through leaves from over forty feet away. “Xiǎoxīn!” he cried and dropped the canteen, reaching for his rifle.
That was the same moment that there were growls of wild cats and screams from those in the back.
“Look forward!” Shun commanded. He saw Jian move up beside him on his left. The two trackers were pulling back, but one of them had turned to run, and he made it maybe three steps before he screamed as he disappeared into the undergrowth.
The second had a pistol and a blade out, looking for his attacker and was taking backward steps.
“We are coming up beside you,” Shun called out. The terrifying screams from those in back and the other tracker, off to their left, cut through the shouting of the men as they continued to look out into the jungle, growls often causing many of the men to shoot their precious ammunition.
“They are making you shoot at nothing!” Shun yelled. The only ones who listened were his men.
Except for Bai. He had already shot off some of his ammo before he turned, embarrassed.
“Jian, we pull Hulin in with us.” Jian nodded.
A small tree bent ever so slowly. Shun had punched three shells into the brush before he could think. A primal scream greeted him. “Now!” Shun and Jian took four steps and grabbed the tracker and the four men made a circle around him.
“We have the scientists to protect!” Zhu yelled.
Shun grimaced. Tactically, that was going to be a challenge. “All face out and Hulin watch our back trail.”
There was occasional fire now. The men, some probably down to their final magazines of silver ammo stopped firing indiscriminately.
It was quiet, too quiet, Shun and the men kept looking around, trying to see if any more bushes or trees moved that shouldn’t. Shun searched his quadrant, heart racing when Jian said, “Up!”
The four men turned, Hulin got one shot off before a hundred pounds of North Chinese leopard landed on the tracker from the limbs above, dragging him to the earth. The man’s screams became gurgles as his throat was torn out. Bai got one shot in the leopard before it screamed in pain and leaped at him. The cat raked his right claws across Bai’s face and used his left to slice open Bai’s neck in multiple places. Digging his rear claws into Bai’s body, the leopard jumped backward, causing Jian to duck as it flew over him. The three remaining men turned as one and shot into the brush until Shun commanded them to halt.
Shun could hear the shots had mostly stopped. He turned to see Jian holding Bai’s head up. Zhu kneeled by his friend and held his hand as Bai tried to smile, his face too messed up to understand the words that Bai’s bloody lips were trying to form, as his one good eye slowly closed a final time.
Shun’s lips pressed together, his head turning to search out in the forest, willing a pair of luminescent eyes to be looking back at him.
He desperately needed something to shoot.
Dulce Lake New Mexico, USA
“Explain this to me one more time?” clean shaven with short cropped hair, Patrick M. Brown looked like you could have taken him off of a military poster and stuck him in the chair behind his medium-sized desk. Well, except for his right eye, which was completely blind.
“We have lost Mason Jayden. He didn’t arrive this morning and we, of course, went to track him down. Half of his house is burnt down, and witnesses are saying there was an explosion on the second floor. Only one old lady admitted to seeing anything, and her eyewitness report is odd.”
“Go on,” Patrick said. “I suspect this will be good?”
“Oh,” his second, Bruce shrugged and took one of the two seats in front of the desk. “It’s either perfect, or she’s a loony.”
“In our business, loony is more likely.”
“True,” Bruce crossed his legs. “The lady says she was walking to pick up her paper when the explosion happened. She looked to see three men lying in the yard across the street from the burning home and the neighbor’s roof raining down. The three men got up, raced across the street and had what looked like guns in their hands.”
“Looked like?” Patrick asked.
“Six houses and she’s old, eyesight problems.”
Patrick nodded.
“So, assuming pistols, they run across the street. Then something kinda round drops right out of the sky and a huge guy jumps from about a second-floor distance down to the ground. She can’t hear anything from the round thing. Then, a woman and a dog come up behind the three men. Little old lady says the guys laid down their pistols, the woman goes up, and she swears this is true, she hits each man once and they disappear. Then the strange lady, the dog, and the huge guy disappear as well. She had a car…”
“Oh? What happened to the car, it disappears too?” Patrick smirked.
“No, it flew away,” Bruce said.
Patrick’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of car?”
“She claims a sports car, maroon color.”
“Fucking A,” Patrick exploded. “Fucking A! It’s got to be that bitch CEO of
TQB Enterprises. She’s the only person with a sports car that flies. They have those Pods, so her man could have come down and jumped out. Her guards are huge.” He thought for a moment, then asked in a calmer voice, “Why were they there?”
“Running hypothesis is the three guys with the guns were doing something with Mason. I’ve done a quick check of the logs, and he has accessed secured data areas he wouldn’t normally go into. Not something that trips our systems, but odd. No one has seen his wife in a few days, and we have the explosion upstairs.”
“Bedrooms?” Patrick asked.
“Where you would think, upstairs.”
“Wife is gone, the child is home, Mason is checking into stuff he shouldn’t.” Patrick leaned back in his chair and thought about possible scenarios. “Okay, if we assume the guys were bad, they took the wife and maybe did some sort of dead man’s switch on the child, we have someone trying to mine our data. That means we have a mole or someone who has figured out who our people are.”
Patrick leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk. “If we assume TQB were the hostiles, I can’t make that work. They could easily come get us here if they wanted. I’m sure they have more technology than they’re showing. That she can do something to move someone into another dimension is believable, if barely. I hadn’t considered it, but I can believe it. Further, from our own people who have tried to hack their computers, it can’t be done. All psychological reports indicate they would never take a wife to get Mason to steal data.”
“What if they changed?” Bruce asked.
Patrick shook his head. “We could what-if the hell out of anything. No, go with the knowledge and see how it fits. What it tells me is we almost had a data breach. We have three additional families that leave us vulnerable. So, we need to pull in our reliable people and disappear and take care of any loose threads. We aren’t nearly ready to produce our tech at scale yet, nor can we fight the government.”
“A government who funds us,” Bruce smirked.
“Well, yes,” Patrick said. “But we don’t really work for those civilians anymore, do we?” Patrick looked over at Bruce, his one good eye reflecting the question to his subordinate.
“Nope,” Bruce agreed. “The sheep are clueless.”
South America
Tabitha’s Pod dropped her off back at home, or at least at Michael’s old home.
Just not the same anymore.
Hirotoshi and Ryu were both standing outside, in the dark shadows. “Hey boys,” was all she said. Hirotoshi gave nothing away, but she did notice the slight amount of aggravation Ryu allowed to show at being caught.
“Don’t get your tighty-whities in a bunch. Wait, do you guys even wear banana hammocks? I mean, I suppose it could leave your cherries in a bunch and all, or do you let the grapes-of-wrath just swing as God intended?”
Hirotoshi dipped his head in acknowledgment and went inside the house first. Ryu brought up the rear and answered, “Yes, we use the German Ein Dickenhammaker variety,” he whispered, completely straight-faced.
Once inside, Tabatha went to the sink, filled up a glass and started drinking before she pieced together what Ryu said. Then, as Ryu watched, she spit out the water, started choking and laughing at the same time as she slapped the granite beside the sink. “Ein dickenhammaker, PRICELESS!” She started choking again and had to try to stop laughing for a minute.
Ryu turned to Hirotoshi, who winked at him while Tabitha kept sputtering, “Guys! Cough…cough…guys, dammit, that shit is …cough…funny! Oh my God, Dickenhammaker!” She finally got herself under control and turned around and smiled at Ryu. “Okay, we’re one and one. I found you guys in the shadows, but you nearly killed me with a joke.”
She walked past them into the dining room. “Come join me here, we have an assignment.”
Ryu lifted an eyebrow at Hirotoshi who gave a tiny shrug and they followed their leader to the table and sat down.
Tabitha pursed her lips. “Okay, we ain’t got much to go on so far. We have three mercenaries who are no longer with us but were hired by parties unknown. We, of course, need to put real names to unknown. It, perhaps, might have been nice to see if these guys had overheard anything, but I understand our Queen was short of patience. I am totally behind this and support her one-woman effort to rid the Earth of dipshits and dingbats who harm kids.”
There was a long pause before Hirotoshi said, “But?”
She shrugged. “I just wish she would get a little more information between judgment and execution.”
Tabitha sucked in a large breath and released it in a rush. She turned to her right. “Let me ask this question, Hirotoshi. Do we need this location any longer?”
“This house?” he asked. Tabitha nodded. “No. We can operate from anywhere. Since the Queen has fixed our sun weakness, nothing is keeping us indoors any longer. We can work anywhere.”
Tabitha’s eyebrows drew together. “Are you saying we can stay out in the woods?”
“Easily,” Ryu responded. “Most of our team learned to live off of the land as little kids. As vampires, we often would need to go underground to hide from the sun. You learn to lose any fear of bugs, snakes, insects…”
“Stop!” Tabitha had her hand up. “I’m South American, we deal with lots of stuff. However, this PYT is not into creepy crawlies anywhere near my hair, or anyplace that can be considered an entry point. So, let’s focus on leaving disgusting methods of sun aversion for the history books and figure out how to get what we need to sleep above the insects, not with them.”
Tabitha was so intent on watching Ryu she failed to notice a very small smirk form on Hirotoshi’s face.
“Okay,” she took control of the conversation again. “We don’t need this location, then I want you guys to work with me on how we can stay mobile. We will designate any semi-permanent location our base of operations and I want us to be able to leave anyplace within fifteen minutes. I know you guys are lean so that probably isn’t your problem. However, I need to teach at least one of you, maybe two of you, computer hacking skills. Do we have anyone on the team that would be interested?”
“Most would be interested,” Hirotoshi answered. “When you live a few hundred years, you learn that curiosity solves a lot of problems.”
“Okay, who has the most proclivity to learn it?”
Hirotoshi and Ryu stared at each other. Tabitha pretended she could see the mental mind meld the two must be doing. It was a shame, she conceded, she couldn’t jack into it.
Or could she? It was something worth testing.
Finally, they broke their staring contest. “There are two,” Hirotoshi said. “If you permit me, I will ask them personally, but discretely, so their answers might not be considered dishonorable if they do not desire to do this. May I?”
“Sure,” she agreed. “I’ve learned my lesson before if you seek permission, it’s usually an honor thing. Okay, make it so, Number One.”
Damn, Tabitha thought, she was sure she was going to get Hirotoshi tweaked just a little by calling him Number One. She had spent two weeks setting up the plan to get him to accidentally see Star Trek: The Next Generation and now… nothing.
Dammit!
“Next question,” she continued. “What do we do with this house?”
This time, there was no pause. Both men said ‘burn it down’ at the same time. Tabitha shocked, stared at both of them, then first one, then the other. “Burn it?”
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