The older gentleman wearing the toupee that fooled no one was back on his high horse about something or another. Daniel was his name, if memory served correctly.
“I, for one, am glad the rebels were finally sentenced today by a jury of their peers,” Daniel pontificated. “The scene they caused at President Evans’ inauguration was beyond the pale.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” the blonde hostess—Esther—seconded. “Let’s go to Abraham for a more detailed account of today’s decision. Abe.”
Gaia stopped mid-sip and put the coffee cup down on a table. Her pulse picked up as she watched the news report unfold. Although biased in its coverage, the account was more or less accurate. Or it was, at least, until it reached the part where the lone female protestor had been stripped naked by the angered crowd.
“She stripped herself naked in front of all and sundry—the president and First Lady included—and began screaming like a banshee,” Abraham finished. “It was an unforgivably brazen act of wantonness that the jury had no choice but to punish accordingly.”
“That isn’t true,” Gaia told the TV. She swallowed roughly. “Not even close.”
The 3-D image flashed to the jury delivering a guilty verdict before switching over to show the punishment phase. Gaia smashed her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming as the naked, lifeless body of the female protestor swung from a tree in the town center.
Gaia gasped from behind her hands. Her stomach roiled, its contents threatening to come back up. Horrified and traumatized, she ran into the master bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, fell to her knees, and vomited up her breakfast. She held her hair back with one hand as she continued to wretch over the toilet. Pain lanced through her head as a memory jarred her.
Dead, naked bodies hanging from trees. Screaming. Crying. Gunfire. Smoke—so much suffocating smoke. “Kill them all!” a man in military fatigues roared. “No survivors!”
Gaia vomited again, the pain in her head excruciating. The memories kept flooding back, agonizing in their intensity. Afraid she might pass out, she held onto the toilet for dear life.
She fired the AR-15 at a group of enemy extremists, praying that all of them died. They were easy to spot because of the common insignia they all wore around the biceps area of their arms. The emblem, a symbol that invoked as much revulsion as the Nazi’s emblem had, was that of the United States, a singular gold cross present where the fifty stars had once been.
Her legs shaky, her entire body trembling, Gaia forced herself up onto her feet. She staggered over to the sink and stared at herself in the mirror through haunted eyes. Now she understood the reaction her mere presence had garnered during the inauguration. Now she comprehended the enormity of the situation she was in. Gaia was a rebel. “Oh my God,” she cried. “It’s no wonder that poor woman called me a traitor.”
To United Christian America, Gaia Evans was a traitor who had been miraculously redeemed and transformed into one of their own. To United Democratic America—the country where her allegiance lay—she had undoubtedly gone from being a war heroine to a traitor in truth. The knowledge made her want to vomit again.
Gaia held her stomach and tried not to panic. She was fairly certain she was pregnant with Ryan’s—the enemy’s—baby. Her hazel eyes narrowed into menacing slits as she continued to stare at herself in the mirror. Chills worked up and down her spine as she considered just how much of a coup it must have been for her so-called husband to bring the civil war’s most famous rebel to heel—his heel.
She forced herself to calm down, to figure out a method of escape. Splashing water on her face from the sink, she next brushed her teeth. Until she could find a way to successfully thwart the enemy, she couldn’t let on that she knew he was one.
Gaia’s teeth gritted at her own foolishness. Clearly she had been outwitted, though he’d held an admitted advantage over her because of the amnesia. It physically repulsed her to acknowledge that Ryan had been crafty enough to get her to fall in love with him, or at least with the man she’d thought he was.
Dead, naked bodies hanging from trees. Screaming. Crying. Gunfire. Smoke—so much suffocating smoke. “Kill them all!” a man in military fatigues roared. “No survivors!” The man, the soldier, turned. His wolfish blue gaze bore into hers.
Ryan. Oh my God.Ryan.
The memory was like a punch to the gut. Gaia stumbled into the bedroom and searched for the clothes he’d torn off her not even two hours ago. She felt faint, slightly dizzy. Where had she put them?
“Baby? Are you okay?”
Gaia whirled around, an action that only made her dizzier. A good spy would have continued playing her part. She supposed she wasn’t CIA material. “Stay away from me!” she spat, reaching for a bed post to steady herself. “You might as well string me up on a tree the way you did that protestor because I will never willingly stay with you!”
His eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. “You cannot and will not leave me.”
She wanted to tell him how wrong he was, but the vertigo proved to be too much. One second she was shooting daggers at him with her eyes and the next she was falling onto the bed. The last coherent image she took in before succumbing to blackness was that of Ryan standing over her fainting body.
Chapter Eleven
Gaia’s dreams were fitful. So much tossing and turning, so many memories rushing back to fill the five-year void, so little light in a world of chaos and darkness. The United States had bitterly divided and subsequently fallen, breaking up into two disparate zones: those who wished for a theocratic government and those who didn’t. The entire west coast along with most of the northeast were the first to band together and form a new government: United Democratic America. The rest of the former USA founded United Christian America, which ruled its people with an iron fist—Ryan’s iron fist.
There had been other leaders to emerge before Ryan, but they lacked his charisma and ability to bring squabbling factions together with relative if tentative calm. General Evans had come out on top, as much a symbol of the revolution to UCA as Gaia had been to UDA.
The dreams continued, her memories flowing back faster than she could keep up with. She knew deep inside she was remembering, not just dreaming, and told herself so even in her state of unconsciousness.
“You will go behind enemy lines. You will marry him. You will become one of them. We will tear them apart from within and annihilate them from without.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take out that Russian-backed general first. I’ll find a way to get your next orders to you.”
