WARRIORS HIGH
ISLAND OF THE LOST
CHAPTER TWO
FIGHT AND FLIGHT
"Is that everything?" said the woman, loading the six bags into the trunk of the red SUV.
"Yep! Thanks for your help!" said the bearded man, shutting the trunk and shaking hands four times with his grocery helper before they went their opposite ways, the man slipping into the driver's seat and setting his GPS to the hardware store, the next stop in a long line of errands he needed to complete before day's end.
That's what he had been doing for the year and a half since the bombings. His wife had been severely injured when ARS attacked, so as a low-income family in an island in deep political distress, he was the one working the most, working three shifts at two department stores six days a week, taking the kids to and from school and running errands every Sunday. Yes, it was a haul and hard on his back, but at least he was never bored with himself.
He made a right turn onto Lee Avenue, one of the five roads that led into the city of Excelsio, and accelerated to the speed limit of 60 mph, tapping an incoherent tune on his steering wheel to fill the silence with something more interesting than the purring of the engine.
But as he approached the city gates, the GPS abruptly changed course, instructing him to turn away from the city. To this he momentarily raised an eyebrow, but regardless, merged into the left turn lane at the next stoplight.
As he completed the U-turn, he swiped up to look at the direction list and he stared at it, confused. This happened all the time, the GPS being rerouted, but it just gave him coordinates. He was never usually the one to receive coordinates when this happened.
With a bit more anxiety shown in the speed of his car, he drove back through the suburbs into the suburban area of CoastClan, which was still picking up the pieces from when they were bombed. Hundreds of houses were destroyed, a harsh blow to the area with the most focus on affordable housing.
He made a right on 5th and drove a mile and a half to the shore walk entrance, a small pathway that led from the outskirts of the forest to the north shoreline. He pulled aside, parked the car and grabbed his phone, waiting.
Moments later, he got a call. The caller ID said "Unknown Caller," but he picked up anyway.
"BLACK BICYCLE, LIGHT ORANGE STRIPES. RIDER INJURED. FIND RIDER."
The call hung up. He sighed and reached into his glove compartment, grabbing the Ruger SR9C out from it's hiding beneath some forms and a sheet saying "Terms of Surrender," loaded it, and pursued onto the path. His aim was sloppy, but he moved quickly, taking somewhat minimal precautions to not stay seen.
As he came to the edge of the forest, he saw a glimmer, and he stepped into a modest clearing, where a glossy black bicycle with light orange stripes lay, it's wheels being punctured and dented beyond repair.
But there was no one in sight. The man couldn't even find the direction in which he exited.
Sighing, he pulled out his phone and took a picture of the bike, automatically uploading it to the Cloud, and walked away. He didn't really care that he couldn't find the rider. He just hoped that he could get back on task now. He had a wife and kids at home, too.
He slipped into the driver's seat, tossed the gun on the passenger seat, and turned the key.
The car exploded immediately, the windows shattering to microscopic pieces and the plates and sidings flying out in all directions.
What was left was a burning frame and the skin and bones of a man who had failed his job.
"If you just wanted me to go straight home, you could have just called."
"We needed to be discreet," said Ashtooth, squinting at the road ahead through his darkened sunglasses, "ARS got on your trail. We needed to give them a false lead to lead them away from us.
"Wait, seriously?" said Dusty, adjusting the fetal position he was in under the back seat, "How did they get to the music store?" Ashtooth shrugged at that.
"Stay low," he said, "They could be anywhere."
'Side note," he said as Ashtooth made a U-turn for the seventh time since he picked him up, "Is Jay working on a way to alert me of suspicious thugs for school in two weeks? Cause if ARS is everywhere, than they'll almost certainly be at school."
Dusty was confused when he didn't answer him.
"941762"
Mallowleaf used the keypad to unveil the hidden door behind a false bookshelf. She shoved open the weighted gateway into a dark, concrete stairway leading fifty feet down at first sight. Following the general was Dusty, Ashtooth, Jaywhisker and two other soldiers acting as guards.
"I'm not trying to solicit myself from you guys!" said Dusty, continuing the argument they had been having since they drove into their CoastClan lakeside house, "I'm just saying that there are some interests that I would like to keep to myself!"
"Why? So you can sneak away successfully without us knowing where you are? Do you know how dangerous this is? ARS could be anywhere! They could kill you whenever they want!"
"Oh, so I'm not good enough to defend myself from the enemy I've been training against for over a year?!"
"YES! Because you keep skipping training! That's why!"
"If you two are quite done arguing," said Mallowleaf, now stopped in front of a heavy metal door. She knocked twice, before an eye-slot just above her head slid open.
It scanned it's judging gaze along the impatient and calm before it retreated, sliding the door open. "General," said the man manning the door with a salute.
They walked into a room filled with maps, pictures and sloppy Sharpie writing. The singluar, exposed and worn lightbulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the room was the only chance of illumination, scarring the room with ominous shadows. Dusty took the chair closest to him while everyone else stood behind him, at attention, at ease.
"Glad to see you enjoyed your morning off, Dusty," chastised a booming voice opposite the boy. Any sarcastic quip or retort fizzled out of Dusty's mouth the moment he heard the threatening voice.
From the shadows emerged a muscular man, about 6'3", wearing a worn and torn green army jacket. He had handsome, black hair and a cleanly-cut beard, impressive for a man very early in his mid-twenties. Next to him emerged a beautiful woman in her early twenties, her clean, brown hair draping over her shoulder, a near match in height. Their disposition commanded attention, and seemed to say novels about how they could be the leaders of this operation. They were not, but their posture and voices gave them a certain aura of confidence no one could so easily overlook, even if they tried.
"Coalstrike, Seashell," said the general, stepping forward and shaking their hands respectively.
After taking Mallowleaf's hand, he turned to Ashtooth. "How goes the setup?"
"All ready. Took some bribery, but they'll be ready to move on our command. Should fit us all perfectly."
"So they say," he said distrustfully, though he let an affectionate smirk slip through the corners of his mouth that only the other could see. "As for you..." he said, turning to the boy.
Dusty only glanced up from staring at the table, obvious intimidation eliciting his mind even though he had known them since the week after the bombings. He braced himself to get hit. Coalstrike was known to be quite aggressive, after all.
But Seashell reached to the wall to her left and pulled off a large packet, which she promptly dropped in front of Dusty. A pen landed on top of the pile a moment later.
"You have work to do," said Coalstrike, "All of these papers need to be filled out before the day's end. Get ready to practice your signature."
"I thought you did all the paperwork round here," he said, but Coalstrike had pulled Mallowleaf and Ashtooth aside, addressing them urgently.
And then he looked at what he was signing.
A small packet from the private plane company downtown.
A transfer of ownership from the music store downtown regarding his studio.
A small passport, emblazoned with a hastily crafted emblem of Lindisfarne.
An order confirmation sheet for an American private bus service.
A check for $150,000.
And papers emblazoned with a grand tree rising from a lake with a star cut out from the middle.
Dusty sifted through the papers, his eyes widening more and more, before looking to Seashell. "I...I don't understand."
Seashell looked conflicted about this decision, taking a seat across from Dusty. "We...have decided to transfer you out of Lindisfarne and into Warriors High. On Forrestlake."
Dusty was shocked.
He was leaving?
"We made contact with a source on Forrestlake who reached out to us and said they would like to help," Seashell continued, gesturing to a picture of a young man, about twenty or so, with vibrant ginger hair, "He's got money, he's got resources and he's got friends with…'fighting experience,' he says."
"Yeah, that's great and all, but why do I have to leave? Why am I the one running from this fight?"
"You're not," said Coalstrike, the conversation with the two soldiers concluded, "We're coming with you, at least for a little while."
"Why can't they just come to us?"
"Too risky. ARS would find out someone is coming. They've cut off all passenger boat lines and flights for a reason."
"Well then, Why can't they just send us supplies?"
Coalstrike crouched, meeting Dusty's eye-level, "Because what good are supplies when ARS is just gonna match them and overtake whatever we get. You saw that ARS tactician. He looked just like an average Joe, but he had a Glock in the trunk of his car. We get knives, they get Glocks. We get assault rifles, they get semi-autos. We get grenades, RPGs, they get nuclear bombs."
"And you think we're not capable of defeating them ourselvers? After all we've been through, we go running to some other rock in the ocean who has better guns than we do? That's it?"
"We've lost the island, Dusty," snapped Mallowleaf, likely bursting a dam that held back her pent up frustration, "We have for a long time. Look around. So many civilians have gone to ARS that it's impossible to tell who's innocent and who's under their orders. They have the power to tell one of their agents to whip out a gun and kill who they like. We've done too little too late here. We need to find another front to fight on if we want to salvage our sliver of a chance of beating them."
"So then why are you so bent on taking me out of the fight?!"
"Because we want to protect you!" shouted Ashtooth, "That's always been our priority. You first, island and war second. That's how it always has been!"
Dusty couldn't believe this, standing up so quickly, his chair toppled over."So all this is to get me out of the fight?! After all the training I've done, you want me to hide?!"
"Yes!"
"WHY?!"
"BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT JETSTORM AND AMBERCLOUD WOULD HAVE WANTED!" roared Coalstrike.
A tense silence followed. Dusty, after a couple moments, reached over and sat his chair up again, slouching back in his seat. Coalstrike winced and looked away, regretting what he had just said intensely.
Ashtooth walked up from behind him, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "We're your family, Dusty. We've always tried to protect you and we always will."
Dusty glanced around, surrounded by aunts, uncles, godparents and unwavering friends, but there still resided the hole in his heart that would never be quite filled again.
And he had been shutting them out after they were gone. Acknowledging them as comrades, generals, ignoring the roles they played in his family. Yet here they were, willing to travel between oceans to save him.
"It's always been for you, Dusty," said the general, kneeling down to look at him opposite Ashtooth, "ARS took your life away from you. We don't just fight for the island. We fight for you."
Dusty looked around at his family, smiling, letting their guard down for the first and one of the only times in their lives.
His family, the one that would truly to anything to protect him.
And in that fleeting moment, he felt almost as safe as he ever had in his life.
He grabbed the pen, turned to the final page of the packet consenting his transfer to Warriors High, and signed it, his name skewered sloppily across the dotted line.
He looked up to see everyone smiling around him. A confident smirk slipped through the corners of his mouth.
"When do we start?"
Doesn't it suck when you finish what you think is a pretty solid chapter and you have nothing to say about it after?
Well okay, I will say what comes next, is pretty intense, and it involves ARS, motorcycles, an Uber, tension between America and Lindisfarne, a prettty sick fight sequence (hopefully), and a fuel crisis executed better than Last Jedi.
And that's before we even get to Forrestlake.
So keep an eye out. Hopefully you find this story intriguing and stick around for when things get real interesting.
Best,
~Res