We Had Flags (Toxic World Book 3) (9 page)

“None of them carried any weapons that I could see and they kept their hands away from their pockets. They came up to Father and told him he’d been doing a good job, that the wildlands needed someone like him. Then they gave him a sack of flour, enough for us to live on for months. ‘Share it,’ they said. ‘Not that we need to tell you that. When it’s all gone we’ll bring you more.’

“And they did. The next time they showed up they brought two sacks of flour. They appeared every month or so after that. There were always five of them, but I could tell they were sometimes different people. They were different sizes and shapes and sometimes there would be more women than men. They always wore those masks, though.

“Sometimes they brought things other than food—clothes or batteries or medicine. Anything people out in the wildlands might need. Father got a big reputation among the scavengers. He never told anyone where he got the stuff he gave away.”

The Doctor leaned forward. “No one tried to make him tell? They must have thought he was sitting on a treasure trove.”

Jessica nodded. “A couple of times bandits tried to grab him, or grab me to get to him. Father’s a damn good fighter, though, and the other scavengers always came to help. Soon word got around and everyone left us alone. No one wanted to ruin a good thing.”

“Did these masked strangers say where they were from?” The Doctor asked, thinking he knew the answer.

Jessica bit her lip. “I’m coming to that. When I was twelve I finally got up the courage to run after them after one of their visits. I told them how lonely I was, how I never got to hang out with other kids or stay anywhere long enough to get to know anyone. Even when father gave stuff away he did it from a distance. He’s obsessed about my safety. He would have never left me with Uncle Marcus and Aunt Rosie if the Righteous Horde hadn’t been taking everyone in the wildlands. Anyway, I asked to go with the people in the masks. They just shook their heads and told me that I’d soon have a job of my own.

“So I stayed with Father. Then last year they started giving him those crystal radios. The ones that only pick up Radio Hope.”

The Doctor started to tremble. The radios…the masks…when Annette Cruz and Jackson Andrews had found one of Radio Hope’s repeaters in the mountains, they’d met a group of people wearing masks that sounded just like the ones Jessica described. They’d told Annette they knew him and gave them a medical kit tailor-made for his condition. They said they had known Jackson’s father, Casey, too.

“So that’s when you figured it out,” The Doctor said.

Jessica nodded. “The strangers are from Radio Hope. And they gave my father a transmitter to contact the ship, and coordinates to bring it to a bay three days north of here.”

The Doctor rubbed his temples. “And if you had done what you were told, your father would have picked you up and you would have gone north to meet it, you and the scavengers.”

“That’s right. I didn’t know they were Chinese, though. I didn’t know anything beyond that, I swear.”

Marcus gasped. “I bet Radio Hope did. But why would they bring them here?”

The Doctor held his aching head. He needed a painkiller. Maybe some opiates from that medical kit. Yeah, some opiates and ten hours of sleep.

“But you didn’t want to go north with your father. You wanted to stay here. So you brought the Chinese here. And you’ve pissed off your father, and you’ve pissed off the scavengers, and…”

He didn’t have the strength to finish the sentence. Marcus did it for him.

“And you’ve pissed off Radio Hope.”

CHAPTER NINE

The first thing the next morning, Pablo fidgeted at the gate waiting for it to open. He had to get out and see if Hong-gi was safe. He bounced from one foot to the other next to the big steel plates until at last the siren wailed and the heavy gate began to roll open.

As he was about to bolt through the widening space, a hand grabbed him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the guard asked.

“I, um, I’m supposed to meet my mother, Sheriff Cruz.”

The guard looked uncertain. “You should probably wait for her to pick you up.”

“She’s busy with sheriffing stuff. She told me to go meet her for breakfast.”

The guard let go. “Well, all right.”

Pablo was out of the gate like a shot. As he ran across the empty ground between the New City wall and the edge of the Burbs, he scanned the shantytown ahead for signs of Mom or her deputies. If they spotted him outside the walls he’d get it for sure.

His luck held and he hurried to the market. Hong-gi was already setting up the stall. He looked tired and glum.

“Hey, you OK?” Pablo called out as he ran up to him.

Hong-gi shrugged.

“What happened?” Pablo asked.

Hong-gi snuck a look around. “Mr. Fartbag kept me up half the night burying all his stuff. He thinks the Chinese are going to take it.”

“They’re probably going to attack today! You got to get inside the walls. Stay with Greg and me. Greg says hi. He couldn’t come because his dad is picking him up first thing.”

Hong-gi stuck out his lower lip and kept arranging the sacks of grain.

“Mr. Fartbag is making me work all day. I don’t even have time for baseball.”

An unwashed scavenger came up to the stall.

“How much for half a kilo of wheat? I got salt to trade.”

The man opened up a package and showed them.

“It’s from the salt flats,” he said, “not the sea. It’s clean.”

Hong-gi studied the salt. “Looks like sea salt to me.”

“I said it’s from the flats,” the man growled.

Hong-gi didn’t flinch. Sometimes grownups tried to scare kids into giving them better trade, but Hong-gi had been doing this too long to back down.

“Half a kilo of wheat for a hundred grams of salt.”

“My friend got it for fifty grams just yesterday!”

“My boss says the price has gone up because of the ship.”

“Yeah, but this is salt flats salt, not dirty sea salt, I told you.”

The woman running the next stall said, “You heard the kid. Trade or don’t.”

The man scowled at her and turned back to Hong-gi.

“Fucking Asian.”

He turned and walked off into the market.

Hong-gi looked at the ground, his lower lip trembling. Pablo put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t listen to that turdball. Come on with me. Mr. Fartbag can take care of his own stall.”

“He’ll kick me out if I leave. He said so!”

Hong-gi looked like he was about to cry.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Pablo said.

“He
totally
would. He’s always saying how lucky I am to have someone to take care of me. Yeah, right. I work harder than his field hands and get less. But he says there’s lots of orphan kids who’d take my place and he’s right.”

“You could live with Uncle Marcus and Aunt Rosie.”

Hong-gi slumped his shoulders. “They’d take me for a few days but they wouldn’t take me forever.”

“But you can’t stay here. The Chinks are going to come and kill everyone.”

Hong-gi stamped his foot and shouted at him. “No they’re NOT!”

“They will! They eat babies and blow up cities and—”

“Shut up! Shut up! You don’t know anything! Go away!”

“But—”

“GO AWAY!”

Pablo backed off, stunned. What was the matter? Hong-gi looked like he was about to slug him.

“I said go away!”

Pablo hurried off.

He walked around the market, wondering what had gotten into his friend. Hong-gi must be scared of the Chinese and got mad when Pablo reminded him how dangerous they were.

Yeah, that must be it. With Mr. Fartbag keeping him outside the walls, of course he’d to be scared. Pablo was scared and he got to stay at Uncle Marcus and Aunt Rosie’s house.

Something weird was going on back there. Jessica hadn’t come home last night. She was in New City, though. He’d seen her walking into the warehouse with two guards. He had started going over to her when she had given him a look that made him keep away. It was like a signal or something.

Pablo stopped and nearly got knocked over by a grownup who was walking right behind him. As the grownup grumbled and passed by, Pablo thought about what had happened. He had radioed the ship with the coordinates Jessica had given him. Her dad wanted to bring the ship somewhere else but she wanted it here for some reason. Why?

“To stay.” That’s what she’d said. So if the ship had gone where her dad wanted it to she would have had to leave New City? Maybe her dad would have come and taken her away. She’d always been scared of that.

She seemed so happy and proud to see the ship come in. Jessica wouldn’t have brought the Chinese against them, would she?

No. She wanted to stay and she loved Uncle Marcus and Aunt Rosie and him and that loser Zach too. She wouldn’t want a Big One to drop on New City. So why bring them here?

Maybe she didn’t know they were Chinese. If she had never seen them before, how would she know?

But what if her dad did? That guy was crazy, Pablo had seen him. Lots of the scavengers were crazy, but this guy looked extra crazy, like he’d do just anything. Maybe he hated New City for having better stuff than the scavengers and wanted a Big One to drop on it. Maybe he was working with the Chinese.

That must be it!

So why were those guards walking with Jessica? To protect her from her dad?

That wouldn’t do much good if a Big One dropped.

Pablo started walking again.

He still needed to help out Hong-gi. How could he get him into New City without Mr. Fartbag kicking him out of the house?

He passed Lupita’s stand and noticed it was empty. He went up to a red-nosed man selling whiskey at the next booth. His still bubbled away right behind the counter and Pablo reached out his hands to warm them.

“You trading or just getting in the way?” the man asked. His breath stank.

“Have you seen the Sanchez family?”

“They packed up and headed into the wildlands. I’m planning on doing the same once I trade for the stock I have. You should tell your parents to get out too.”

Pablo walked away. He hated it when his scavenger friends left for the season, and those stupid Chinks were going to make everyone leave. He probably wouldn’t see Lupita until next winter.

He noticed a crowd in an open part of the market. A group of men and women stood in a line with guns sloped across their shoulders. A second line behind them was made up of people with bows and spears. A man facing them shouted directions and they all turned right or left at his command, or got to one knee and pretended to shoot.

“What are they doing?” he asked another kid standing nearby.

“It’s the new militia. They’re getting ready to push the Chinks back into the sea.”

“Cool. What’s that cloth?”

Pablo pointed to a man standing next to the guy shouting orders. He was holding a pole. On the top was tied a colored cloth with stars on it.

“That’s a flag.”

“Whose flag?”

The kid shrugged. “I dunno.”

A hand on his shoulder made him turn around. It was Jackson Andrews, one of Mom’s deputies.

“What are you doing out here?” Mr. Andrews asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, I’ll take you back to the gate. Stay inside where it’s safe.”

They started walking back to New City. Pablo noticed Mr. Andrews walked slowly and kind of stiff.

“Does that bullet still hurt you?” Pablo asked.

Mr. Andrews got shot by the cultists and The Doctor had saved his life. He was a hero.

“Yeah. Probably will for a while too.”

“Can I see?”

“What do you want to see a bullet wound for?”

“Pleeeeaaase?”

“You can’t see anything, just a bandage.”

“Can I see that?”

“Oh, all right.”

Mr. Andrews pulled up his shirt. There was a bright white bandage stuck with tape to his chest. The bandage looked funny. The material wasn’t like any type of cloth he knew. Once Greg Miller had cut his arm real bad and The Doctor bandaged it. That bandage looked like normal cloth. This stuff was all shiny.

“That’s a weird bandage.”

“That’s because it’s from the Old Times, not one of the ones The Doctor makes himself.”

“Wow! He must really like you to give you that,” Pablo said.

Mr. Andrews laughed the way grownups do when they think you’ve said something cute and stupid.

“Come on, let’s go.”

“Are the Chinks going to attack?” Pablo asked.

“They’re called Chinese.”

“Are the Chinese going to attack?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they want to kill everybody?”

Mr. Andrews stopped and turned to him. Crouching so he could look him in the eye, he said, “Pablo, there are a lot of bad people in the world, but you can’t tell who’s bad and who’s good by how they look.”

Pablo thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean Asians? I have an Asian friend. But I wasn’t talking about Asians, I was talking about Chinese.”

“The Chinese are Asians.”

“Yeah, but they’re bad Asians,” Pablo said.

“Not all Chinese are bad,” Mr. Andrews told him.

“Have you met any Chinese?”

“Um, no.”

“Then how do you know they’re not all bad?”

Mr. Andrews grinned. “You’re almost as annoying as your mother, you know that?”

Pablo’s face fell. He didn’t want to be compared to his mother.

“Just joking, kid,” Mr. Andrews said, tousling his hair. “Look, what I mean to say is, you can’t judge someone based on where they’re from or even the company they keep. Remember the Righteous Horde? They were all bad, right? But they were white and black and even Latino, just like you. So you couldn’t tell who was in the Righteous Horde just by how they looked, could you? And then it turned out not everyone in the Righteous Horde was bad. The refugees aren’t bad, are they?”

“And neither was Mitch!” Pablo said.

“Um…”

“He wasn’t!”

“OK, kid,” Mr. Andrews sighed, leading him to the gate. “What I’m trying to tell you is you can’t judge someone until you know them. Look at Suzanna Waites, she came from the Righteous Horde and now she’s doing all sorts of good stuff for the refugees.”

“They’re starting to call her The Liberator,” Pablo told him.

Mr. Andrews looked surprised.

“Who?”

“The refugees. Some work on the farm where my Asian friend works and he told me.”

Mr. Andrews shook his head. “Just what the world needs, another person going by a title instead of a name.”

“People are saying a lot of bad stuff about Asians.”

“Yeah, they’re beginning to Blame too. Everyone’s pointing fingers and claiming someone else caused the wars.”

Pablo stared at him. Mr. Andrews got branded for Blame a few years ago and still had a big scar in the shape of a “B” on his cheek. Mr. Andrews must have noticed him staring at it because he smiled at him in kind of a sad way.

“Blame is wrong,” Mr. Andrews said.

“But you Blamed.”

“Not the Asians. I Blamed the people who really screwed up the world.”

“Who was that?”

Mr. Andrews looked away and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Nobody listened to me anyway.”

They found Aunt Rosie waiting for them at the gate with a worried expression.

“There you are! I heard you’d run off into the Burbs. You know it’s dangerous. Come with me. We’re making some apple pies. If you’re good I’ll let you lick the spoon.”

Pablo spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen with Aunt Rosie. That evening as they were finishing up dinner, Mom finally showed up.

“Hey kiddo,” she said, sitting next to him and giving him a hug.

Pablo stiffened. He didn’t like Mom’s hugs anymore.

Rosie hurried into the kitchen to get some leftovers. In a minute she had served a steaming plate of food and a glass of goat’s milk.

Mom dug in.

“Thanks,” she said around a mouthful of food. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Is it bad out there?” Aunt Rosie asked.