We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3)

WE HAD FLAGS

Toxic World Book Three

by Sean McLachlan

For Almudena, my wife

And Julián, my son

CHAPTER ONE

Song Yu-jin tromped down the mountain trail, sweat beading her brow as the straps of her backpack dug into her shoulders. It was always a hard slog to the Burbs carrying a season’s worth of scavenging, but this time the ancestral tablets more than doubled the weight.

Yu-jin kept a sharp eye out around her. It was late in the season, long past the annual trade market, so she should have seen some scavengers making their way back into the mountains. So far she hadn’t seen anyone. That was strange, and strangeness in the wildlands meant danger. She kept an arrow nocked in her bow.

The faint path led down the side of a long, gentle valley that ended in the foothills of the mountain range she was leaving. The rocky slopes allowed only a few shrubs, tufts of grass, and one or two stunted trees to grow. She scanned the area for fresh droppings, either animal or human. Every now and then she saw the little pellets left by rabbits, but no human turds. Nobody had passed this way since at least the last rain, and that had been a week ago.

Yu-jin glanced to the right side of her backpack to make sure her quiver was in place, each of her score of arrows fletched with her own hand and tipped with metal taken from ruins and honed razor sharp. She felt a tug at her chest to see the red shafts on several of them, each painted the color of good fortune by her father. She felt another tug to see the newer, plain arrows, those she had made after he had died. Yu-jin reminded herself to paint those red once she was settled in the Burbs.

The weather was clear and the sun felt too strong. Good thing she had exchanged her battered cap for Auntie’s straw hat after she had died.

A wave of sorrow washed over her and she choked back a sob. Auntie had been the last.

Yu-jin stopped, shucked off her pack, and sat on a rock. She told herself it was because she needed to rest. Carrying those ancestral tablets was exhausting. Each one was a slab of stone, carefully carved by Father except for the last two, Mother’s and Auntie’s, which Yu-jin had carved herself. Her whole lineage was weighing down her pack. She hoped the bottom didn’t fall out.

Yu-jin fell to the ground, curled up in a ball and sobbed, her cries echoing through the empty valley.

No she didn’t. That was in her imagination. That was the little girl she saw inside herself, the one who had never entirely gone away. The 22-year-old scavenger remained sitting on the rock, her bow at the ready in an unwavering hand, the only hint of the grief inside her being a slight slump of her shoulders.

Memories rolled over her like a storm, a jumble of faces, voices, snatches of conversation from those who would never speak again. A favorite saying of Father’s came out loud and clear, an old Chinese saying he used to say to her when she cried as a child, “Oh, when will the iron be forged into steel!”

He had stopped saying that when she had killed her first bandit at twelve.

She pushed that unpleasant memory away and imagined her father, calm and supportive and old beyond his years from a lifetime of hunting and scavenging. He had been proud of her, the youngest and strongest of her band. And now she was the only one left.

Yu-jin bit her lip and forced herself to stand. It was still a long walk to the Burbs.

“Only steel on the outside, Father,” she whispered.

Five minutes down the trail she spun to her left and let loose her arrow, transfixing a rabbit a hundred meters away. The movement had been so fast the animal hadn’t had a chance to be startled. Yu-jin took off her pack again, clambered up the steep hillside, and retrieved it.

“Randy can make you into a good stew,” she said, slitting the rabbit’s throat with her knife to let the blood out.

Yu-jin hung the rabbit on the back of her pack so the last trickle of blood wouldn’t stain her clothes. The acrid tang of chemicals told her she was an hour’s walk away from the foothills. A dump from the Old Times lay just inside the valley mouth. She could see it in the distance, a rusty stain of corroded barrels, their contents leaking out to make a stinking pool that glistened iridescent in the sun.

Movement further down the trail caught her eye. Men. Four of them. No, five. About a kilometer away and on the same trail as her. She stopped. The valley was too open. They were sure to have seen her by now.

She stood her ground, deciding to make a brave show and get rested before they came close. She could pick off two or three of them before they’d ever have a chance, assuming they didn’t have guns. If they did, she was fucked anyway so there was no point in running. They’d be doing the math too and would leave her alone unless they had guns and a bad attitude. Not all scavengers would descend on a lone woman in the wildlands, but it paid to be careful, and it paid to be a good shot.

The figures moved slowly, strung out along the trail. They looked sick or exhausted. Something else was strange too. None of them had packs. No one went anywhere without a pack.

They had weapons, though. Sunlight glinted off the blades of machetes and the tips of spears. Those who had spears used them as walking sticks, while those with machetes stumbled along, heads hanging low. They were taking forever to get up the valley. Yu-jin started walking towards them. Once she was about two hundred meters away she called out,

“State your business!”

The men jerked and looked up. Yu-jin blinked. They hadn’t even spotted her.

Then she saw why. Their faces were drawn, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. Their clothes hung in loose tatters. The hands that gripped their weapons looked skeletal. Three were barefoot.

For a moment they stared at each other in silence. Then the strangers huddled together and started talking among themselves.

“I have twenty arrows in this quiver. That’s four for each of you.”

The men looked back at her.

“All of you get off the path and walk down the slope. Those with spears drop them.”

They hesitated.

Yu-jin strode forward, adrenaline pushing away the morning’s fatigue. She closed the distance to one hundred meters. They didn’t budge. She stopped and drew back the string of her bow.

“You, the blond guy on the left,” she addressed one of the spearman. “You’re first. Then the guy with the goiter. The last guy with a spear will be next, then the other two.”

That got them moving. The spearmen dropped their weapons and the group struggled down the slope. She waited until they were well away from the path before she continued along it.

“We didn’t want to hurt you,” one of them said as she drew close. His voice came out weak and whiney.

“Yeah, right.”

“You have any food to trade?” another asked.

“No.”

“We’ll trade our weapons.”

Damn, these guys really are desperate.

“I don’t have any food to spare.”

“Oh my God, look at that rabbit she’s got!”

She was right above them now. The three spears, crude things made from sticks and scavenged metal, lay at her feet. The strangers looked up the slope at her with desperate eyes.

Yu-jin tensed. Starving people did stupid things. If they charged up the slope to get her food she’d have to kill them all. She sent a quick prayer to her ancestors and Jesus that she wouldn’t have to.

“Who are you? What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Give us some food and we’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and I won’t break your spears.”

Is that enough steel for you, Father?

“We’re from the Righteous Horde. But we didn’t want to be part of it! We, um, we deserted. We won’t hurt you.”

“The what?”

The men looked confused.

“The Righteous Horde. Followers of the Chosen One.”

“Never heard of him.”

The men looked at each other.

“You must have been far out in the wildlands,” the blond one said.

“Yeah, I was. Where are the rest of you? You don’t look like much of a horde.”

“We were thousands until the battle. Then we scattered. We don’t even know if the Pure One still lives.”

“Fuck the Pure One!” another said. “I never wanted to attack New City!”

“What?” Yu-jin cried.

“They defeated us. The Righteous Horde fell apart.”

“What about the Burbs, the settlement outside the walls?” Yu-jin asked.

“All those people went inside. They didn’t leave us much.”

Yu-jin’s mind raced. Noncitizens had been allowed inside New City’s walls? That was unheard of. It must have been a hell of a battle.

Oh God, please let Randy be OK.

“Please give us some food.”

“Go fuck yourselves.”

Yu-jin hurried down the path, fear giving her legs strength. Not fear of these soon-to-be corpses, but fear for the people she cared about in the Burbs, the people she hoped to build a life with now that nothing was left for her in the wildlands. She kept an eye on the strangers in any case. They sat where she had left them, seeming to lack the will to get back up the slope.

She left the valley and made her way through the foothills. At one prominent hill she knew that offered a view of Toxic Bay, she climbed up and took a look. The ruined city from the Old Times with its dead port lay spread out in the distance. She could just pick out the smoke from the village that a few crazies lived in on its north shore. Beyond that she could see a faint haze—the Burbs and New City. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Making her way back to the trail, she continued through the hot afternoon, stopping only to have a quick lunch of pemmican and oatcakes. She stopped again an hour later to inspect a fresh body of a man. He looked as thin as those she had met in the valley. He’d been stripped. From the color of his skin and the number of flies covering him, Yu-jin estimated he’d been dead a couple of days.

The sun was sinking low in the west as she made it to the first of the farms. Her back ached now. Every step was agony, but she couldn’t sleep outside tonight, not with those Horde people wandering around. She briefly considered offering some farmer half the rabbit to sleep in a barn, and decided against it. She’d feel much better to be in her own bed with Randy at her side.

Assuming he was OK.

Her tension mounted as she walked on a well-worn path through good farmland. Everywhere she looked she saw evidence of destruction. Farmers, eyes suspicious at her passing, mended fences and fixed homes that had obviously felt the touch of an invading army. Fresh graves dotted several farmyards. A few houses had been burned to the ground. Yu-jin shook her head. Only lunatics would burn shelter. Kill the inhabitants and take it for themselves, sure, but destroy it? Madness. New City and the Burbs were the only settlements worthy of the name that she knew of and they’d suffered plenty of bandit raids, but this was far more serious.

She made it to the edge of the Burbs just as the siren sounded to signal that New City was closing its gates for the night. Citizens would be safe behind the walls while the Burbs would have to fend for itself until dawn. It appeared noncitizens had only been allowed behind the gate when the Righteous Horde attacked. Now it was back to business as usual.

The outskirts of the Burbs were a haphazard collection of tents and tin shacks put up by scavengers who wintered over like she used to do. Children squealed and chased each other between fires tended by careworn parents cooking in common with other families in order to save fuel. A few people had raggedy stands offering homespun clothing or battered items from the Old Times. The main market with all the good stuff stood at the center of the Burbs where its permanent residents had decent shacks with roofs that didn’t leak. A few even had electricity provided by New City. Randy’s place was about halfway in. He lived there permanently, and now so did she.

She was coming to it now, but her gaze strayed further along the road. The Yao family had a place a little further on. There would be a good meal cooking on the hearth and understanding ears to listen to the autumn’s sorrow. There was an ancestral shrine in the back where she could put the tablets until she built her own. There were joss sticks to burn and people who would say the prayers with her.

Yu-jin stood in the road, unsure. The Yaos were good people. Chinese, like her, but not fortunate in having a family name like Song that could be mistaken for Korean. Everyone knew the Yao family as the Moon family—a good Korean name. A respectable name. A safe name.

Now that the last of her relatives had died, the Yaos were the only Chinese people she knew.

Yu-jin ran down the street sobbing, arms outstretched and crying “I want to go home! I want to go home!”

No she didn’t. The young scavenger, the archer, the tough woman who showed the world something quite different than that weak little girl she often felt like, stood tall in the middle of the street, the only hint at what was going on inside her being a little wetness in her eyes.

“Too much steel, Father. The iron forged too well,” she whispered.

She turned and headed for her lover’s shack, the place she would now call home, hoping he was still alive.