Allie's War Season One (80 page)

“I cannot believe he wanted to do this outside,” the Secretary of State muttered to Ethan’s right, within the girl’s earshot.

The Secretary of Defense stood beside him, wearing a navy uniform covered in medals. She smiled, flipping back long, dark, mahogany-colored hair.

“It plays well for the press,” she said. “Especially with him injured.”

“Do we know yet, who is responsible?”

Her well-formed lips curled a little. “The same fringe group Caine was working with, we think. Wellington’s already declared war. Of course, it won’t be official until tonight.”

The Secretary of Defense’s eyes flashed a pale yellow as she glanced over the crowd, pausing to wink at the little girl before she smiled at Ethan.

“Caine did us a favor,” she added, giving the other man a disparaging look. “If nothing else, it is clear now, what we must do to survive.”

“Really?” The Secretary of State said. “...And just what is that, Jarvesch?”

“Exterminate the enemy,” she said. “Before they are strong enough to do it to us.”

Beyond them, Ethan Wellington continued to speak into the small but powerful microphone, using the words that would make him the next President of the United States.

“...will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office in which I am about to enter,” he said forcefully.

“So help me, God,” the Justice prompted, her hard eyes smiling faintly.

The crowd erupted behind him in emotional cheering. The feed cameras ran, capturing faces and waving hands, tears wiped from the eyes of watching humans, banners waving back and forth as Ethan gazed out over the Washington Monument.

In the distance, tanks could be seen parked at either end of the mall.

Jets flashed in the sunlight overhead.

He had made it, in spite of everything.

He had reached for it, and he had finally made it.

Ethan smiled, and the cheering grew louder still, more emotional.

“...So help me, God,” he said.

SHIELD

Allie’s War Book Two

Dedicated to

The man dancing in the stars

(you know who you are)

“The time is still not ripe. But through the blood sacrifice, it should ripen. So long as it is possible to murder the brother instead of oneself, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. But anything else will not ripen humanity. Hence all that takes place in these days must also be, so that the renewal can come. Since the source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of new life.”

~ Carl Jung,
The Red Book
 

1

WAR

I TRY TO view death objectively. Everything dies.

Humans die...that has always been the case. Trees burn. Countries go to war with one another for reasons more terrible than the wars themselves. The world is insane in a way. All of us are insane. People don’t talk about it, but we all feel it. That the insanity depicts itself as mundane doesn’t make it any less insane. I know more now, about how humans have been manipulated for years, at least since the end of the first World War.

I also know that none of us is as innocent as we pretend. We affect one another, whether we mean to or not.

But this time, it’s not abstract.

This time, I had a direct hand in starting what I’m looking at now.

“HOLD HIM!” CHANDRE caught another infiltrator by the neck.

Her braids whipped behind her like a dark tail as she slammed the smaller, Tibetan-looking female into a wall, knocking down wall hangings and flecks of blue paint. She shoved the barrel of a gun into the hollow of the woman’s throat, aiming upwards, throwing the image of her intent into the other’s mind so there’d be no mistake.

In nearly the same instant, Chandre jerked her eyes to me.

“Stay back! I mean it, Bridge!”

I held a gun myself. You wouldn’t know it by the way they were all treating me. I had six babysitters, all of them sure they were doing god’s work, protecting me from harm. Being leader wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Even so, I trained my gun on the other seer in the room, a male, even as Maygar, Dorje, Brevin, Alex and Cass came in behind me. I knew Chandre didn’t want me there at all. All of them, even Cass, would rather if I’d stayed on the plane. But I couldn’t simply sit there, imagining my instructions carried out as if I’d ordered a pizza. I pushed my calico mane of hair out of my face, wishing I’d tied it back with one of the leather thongs Cass had used.

I spoke Prexci, the only language all seers know.

“Where is it?” I pointed the gun at the male infiltrator’s chest.
We know you’re holding it for him,
I said directly into his mind.
You can come with us. We’ll make sure he can’t retaliate. We can protect you...

The seer laughed. A young male, he had high cheekbones and violet eyes he probably wore contacts over when working with humans. He spat in my direction, not bothering with words to respond to my offer. He wore fatigues, I noticed, the uniform of Russian infantry.

I took a step nearer, wiping my face.

“Where is it?” I said again. I raised the gun, pointing it at his face.

Maygar crossed the room behind me. Walking to where I stood, he grabbed the collar of the seer I had in my sights. He proceeded to drag him across the room.

“Maygar, wait!” I said in English. “Don’t hurt him!”

The muscular seer with the sword and sun tattoo on his arm acted like he didn’t hear me. I clicked at him in irritation as he pulled a hunting knife from the sheath on his thigh, showing it to the other seer before he set it against his neck. He growled something at the seer in Russian.

I saw the violet eyes lose their confidence as he spoke.

Then I heard a word I recognized, and the violet eyes shifted to me, just before they widened in fear.

“Bridge?” he whispered in Prexci.

“Where is it?” Maygar said in English.
Or she’ll create a new orifice in that pretty face of yours...without even breaking a sweat.

I lowered my gun, biting back my irritation. The seer began jabbering at him again, in Russian. Maygar listened for a moment, then looked at me.

“The other room,” he said, in accented English. He motioned with his head. “There’s a box in there. He says it’s all paper. No organics.” He shook the seer, asking him something again in Russian. The seer nodded emphatically, pointing again to the other door.

“Paper only,” Maygar confirmed.

Fighting an impulse to reprimand Maygar, I turned instead, walking to the door he’d motioned towards with his head.

When I entered the small bedroom on the other side, I passed Cass, who gave me a half-smile that stretched the scar on her face. Her delicate features showed through beneath the scar, but it still hurt me a little, each time I saw it.

Growing up, she’d always looked like a model to me, with her odd mixture of Thai, Ethiopian, Irish and whatever else she inherited from her two parents. Now she clutched a gun in her hands too, looking like something in a guns and ammo magazine with her shocking dyed-red hair and the tee shirt stretched across her chest with words that read, “Spacegirl Don’t Need a Reason.”

Unlike my adopted brother, Jon, Cass had embraced living with the seers in a way I couldn’t possibly have imagined when we were best friends in San Francisco a year ago. Of course, being tortured for months by a psychotic seer could do that to a person.

Somehow, she never blamed me. I wished I could say the same. Touching her shoulder as I passed, I entered the bedroom. A flapping rag covered the one, broken window.

Terian, the aforementioned psychotic seer, had been cleaning up, ever since he managed to come into power in the human world. Thanks to me, the craziest, smartest and most bloodthirsty seer I’d yet encountered was now President of the United States. He’d figured out a way to break his mind into pieces to spread himself across numerous physical bodies, and managed to place one of those bodies in the White House. He’d managed it because I’d killed the previous president, a genetically-evolved human who happened to be the head of the Rooks’ international network of seers.