New World Order

by S. M. McEachern

  New World Order

  Sunset Rising, Book Three

  By

  S.M. McEachern

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  New World Order (Sunset Rising Trilogy, #3)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  The End of the Sunset Rising Trilogy

  Shag Lake

  For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains,

  but to live in a way that respects and enhances

  the freedom of others.

  - Nelson Mandela

  July 18, 1918 to December 5, 2013

  Chapter One

  Jack

  Voices echoed inside my head, reminding me of something. Something important... something I needed to do.

  Sunny.

  The memory of her screaming my name resounded through my head. Was I dreaming? I couldn’t be. The image of an arrow striking her side was too real to be a dream.

  I needed to get her.

  I struggled to stand, my heart pounding with the effort, but my body remained completely immobile.

  I couldn’t move!

  Then it came back to me... an incredible burning sensation in my leg had made me collapse onto the ground. Is that why my legs wouldn’t move? No, because I also remembered a hand, with coarse black hair springing from the knuckles, wrapping around an arrow sticking out of my leg and ripping it out. I think I screamed. At least, I remembered the men closest to me ran, yelling something about me being awake. I hadn’t stopped to wonder why they were afraid of me; I just used the opportunity to get back on my feet.

  Sunny and Ted were nowhere to be seen. Naoki, Talon, and Ryan lay on the ground, each with an arrow jutting from his leg.

  Three men—recruiters Talon had called them—stood about twelve feet way, staring at me wide-eyed and openmouthed. I remembered ordering my feet to move, but the world had tilted at an odd angle and my eyes couldn’t focus on a straight path to follow.

  Then the three men had raised their bows at the same time and three arrows slammed into my chest. The pain had been excruciating, the sky the last thing I saw.

  Three arrows to my chest...

  This couldn’t be a dream because I had to be dead.

  So why was I going to vomit?

  As the first heave gripped me, my eyes flew open and I pulled myself up with the contraction. My hands were bound together behind my back and secured to something that restrained my movements. I turned my head to avoid puking on myself and smacked into a wooden rail. Aiming between the slats, I retched up something extraordinarily vile. It was thick and white with red streaks running through it. Just looking at it made me heave again.

  “That is disgusting,” said an unfamiliar voice.

  Someone else gagged.

  I didn’t recognize the voices and my body was too focused on wringing out my stomach to pay much attention to their jeers of revulsion. I heaved until there was nothing left to retch and then, exhausted, I rested my forehead on one of the planks and cast a glance at them. One was a tall, lanky, middle-aged man with beige skin and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down as he swallowed. The other was a younger man, about my age, his eyes almost hidden behind a mop of dark curly hair. Each had a cross-shaped scar disfiguring his cheek. I recognized them as two of the men who shot me.

  I closed my eyes as the realization that I was a prisoner sank in.

  God, I was thirsty. And my head was pounding.

  I sucked cool spring air deep into my lungs, and as I did the acrid stench of urine and animal dung hit me. A stain on my pants suggested where the smell of urine was coming from.

  I looked around. Crammed in the wagon with me were Naoki, Ryan and Talon. Like me, their hands were bound and secured to the side rails. Unlike me, their lifeless bodies were slumped forward, lolling in rhythm with the moving cart—an open-topped wooden structure with four rows of planks making side rails.

  I didn’t see Sunny or Ted.

  Where were they? Was Sunny safe?

  A third man, walking on the opposite side of the wagon from the Adam’s Apple and the younger guy, quietly studied me with narrowed eyes. He was a burly individual, slightly shorter than average with black wavy hair peppered gray and slicked away from his face. A big, bushy mustache almost concealed the cross-shaped scar on his cheek. I recognized him as the third man who shot me.

  Two enormous bears, their thick fur coats mottled brown and white, lumbered a short distance behind us, hauling a wagon. Four men walked alongside the cart, two on either side.

  Including my three captors, that made seven men, I thought.

  “You should be dead!” said Adam’s Apple.

  I looked down at the bloodstained holes in my shirt. So taking three arrows in the chest hadn’t been a dream, yet there were no visible wounds, only new skin. I figured it was either a miracle or Doc’s nanosurgeons.

  “What is that?” asked the younger guy beside him.

  Adam’s Apple looked at it, crinkling his nose in revulsion. “It looks like...” He paused, his face transforming into horrified surprise. “Devil’s blood.”

  My mouth felt like every drop of saliva had been sopped up. I smacked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Water. I needed water.

  “I told you!” blurted the young man. “The stories are true. We should never have gone into that area of the mountains. Father Ryder’s going to be furious if we bring back a demon.”

  The mustached man walking alone on the other side of the cart chuckled without a trace of humor. “Demon,” he admonished. “More likely he’s a mutant from the scorchedlands. Maybe we even caught Yugo himself.”

  Scorchedlands? Yugo? That was familiar, but... I shook my head, hoping to clear the thick fog that had settled there, and my eyes fell on Naoki. I couldn’t tell if he, Ryan or Talon were breathing.

  “Are they—” My voice rasped in my throat. Sucking in my cheeks, I probed the recesses of my mouth with a swollen tongue in search of even a drop of saliva, but only found the thick, sour paste of whatever I had just heaved up. “Are they dead?”

  “See how thirsty he is?” Mustache said. “Devil’s blood would have no effect on a demon, so he must be made of flesh and bone.”

  I nodded my agreement. I was literally dying of thirst. “Water?”

  Mustache shrugged. “Stop the cart,” he said. Adam’s Apple and the younger guy sped up and grabbed the ropes secured at the front of the cart as they chanted, whoa, whoa. Our wagon came to a slow halt.

  “Give him a ration, Sanjay,” Mustache sai
d to the younger guy.

  Sanjay shook his head. “I’m not going near him. You do it, Phillip.”

  Adam’s Apple shook his head and took a step back.

  “Cowards,” Mustache muttered. “I’m not sharing payment if you’re not earning it.” He pulled a bottle from its holder on the side of the cart and approached me, eyeballing the puke still dripping from the slats. “Well, I’ll be. It does look like devil’s blood.”

  I focused on the bottle, sitting up straighter in anticipation of a drink.

  The cart behind us rolled past. Two men were in the back, secured to the rails like us and barely conscious.

  “You got a recruit awake already?” asked one of the passersby.

  Sanjay nodded furiously. “We think he’s a demon.”

  “Scorchedlander,” Mustache corrected him. He pulled the top off the bottle and came within arm’s reach of me.

  “I told you to stay away from that city. It’s the giant’s territory. You’re lucky to be alive,” the man said.

  Now I remembered Yugo the Scorchedlander. He was a fabrication to explain the strange goings-on around our hidden biodome, like the mine tailings we dumped and, worse, our dead.

  “Be careful, Hollywood,” Phillip said to Mustache. “Just in case...you know...he has evil powers.”

  “I’m more afraid of him hurling again. I don’t want that stuff on me.” He gave me a curious look as he kept the water bottle close to his chest. “How’d you manage to throw it up?”

  I dragged my eyes away from the bottle. “It?”

  “Devil’s blood. We coat our arrows with it. Puts a man to sleep for close to two days.” He motioned at the others in the cart with me. It was a relief to know they weren’t dead. “Except you. And I never saw anybody puke it up before.”

  Silently I wondered if it was because of Doc’s nanobots or if I was just lucky. “I don’t know,” I croaked. “I’ve never heard of devil’s blood.”

  Hollywood grunted something incoherent, and without coming any closer, he stretched his arm toward me and tipped the bottle. Water came dribbling out. I opened my mouth and scrambled to catch the thin stream, relishing the river of moisture that went rolling down my parched throat, washing away the paste. I fought the urge to close my mouth and swallow, too afraid he’d take the flask away. I choked it down and gulped for more.

  Then he snatched it away. “That’s enough for now.”

  I yanked against my bonds in a futile attempt to grab it back. “I need more.”

  “Well,” he said, capping the bottle, “that all depends on you. If you behave yourself and do as you’re told, you’ll get more.” He sauntered toward the back of the cart. I watched the bottle go.

  “You’re not really thinking of letting him join us, are you?” Phillip asked, his sunken eyes big with fear.

  Hollywood frowned. “No, he stays tied up.” He regarded me, his eyes meeting mine for a moment before he gave me an once-over. “But whether you live or die is up to you. And you can start by telling me where you got those fine clothes and”— he paused, pulling something from behind his back—“this.” My rifle. A semiautomatic made from reclaimed steel.

  I looked down at my clothes. Army fatigues made of replicated material and thick-soled waterproof black boots with Velcro fasteners. Although I hadn’t been on duty when the recruiters had taken me, I was dressed in my military gear because they were the warmest clothes I owned. The early spring temperatures hovered around freezing, and I had planned to spend the day in the old city with Naoki and the others collecting artifacts.

  I took in my captors’ appearance. With the exception of my stolen coat, which looked completely foreign on Hollywood, they were all dressed similarly: pieced-together animal-hide jackets worn over plain clothes constructed of loosely woven cloth. I regarded Naoki, Ryan, and Talon, all dressed in animal skins too, although their similarly long twisted hair and unique camouflage tattoos streaked across their skin and clothes gave them a more uniform appearance. The only thing I had in common with my fellow recruits were the urine stains.

  Hollywood stared at me with an expectant expression. It occurred to me that by telling him the truth about where my clothes and rifle came from, I might stand a chance of convincing him to take us back. I was pretty sure he would be tempted by the promise of unlimited supplies. But I couldn’t tell how big an army they were, so there was no way I was going to lead them to the Dome... and to Sunny. Or at least to where I hoped she was.

  An image of her being shot by an arrow ran through my head. I closed my eyes tightly to banish the vision. When I opened them, Hollywood was still staring at me, waiting for my response.

  “I found them,” I croaked.

  “Where?”

  An empty cart pulled by two goliath bears rolled past us. The men walking alongside that cart—three of them—ogled the rifle appreciatively but didn’t say anything. That’s three more. We’re up to ten men, I thought.

  Craning my neck, I tried to turn around and look in the direction we were headed to see how many more were up front, but the only sight that greeted me were the rumps of the two beasts hitched to our cart. With no way of determining how many of them there were, I had no intention of leading them back to our valley.

  “I can’t remember.” As the swelling in my tongue receded, the pounding in my head increased. I didn’t know if the two were related.

  Tight-lipped, he shoved the bottle back into the holder. That’s when it dawned on me that the bottle was made of plastic.

  “Maybe I found them in the same place you found your plastic bottle,” I said in the hopes it would earn me another drink.

  Hollywood narrowed his eyes. “We didn’t find these bottles. We made them.” He ignored my look of surprise and turned his attention to Sanjay and Phillip. “Giddy up.”

  They snapped the ropes and chanted, “Giddeeeyup!” The beasts responded with deep, breathy huffs, groaning in disapproval, but the cart creaked forward. As Phillip and Sanjay secured the ropes to the cleats, I noticed the quivers for their arrows were made of plastic too. They knew how to make plastic? And yet their clothes—the very wagon I was being hauled in—looked a lot more primitive.

  As the cart rolled along the uneven surface of the forest, my head bumped against the rail. Grimacing, I used the excuse to lean forward so I could get a better view of my surroundings. We were following a rocky pathway dotted with trees still bare from winter but dense enough that the trunks presented an obstruction. On the left, the terrain rose into a rocky outcrop, and to our right it dipped straight down. I could hear water running and assumed it was a river. Two more carts pulled by bears were behind us as well as several men armed with bows and arrows.

  “What are you doing?” Phillip demanded.

  I faked stretching out my neck and leaned back against the rail. “Just trying to get comfortable.”

  “You want to know why I’m not afraid of a freak scorchedlander?” Hollywood asked. I raised my eyebrows in mock expectation. He jabbed a dirty, stubby finger against his own chest. “Because we are an advanced society. You’ll see when we get home to New Canon.”

  Despite my aching head, overwhelming thirst, and imprisoned condition, I couldn’t help but smile at that.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “No,” I lied. “I was just thinking that if I had to be shot several times with arrows coated in devil’s blood, tied up, and thrown into the back of a cart to languish in my own piss while I die of dehydration, then I’m glad it was by an advanced society.”

  Hollywood gave a nod of approval. “It takes most recruits a while to figure that out. Maybe you’re not so stupid after all.”

  ***

  As the sun sank lower in the sky, snow started to fall. There were rumblings among our convoy about stopping for the night. Foot soldiers were sent to scout for a good place, and within an hour the wagons were pulling together in a circle to camp for the night. It was my first chance to see the entire group en
masse.

  There were eleven carts, each hauled by two massive bears and escorted by three or four armed recruiters. Of the eleven carts, four contained prisoners (including ours), and seven were empty. In addition to the teams of recruiters escorting the wagons, there were approximately thirty armed men who didn’t appear attached to any one wagon. I wondered if they were guards or foot soldiers of some kind.

  Hollywood was obviously in command of the team with our wagon. He sent Sanjay to collect firewood while Phillip was ordered to refill water bottles at the river. I noticed no one went to the river alone, but rather they stayed in groups. Hollywood remained with us and checked on Naoki, Ryan, and Talon, feeling for a pulse to make sure they were still alive. Then he turned his attention to taking care of the bears.

  Silently I observed the rest of the camp. There appeared to be a similar routine among the wagons carrying recruits. In two separate instances, a recruit was unbound and his lifeless body rolled out of the cart.

  “What’s with them?” I asked Hollywood.

  He paused in his task of feeding the bears to level me with a hard glare, and I wondered if I had broken some tacit rule by speaking aloud without permission. Inching my chin a little higher, I held his gaze. Eventually he went back to tending the bears. “Dead.”

  That was alarming. Some recruits never woke up from devil’s blood? I stared at my companions, making sure their chests were rising and falling. They were breathing.

  And then I watched a recruiter approach the dead body, axe in hand, and start chopping. The unbelievable horror of it stole my voice for a second before I screamed, “What the hell! Stop!”

  Hollywood was beside me in a flash. Last thing I saw was his hairy-knuckled fist.

  Chapter Two

  Sunny

  Eight days, twenty-two hours, and thirty-five minutes had passed since Jack had been taken, and during all that time I hadn’t been able to do a single thing to find him. I looked down at my belly, still flat and unchanged by the life growing inside me. It was difficult to believe that a tiny human being—an actual someone too small even to be registered a citizen in our still unnamed city—could actually be residing there. And yet this tiny little noncitizen was already a powerful force in my life. If not for him, I would have gone after Jack the moment I was able to stand up. Instead, I “took it easy” while anxiety ate away at my sanity. The worst part was the sitting around while every fiber of my being screamed at me to do something.