“What’s going on?” Gerry wondered.
“The short version? Forsaken have kidnapped the colonel and we’re waiting on Akio, because we’re going after him.”
“How did that happen?” Gerry was all ears.
Mark shrugged. “He killed eight of them, but they had an airship of some sort and flew away. Akio is going to take us to them so we can kill all the rest of them. If they’ve hurt the colonel, I suspect the major will lay waste to every fiber of their beings.”
“I expect that she will. Give me a pistol, because I’m going, too,” Gerry demanded.
Mark looked at his friend before shaking his head. “Can’t do it, man. Only the active members of the Force,” Mark said sadly.
The sound of a vehicle approaching drew their attention. It was one of the jeeps that they’d started to produce in one of the nearby factories that had been refurbished and restarted. It belched black smoke as it kicked up dirt during a high-speed cornering maneuver. The engine screamed as the driver revved the engine, powering through the curve and sliding to a stop next to the weapons stack.
Blevin was laughing as he climbed out, shuffling to the other side to help Corporal Heitz.
“Is this where they’re boarding the train?” Blevin called.
“If they’re going, I’m going,” Gerry said flatly.
“They’re not going,” Mark said definitively as he intercepted the oldsters.
CHAPTER SEVEN
North Chicago
Ted woke with a start, feeling refreshed but realizing he may have missed the pod.
“Oh, no!” Ted cried, getting up and high-stepping over the sleeping wolves. “Come on, my pretties!”
He usually wouldn’t waste a brain cell thinking about going to war, but this was different. Someone had come into their house and taken the patriarch right out from under their noses. There was a line that one didn’t cross, and that was it. Ted’s peace and security had been shattered. His ability to work without interruption was gone as long as he was afraid that strangers could enter their town with impunity.
That wasn’t the deal. The FDG was there to keep the bad out. Ted needed them to keep it out.
He’d been able to concentrate in peace since setting up in New Chicago. Terry Henry Walton and Charumati, the pack’s alphas, saw to his safety and their security.
Although Ted lost his way briefly, getting sucked into the Mini Cooper and the allure of the wolf pack sleeping in the morning sun, he felt that he had to take things into his own hands to ensure status quo was regained. That meant finding and recovering Terry Henry Walton.
As in all things, Ted believed that if they wanted something done right, Ted had to be the one to do it.
Which meant that his equilibrium was in jeopardy if they left without him. He cursed himself for not seeing it sooner. He took his clothes off and changed into Were form.
He ran like the wind, the wolves barely able to keep up.
When they arrived, they found Cory and a few others still waiting. Ted changed into human form.
“Thank God you haven’t left!” he exclaimed.
“Uncle Ted,” Cory said softly, looking over his head. “Where are your clothes?”
He shrugged as if that was inconsequential. Felicity was enjoying the show, not in a hurry to see Ted get dressed. Billy shook his head and cackled.
“I don’t mind you looking at the menu, my love,” he told her before he started coughing. It had been getting worse of late.
He covered his mouth with his arm as the violence of his fit wracked his body. When he finished and pulled his arm away, the blood splatters stood out in sharp contrast to his pale skin. Billy looked at them oddly, something that shouldn’t be there but was.
“That ain’t good,” Billy Spires suggested slowly in his gruff voice.
Terry’s Prison
Terry woke up with a start. It had not been a nightmare.
He was still in chains. TH stood on his toes and worked his shoulder until the nanocytes helped pop it back into place. He grunted with the effort.
Terry had no idea how long he’d been there. Hours? Days? His insides still felt like mush, which made him think that he’d only been out for a few minutes. He hated not knowing.
A shadow darkened the doorway. He flinched, which made him angry. Flinching was caused by fear. Was Terry Henry that afraid of the pain?
“FUCK YOU!” Terry screamed, straining at his shackles as he leaned forward to glare at the Forsaken.
But Kirkus wasn’t the one who walked through the door. The Weretiger walked through, in human form, wearing slipper-like shoes and dressed casually in blue jeans and a floppy sweatshirt.
She looked at him, seemed to study him. She called into the hallway in Chinese. The other woman appeared with yet another tray of food. Terry could have eaten a whole buffalo, so he looked at the tray in anticipation. His mouth started to water.
The Weretiger held up a hand, stopping the servant.
Terry growled. He was being played. From pain to pleasure, to withholding pleasure, creating a different mental anguish.
“You will not hurt my servant?” the tall woman said with a Chinese accent. She articulated her words smoothly, as if she had spent a great deal of time in America.
“No. I did not before and I won’t now. I will not because she is an innocent. Not so much for you, though,” Terry cautioned, glaring at the Weretiger as he flexed his injured shoulder, willing the strength to return to it.
She signaled for her servant to feed the prisoner.
“Maybe we do as we are ordered. Not everyone is the great Terry Henry Walton, master of the world’s destiny with final say over life and death itself,” she said in a sultry voice.
Terry wondered if her accent and breathy voice were part of a ploy to get inside his mind, try to seduce him, but he had more control than that. Her body language suggested otherwise, so he discounted his initial impression.
“Master of life and death? Is that how you see me?” Terry asked between bites.
“It is what you do, is it not, keep the world safe from people like him, people like me?” she clarified.
“Not people like you. My wife is Were. You should see my daughter’s ears. Wolf ears on a human. It could be her best feature, definitely makes her stand out,” Terry said, smiling as he thought about Cory. “No, not Weres, but Forsaken. They have no place here, and even then, there is a Forsaken who I call a friend. Tell me, why did Kirkus come after me?”
She waited while Terry took a long drink from the pitcher. When it was drained, the servant wiped Terry’s mouth, bowed to her mistress, and left.
“We know about Joseph,” she answered softly.
“Then you know that I don’t kill every Forsaken I meet. I don’t kill every Were. Look at who is around me—Werewolves, Weretiger, and a Werebear. We have an elephant, but she’s a real elephant, not Were. Can you imagine a Were elephant?” Terry continued to watch her closely, looking for any sign of duplicity, but he didn’t see any twitches in her lips or eyes. “What’s your name?”
Leaning against the wall, she blinked slowly without replying. Terry waited. She pushed away from the wall, turned toward the door, and with one last glance in his direction, she was gone.
“Well now, whoever you are, what’s your game? Or are you out there, Kirky-poo, listening in, doing your Forsaken voyeur thing? Well, you can suck my hairy balls. NO! Scratch that. I don’t want your lips anywhere near there, so how about suck my ass or maybe you can just fuck off, you jack wagon.”
Terry was feeling better by the minute. They’d fueled his body well. That meant round two of pain was coming. He didn’t let that bother him. For the moment, he was good enough.
***
Char and Joseph ran through the gate and continued running to Mayor’s Park, where they found the weapons stacked and Cory talking with some of the others. She wondered why Ted was naked, but only for a moment.
“Akio should be on hi
s way any time now,” Cory reported as she handed the communication device back to her mother. Char looked at the small piece of technology.
Everyone used to carry something like that. Char kept hers for months after the fall before realizing that it was a waste, a relic. She didn’t need anything on the phone to survive, which was what her life had devolved into.
She had hidden the phone in a sturdy building outside Toronto, refusing to simply throw it away as the others had.
Someday, she thought she would go back and get it. Charge it and see if there was anything from her former life that mattered.
Cory cocked her head as she looked at her mother. The young woman’s hairy, wolf ears stuck out beyond her hair.
Seeing Cordelia, Char knew that she didn’t need any reminders from her past. It was a brand new world, a good place that they’d created from the ashes of humanity’s conflagration.
She reached out to play with her daughter’s ears as she stuffed the communication device into her pocket.
“Mom!” Cory pulled away and straightened her hair to drape it over her ear. Char laughed.
“The little things that make us all unique,” she said, looking around her at the assembled group. Ted, Joseph, Billy, Felicity, Gerry, Mark, and a few others. “Ted. Go get some clothes on. What are those reprobates doing here?”
She smiled at the two old men as they waved, grinning.
“We’re bringing the firepower, ma’am!” Blevin belted out, almost falling over as he snapped to attention and saluted. Heitz caught him but lost his grip on his cane. Mark stepped in to keep them both from falling. Gerry limped over to help.
“Is that still bothering you?” Cory asked, upset that he had refused her help. “Are you here because you want to go?”
Gerry nodded sheepishly.
“Pull up your pant leg,” she ordered, passing Ted, who had not yet left. She turned to Ted. “And you, go get some clothes on!”
Gerry tugged at his pants, Mark helping to steady him. Cory gripped the man’s knee and closed her eyes as she let her nanocytes flow through her hands. She squeezed his knee tightly to stay in contact as long as possible. Without linking to her flesh, the nanocytes quickly died. She stood up after a minute, weaving a little, dazed for a moment as she always was after healing someone.
Geronimo smirked as he flexed his knee. “Why didn’t we do this ages ago?” he asked.
“If your knee was good, what would you have done?” Cory asked sagely.
“I would still be a warrior in the Force!” he exclaimed proudly, before his exuberance faded.
“Because you needed to be with Kiwi and your family,” Cory replied. The older men shifted uncomfortably. No one wanted to think they were being manipulated. Cory saw them all as family, but her father’s demands on those in the Force de Guerre were monumental.
“It is my gift to use as I choose. No one has the right to demand that I use it on them. It is not theirs to command. We live in a society of free will, don’t we? My father taught us that,” Cory said passionately. She looked intently at the oldsters.
“We owe each other the gift of courtesy and honesty. If anyone is down, someone will always show up to help. It’s what we do. If someone is where they shouldn’t be, isn’t it incumbent upon us to let them know? Kiwi was carrying a heavy burden, and you weren’t there, but we were.” Cory stopped to lift Gerry’s chin to look at her. “Not helping you was my way of helping you. You didn’t know that you needed that help, but you did. And look how it turned out. Your daughter is in the Force and doing well. Your family is happy. Kiwi is happy. I’d like to think that you are, too.”
Gerry looked befuddled. He hadn’t complained about his knee, only looked longingly at a life of adventure and excitement.
“I guess I was always a family man,” he finally admitted. “The horses, Kiwi, the children, the tribe. My family.”
“Who in the fuck started a shmoopfest?” Char yelled. “Family is why we’re here because my husband is in the hands of some fucking Forsaken who’s written his own fucking death certificate!”
Ted finally ran toward the housing units where they all still lived from when they’d first arrived. Felicity watched him go, the wolf pack running alongside. Despite Ted’s foibles, he was a good-looking man, something he never paid any attention to.
The others sobered.
“Prop me up so I can fire my baby!” Corporal Heitz called. Blevin wasn’t sure, but Char nodded. The two old men climbed back into the jeep, where Max stood in the saddle, bracing the fifty cal against his shoulder. He leaned backward and cocked the weapon, not an easy task even for a young man.
Shocked expressions preceded people diving out of the way. Even Billy ran two steps to the side and dove to the ground. That made him cough and hack again. Felicity joined him, to help him up.
“Get that idiot away from that gun!” the mayor yelled. Corporal Heitz bristled, but he immediately unloaded the weapon, and then refed the belt into it, before leaning back.
“I’m nobody’s idiot,” Max said coldly. Felicity was angry because Billy continued to cough, sending blood specks over his arm.
Cory joined the mayor, shaking her head sadly. Billy’s problems were internal, where her nanocytes couldn’t reach, unlike repairing a knee where she could get close enough to the damaged tissue.
They propped Billy up. Felicity looked daggers at the two oldsters and started to go after them. Char stopped her.
“They didn’t do this. No one did,” Char whispered, looking deep into Felicity’s eyes. “Seeing people grow old is the bane of our existence.”
Felicity looked down, sighing heavily. Billy’s skin was pale and clammy, his lips blue.
A somber mood descended on the group. Char and Cory stood together, looking more like sisters than mother and daughter. Char needed the anger. She wanted to tear into the Forsaken, into the minions, and rip Terry Henry from their grip.
“We will rise to the occasion, dear lady,” Joseph told her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What kind of damn Neanderthals are you?” Mayra yelled from the kitchen as nearly one hundred members of the Force de Guerre stormed through the serving line.
Everyone tried to talk at the same time while cleaning out all the pans in rapid succession.
Mayra rallied the kitchen crew while those with empty trays waited impatiently.
“Now tell old Mayra why you’re causing such a ruckus,” the older woman demanded. Once again, they all started talking. She stopped them by holding up her hand. She heard the retiree table laughing. Mrs. Grimes was pushing ninety years old, but she still had plenty of fire. Claire Weathers had passed on not long after her husband passed away, but in her honor, they kept the name of the diner the same.
Margie Rose sat next to Mrs. Grimes and giggled. Both of them raised their wooden spoons in solidarity with Mayra, who was soon to join them at the retiree table, where the two old women sat like mobsters from the before time.
The company calmed down. Margie Rose pointed her spoon at the mob. One person stepped up as the designated spokesman.
“Colonel Walton has been kidnapped, and we’re waiting for our ride to go get him. We need energy, woman!” the young man shouted.
Someone punched him in the back of the head, almost knocking him down.
Another spoke. “We only have fifteen minutes to eat before we have to leave. Anything you can do would be greatly appreciated.” It was Kiwi and Geronimo’s young daughter who had stepped up. She wasn’t the youngest in the company, but close.
“I should have simply asked you since I know you have manners, Ayashe.” Mayra smiled. Someone pushed the private, and she stumbled. She turned and dove at the man, winding up to punch his face.
“No fighting!” Mayra said without raising her voice, but everyone heard. Ayashe stopped mid-swing.
Margie Rose and Mrs. Grimes banged their spoons on the table instead of clapping.
“Get that food out here
. It’s so they can rescue Terry Henry!” Mayra bellowed.
Most of the kitchen staff was comprised of the girls who Terry Henry had rescued twenty-six years earlier. She and her people had worked the fields until Margie Rose asked if she wanted to run the diner. It wasn’t easy work and it wasn’t women’s work. That wasn’t it at all.
It took a family to do it right, and that was what Claire had originally built, and it seemed only natural that Mayra take over. Some of the girls never came out of the shells that the evil ones had put them into.
Terry and the FDG had killed those men, maybe too swiftly for some of the women and girls to gain closure. Mayra kept them close and together, showed them love and helped them feel safe. The FDG had done their share as well to protect the women rescued from that compound so long ago.
The food started arriving, much of it raw vegetables and smoked meats. They still hadn’t been able to raise chickens in a way that provided eggs and meat for the thousands of people who lived in North Chicago. The herd of cattle made up for it. The Weathers legacy lived on as the oldest children were the tycoons of the cattle ranch.
The warriors moved quickly through the line, and soon everyone was eating. The only sounds were utensils ringing against the metal trays. They had nicer plates, pottery style that had been manufactured nearby, but the warriors preferred the trays, a holdover from the oldest members of the group.
They felt more in touch with the militaries of old.
The new people had no idea, having only heard the stories of those who lived in the before time. They accepted it without question.
“Join us, dear,” old Mrs. Grimes said slowly and softly. Ayashe heard her and picked up her tray while still chewing, walking quickly to the retiree’s table. She sat down and nodded to the old women.
“Reminds me of my cousin, John. He always ate so fast, just like that young pup Terry Henry Walton and your dad, Geronimo. Kiwi tried to slow him down, but he was too busy. They were all so busy,” Mrs. Grimes lamented, looking through old gray eyes at a point on the ceiling. She sat in her wheelchair, barely able to stand on her own, let alone walk.
Nomad Omnibus 02: A Kurtherian Gambit Series (A Terry Henry Walton Chronicles Omnibus) Page 63