We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3) (12 page)

Poor kid, sitting there as they talk about her like she isn’t even there. Maybe I shouldn’t be so trusting, but my gut tells me she’s OK.

Well hell, my gut has gotten us this far…

“We’re going back to Toxic Bay, and this time we’re going with no guns.”

“What!” Clyde exclaimed.

“They can wipe us out anyway with that cannon. Probably have a few machine guns too. The first time we tried to talk to them we nearly had a firefight. This time we’ll show we want to talk business.”

Clyde shook his head. “No way.”

“I’ve already made my decision,” The Doctor growled.

“I’m Head of the Watch and it’s my duty to see to the safety of—”

“It’s your duty to obey the mayor!” The Doctor snapped.

Clyde sat there and seethed. He’d backed down, but just barely. The Doctor glanced at Marcus, who looked unsure, and Annette, who looked like she wanted to sink through the floor.

Prefer barroom brawls to politics, eh? Good. We have too many politicians as it is.

This was one of Annette’s first top-level meetings and she had managed to piss off two of her seniors. He didn’t even look to see how Yu-jin was taking all this; he didn’t want to know.

You better make this work, kid, because you coming out is causing all sorts of divisions I didn’t even know existed.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Adults were so easy to fool. Pablo had been told to stay inside New City, so he told Aunt Rosie he was going out to play, and to keep from feeling guilty about lying he did play for a few minutes before heading to the gate.

The gate was tricky. The guards there had seen Aunt Rosie scolding him when Mr. Andrews brought him back, so they probably wouldn’t let him out. He waited until a group of grownups headed out and walked with them. The guards didn’t even look at him.

Pablo glanced over his shoulder at New City as he crossed over to the Burbs. He’d get into big trouble for sneaking out again, but he had to get Hong-gi inside. It was too dangerous with those Chinese around. He also wanted to get more of his stuff from his house. Mom wouldn’t understand, though, she’d just cuss him out. Maybe he could slip back in without being caught.

Pablo let out a breath of relief as he got to the first shacks and tents. It was easy to hide among all these buildings and no one took much notice of him. As long as Mom or one of her deputies didn’t spot him, he’d be fine.

A nearby cheer attracted his attention. He passed through a row of tents and saw a small crowd on the street. Most of the people were refugees from the Righteous Horde. He could recognize them easily because they were so skinny and sick. The Doctor had given them fishhooks and lines and now they worked as fishermen. Pablo wrinkled his nose at the thought of standing in the sea trying to catch fish to eat. Being slaves to the Righteous Horde must have been pretty bad if they were happy with their new life.

In the center stood Ms. Waites. She’d been a slave too and had convinced The Doctor to free them after they were captured by Mr. Weissman. From what he heard that guy treated them even worse than Mr. Fartbag treated Hong-gi. The Doctor freed them all right, and kicked Mr. Weissman and all his people out of New City. Pablo had worried that they’d lose New City Radio because it was Mr. Weissman’s, but The Doctor kept it. Now there was a new staff still playing music and advertisements for market stalls.

Pablo smiled as he remembered when Ha-ram Lee had been a DJ there and let him make an announcement over the air. That’s what started his career as a radio operator. Then he got to talk with the ship. Pablo worried that someone would find out about that. Would Mom blame him for bringing the Chinese? Probably.

Curious about the crowd, he went over. Ms. Waites was shaking hands with everybody. She was a raggedy woman, her hair all crazy and her clothes baggy because she was so thin, but she had scary eyes, like The Doctor’s eyes when he was mad. They were eyes that said, “Do as I tell you or else.”

Next to her stood Mr. Ahmed Abd-Al-Karim. He was a nurse who lived in the Burbs and gave out free medicine just like The Doctor. He smiled and clapped as Ms. Waites shook everyone’s hand.

“Hooray for The Liberator!” one of the refugees shouted. The others took up the cheer.

“What’s going on?” he asked the nearest one. The guy was a grownup but he looked like he didn’t weigh any more than Pablo. He was bald and had nasty scabs all over his scalp.

The refugee grinned at Pablo. He didn’t have any teeth.

“The Liberator has been elected to the Burb Council!”

“That’s cool, I guess.”

“She’s going to change everything, get a good deal for the refugees and the Burbs too!”

“Um, OK.”

Pablo wandered off as Ms. Waites started making a boring speech.

He headed home, found his mother gone, and gathered up some spare clothes from his room. Then he went to the little bookshelf that he and Mom shared. She traded for books a lot. He took his atlas and his Spacequest comic and tucked them under his arm. Grabbing an apple to munch on, he headed back out.

The Burbs sure were busy. He saw a bunch of people with guns and bows and spears heading for an open space near the market. One man carried that flag thing from the day before. Pablo started trailing along beside him.

“Is that a flag?” he asked.

“Sure is, kid. It’s a flag from the First Republic”

“Wow, that’s old!”

“Yeah, it’s the only one of its kind that I know of. Already got the wife sewing a new one.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been without a flag for too long. We gotta get our pride back.”

“The flag’s going to do that?”

“Sure is. This is the symbol of our land. This is the flag that defeated the Chinks.”

“Didn’t we lose that war?”

“Hell no, we destroyed China.”

Pablo thought that his own land was pretty messed up too. Could China be even worse? Not if they built a ship.

The flag man met up with a bunch of the Burbs militia in an open space between the tents. Everyone was talking and puffing their chests out and speaking real loud. It was like how adults acted when they drank in Uncle Roy’s bar, except this time everyone was sober. Well, most of them, anyway.

“So is there going to be a country again?” Pablo asked the flag man.

“Country” was one of those words from the Old Times. It meant a big space all run by one person like a general or a dictator. Generals were like the Head of the Watch with lots more guards. He wasn’t sure what a dictator was, but he knew they got to fly in airplanes with lots of women and a type of beer called champagne.

“Maybe so, kid. The Chinks caught us with our pants down once before. Looks like they’re trying to do it again. This land has been disunited for too long. We got to get everyone together—New City, Burbs, scavengers, even fishermen—and make a nation once again. You can’t have no pride if you got no flag.”

“What’s pride?”

“Knowing the difference between right and wrong and doing what’s right.”

The Burbs militia assembled into lines as a man at the front shouted at them. The guy with the flag stood at the end of the line, his chest puffed out like he was holding his breath.

“So if you don’t have a flag you don’t know what’s right?” Pablo asked.

“Get going, kid. We got things to do,” the flag bearer said, sounding annoyed.

“Like what?”

The man smiled and bent down. “Can you keep a secret?” he whispered.

“Sure.”

“Even from your parents?”

“My mom says it’s OK to keep secrets as long as they’re not from weirdoes.”

“Ha! Your mom’s raising you right. Naw, this is an OK secret to keep, and you won’t have to keep it for long.”

“Tell me! Tell me!” Pablo jumped up and down. You could tell when a grownup wanted to say something, but they liked you to think you were all excited.

The flag bearer bent closer. “We’re going down to the bay and we’re going to ambush those yellow devils.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Yu-jin walked through the foothills leading to Toxic Bay. Only The Doctor and Marcus walked with her. Getting to that point required The Doctor to have a half-hour argument not only with Clyde Devon, but also with several leading guards who with varying degrees of courtesy told him he was an idiot.

One guard had looked like he wanted to shoot her. A guy named Kent referred to her as a Chink. The Doctor told him that if he used hate speech again he’d lose his job. That shut him up, but now she had two guards who looked like they wanted to shoot her.

Clyde eventually relented. He pulled back his men from the shores of Toxic Bay, positioning them along the northern edge of the hills, ready to act if there was any firing. When The Doctor told him to move them further back, Clyde dug in his heels.

A crowd of Burbs residents and some New City citizens had also gathered, all of them armed. Clyde’s men tried to keep them back but they remained close enough for her to hear their conversations.

Most were about her.

None of that disturbed her as much as what she was about to face.

She was about to meet an entire shipload of Chinese. Chinese from
China
, a country she knew only from old stories handed down over the generations and a few faded photographs torn from old books. There was one photo she had loved as a child; it was in her pocket even now. It showed a huge plaza with a line of red-roofed buildings in the background. In the foreground was a whole crowd of Chinese schoolchildren in identical uniforms, the boys in sky blue shirts and dark shorts, the girls matching them with their sky blue blouses and dark skirts. They all looked so healthy and well-fed. None of them had grown up in a cave wondering if they’d catch some meat that week.

They looked happy too. The girls and boys were laughing and playing all sorts of games she couldn’t identify. When she was young she would stare and stare at that picture, imagining herself in one of those nice sky blue shirts instead of her rough homespun shirt and patched jeans from the Old Times. The skirt would be nice too. She’d never owned a skirt. Nobody wore them in the wildlands. She imagined herself with all those other Chinese children, learning their games and going to one of those big schools they used to have in the Old Times, filled with friendly Chinese teachers who could teach her all about China and answer all the questions her parents couldn’t.

The worst part of her childhood was knowing that her fantasy would never come true. Even so, she kept the picture. It was as much a part of her upbringing as the ancestral tablets of the great-grandparents she had never met.

Now she was going to actually meet the people of her childhood dreams.

“Rosie! What the hell are you doing here?”

Marcus Callahan’s voice snapped her out of her memories. Marcus and The Doctor had stopped and were looking back the way they had come. Following them were an old woman, Joe, and Roy. The woman carried what looked like a pie covered in cloth. Roy struggled under the weight of a small keg, and Joe had a big package. As they approached she caught the unmistakable smell of sesame chicken.

“We heard what you’re doing,” Roy puffed, setting down the keg once he reached them, “and figured we’d help smooth relations with a bit of home cooking. And brewing. Oh, don’t give me that look, Doc. It’s the lager, not the stout. Wouldn’t want to get everyone drunk, eh? At least not yet!”

Marcus stomped up to Rosie. “You go back to the house right this instant!”

The old woman stood her ground. “We have guests and we need to show them hospitality.”

“Guests? They’re Chinese!”

“Which means they’ve come a long way. They’ll want some good cooking. I can’t imagine what they must have been eating while crossing the ocean. Good Lord, they might have been eating fish the whole way!”

“Serves them right for polluting the waters,” Marcus grumbled.

Rosie frowned at him. “That was everyone and you know it, so don’t Blame.”

“They could be dangerous. Who knows what they’re up to!”

Yu-jin shook her head in wonder.

All my life they’ve been talking about Chinese while I sat by, invisible. Now that I’ve told them they still talk about us like I’m invisible.

“Hey!” she said out loud.

Everyone turned to her.

“What do you want?” Marcus snapped.

Suddenly she felt embarrassed. She wasn’t used to standing up to her elders, but this was too important not to.

“I just wanted you to notice that I was here,” she mumbled.

Rosie placed the pie on a nearby rock and went over to Yu-jin. She gave her a warm smile and put her hand on Yu-jin’s cheek.

“My, aren’t you lovely? I don’t know how you can keep yourself looking so lovely out there in those terrible wildlands. I want to apologize for my husband. You see, our eldest son Austin was killed by some Chinese bandits. There were a lot in the old days after the armies broke up.”

Rosie’s voice caught and tears came to her eyes. Marcus turned away.

“But that wasn’t you,” she continued. “And it wasn’t those people on the ship. The Chinese did a lot of bad things back in our day, and so did white people and brown people and the blacks too…”

Roy shook his head. “Don’t even get me started on the New Panthers.”

“…Marcus and I lost all our children one by one to stupid people who shot before they talked, and none of them died by a Chinese hand except Austin. So if I damn you I have to damn everyone, and I’m not going to do that.”

Rosie planted a kiss on Yu-jin’s forehead. It felt like closure.

She turned to her husband. “Marcus, come over here and shake this girl’s hand.”

Marcus shook his head, his back still turned.

“We need to go,” The Doctor said. “We’re going into this unarmed, so if any of you are packing, get rid of your weapons.”

Roy rolled up his pants leg, pulled a small automatic from his sock, and placed it on a rock. He looked at Yu-jin and shrugged.

“I wear it for all my customers, no offense.”

Yu-jin smiled back at him. “None taken.”

They continued on through the hills, Yu-jin helping Roy with the barrel. Marcus wouldn’t look at her. As they approached the bay they put on gas masks or kerchiefs soaked in water. The path opened up onto the bay and they saw the ship where it was before. A few of the boats from the village were moored next to it.

“Fucking hell, what are they doing out there?” The Doctor muttered. He got on a rock and started waving his arms in the air.

While they waited for a response, some of the villagers came over to them.

“Where’s Oscar?” The Doctor demanded.

“On the ship,” one of the men replied.

“Doing what?”

“Trading.”

The Doctor shook his head. A boat was lowered over the side of the ship. As it rowed towards shore, two more boats appeared from the far side of the freighter. All were packed with sailors. Yu-jin spotted the African interpreter at the prow of the lead boat. The officer was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh Lord,” Rosie said, her voice quavering.

Yu-jin put her hand in her pocket and held her cross. It had kept her safe through a lot of trouble in the wildlands. She hoped it would keep her safe now.

Why should it? She had thrown it in the dirt this morning.

She pulled it out and began to put it around her neck. She hesitated, looking at the approaching Chinese, and finally put it back in her pocket.

They might not like it
, she reasoned with herself. That didn’t take away the guilt.

The Doctor addressed the villagers. “Go on back to your homes. We want to speak with the Chinese alone.”

“This is our land,” a woman replied.

“You never claimed it.”

The woman gave him a gap-toothed sneer. “That’s because no one else ever wanted it. Looks like it’s got some value now, huh?”

“Beat it, or I’ll slap an embargo on the whole village.”

The villagers grumbled and moved away.

“That was a bit hard, don’t you think, Doc?” Marcus said.

“Oscar and his men hunt scavengers,” Yu-jin said.

“I wasn’t asking you.”

“Marcus!” Rosie snapped.

The Doctor rubbed his temples. “Everyone please shut up. The air is foul enough.”

The boats scraped against the gritty shore. The interpreter got out first, the sailors forming a rough line behind him. Yu-jin counted two dozen of them, all armed with AK-47s. Her mouth went dry.

Yu-jin addressed the interpreter in Mandarin. “My name is Song Yu-jin. I am a Chinese native of this region. I’ve volunteered to be New City’s translator.”

A look of surprise and relief passed over the man’s face. The sailors gasped and whispered among themselves.

“I am Gebre Selassie,” he replied in Mandarin. “I’m the chief radio operator and official translator for the Admiral Zeng He.”

“Is Zeng He the officer in charge of the ship?”

Gebre Selassie looked amused. “No, that’s the name of the ship!”

Yu-jin couldn’t think of what to say to that.

“You know, the famous admiral who explored the world?” Gebre Selassie prompted.

“Oh, right. Yes, I’ve heard of him,” she lied.

Great, I’m getting lectured in Chinese history by someone from…where?

“Where are you from?”

“Tigray on the Red Sea. East Africa.”

“Sorry, I haven’t heard of Tigray.”

“It’s had lots of names over the years—Abyssinia, The Second Tigrinya Republic, the Mogadishu Caliphate, plus a few more. Your region has suffered the same fate, I’m sure.”

“They speak Chinese there?”

Gebre Selassie laughed. “No. I have a gift for languages. I speak Tigrinya, Amharic, Oromo, New Swahili, English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.”

Yu-jin felt a flush of embarrassment. Not only did this guy know more Chinese history than she did, he also knew a second Chinese language. She suddenly felt an irresistible urge to one-up him.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Gebre…”

“Mr. Selassie, our family names come second. Please call me Gebre. We’re friends.”

“Right. Well, if you don’t mind my asking, why is your English so bad? Your Mandarin is perfect.”

Gebre shrugged. “No teachers.”

Yu-jin felt a sudden chill. “What?”

“No teachers. I had to learn from some old books and a few music CDs. Do you know what ‘pass the Dutchie on the left hand side’ means?”

“I have no idea. Stuff from the Old Times is filled with weird expressions. You mean to tell me you’ve never met a native English speaker in Africa or China?”

Gebre shook his head.

The Doctor cut in. “Um, translator. Could you translate, please?”

Yu-jin turned to him. “We were just getting acquainted. This is Gebre Selassie. He’s from somewhere in East Africa.”

“Fascinating. Now could you please ask what they want?”

She turned back to Gebre and switched into Mandarin. “You are welcome here as long as your intentions are peaceful. Just what are your intentions?”

“To trade. We have some items that may be of interest. We’re interested in whatever you might have to trade in return.”

She turned back to The Doctor. “They want to trade. They say their intentions are peaceful.”

Rosie breathed a sigh of relief. Roy and Joe looked happy too. Marcus looked incredulous and The Doctor’s face was a mask. Yu-jin continued.

“I suggest we offer up that food now. Chinese don’t like to do business until they’ve sat down and eaten together.”

The Doctor nodded his assent and Yu-jin said, “We’d like to invite you and your men to lunch. We’ve brought food and beer from the finest restaurants in our city. I suggest, though, that we go into the foothills. I can’t imagine being able to eat in this stink.”

Gebre grinned. “We have an air filtration system on the ship. Even that can’t get rid of all the smells. Yes, let’s get out of here.”

One of the Chinese sailors, whose uniform differed from the rest by having a wide gold stripe on the cuffs and shoulder, spoke up. “Lieutenant Selassie, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Objection noted, Sub-lieutenant Yu, but as you can see they are apparently unarmed, and these elderly men and women are too wise to give us any nasty surprises over lunch.” He turned to Yu-jin. “Aren’t they?”

“You will be safe,” she promised.

Sub-lieutenant Yu didn’t look convinced. He barked an order to his men, who spread out and kept a close watch on the hills as they started walking away from the water. Sub-lieutenant Yu and a few other men kept close to the group from New City.

Great,
she thought.
A Chinese version of Clyde Devon.

They walked about halfway through the hills to an open spot where the air was clearer. “What’s that?” Sub-lieutenant Yu demanded, gesturing with his AK-47.