War Gods

Chapter Three

He snapped back into consciousness. Not the gentle and gradually increasing awareness to be expected as one comes out of a restful slumber. It was more like being asleep and then having ice cold water tossed in your face. Or a sharp stick shoved under a fingernail. It was an awakening defined by confusion, pain, and a sense of urgency the cause of which the brain couldn’t immediately grasp or explain.

Where am I? Zach asked, his voice a sputter in his brain as he struggled through ten thousand memory files in his head looking for the one that would answer the question.

Then it hit him; the battle. His eyes flew open as he gripped the side of the small bed he was laying on, his fingers sinking into the soft mattress like talons.

The gasp of shock was loud, and frightened. Light streamed into his eyes, temporarily blinding him, adding to his confusion and sense of being detached from reality.

“The war god awakens,” the girl stated, sarcastically, shifting in her chair. Zach focused on the chair, and even he knew that was strange. It was a pre-war, all steel chair, it’s leather or cloth seat and backrest long since worn away and now replaced with a handmade jury-rig of roughly cured leather.

The girl stared at him just as he stared at the chair. She shifted slightly, presenting herself so as to deliberately reveal the semi-auto holstered on her left hip. Zach concentrated on the gun, his brain choosing the oddest things to prioritize. Or perhaps not. It was easily older than her, likely a pre-war military model, a Beretta 9mm by the look of it. Definitely old, but obviously well cared for and serviceable.

“Focus, war god,” the girl continued, her voice cold, as she rapped her knuckles on the steel arm of the ancient chair she was sitting in. “You’re alive, and reasonably healthy. Count your blessings.”

Zach struggled to focus on the girl, taking in her voice, examining the details he could process. She was black, doubtfully no more than 18 years old, her head shorn to a dark stubble, but obviously by choice. He could tell that the girl wasn’t sick, or diseased, or radiated. Far from it. She looked like she was fit, athletic, and the menacing look in her eyes more than suggested to Zach that she was very familiar with the firearm on her hip. She wasn’t from NewAm, nor any allied communities that fell under the NewAm umbrella.

A savage, a feral.

She was dressed in deerskin leggings, with a tan coloured cotton shirt, cinched at the waist with what looked like a pre-war studded belt. A very long and nasty hunting knife hung from it on a scabbard, secured with a leather strap tie down to her left leg. She was wearing knee high deer skin boots, but with rubber soles sewn to them, the rubber likely salvaged from the countless automobile and truck tires that littered the world. He was surprised that the clothes appeared to be well crafted, and quite clean.

He’d heard tales of small groups of humanity that had survived the war, reverting to savagery and losing all concept of civilization. He’d been told that over half of such communities had adopted cannibalism in the years following the war when food supplies dwindled and local wildlife had all but been eliminated by over-hunting.

“Hey, war god!” The girl rapped the steel again, demanding his attention.

“I’m not a god,” Zach croaked, suddenly realizing how thirsty he was. “Just a thirsty man.”

“I wasn’t offering worship, thirsty man,” the girl laughed, harshly.

“Then what did you mean, girl?”

“Call me girl again and I’ll put a bullet in your skull,” she promised with a menacing smile. “What it means, war god, is that my people don’t like your people. We call you war gods, because that is exactly what you think you are. Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, biting back the word girl.

“You damn war gods in your war machines, flying above us, all-mighty and powerful, thinking you are superior to all of us.”

He noted the ancient and battered plastic cup on the utilitarian steel table bolted to the wall and the plastic jug of water next to it. With considerable effort he slid his body upwards so that his back rested against the steel headboard and reached for the water. The girl watched him with interest, her hand moving slowly so that her palm rested on the butt of her gun. She looked like she was hoping he would give her an excuse, any excuse, to use her gun.

The water was warm, but still delicious. It even appeared clean, which wasn’t something he’d expected.

Obviously he’d been taken prisoner by a group of ferals. These poor people likely had no concept of freedom or democracy, often living out their miserable lives with no knowledge of the great nation that had been taken from them. He couldn’t help but feel pity.

The tissue in his throat absorbed the water like a sponge. He drank the entire pitcher.

His brain a little clearer, Zach noted the IV bag hanging from the wall and the plastic tube leading to a vein in his hand. The sheets on the bed were crisp and white, thin with age, and the pajamas he was wearing were also old, a little threadbare in places, but serviceable. There were at least ten stitches on his arm, and a large bandage covering some sort of injury on his abdomen. Now, if he could just remember what the fuck had happened.

The room he was in was lit by two fluorescent lamps, dangling from the ceiling, clearly old pre-war technology. The room itself was small, three meters by three; the paint that had once covered the walls long vanished leaving behind only bare water stained concrete. The room was windowless, making Zach wonder if he was underground.

“What?” He asked, still confused, his brain fuzzy and not quite keeping up with the new information being fed to it. “Look, my head hurts, I’m aching all over, and I have no idea who you are or where I am. What is your fucking problem with me?”

“My problem? You fucking war gods and your promises,” she sneered. “You have the tech and the resources to save all of us, but instead you try to kill us!”

“Hate to break it to you, miss, but really, I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Zach answered softly, rubbing at his temples. There was a slight annoying buzz in his ears. Her shouting wasn’t helping any.

“Really? No idea?” She asked, feigning shocked surprise. “What was your mission? Why were you flying over Fort Drum? Trying to finish what you’d started?”

“I ejected,” he suddenly remembered. “From my Falcon over Fort Drum!”

“Yeah, you were getting your ass whooped real good, war god,” she laughed, moving her hands together and then rapidly apart, imitating an explosion. “Boom!”

“My name is Zachary,” he told her, irritated, processing the sudden flood of detailed information washing over his exhausted brain. Introductions seemed as good a way as any to establish some sort of rapport with the girl, or maybe even just to make her stop yelling at him. “Zachary Lyons, but I’ll answer to Zach.”

“I’m Vale, Vale Darnen,” she responded, her tone spiteful, angry. “Pleased to fucking meet you, Zach! I’ll be even happier when we shoot your ass.”

“Did you rescue anyone else?” He asked, remembering his team mates, ignoring the girl’s tone and anger. “My squadron, five other jets. Did anyone else make it?”

“You’ll have to wait, Zach,” she said with a pleased sneer, seemingly happy to be depriving him of something he wanted. “Until we decide what to do with you, all you need to know is you are a guest of the Drummers.”

“A guest?” Zach asked, not recalling that tactic being taught in Escape and Evasion training. What he had been taught though was that if you fell into anyone’s custody that wasn’t from NewAm, then you were in the hands of an enemy. “You mean a prisoner?”

“Fuck, ain’t you the smart one,” Vale laughed again, a mean, spiteful sound, filled with hate. “Yeah shithead, you’re a prisoner. The first war god we’ve had as a quest in a long time. Want to know what we did to the last fucker that we caught?”

“Not really,” he said flatly, growing tired with the conversation. He’d already accepted more insults and threats from this one person than he had from anyone else in his entire life. The only reason he hadn’t tried to kill her was that he needed to determine if staying alive was more important than avenging the insult to his honour. He needed to first respect the lives of his squadron, and find them, and rescue them. If they were dead, he needed to report to his superiors, to explain what had happened and what he had seen. It was critical they be informed that a Russian-Chinese fighter jet, maybe more than one, had attacked them. Nothing was more important than that information being delivered.

If he was absolutely certain he could kill this child to avenge the insult to his honour and still carry out this new and very important mission, he would have done so. He was still weak, still disoriented. Killing her was not a certainty. He needed to wait, bide his time, heal.

“We skinned him, one little strip at a time,” she told him, smiling. “Fed each little piece of skin to our dogs.”

“That’s enough, Vale!” A woman stated with a voice as hard as steel.

Vale scowled at the woman who stood in the doorway, grabbed the empty plastic pitcher of water and stormed from the room.

“I’m sorry,” the woman continued as she walked into the room. “The younger generation doesn’t have the same perspective as those of us who were alive a little closer to the war.”

Zach looked at the woman, his eyes widening slightly. While true that life in the wastelands tended to age people there was little doubt that this woman was well over seventy years of age. Possibly old enough to actually remember pre-war America, the war that took everything away from everyone.

“I’m Liz,” she said, lowering herself carefully into the chair that Vale had occupied. “I was born Elizabeth Howard, before the war, but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

Zach gave her a puzzled look as she seemed to laugh at some private joke. She shook her head, amused, as she pulled a small flask from her worn leather coat and offered it to him.

“The battle you were involved in has many of us a little confused,” she told him. “Tell me, is it normal for your people to attack one another?”

Zach twisted the steel cap on the small flask, sniffing at the contents. The smell of alcohol, good quality stuff, tickled his nose. He took an experimental sip, his eyes widening.

“Yeah, 75 year old scotch, bottled the same year I was born,” Liz said with a certain reverence. “I keep a private stash, an entire liquor store, one of the perks of being among the ‘most Elderly of the Elders.’”

“You were alive before the war?” Zach stated more than he asked. There were very few people still alive who could remember the pre-war America. In Eads they were accorded the status of mythical heroes.

“Yeah,” Liz said simply, adding a shrug as she thought about it. “No biggie. I just got real, real lucky. Probably helped that I wasn’t a Trump supporter, good karma and all that.”

Zach listened, trying to understand, but most of what she’d said was meaningless to him.

He took a stronger pull from the flask, savouring the taste. Military personnel weren’t supposed to imbibe, but there was a very thriving market in Eads that provided all things for all people, despite government attempts to prevent it.

“We hadn’t intended to attack each other,” he admitted, deciding that sharing that sort of information with feral humans living at such a low technological level was hardly going to place NewAm at any risk. Besides, the appearance of cooperation worked both ways. His captors were more likely to give away information if they thought he was being fully cooperative. He needed to find out about his team mates. “Something went very wrong.”

“Understatement of the year there, dude,” Liz laughed, using archaic terms Zach was only vaguely familiar with. “Like, Houston, we have a problem, level of understatement.”

“Did anyone else survive?” Zach asked, as nonchalantly as possible, passing the flask back to Liz. For all that he’d understood of her last sentence she might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Then again, maybe she was.

“Well, I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Liz admitted, taking a drink without bothering to sanitize the mouth of the flask. She chuckled at the small gasp that escaped Zach’s lips.“We rescued three survivors from your little air battle.”

Zach sucked in a breath, holding it. Only three survivors?

“Who?”

“Well, I can’t tell you that,” Liz admitted, taking another stiff pull on the flask. “I’d like to, but you are the first to wake up. The others were pretty banged up, and we have no way of knowing who they are until they can tell us.”

“Take me to them,” he suggested but with enough steel in his voice to make it clear he wasn’t simply asking.

“Well, those folks are in intensive care at the moment,” Liz told him, frowning slightly, seemingly amused by his tone. “We have a little rule here, allowing only family members to visit the really sick folks. Doctor’s orders.”

“I understand,” Zach told her, considering his options. “Fine, let me talk to the doctor.”

“You are, kid,” Liz told him with a smile, amused by the surprised look on his face. “You think I managed to survive this long because of my good looks? I had a skill set, son, and one that made people keen to protect me. They kept me alive, I would always do my best to keep them alive.”

“I’m sorry,” Zach told her, somewhat embarrassed. “We don’t have very many old people where I come from.”

“Common enough story,” she shrugged, though Zach caught a glimpse of something in her eyes. Regret? Remorse? “There wasn’t a lot of anything in the early days after the war, certainly not enough to care for people that couldn’t contribute; the elderly, the sick, the differently enabled. Food shortages, no medicine, no doctors or far too few, no electricity, everything falling apart and the strong killing the weak to get what little remained. They were the first to go.”

Liz straightened her sleeve with one hand, a nervous gesture.

“We’re still not doing a very good job of it,” she continued, looking past Zach’s shoulder at the wall behind him. “That’s part of the reason why the Drummers have developed a severe hate-on for your people.”

“We could help now,” he assured her, trying to demonstrate that it was in their interests to be friends. “We have food, medicine, even weapons that we could give you. There are entire communities joing New America, benefitting from our protection.”

“Really?” Liz raised an eyebrow, a bitter smile on her lips. “We tried to arrange a meeting about two years ago with your people. We built ourselves a pretty powerful radio transmitter, and a tall antenna to receive, and got a response from this organization in Portland. New America they called themselves, your people. They made all sorts of promises, just like yours, and asked where they could meet up with us to deliver all these goodies.”

“What happened?”

“We were cautious, arranged for the meeting to happen a good distance away from here,” she explained, her eyes hooded and dark. “A delegation went, some of our leaders, our best fighters, a full diplomatic mission to establish ties. Your people showed up in machines, killed most of the people we’d sent, took the others prisoner and flew off. Three of the forty people we sent made it home.”

“My people wouldn’t have done that,” Zach said firmly. Part of the 224th mission was to find human survivors in their area of operations and report that to higher command. They all knew that New American could not restore the United States without bringing all Americans together. That was the slogan, One America, One people.

“Look, kid, you saying it isn’t so isn’t going to change anyone’s mind around here,” Liz told him with a cold shrug. “Vale’s father was one of the one’s taken prisoner, and she is one of our reasonable people. You saw what she’d like to do to you. The only reason you’re here is because the group of gatherers that found you belongs to one of our Pacifist sects, a faction with a fair bit of pull on the Council.”

“And if I hadn’t been found by pacifists?” The word was unusual to him, though he’d heard it used a few times in school. It had been the pacifists that had undermined the American government, diminishing America’s power and what lead to the war.

“We don’t murder helpless people,” Liz snapped at him, offended. “If that is what you were thinking.”

“Neither does New America.”

“So you say, kid, so you say,” Liz said as she tilted her head, the cracking of her neck a strange counterpoint to her statement.

Liz stood up slowly, stepping next to Zach, and began to carefully remove the IV peripheral venous catheter from his hand. She wasn’t being careful because she wanted to avoid causing him pain. She was trying to remove the PVC without damaging it.

“One thing I’ve learned, and you should pay attention to me here, kid,” Liz told him as she handed him a strip of cloth to press on the pearl of blood forming on the top of his hand. “As you go through life you discover that a lot of the things you thought you knew for certain when you were young, turn out to be not quite so certain as you grow old. For instance, back in 2019 I was certain I was going to have a successful and lucrative medical career, possibly as Head Surgeon at Johns Hopkins. Now ask me how that turned out.”

The door to the room opened and Vale peered in. Her anger against Zach not diminished in the least.

“The Council of Three is ready to see him now,” she announced, a cold smile lighting her face as she glanced at Zach.

Standing behind her Zach could see four men. One of them was carrying a set of handcuffs linked by heavy chain to ankle bracelets. Vale pulled a black hood from her belt.

“Just a few preps for the journey first,” she chuckled as she stepped into the room.