Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (7 page)

Just then, she saw him scatter some
tools with a clatter and burst from behind the shrub towards the main house.
They saw him too! He was running as fast as she had ever seen him go. He only
had to cover twenty yards to get to the cover of the house. She didn’t hear the
muzzle report of any gunfire, but she could definitely hear the sound of
bullets ricocheting around her father as he turned the corner of the front
portico. And then she saw that the whole house seemed to be on fire! She
desperately wanted to run to her father, to see if he was hit, to warn him
about the fire, to wrap herself in his arms. But she knew she should hold back,
wait just a moment, see what those men were up to. They didn’t know she was
there yet. She might need that advantage.

They had guns, seemed to be very
heavily armed. She saw them running toward the house. They had to cover about a
hundred and fifty yards. She shifted her position further to her right, trying
to find a position as close to the kitchen door as she could manage without
drawing their attention. This brought her to a position near the blazing
woodshed as well. She discarded her backpack and got ready to run. Her jacket
was dark brown, but she was wearing khaki pants and an orange tank top. It
wasn’t ideal camo, so she would need the cover of the fire.

She saw eight or nine men crossing
the lawn, firing as they ran. Four of them ran straight for the front door. The
rest peeled off and circled around toward the back of the house, pausing to
consider the garage. Once they made it to the kitchen, she would have no way to
get to the house. She had to act now. There was no more time to wait, no more
deliberating. She moved quickly, but deliberately toward the corner of the
house near the kitchen, keeping the woodshed between herself and the last
position where she had seen the second team. The brightness of the flames kept
them from seeing her, but it also kept her from seeing precisely where they
were. At least, they weren’t aware of her presence yet, she hoped, so they
wouldn’t be looking for her in the fire.

She heard a noise from the house.
It sounded like muffled gunfire. There was a crash and the sound of breaking
glass. She peered as far around the woodshed as she dared. The men in the
driveway ran toward the house, some toward the front, the rest burst in through
the kitchen door. Emily followed them in as closely as she could without
attracting their attention. What she saw when she cleared the door was a full
on gun battle. Two men in the kitchen were laying down a steady fire into the
public rooms of the house. Even more gunfire was returning their way. One man
had sustained a significant leg wound, another was trying to help him out of
the line of fire. None of them seemed to see her..

Emily’s first thought was to launch
herself at the two who were shooting into the rooms where she assumed her
father was. But the gunfire was too hot to make it worth the risk. If she were
shot or killed, she would hardly be any help to her father. Her next thought
was to make her way to the kitchen staircase and down to the basement. From
there she could come up at the other end of the house where she might be able
to help her father.

She cleared the staircase and
entered the furnace room. Peering through the doorway into the rec room, she
saw her father walking unsteadily from the other end of the basement. He was
bleeding from his left side! She ran to him, threw her arms around him. All she
wanted was to hold on to him. He winced. She slid around under his right
shoulder and helped him stand. With the relief of seeing her, he breathed a
little easier. Now to get them both out of there.

“Quickly, Chi-chan, downstairs,” he
said in a sharp whisper.

“Okay, Dad. What’s going on
upstairs? Anyone else up there?”

“No. We’re all that’s left. Come,
quickly.” They slipped behind the bar where a door in the floor covered the
ladder to the lower basement. Emily lowered the door over in place them. It
wouldn’t conceal their escape route for long. At least it wasn’t the first
place they’d look. It might buy them a few minutes at best. The sound of
shooting died away. The tactical teams, or what was left of them, must be
regrouping. In the initial onslaught George had managed to disarm the first man
through the front door and used that gun to dispatch the next man through. He
ducked into the study off the dining room, crouched in its doorway, and fired into
the kitchen as the second team entered there. They returned fire through the
dining room and living room. The remainder of the first team fired back. George
slipped down the basement stairs in the confusion.

“We need to get out through the
tunnel before they make it down here. Hurry, Chi-chan.”

“I’m on it, Dad. Let’s go!”

Unfortunately, the enemy was
already there. Somehow. But, how?! One man in black tactical gear burst out
from behind the door to the tunnel. George saw him just as he was pulling his gun
up to fire. He knocked the gun to the side, slapped the man hard across the
face and shoved him back into the tunnel door, slamming it closed with
considerable force. If there was anyone else in the tunnel, this would contain
them until he could settle with this first attacker. The man sprang up with a
huge knife in his hand, and lunged towards George.

Emily was paralyzed in shock. She
desperately wanted to help her father but found herself rooted to the floor.
She watched as he parried the lunging knife. His left arm appeared to move in a
lazy circle around the man’s right hand. It had an almost hypnotic effect. She
couldn’t quite see how it happened, how he controlled his opponent’s arm. He
twisted the arm out and away, slapped his face again with his right hand, and
sent him sprawling backwards in a complete flip. He stood over his attacker,
holding his wrist as he pressed a foot to the side of his face. The man reached
for the gun, which lay just within reach. George pulled up on the arm sharply
and stomped down hard on his face. He stopped moving.

Emily was stunned by the blunt
violence of her father’s skills. She had never seen him in a fight before. She
found it both thrilling and terrifying. He didn’t have the luxury of fighting
from out of the stillness of his
qi
,
that much was clear. He had too much to lose: he fought to keep her safe... and
he was bleeding out of his side. The important thing was to find the most
direct way to dispatch this man, prevent him from firing his gun, or alerting
the men upstairs, not to mention whoever might be behind him in the tunnel.
Emily understood her father perfectly, appreciated him as never before.

George picked up the gun, tore open
the door and fired several rounds into the tunnel. The light from the muzzle flairs
didn’t reveal anyone. The tunnel was clear. The men upstairs had found the trap
door behind the bar. Emily pulled the dead man into the tunnel and pulled the
door closed, hooking him to the handle by his gun strap. The barrel caught on
the doorframe. They ran as fast as they could to the other end and out into the
woods.

The sky began to show blue. It took
only a moment to find where George had left the motorcycle, collect their
packs, kick over the engine and speed off into the woods. They were going much
faster than Emily felt was safe, strictly speaking. But she figured her father
wanted to be out of sight or hearing when the tactical teams emerged from the
tunnel.

They rode for a couple of hours
through the woods, hardly ever coming out from under the canopy of trees. If
anyone was looking for them from above, they would be practically invisible.
They stopped a couple of times to rest, and to give George a break from the
jostling of the ride. His wound was starting to bother him. Blood had soaked
all the way through his jacket. Emily began to worry.

“Dad, we gotta get you some help,”
she pleaded.

“We have to keep going. There
is
no help around here.”

“How far is the nearest town?”

“Chi-chan, it’s another thirty
minutes to the car.”

“Dad, you can’t make it that long,
can you?”

“I dunno. I think you’ll have to
take over from here. You up to it?”

“Trust me, Dad. I can do it. Clutch
with my hands, shift with my feet, right?”

“Oh, Lord,” he snorted.
Fortunately, Emily turned out to have a better understanding of how motorcycles
work than she let on. There were only a few rough bits at the beginning. Her
father hugged her from behind, and held on for dear life. He couldn’t remember
ever feeling any happier than at that moment.

By the time they got to Mill Creek,
he looked much weaker. Emily saw how pale he had become. She tried to dress the
wound with a first aid kit from the trunk of the car. The hole wasn’t large,
and the bullet seemed to have missed his ribs. It had entered and exited
apparently without injuring any organs. But he had lost a lot of blood. He lay
in the back of the car. She seemed to have stopped the bleeding. Emily drove as
her father directed her to the interstate. They headed north to Pittsburgh.

At a steakhouse in Morgantown,
Emily got takeout and George ate what he could in the back seat. His plan was
to take a northern route through Ohio and Michigan, eventually make their way
to Montana, where they could hide out in the wilderness for a few weeks. He
knew there were lots of cabins in the area around the Kootenai National Forest,
and many of them would be empty in late October. From there they could travel
south to New Mexico and meet up again with Michael and Yuki. The entire trip
would take a couple of months, plenty of time for their trail to go cold.

Emily
understood the plan perfectly. It was just like her father. He would elude the
enemy who expected him to move quickly by moving as slowly as possible without
remaining completely still. Everything would be direct and deliberate, nothing
rushed, nothing decided in haste, and yet still be utterly elusive. He would
make the enormity of the country his ally instead of his obstacle.

George lay across the back seat as
they bucketed up interstate 79 and pondered their situation. He could feel his
strength ebbing. He sensed he didn’t have much time. But he couldn’t leave
Emily without telling her the truth. He’d been looking for the right moment to
tell her everything for the last few years. She wasn’t a child anymore. She
wasn’t exactly an adult yet either, but she might have to become one in a
hurry. This wasn’t the moment he was hoping for, but he was afraid there
wouldn’t be a whole lot more moments to choose from. She would be pissed at
him, he knew, for all the lies. But he had had his reasons. He just hoped she
would see the wisdom of his schemes and precautions, too. Fortunately, the
truth he would tell her would have a happy side as well.

Emily pulled the car into the Grove
City Airport parking lot. It was a sleepy spot this time of day, a good spot to
give her dad a rest from the ride. He propped himself up on a bag and reclined
against the back door. He was pale as a sheet. Emily looked at him in horror.
“He must be bleeding internally” she thought. She tried to simulate a cheery
expression to keep his spirits up. He wasn’t fooled.

“Open that up.” He motioned to one
of the packs in the front seat. “I need to talk to you about something in
there,” he said.

Emily looked in
the pack and pulled out Yuki’s rice balls. “Wow, this is just what I need, Dad!
You didn’t make these, did you?” She handed him one and took a bite out of one
herself. Those were definitely not what he expected to see come out of her bag.
Still, he decided to get right to it.

“Your mother always knows what to make
for you,” he chortled.

Emily laughed. She was glad to hear
a lighter tone in his voice. It took a moment for her to register what he had
just said. She turned her eyes directly into his, trying to read his face. What
was he saying? “No, it couldn’t be,” she thought. “He wouldn’t make a joke
about that.” She felt a tug in the deepest part of her stomach. Her eyes
flashed.

“What are you trying to say, Dad?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I should
have told you sooner. I wanted to. But it just didn’t seem safe before.”

“Tell me what, Dad?!” She felt a
storm brewing in her heart. The signs were easy to see in her watery eyes and
trembling on her lips.

“I’ve been deceiving you all these
years about your mother,” he began nervously. “Her name is not Mei Li. She is
not Taiwanese. That was all a lie.” He paused for a moment before going on.
“Yuki is your mother.”

She sat speechless for a few
moments as that last statement hung in the air. Finally she burst out: “Daddy!
What possible reason could you have for not telling me? Why didn’t Yuki tell me
herself? All these years!!!” She yelped in rage and frustration. Her father
looked deeply ashamed, as well he might. He had obviously cheated her of
something, wronged her. But why? Whatever his reasons might have been, his worries
about obscure dangers, none of it had any weight compared to the pain she felt
right then. Nothing he could say wouldn’t seem like a craven excuse. Even so,
she wanted him to answer, to tell her if anything about her life was true. His
hesitation was choking her.

He let out a sigh and told her
about Cardano’s assignment in Tokyo. He told her all the things Cardano knew.
Then he told her about him and Yuki. She was born in Okinawa at the base
hospital. They had been married a few weeks earlier.

He explained her grandfather’s
research to her. She was disgusted. It seemed little more than a war crime to
her, or some sort of atrocity without an official category yet. There was more
he told her, stuff Cardano didn’t know. The Chinese had heard her grandfather
had shifted his efforts from seeking a gene mutation to support the Predator
drug to developing a mutation that would achieve similar ends independently of
the drug. He was apparently convinced he could design a virus to implant the
mutation in an adult subject. It would take effect in a few days. Perhaps it
would even prove to be reversible. That, at least, was what the Chinese
believed. Of course, even if such a thing were possible, the risk of the virus
getting loose in the general population ought to dissuade any sane person from
carrying on with the project.