They followed as Harris walked at a strong, quick pace. They walked for a good half an hour until they found a road. It was a four-lane main road, not a highway.
Cars had stopped and been abandoned on the side of the road. They looked as if they had been moved aside.
They stayed center of the road, completely visible. Within a half an hour, the sound of a truck carried to them.
It came from behind and was getting close.
Toby looked over his shoulder and saw it coming. It didn’t look like it was slowing down at all.
The three of them stepped to the side and waved their arms, calling out, “Stop. Help.”
Just as the truck past them about fifty feet, it came to a stop.
Marissa smile, Harris showed excitement, and Toby did a little skip and jump
It was one of those long, green military trucks with a tarp canopy covering the entire back. They quickly made their way to the truck and as soon as they got there, relieved and slightly out of breath, the back gate dropped, the tarp opened, and two Chinese soldiers jumped out, aiming their weapons at them.
“What the hell?” Harris asked.
“Bags. Bags. Down,” the one soldier said. “Hands up.”
Toby did as instructed, dropping his bags and raising his hands. Once Harris and Marissa did the same, the soldier swung his weapon and pointed to the truck.
“In,” he ordered. “In now.”
Toby didn’t have a clue what was going on, or why Asian soldiers had guns on them. He did as he was told, he would have believed that maybe China came to help if he didn’t have a gun in his face.
As soon as Toby was close to the back gate of the truck, he knew they weren’t rescuers and they were in trouble. The inside of the back end of the truck was filled with people, all looking scared and all of them Americans.
Outskirts of Houston, TX
He was tired. His journey from his homeland to America had been nonstop and long, but General Liu wasn’t ready to stop, he couldn’t. He relaxed on the plane, taking the time to look over his area and the plans laid out for him.
He hated it.
If his country were to put on the appearance of being humanitarian and helping America, the detention camps were not the way to do so.
His folder stated his area had already initiated nine detention camps. Four of which were filled to capacity. They were wasting valuable resources and manpower detaining people. People they had to feed, house, and guard. That wasn’t including the camps erected for those who were displaced. Americans who had lost their homes to the bombs and were seeking refuge and answers. In his opinion, it was an undertaking that was too large.
There was no inkling of war, nothing to suggest that China would attack and invade the United States. The only reason he could think of were the recent tariffs that hurt their country. Not to mention the tax placed on imports of food.
All of those were negotiable items, not war worthy.
He was supposed to go to San Antonio, his base of operation. Instead, he needed to see something he never thought he would see in his lifetime: the devastating effects of a nuclear weapon on a large American city. The George Bush International Airport was unaffected by the bombs, at least the runways were. He set a course for that. Fen Shu wasn’t happy and expressed her dismay. General Liu didn’t care. He set a course to land at that airport after circling around Houston.
When they did, he couldn’t believe it and couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
The gleaming city of Houston which was spread across a flat terrain, encircled by its intricate wide roadways, took the brunt force of the nuclear weapons.
The bomb had hit dead center causing a massive crater that ate most of the city and buildings. The outer area of the crater was rubble and the roadways were twisted wreckage.
A thin cloud lingered in the area hiding a lot of damage, but General Liu didn’t need to see fully to know what had happened and what was left.
The air was deemed safe enough for short term exposure with low level readings of radiation, and General Liu ordered that they land.
“I don’t understand why it is we are landing,” Fen said.
“This area is devastated. I need to see what we are doing with those who have survived.”
“Minimal. There is not much we can do without a surrender.”
“There were two million people that lived in this area, and you tell me we are doing minimal?”
“It is all part of the plan. If we take care of them their hands will not be forced for a surrender. Right now, the Americans are setting up their own medical camps. We are merely overseeing them.”
“Then I need to see what we have done.”
Once they landed, a car waited for them. Fen repeatedly expressed that it was not part of his job to but the general disagreed. If he was to control an area, he needed to know everything that he had to control.
The first medical station they visited was located not far from the Houston epicenter. The People’s Republic of China was present, but mainly it was an American set up.
At least two dozen large white tents were erected, and in the field surrounding that, hundreds of people camped out. This was their home.
They were shouted at, spat at, and even had items thrown at them as they walked into the medical area.
The Americans made it clear they were not welcome.
Liu looked at every person he passed. All of them began looking the same. Dirty faces, some had injuries that were not healing. People lay on blankets and in the grass. Their faces expressed loss, hurt, and anger.
The first tent they entered, Fen left immediately. The smell was horrendous, rotting, burnt, and sour. Liu took a mask and covered his mouth and nose, though it did little to cover the smell.
The large tent was packed with cots and every single one of them was occupied.
He walked through, looking at the victims, many of them burned, missing limbs. Some too sick to even move while only a handful of healthcare workers moved about.
He walked through that tent and into the next.
That one was different. Even though it was just as packed it had a quieter feel to it. Those in that tent didn’t seem to be injured, they were different, and he noticed it right away when he looked upon a man who lay on his side. The man coughed out of control and turned left to right as if he were trying desperately to get comfortable. His skin was pale, glistening with a layer of sweat, but the entire area around his nose and mouth was covered with sores. General Liu slowed down and looked at the man. Not only was it his face, but his hands had the same sores.
He turned to the cot next to the man and the person there, a woman, looked the same.
Something was wrong.
Immediately, he started to visually examine the patients. They all looked the same: sores, pale, sweaty, and the general then sought out someone on the medical team that was helping them.
His English was pretty good, and he approached a woman wearing scrubs. “These people here. What is this? Radiation? They don’t look like the others.”
The woman ignored him and kept moving.
Frustrated, he followed the woman. “I am speaking to you.”
She spun around. “I don’t care. I’m busy. I’m taking care of people you … you and your people hurt.”
“These people are victims of the bombs?” he asked. “They do not look it. This looks like sickness.”
“It is.”
“From the bombs?”
“I doubt that,” she replied. “These people survived the blast and the radiation.”
“Then what is it?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” she said. “Because they all just started coming in two days ago not long after you arrived. I guess the few bombs weren’t enough. It’s no coincidence that some sort of virus is now out of control. So why don’t you tell me what you brought? So we can try to help these people.”
General Liu didn’t have an answer.
“If this interests you, move on to the next tent, there’s another two hundred there. And take a deep breath, maybe you’ll get it.”
Before he could respond, she had moved on.
She had to be mistaken. If he understood her correctly, she was accusing and blaming the invasion for an outbreak, some sort of biological warfare. To the best of his knowledge that wasn’t part of the plan, not at all. Then again, with Fen Shu at the helm, he couldn’t be all that certain that they hadn’t brought the disease to America. Thinking about what Fen had said, make America weak and needy, a deadly viral outbreak would be the thing that would do just that. He had to wonder even as cold and callous as she was, would she do something as inhumane as that? There was only one way to find out, he would ask. In the meantime, he would move the supplies required to the medical station to get the sick the help they needed. That was the least he could do.
Chapter Nine
Thirteen Days Post Bombs
White Sulphur Springs, WV
The smoke that trickled into the communications room wasn’t alarming as much as it was irritating. Troy wasn’t thinking at first. He believed that it was perhaps some wire burning, something simple. He told Madeline to leave, but he didn’t expect her to leave the shelter.
She was escorted out and Troy figured it was to the other level. After all, the bunker was a contained environment.
After radioing and tracing the source of the smoke, Troy had a bad feeling. What if the enemy tapped into their location and was using the outside ventilation to smoke them out? Immediately, he went into lockdown, closing and securing all bunker doors, both interior and tunnel entrances. No one was getting in. Every entrance was closed. The lockdown was protected by a two-person number system.
It was when he returned to get the president that he realized she was outside. By the time he had Major Reyes put in his code, the ground shook with explosions.
Troy’s heart raced out of control. What had he done? He sent out the president into the madness.
Six minutes.
It was a lifetime.
Six minutes it took to open the doors, arm up, and charge out.
He led the troops.
Racing up the tunnel entrance he could hear the gunfire. It was steady, in the distance, and then just as he reached topside, it slowed down like popping corn.
He emerged to fire.
The beautiful grounds had been set aflame, the once grand, white Greenbrier resort … burned. The entire left wing was engulfed in flames and thick black smoke billowed up into the air.
He had over twenty men on the perimeter, and body parts scattered about.
Every vehicle they had outside was destroyed.
He could hear screaming, and Troy charged toward them.
One of his soldiers was trapped in a burning truck. His hands pounded against the smoky glass. The door had been jammed and Troy jumped on the hood of the burning vehicle, smashed the windshield, and pulled out the driver.
He died within seconds.
“No, no, no!” Troy cried out. How could he be so stupid? How could he let it happen?
She was gone.
One lone soldier stationed on the exterior lived.
“They took her,” he said. “They took her, put her in the truck, and shot the two men with her.”
Defeated was an understatement. He was tasked with the job of keeping the president safe and he failed.
Troy’s next move was to find her. He also had to abandon the bunker; he didn’t know if the enemy would be back or not.
He and his remaining men, all seventy of them, gathered every weapon they could, bagged supplies and water, and hit the road. They divided up. Some went south toward Charleston. Troy went north. He figured that was where they had reports of invading troops. They would have to take her close.
Two days into the journey, exhausted from walking, wounds failing to heal, Troy spotted an orange flyer posted on a telephone pole outside a rest stop.
It was oddly placed, almost as if it wasn’t supposed to be there and Troy knew as soon as he saw it, that the flyer was coded.
It had to be.
To him it screamed a call to arms, a recruitment for a resistance. Something Troy was wanting to do.
With that flyer in hand, he radioed his men that had headed south and then, with his group, headed to the location on that flyer.
Hanlen, WV
When Cal was in secondary school, he had a class called Personal and Social Education. They were doing a study on war and effects on society and as preparation for the class discussion Cal watched two movies. Both were on nuclear war and both of them made during the height of the cold war era. They weren’t propaganda, they were a hard look at would could happen.
While the American movie, The Day After, really was medically informative, the BBC drama, Threads, scared the hell out of him so much that he had forgotten all about the American film. Threads was horrific; it dealt with the blast aftermath and the downfall of society.
And in the aftermath of his own personal confrontation with nuclear war, Cal was ready to kick himself for forgetting those movies.
How could he do so? He debated those movies in class, he had nightmares. Yet for some reason, knowing full well nuclear weapons had exploded by him, everything he learned from those films remained hidden in the file cabinet of his mind until he ended up on a cot in the medical camp.
Suddenly, upon looking around, he was in that final gymnasium scene of The Day After. Scores of people laying on cots and whatever they could find. The hero of the movie, limping his way to his love interest ravaged by radiation. All of it could have been avoided had he remembered an inkling of what he saw in those movies. Had he done so he would have insisted on finding shelter, at least for a week. None of them would be ill.
The effects on his body should not have come as a shock to him. He knew better. There was no one to blame for his ignorance.
Back then, when he watched them, nuclear war was a thing of the past. A relic of an age gone by, pretty much a fable that would never happen. However, there he was making his way to Louise.
He hobbled across the gym floor, stepping over sick people. Victims of war, fleeing from their home cities that were hit. Refugees hoping to find a safe haven became incapacitated radiated statistics stuck in a high school gym.
Just like Louise.
Cal made it his personal job to take care of her. Several times a day he tended to her, fed her, washed her, changed her, and at the end of the day, he sat with her. More than anything he wanted to move her somewhere private, but there was nowhere to move her. Not yet. Once she was better and didn’t need constant attention and IV treatment, Cal could move her to a classroom.
Then again, there was little medical help available. One doctor, two nurses and a few volunteers. That was it. There was news and chatter on the radio that help was coming. However, that seemed like a fairytale as supplies diminished.
There were positives.
Cal didn’t look nearly as bad as he felt.
He successfully avoided his reflection fearing he’d look like one of those stricken in the movie The Day After, or from the multitudes of images he had scene from Hiroshima. Surprisingly, he wasn’t as bad as his mind imagined. He wore a baseball cap to cover his balding head, his weight loss wasn’t as drastic as many, and he didn’t have radiation birthmark-like discoloration that many had. His radiated wounds were healing and he hadn’t lost his teeth. Something many of those in the gym had experienced. Their teeth just fell out.
Shortly after Cal gathered the strength to stand and help, he discovered Jake and Ricky. Since both of them weren’t nearly as bad as Cal, he encouraged them to get up and get moving.
They did.
Cal was convinced that staying busy was what made him feel better.
The three of them were quickly educated on what to do.
Cal learned a lot, how to do an IV, change a bandage, however, the tooth loss was one of the last thin
gs he learned.
He was sitting at a table with Jake and Ricky, sipping on broth when he noticed Jake fiddling with a tooth.
“What are you doing?” Cal asked.
“It’s loose, man,” Jake replied.
“Did you hit it in the accident?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just loose.”
Ricky looked up from his meal. “It’s the radiation. It causes your gums to recede and your teeth to fall out.”
“No way,” Cal said.
“Yep.” Jake removed his fingers from his mouth and between them was his front tooth. “Just came right out.”
Cal cringed.
Jake dropped the tooth and it ‘clinked’ against the plate.
“Don’t …” Cal winced. “Pick that up.”
“I lost three yesterday,” Ricky said. “See.” He flashed a smile to show the spaces.
Immediately Cal checked his teeth. They felt strong, but he prepared for the worst. He only hoped he could handle it as nonchalant as Jake and Ricky. Their reasoning was that it was better to be toothless and alive then dead with perfect pearly whites.
Cal told that to Louise who, although tried to put on the face of being strong, cringed with a simple sip of water because her mouth hurt so badly. Her gums bled and her lips were swollen.
She was alive and her chances of living increased every day she held on.
That day Cal stood from the cot was the day that the doctor believed Louise was going to die. She had a ninety percent chance. But she made it through that day, and each day increased her odds of survival.
Louise shunned Cal at first.
Leave me alone.
Let me die.
Don’t look at me.
Then she relented, accepted his help, and welcomed his care over that from a stranger.
Cal was bound and determined to see her through.
Before it all, Louise was a strong woman, outspoken and full of life. It broke Cal’s heart to see her so weak. He didn’t baby her or pamper her, he pushed her to fight.
She was fighter before and needed to be one now.
Burning Skies (Book 2): Fallout Page 7