Tomorrow War by Mack Maloney Read Free Book Online

children—it didn’t matter to them. They had slaughtered more than two hundred innocents in that grisly manner in just the past six months.
    And now they believed two young, beautiful girls were walking toward them, bare chested and laughing. With such pretty necks.
    The two visions reached the small guardhouse and just stood there for a moment Aki and Laki spoke only Japanese. But it made no difference—these girls could not speak at all. Instead, they began stroking the barrels of the guards’ rifles. It seemed like they were speaking in a very universal language.
    “You are gifts for us?” Aki asked in Japanese.
    The girls just smiled.
    “From our commanders?” Laki asked.
    The girls smiled again.
    “And we can do anything we want to you?” Aki asked.
    More smiles.
    Aki laid down his rifle and pulled out his razor-sharp knife. His idea of “anything” went way beyond normal sex.
    “Come here, sweet one,” he said to the nearest girl, hiding the knife from view.
    The girl took a step forward. Aki, bulging with anticipation, looked over at Laki to give him a wink. Laki was looking back at him—but he had the oddest expression on his face. His eyes appeared twice as big as normal, and his complexion had turned pale white. His mouth was open as if he was trying to scream, but couldn’t.
    That’s when Aki noticed a silver shaft protruding from Laki’s chest, just below his rib cage. It was the handle end of a long, razor-sharp bayonet. A gurgling sound came from Laki’s mouth, and then, in a very strange way, he began laughing.
    “If they … try to … rescue the princess,” he said in halting Japanese. “They have to take … the train first ….”
    And with that, Laki toppled over face first.
    He was dead before he hit the ground.
    Aki just stared down at him. When he looked up again, the two girls were still smiling at him. But then, in the space of a heartbeat, their images dissolved, only to be replaced by those of two paunchy, middle-aged men, one with an outrageous goatee. This man was swinging an old gold timepiece, back and forth at the end of a long gold chain. This accounted for the glare in Aki’s eyes.
    “What demon thing is this!” Aki cried out.
    “It’s called hypnotic suggestion,” Zoltan told him. “Scary, isn’t it?”
    Aki did not understand what Zoltan was saying, but it didn’t matter. Aki dropped his weapon and began running down the path, heading toward the interior of the island.
    Zoltan spun his watch around once and returned it to his pocket with flare.
    “Mission accomplished,” he said. “Hypnotism, I’ve heard of,” Crabb said, taking the weapon from the dead guard. “But how can you project the suggestion that we are two young girls? I mean, that’s a real stretch ….”
    Zoltan tapped the side of Crabb’s head.
    “You would not believe what I can make you—or anyone else—see up there,” he replied enigmatically. “Want another example?”
    Crabb watched as the hysterical Aki scrambled over the next hill. He was screaming at the top of his lungs.
    “I don’t think so,” Crabb replied.
    The next Cherrybender outpost was a small launchpad located about a half mile from Aki and Laki’s position.
    This housed one of the few aircraft the Benders knew how to fly—the TRX jetcopter. In a world dominated by huge eight-rotor helicopters/airliners known as “Beaters,” the jetcopter, or Bug as it was also known, was a fish out of water. Large enough to carry four people, and that rather uncomfortably, the Bug took off like a helicopter, its smallish rotors powered by movable jet thrusters located on each tip. Once airborne, the Bug could translate to the horizontal and move with the speed of a slow jet fighter. They could be incredibly maneuverable under control of the right pilot, and could pack a minor wallop in armaments, including a machine gun in the nose and up to five hundred pounds in bombs carried under two small winglets sprouting from its