Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “You doing okay?” Bernard asked. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  The town was full of ghosts. All those little splotches of clothing were ghosts. The water barreling down the valley was now filled with tens of thousands of shoes, shirts, and pants. None of the men around him cared a fig for the dead. What would they say if they knew he was part of this?

  “I, uh…” he said as he thought of what to say.

  Poppy dug her claws into his scalp. “Ow! Stop it!”

  She continued to give him advice, but none of it was good.

  Bernard had a confused look on his face. He was seconds from being done gassing up, then it would be back to the road and back to more burning. He was never happy with the idea, but Poppy’s complaining, along with his imagining of ghosts, made him think of how he could get out of working with them for a second longer.

  I only want a warm bench and a smooth bottle.

  Dwight heard himself think and knew in his heart that those weren’t the only things he wanted. No matter how many times he’d let himself down in the past, he always tried to be one of the good guys. He’d managed to steer clear of the hard drugs that had brought down countless friends. He’d stayed away from the prostitutes. He rarely got taken to jail, and the times he did were usually for sleeping where he didn’t see the keep out signs. Poppy was complaining because she knew…

  This isn’t me.

  He rolled his motorcycle away from the fuel station but didn’t hop on or start it up. When he’d gone about fifty feet, Bernard seemed to notice him. “Hey! Wait up! We’re almost ready.” The leader of their crew talked to the fuel-truck guy standing next to him.

  Dwight swatted at Poppy, catching her on the wing. That made her get off his head and fly wildly away from him. She still cawed at him with advice he was reluctant to hear.

  “You think it will work?” he asked, terrified of her answer.

  The bird told him it would be cleanliness in all things, as they liked to say.

  “If you say so,” he replied.

  He didn’t like having the dark thought, but Poppy was right. The work Bernard and his team were doing wasn’t for him. They were the bad guys. They were evil. And it was up to him to make things better.

  Dwight pulled out his flamethrower tube and hit the electrical ignition. When it came to life, he didn’t look up or aim. He simply crunched the handle and sent a jet of liquid onto the men tending their bikes nearby. Bernard screamed for him to stop—a distinctive voice he heard above the others.

  “Sorry, Bernard. You aren’t a good guy.”

  The pleas were heartbreaking, but he flicked the switch to touch off his flame. The men went up with wet screams. Every square inch of the nearest twenty yards rose into a plume of hot gas and fire.

  Poppy flapped away as fast as she could, but she also yelled down that he’d done the right thing for once.

  He didn’t stick around to see the grisly end. At some point, the fuel truck blew up, which meant someone was going to come looking for what went wrong. There were thousands of bad guys in the city, if the dam-breaking party was any indication. Hundreds could have chased him if they’d known where he was, but he’d chosen a road that took him out of the city and toward the mountains in the east.

  However, the second he felt like he’d put enough distance between him and the city of Folsom, he pulled in front of a liquor store and raided the place. Before, Poppy had been all over him to kill the bad men, but now she warned him against having too much liquor.

  “You silly girl! There’s no such thing as too much liquor!”

  In thirty minutes, he’d drunk himself into his own version of a flammable fuel truck. It took the edge off, then continued its rub until all his senses were numb. He heard the complaints from his bird, but he thought he deserved a little drinky-poo since he’d done the right thing, so he ignored her.

  Before his blood alcohol level reached uncharted territory, he saw a man dressed like Bernard come into the liquor store. Then, several other Bernards came in behind him.

  “Hey, Bernard! I’m glad you made it. Won’t you join the celebration? It’s all free for the taking. Look at this place!”

  The Bernard look-a-like said Dwight must have forgotten about the tracking device on his motorcycle. The men converged around him, kicking and punching, shouting about payback, but then a white bird arrived at the front door.

  The white shape hovered mysteriously, like a ghost, but its voice was human and male. “Stop! Do not kill him. Bring him to NORAD, my rebels. I want to know how the Americans got a spy this deep into my precious legion.”

  What a wild dream!

  Poppy flew rings around a white bird, screaming at it, advising Dwight to run from it, but he was too far gone to even stand, much less run.

  “It will be done, David,” the Bernard-clone replied.

  The last thing he vividly remembered was someone’s fist hitting his face.

  “Hey, man,” he pleaded as blood pumped out of his broken nose. “He said you couldn’t kill me.”

  “But he didn’t say we couldn’t hurt you,” the man in black replied.

  Dwight laughed and talked with a heavy slur. “Bernard, I kind of liked you when we were friends, but Poppy said I needed to kill you to keep up with the ‘cleanliness in all things’ motto you like. Plus, you turned out to be a real asshole.”

  Poppy scolded him.

  “No, I’m not trying to get you in trouble, Pops,” he pleaded with her. “Honest.”

  The bird flew down, green and red wings flapping, and landed on his head. She begged him to stop talking before he got himself killed.

  Sometimes, he did the opposite of whatever she said. “Free America, people!” he shouted in glee.

  The next punch chased her back into the air.

  He didn’t remember anything after that.

  CHAPTER 28

  Minot Air Force Base, ND

  Kyla had the ability to hack the NORAD defense system, but she knew better than to push Uncle Ted to let her do it. Over the years, Mom had tried repeatedly to get her brother to do things her way, but he always had the patience to wait her out. Kyla always thought Mom was the stubborn one, since she saw her every day, but Uncle Ted took it up a few notches whenever he was around. “Oh, shit,” she said breathlessly when she saw the trouble outside.

  Uncle Ted had gone out to the parking lot to be with Emily and Meechum. They’d made it to the bikes but were being “sniffed” by two animal-styled robots. The tall giraffe-like shapes stood over them, heads swiveling around on the upright stalks. Emily and Meechum didn’t shrink with fear, but they did act standoffish and wary. As much as she wanted to go back inside and knock out the bad guy’s access to the American computers, she owed it to her friends to stick around.

  Several of the technicians came into the doorway, and she let herself be pushed to the side. Instead of running with them, she punched up some code on the data tablet. Her eyes absorbed the coding as she tried to modify the screen to let her have access to whoever controlled those things. They couldn’t be truly autonomous, or they’d harass friend and foe alike. Someone had to be feeding it the basics, such as who was the enemy.

  She walked gingerly down the front steps and stood at the edge of the parking lot. Dozens of people ran by, most heading for the civilian cars and trucks parked on the lot. They seemed untroubled by the robots...

  Kyla sped up until she was a lane over from the trio at the motorcycles. They continued to hold position away from the bikes, as if waiting for the robots to discover them. “Uncle Ted! Look at everyone else! Just hop on the bikes!” She waved her hands to the rest of the people on the parking lot.

  He looked at the giraffes, then at the people, then back to her. He stuck his thumb up. Moments after that, he’d gathered the other two ladies and motioned them to saddle up.

  She calmly walked over to the bikes, then climbed behind Meechum like the robots were invisible. Emily did the same on Uncle
Ted’s motorcycle. In seconds, they were on the move, though Kyla kept the tablet out as she held on with one arm.

  “Can you drive?” she asked the Marine. “What about your arm?”

  Meechum turned back a little. “I’ll let it hurt when we’re somewhere safe.”

  Kyla couldn’t even offer to drive for her; she didn’t know anything about motorcycles. That was a deficiency she had to fix right away, if they made it to that ‘somewhere safe.’

  “Let me know if I can help,” Kyla offered.

  “You keep watch, dudette.”

  Her uncle led them through the base until they got close to the front gate. She figured he was going to try to go out the same way he came in, but he veered down an alternate street shortly before reaching the exit. When clear, he leaned over to her and Meechum. “The base is locked down. They’ve got it blocked off.”

  “Where to?” Meechum replied.

  Kyla peered at her tablet, hoping she was competent enough to pull off what she needed. Then she spoke to her uncle. “Go over the grass by the runway. I’ll call off the drones guarding the perimeter.”

  “You can do that?” he asked with surprise.

  She nodded. “With this account, I have access to the whole system, but we have to hurry. I’m not sure if they’ll shut down my link, or if the link has a range.”

  Uncle Ted drove them around the big complex for a short time until he seemed to have his route planned out. All at once, he goosed the motor and headed onto the pavement of the taxiway. Meechum followed close behind; Kyla looked around her shoulder to see their speed go from twenty to seventy in a few seconds. They passed under the wing of a mammoth gray cargo plane. Then, in seconds, they crossed onto the airstrip.

  Meechum groaned as she worked the throttle. She’d made good on her promise to feel the pain later, but it was obviously difficult. Kyla prayed it didn’t get any worse, otherwise they’d have to come up with a way to cram four people onto one bike.

  Uncle Ted had to slow down when he reached the grass, but not by much. Kyla tried to tap keys on the tablet to get a better idea of the number of drones around, but her cursor became stuck.

  “Oh, hell,” she exclaimed. “Someone knows I’m in.”

  Ahead, the line of giraffes patrolling the edge of the property was much easier to see than it had been in the dark. Large, metal dogs also appeared. The tall grass hid their numbers, but they were out there. White flying drones hovered every hundred yards or so.

  Kyla’s interface didn’t show their position on a map, so she had to use trial and error. She tapped the screen and selected a random giraffe to make it deactivate. When done, she searched for a stopped drone, but it wasn’t obvious to her. She tapped a few more and saw a nearby giraffe immediately stop.

  “There! Go by that one!” Uncle Ted had to look back to see where she pointed, but he soon caught on to the fact a drone was behaving in an odd manner.

  They had about a hundred yards to go to the property boundary, and she used the time to tap more of the drones. She tried to find the pattern in where they were on her screen compared to where they were on the security detail. Seconds later, after shutting down three in a row, she finally established the numerical order. Once she had that, she was able to shut down the three different types of drones close to her target. She went out from there as fast as she could click.

  Kyla had eight or nine deactivated before one of them turned back on.

  “Shit! Someone definitely knows what I’m doing! They’re tracking this tablet. They’re tracking these bikes. We’re lit up!”

  “We can’t stop now,” Uncle Ted declared.

  The two original drones were powered down, and that was where they were headed. But other drones were coming back online almost as fast as she could tap them off. A live person was fighting back. It was hard for Kyla read the screen while bouncing on the bike, but she noticed an option to reset the modes of the drones. With seconds to go, she could either try to tap faster or tap smarter.

  Here goes nothing!

  Amarillo, TX

  Brent and Trish had gotten the drop on the stranger in the car. They pulled him out and parked his vehicle behind the Cadillac sculpture to help hide it. They realized immediately they’d found one of the enemy soldiers, mostly since the guy told them over and over that he was done fighting for David.

  They’d waited until all members of the team were back before they tried to interrogate him.

  “So,” Brent began, “tell us again how you came to be here. Are you a deserter?”

  “It’s all over, man. They’re all burned alive. The Americans came back and kicked our ass up one leg and down the other. We were told this was a colonization process, not a war. I don’t want any part of the that.”

  The guy wore black overalls with brown sleeves and traveled with nothing more than the clothes he wore. Brent figured he wasn’t a frontline soldier, and he had no weapons, so maybe he could get some intel out of him.

  “You said the Americans came and attacked. Who are you fighting for?”

  “David,” he said abruptly.

  Brent looked over to Trish and the others before turning back to the man. “Who’s David? Is that a person or a nation?” He figured it might have been a weird acronym or something.

  “David is leading us to the promised land. He’s our generation’s Moses, I guess you could say. But he said everything was taken care of by the reboot. We weren’t supposed to have to fight. As I said, I’m not big on war, especially the death part.”

  “Where does David come from? What nation?” If he could figure out who they were up against, he might be able to craft a proper mode of counterattack. If he could get numbers of men, tables of organization and equipment, and mission objectives, it would greatly help their cause of fighting back.

  “He comes from the old America, but he fights for us all—the poor, the dispossessed, those without a homeland. We’re his rebels.” He stuttered. “Was. I’m not anymore.”

  “Without a homeland,” Brent echoed. There couldn’t be many of those. Everyone came from somewhere. He took the man at his word. “So, David came from the United States. Was he by chance at the Amarillo Airport? Did he die in the fire?” If they’d managed to kill the leader in their bold attack, he was going to buy each of his men a new car with the millions of dollars in gifts he’d be given by the returning government.

  “No, David stays in a place called Cheyenne Mountain. In a bunker. He told us in one of his speeches.”

  “NORAD?” he asked with surprise. If the bad guys had managed to hole up in NORAD, it would be nearly impossible to get them out. It was built to withstand nuclear blasts.

  “Yes, I’ve heard them say that before.” The guy looked around, scared he was going to be in trouble. “Look, it’s all I know. I came over here because I wanted to be one of the homesteaders with a new wife, but look at me now.” He pointed to his uniform. “I’m only a common soldier.”

  “Where did you come from?” Brent asked.

  “I’m from Oregon, but I was living in the Philippines. That’s where I met David.”

  “How did you get to the airport?”

  “I flew, of course. I had a choice to come over on a boat, but those were full. They added me at the last minute. I guess it explains why I couldn’t be a homesteader.”

  “And what’s your mission here? If you aren’t a homesteader, as you keep saying.”

  “I drive heavy equipment. When my assigned burn zone was done, it was going to be my job to level out all the rubble. Guys like me prepare it for the next wave of rebuilders, and the final wave of colonists.”

  Carter ran his hand over his bald head. “Damn. You people are cold as shit. That’s my home you’re talking about paving over.”

  The prisoner must have seen a bad look in Carter’s eyes and held up his hands defensively. “I’m done with all that, I swear. I’m an American, too.”

  “An American?” Brent asked sadly. The others
bristled at the man’s obvious attempt to curry favor, but he let it slide for the moment. He went through a few more questions, but it descended into a rote formality. The enemy soldier was happy to give up what he knew in exchange for the promise of safety. They learned a bit more about the layout of the Amarillo airport, the number of aircraft probably knocked out, and the overall mission in the area.

  The sun shone brightly on the field by the time they finished grilling the guy. They’d asked about the David character, his base in NORAD, and what they might expect if they went to meet him. The guy didn’t know much about the top level of their invasion effort, but he was pleasant and forthcoming about spilling what he knew. However, as time dragged on, and Brent ran out of questions, he was forced to admit he had a dirty job to do. They couldn’t risk the guy wouldn’t change his mind and go warn his old friends.

  Brent recalled the discussion with Trish about how one side had to want victory more than the other, and he was about to go all-in for his seven-person rebellion. He took the man behind the brightly-painted Cadillacs, promising that’s where he’d be let go.

  Dammit straight to hell. I’d forgotten how much war sucks.

  Minot Air Base, ND

  Ted aimed the motorcycle between the two giraffe-drones that were powered down. Since the machines were no longer moving, they were effectively two goalposts to aim for as he sped across the grassy field.

  “We’re going through!” he shouted over the sound of the motors, knowing Meechum probably wouldn’t hear him on the other bike. He glanced over at his niece. She hung on while tapping the tablet wedged between her and the driver. Whatever she was doing, it was giving them a chance.

  A robot horse appeared nearby, with its chain gun apparatus sticking up from its back, but it appeared frozen, like the giraffes. Elsewhere, the sounds of machine guns chattered.

  “Stay low!” he yelled to Emily.

  The motorcycle rumbled through the defensive cordon, which was also close to the dead end of a paved road heading west. He guided the bike out of the grass, onto the concrete, and hit the throttle.

  Meechum wasn’t far behind.