The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (2 page)

Shurikens
.

They were as big as his hands. He
flung them, sidearm, at the fighters. As they left his armor-encased hands they
began to glow. Yellow-green. They spun flat and menacing. Glowing trails of
death slicing through the night air.

Nothing could stop them. Whatever
they struck, steel or flesh, they cut straight through—until their charges
faded and they returned to black steel, stabbing into the next thing they hit.

One sliced through the tank—it
stopped. A direct hit into its guidance system. Sparks spewed out of the
useless vehicle.

Another cut through a line of
soldiers, one after the other. He slung two dozen at them. Until he ran out. There
was nowhere to take cover. The soldiers' mouths gaped at the level of damage
the small weapons wrought. Bodies and broken metal lay strewn across the field.

A row of tanks began advancing
from the rear to help the ground troops.

Then came the sounds of the jets.

At last.

The soldiers breathed a sigh of
relief. The general told his ground troops to back off. He told the tanks to
stand down as well. They needed a safe strike zone. There were still a hundred
yards between the soldiers and the Revolution, and Cleeson knew that would be
enough.     

Revolution stopped in his tracks.

The jets locked on. The pilots
armed their missiles. They were state-of-the-art Viper 700 attack jets. Top of
the line. A dozen of them.

Inside his armor, Revolution read
their missile lock. The display in his visors read
Lantern One: Ready to
Deploy
.

He raised his arms and aimed them
at the oncoming Vipers. An invisible beam shot out from his hands, hitting the jets
at the speed of light, riding the missile-lock radar signal back up to the
source. It bounced a signal to all twelve jets and then rode back down to
Revolution, all in the space of one second.

The heat signature from
Revolution's armor, dressed up against the cool black of the Earth below them,
gave the pilots a clear target. It was all they needed.

Then it disappeared.

Revolution's helmet display read
System
Coolant Activated
. He was now invisible to heat-seeking devices.

But he was too late. The pilots
jammed their buttons down, launching the sidewinders at the signal's
coordinates...

Except nothing happened.

The missile ignitions didn't fire.
The holding mechanisms didn't give way. They nervously jammed their triggers
again. Still nothing.

Then the signal riding their
missile lock altered slightly. A blip of data beamed across the sky.

It detonated the one hundred-pound
annular rod-blast fragmentation sidewinder bombs the fighters carried in their
missile bays.

The jets exploded in fiery starbursts
against the black sky. The field was bathed in light. In another second they
were falling comets of hell crashing directly onto the panicked soldiers below
them. A roaring debris field of fire spread out as the destroyed jets
plummeted.

Revolution winced as the men were
engulfed. Flames roared out of the tanks.

A few were left alive. But they
fled. Revolution let them. He just turned and walked away.

So much pain, so much death. 
No one would ever know how many went missing during those years. Thousands.
Hundreds of thousands. Maybe more than a million. Whatever the true number, the
toll it took was more than anyone could bear.

Even those that gave the orders or
pulled the triggers.

No one could say why it ended
after that day, but as the man in the cape marched from the roaring flames, the
fire of retribution burned away as well.

It would take a few more days, but
the Purge was over.

CHAPTER
2

LAKE TAHOE, CALIFORNIA 

EIGHT YEARS LATER

S
hiny,
new, white tennis shoes crunched damp gravel. Becky Collins jogged up a
mountain trail. She smiled in the steam of her breath. Athletic, thirty-seven,
she sweated in the brisk air. Her blonde hair was darkened by her perspiration
and the dew. It was morning. Summertime. But up here, that still meant jacket
weather.

Clouds covered the sky, cooling
the air below. The California sun had yet to burn them off. They would be gone
by afternoon. She knew these woods, these trails well. This was home. This was
her paradise.

Suddenly she stopped, gravel
spitting up from under her shoes. She nearly lost her balance and tumbled, but
caught herself. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the ground. She knelt, and her
eyes narrowed.

It was the strangest thing she had
ever seen. A single droplet of yellow-green, glowing...
lava.
It looked
hot, like it could melt steel, but it was just sitting there on the rocks.

She reached out gingerly, put her
hand just over it, hovering. No heat at all, but an unmistakable sense of pure,
raw energy. She had been mildly electrocuted once when she was twelve. She had
touched a wet electrical box after a summer rain. She remembered the odd
feeling of power that had danced over her skin just before the bolt of
electricity surged through her body. The droplet gave off a similar sensation.

She snapped her hand back.

Becky peered up. More lava
droplets dotted the trail in front of her. Eyes wide, she crept forward. She
avoided them at all costs, but she was mesmerized. 

The droplets veered off the road
into the grass and up into a clearing.

What they hell are these?

 She had to know. She waded
into the light brush. She'd done this many times. The forest around this
section of the lake was sparse, easy to traverse. Still, she shivered and
gasped. She had no idea why she was reacting this way.

Maybe she should give this up,
just go back, call the authorities. Then again, who would she call?

Something about the droplets
beckoned her. She couldn’t define it.

She
had
to follow them.

She tracked the lava around a bend
in the low brush. That's when she heard it.

She stopped. At first, she wasn't
sure.

Another sound.

Becky focused, concentrated. This
time the sound came clearly. Faint sobs spilled from the forest. A woman.

No need to freak out here, just
stay calm.
No one else was likely to be around for miles. If someone was
hurt, Becky was her only hope.

She tracked the crying into a
dense section of the brush, fighting to make progress against the branches that
now tore at her sweats and jacket. Finally she rounded a bush, and the sobs
grew louder. And there she was. A young girl, crouched. A teenager.

Naked.

Curled up against herself. Her
long, blonde hair draped over her face and lithe frame.

“Oh my God,” Becky whispered to
herself.

The girl was at once both
beautiful and strangely terrifying. She was tall and thin, with naturally dark
skin. Her blonde hair was wavy and thick. She had one of the most beautiful,
symmetrical faces Becky had ever seen on a person in real life, not a magazine.
Yet she was terrifying because the implications of finding a naked, crying
teenager in the middle of these dense, isolated woods were not lost on Becky.

In fact, they dashed through her
mind like a downhill runner.

She spun around, searching for
others. Pictures of Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer in that black hood, Son of
Sam—whatever his name was—and every other crazed lunatic she could think of
zipped past her brain.

The girl had not even noticed her,
too distraught with whatever cruelty had befallen her. Her whole body quaked
from the sobs.

Nothing about the situation was
normal. The girl was petite, dainty, frail even. Yet in the heart of this brush
she hadn't a scratch on her. No mud, no dirt. She was pristine. And not a
stitch of clothing was anywhere around her.

“Miss...are you okay?”

The girl didn't move.

Becky eased closer.

Even in the solitude of these
isolated woods the girl was careful to cover herself. What horror had she been
through? Becky could only imagine. Her heart bled for the girl. Men could be so
cruel. Snuff out a young life for some sick, perverted fantasy. California had
seen more than its share of these kinds of depraved, twisted crimes.

The girl's apparent good physical
condition wasn't fooling Becky. She was sure she was going to need immediate
medical attention.
Keep your cool, though
, she thought, y
ou have no
idea what happened here.

“Hey, miss? Are you hurt?”

Nothing. The girl didn't seem to
hear her. Becky wondered how out of it you have to be to not hear the crunch of
the leaves, the cracking pine needles, and someone speaking to you. Chills
trailed down Becky’s spine; the hair on the back of her neck rose. Still, she
inched closer. Had the girl been stabbed, shot? Was she in shock? 

Becky reached out. “Honey?”

Suddenly the girl jerked away. She
scrambled back in panic. Her arm crossed her breasts, and her palm flew between
her legs. There was no question now that she had been raped. But then again,
there was no blood, no scrapes on the girl, no obvious signs of struggle or
injury. What was this?

“Don't touch me!”

Then it happened.

One moment you are living your
life according to rules that make sense to you; the next, something occurs that
throws all the old assumptions out the window. This was one of those moments.

The girl's entire body
suddenly
glowed
—the strange color of the droplets. Her nakedness was now
concealed by the enveloping glow. Still, she kept herself covered.

She glared upward, her pupils
blazing yellow-green. Only the whites of her eyes and the pink of her lips,
which bloomed like cherry blossoms next to the odd glow, were unaffected.

Tears of liquid lava flowed down
the girl's cheeks. They sprinkled on the ground.

Lava droplets.

Becky’s breath caught in her
throat. “What happened?” was all she could manage. The girl just glared at her.
The power surged off her in waves. The chills again crawled down Becky’s spine.

“They did this to me!
They
did it!”

“Who?” Becky scanned the area.
“Who did this to you?” 

The teenager just cried.

Even sobbing, she was
intimidating. Pure, raw energy pulsed from her. The throbbing power from the
droplet on the trail was magnified a hundred times as it surged off this young
woman. There was no question this girl could harm her, possibly even kill her.
Yet Becky had to help her. The girl was alone. Completely alone.

She reached out her hand...

She was, after all, just a girl, a
child, Becky reasoned. Scared, lonely, and a victim of something, though as of
yet, no way to know what.

The girl is probably
radioactive.
Or poisonous. She’d be frothing at the mouth and writhing on
the forest grass in minutes. Becky was sure of it. It took all the courage she
had not to flee.

The girl watched Becky's hand
coming closer to touch her. “No!  Don't!”

Becky was dead. She knew it. Yet,
she couldn’t stop herself. Something was pulling her toward the girl. She
closed her eyes as she reached for the girl's blazing skin.

The child, inside this field of
energy, looked just as afraid. “You'll hurt”—Becky's hand touched her—“me.”

The touch did not hurt. Either of
them, apparently. The girl's blazing eyes locked onto Becky's hand like it was
the first time anyone had ever touched her in her whole life. She followed it.
She seemed surprised the woman's touch wasn't sending waves of excruciating
pain shooting through her body. Her eyes darted about like a scared animal’s.
The intensity of the energy burning off her pupils was like a spotlight. It was
hard for Becky to look away from the girl’s eyes. Where she gently touched, the
glow of the girl’s pulsating skin faded.

The teenager moaned, as if every
care and pain were draining from her body with each touch.

“See, it's okay.” Becky tried to
smile.

The girl drank in the pleasure. It had been so long
since she’d felt anything but pain. She thought of what she had been through,
what she had seen, what she had done...and shivered. The pain receded. The glow
of her body faded. Her young arms fell to her sides. Too tired to be modest
now. For the first time in months, her body relaxed.

“There now. Just calm down. You're okay now.”

But Becky's face betrayed her
worry.
Who is
they
, and more importantly,
where
are they?
 
Becky slipped off her jacket, draped it over the girl's petite shoulders. They
gazed into each other's eyes. In that moment a bond formed. A bond neither had
expected or could understand...

“What's your name, honey?”

“Fiona. Fiona Fletcher.”

“What happened to you?”

“I was a member”—Fiona glared with
piercing eyes; they
blazed
with power again—“of the Resistance.”

Resistance
. There was the
image in Becky’s mind again. The same image the propaganda folks in the
resistance had wanted her to see every time she heard the word:

A caped figure, decked out in red,
white, and blue, silhouetted in the full moon. He ripped out the new flag of
the post-Depression era—the Freedom Flag, they called it. A flag that hearkened
back to the original Colonial flag. Stars in a circle, fifty instead of the
original thirteen, outlined in red—all of them set against a blue background.
But with one large star at the center. Supposedly the big star represented the
unity of all Americans in getting through the Second Great Depression. But
everyone knew what it really stood for: the Freedom Council.