Knight caught movement out of the corner of his eye and jerked the M4 back in that direction. Two dark figures moved swiftly toward the door.
He didn’t hesitate.
He sprinted back toward the cubicles. The first row of office spaces had a low barrier and a flat shelf instead of a high walled enclosure. Upon reaching these first cubicles, he threw his shoulder down and rolled over the top of the barrier.
He didn’t miss a beat as he hit the ground running and took off after the fleeing watchers. His prey were weaving in and out of the rows, trying to reach the far door.
Knight realized that he wasn’t going to catch them before they reached the exit. Deciding upon a different tactic, he turned a corner and grabbed a rolling office chair sitting against one of the desks. He raised his leg, pressing his foot squarely against the seat of the chair. Then, he kicked the chair toward the two fleeing figures.
The chair rolled down the aisle and collided with the smaller of the two. A tiny, frail voice cried out, and the small form careened over one of the desks.
Knight closed the distance between them and grabbed the small Asian boy by the arm. The boy’s companion, an older girl of no more than fourteen, screamed at him and lashed out with a flurry of punches and kicks.
Knight kept her at bay with his free arm. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. Calm down!”
Eventually, the girl backed away and looked up at him with a smooth tear-streaked face. She was a beautiful girl with a small, upturned nose and long raven-black hair. Her clothes were expensive brands but were dirty and torn. He could smell the stench of body odor emanating from the pair and pegged them as some kind of homeless street kids. Their kind wasn’t uncommon in any major metropolitan area, but to his knowledge, these ghost cities were largely uninhabited and shouldn’t have any problems with the homeless, especially kids.
“Please don’t hurt us. We’re sorry that we were watching you,” the girl said in Mandarin.
He released his grip on the boy, and the child quickly slipped behind the older girl, squeezing onto her leg. Each member of Knight’s black ops Special Forces team, known as Chess Team, had each learned a variety of languages for the different regions of the world based on their heritage. Since Knight was of Korean descent, he knew nearly all of the Asiatic languages. In a soothing and confident tone, he responded back to the girl in her native tongue. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a friend.”
The girl didn’t seem convinced. He slid the M4 to the side. He would have bent down to her level, but the girl wasn’t much shorter than him. He guessed she was around fourteen years old; the boy, maybe nine. Instead, he perched on the edge of one of the desks and relaxed his posture to make himself seem less threatening.
“My name is Knight. What’s yours?”
She shied back a bit, her shoulders shrinking up and her eyes darting around the room as if she was searching for an exit, but eventually she said, “My name is Ling, and this is my brother Wu Jiao. But everyone calls him Jiao.”
He smiled. “Pleasure to meet you both. What are you doing here in the city by yourselves? Everyone was supposed to have been evacuated.”
Ling’s face scrunched up as if she had detected a bad odor. “My uncle was one of the city’s maintenance workers. Our parents were killed last year so we moved here to be with uncle. He’s…an unkind man and two kids...”
Knight understood what she was saying. The fines and extra taxes for having more than one child would have been inherited by the uncle who took them in. While taking them in might have been a mercy, it seemed his compassion had run out with his cash flow.
“We ran away. There are lots of places to hide in this city, if you can find food. We were on our own when the evacuation order was given.”
He didn’t press her on the relationship with her uncle. The abuse she had suffered was written all over her face. “Okay, guys. You’re okay now. I’m going to be meeting up with some friends shortly, and we’ll find a safe place for you. Just follow me.”
He moved down the hallway toward the exit, but the children didn’t follow. He turned the flashlight back on them. “Let’s go. Beat your feet.”
The little boy trembled in the beam of light. He shook his head from side to side and started to sob.
“What’s wrong?”
The little boy mumbled something that Knight couldn’t understand. He could only pick out one of the words among the boy’s frightened ramble.
Monster.
6.