I see the training is paying off.
“Didn’t stick the landing, but I give that a six.”
Hearing the clatter of footsteps approaching from the east, she grabbed Wilks by the collar and dragged him westward between the building and a row of bushes. He was in sorry shape by this time. The fall might have broken his leg. She wrapped his arm around her shoulder and dragged him down Constitution Avenue. There was a flash and the pop of gunfire. Jill threw herself to the ground and returned fire. A squad of Genjix appeared across the street and closed in. There must be a Penetra van nearby. She was a sitting duck. Then she saw one of the Genjix agents approach with a small round object in his hand.
Flash incendiary. Hold until range. Open fire during throwing motion.
She opened fire right when he was about to toss it at her, taking him out at the leg. A moment later, there was a blinding flash and then another hail of bullets ripped through the air right above them.
“You alright, James?” she whispered.
“Ain’t the first time I’ve been shot at,” he replied.
The Genjix closed in. By her count, there must have been seven or so. Far too many to deal with. At best, she could take out two before they pinpointed her location. Still, two was better than none. Jill tensed and waited for them to get in range. Thirty meters. Twenty-five. Just as they were within twenty meters, two of the Genjix suddenly dropped. The squad turned to engage the new threat. Jill got up and fired as well. The five remaining Genjix agents didn’t stand a chance in the crossfire. A new figure sprinted toward her from her left. She dropped to one knee and aimed.
Marco held out his hands. “Whoa, whoa, it’s me. We have to move. Bogies converging on our position. The entire beltway is under Penetra surveillance.” He looked down at Wilks. “Hello, James, need a hand?”
Wilks’ entire body was shaking. A veteran of both Vietnam and Korea, he didn’t scare easily, so he had to be in a lot of pain. “You’re part of these shenanigans?” he demanded. “I should have figured.”
Marco picked the large man up by the waist and started to half-carry and half-drag him as if he were a piece of luggage. “We’re still on for golf, right?”
“I’ll pay for the beer if we survive,” Wilks grinned.
Jill rolled her eyes. They got off the main streets and navigated through the smaller ones leading out of the city. The night was eerily loud for the capital at two in the morning. The center of the city, where the government buildings were located, had very little night life surrounding it. Usually, everything inside 495 shut down early, leaving the Hill a semi-ghost town. Tonight, though, felt more like the Fourth of July. She could hear continuous pops in the distance, followed by low rumbles that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than low-grade incendiaries. The capital was a battle zone tonight.
“We need to find a place to hole up outside of Capital Beltway,” Marco was saying, snapping her back to reality.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Have you spoken with Paula?”
“She’s out trying to bring people in,” he replied. “We’re stretched thin enough as it is and getting massacred out here. Last count was seventy confirmed casualties. The rest we aren’t sure about.”
Seventy. That is twenty percent of our influence in the government. That means we just lost the United States.
Jill stopped dead in her tracks. The States were lost. How could this happen? She stared in stunned silence at the lone flag waving in the night sky next to a government building. The Genjix controlled the United States now.
Marco turned around and snapped his fingers in front of her face. “We have to move. There are more Genjix teams filtering in by the second. Paula is working on establishing a rendezvous point. Until then, we need to stay low and out of danger.”
“What about Command operations?” she asked.
He shook his head. “The first place attacked.”
Jill gasped. “The Keeper?”
Marco exhaled, the usual twinkle in his eye gone. “She left for European Command last week. Paula was able to take the helm and fight off the first Genjix wave, and then they escaped through the manufacturing district. I’m waiting for confirmation on a rally point. The existing safe houses here are all considered compromised.”
“We have nowhere to hide?” Jill said. “Wilks can’t stay on his feet much longer.”
Marco shook his head. “We’re in a bad state. Without a place to regroup to and Penetra scanners everywhere, we’re sitting ducks. We need to avoid all major cities for a few days until Paula figures things out. Unfortunately, that’s where all our safe houses are.”
“Wait,” Jill said quickly. “I know a place. Can you get a word out to Paula and the rest of our people?” He nodded. “Good,” she picked up her pace. “I guess my good for nothing husband is good for something after all.”
THIRTY-SIX
THE FALL
There were others like me who wandered the land, searching for greatness. While most were unsuccessful – finding the special humans who have the power to change history was as difficult as finding Quasing during the Gathering – a few were successful, though sometimes with unexpected results. Huchel and Camr succeeded with King Solomon and Hammurabi. With Alexander the Great, Cualm showed us what could happened if we lost control of a host with unbridled ambition. Both Zoras’ hosts, Nero and Caesar, were cases where the Quasing lost control as well.
Tao
The trip around the South China Sea at the freighter’s snail-paced twenty knots became a mini-vacation of sorts. Though Roen had paid enough to get them all housed at the Ritz Carlton for a year, they were given cargo containers down in the hold as apartments. It seemed that in the distant past, Dylan had indeed dated Manny’s niece, and the two men had once been close and dabbled in cockfighting together. Now, Manny’s niece was a nun and Dylan was on Manny’s permanent shit-list. However, Dylan had saved Manny’s life more than once from bad wagers in the arena, so the old captain put up with him.
Roen and his men spent much of their days practicing their golf swings on the makeshift driving range at the aft starboard side. This was the first real downtime the team had had since they arrived in Taiwan, and the men’s individual talents were coming out of the woodwork. Jim had been an opera major and a pretty decent baritone, Ray had once been a semi-pro figure skater, Grant had graduated from culinary school, Faust had made it to day four of one of the World Series of Poker tournaments, Hutch was a Golden Gloves amateur champion, and one would never guess, but skinny Stan could drive the golf ball nearly three hundred meters. Roen had no idea why Stan bothered being a Prophus agent. If Roen had that kind of skill, he’d ditch Tao and join the PGA in a heartbeat.
Thank you for the loyalty and support.
“I’ve seen the chicks pro golfers nab. You still owe me a Brazilian lingerie model.”
When not working on their golf swings and swilling lambanog, a liquor brewed in the engine room, the team passed the time sparring. Their friendly fights became so popular that it soon became the ship’s main attraction. Grant had to make a fight schedule to accommodate the crew and even set up a relatively complicated system for them to bet on. Within two days, the team was able to amass a tidy enough sum to pay for all the lambanog they could drink.
What also impressed Roen during these sparring sessions was the skill his men had in hand-to-hand combat. These weren’t the green grunts that he had encountered guarding doors at Command. These were the best shock troops the Prophus had to offer. Roen wasn’t about to admit that any of these guys were better than him, and all the betting odds backed his confidence, but all of them had at one point given him a run for his money. There were quite a few upsets during the fights, from Ray with his flashy dance-like moves to Stan’s old-school Chinese Hong Fist to Grant’s “I’m impervious to pain” Neanderthal beat-down. It wasn’t pretty, and he ate punches by the bunch, but once Grant got his paws on him, it was pretty much over. Now Roen knew why the rest of the guys called him Zangief. Hutch, on the other hand, gave him the most problems with his boxing. His odds against Roen were nearly one-to-one.