Read Online Strike Force Charlie by Mack Maloney - Free Book Online

and Li half-expected them to disappear into it—and then finally she could wake up.
    But the figures did not vanish. Instead, they turned around and smiled at her.
    And they were ghosts.
    It was Fox and Ozzi.
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    The next thing she knew, Li was flat out on her back, a wet facecloth draped across her brow.
    She’d never fainted before, and judging from the size of the bump on her head, she never wanted to again. Only slowly were her surroundings coming into focus, illuminated by the light of another candle. She was no longer in her kitchen. The walls around her now were painted cruddy green, the ceiling a hideous navy blue. There were two open windows off to her left, bare light and fog streaming through both. To her right, a painting of somebody’s steamboat paddling its way up the Potomac. Spiderwebs covered the vessel’s name.
    That’s when she realized she was still in her house. But she was upstairs, on the second floor, the place she always feared to tread.
    And finally, she was aware of two worried faces looking down at her.
    Fox and Ozzi …
    They really were alive … .

    She pulled them both down to her, as if she were going to smother them with kisses. That would have been very unlike her, though. She was glad, if totally flabbergasted, to see them but shocked that they were actually here. In her house. Going through her stuff.
    The bastards … .
    She didn’t kiss them—she knocked their heads together instead, eliciting a painful crack! Both fell backward, stunned. Li started kicking at them, furious that they had scared her half to death. And these were not wild kicks, either. She’d dabbled in Tae Kwon Do. And she knew how to hurt a guy.
    Both men tried to disentangle themselves from her, abandoning their effort to lift her up from the floor. Li tried to get to her feet … but suddenly many hands were on her, grabbing her wrists and ankles, trying to hold her down. There were more people in the room besides these two—at least three more. Li saw gloved hands, boots, black uniforms, face masks. Self-preservation took over now, her training really kicking in. She began to fight them viciously even though Fox and Ozzi were pleading with her not to. Somehow she knocked the candle over, causing the room to go black. She never stopped throwing punches, though, connecting with jaws, stomachs, knees, crotches. She was almost on the verge of winning the brawl when two more figures appeared, inexplicably climbing in through one of the open windows, inexplicably soaking wet. They quickly joined the fray. Only with their extra help was Li finally wrestled back to the floor.
    â€œWe are not going to hurt you!” Fox kept shouting at her. “Just let us talk to you … .”
    Finally, Li stopped struggling. She was on her back again, looking up this time at a sea of faces illuminated by the beams of two powerful flashlights. Her eyes darted around the room; she could see more of it now. In one corner, two M15A2 rifles, the civilian clone of the military M16, were leaning against the wall. Both had bayonets attached to their muzzles with thick rubber bands. Next to them was a large
hunting rifle, complete with an electronic gun sight. Next to the rifle, a jumble of laptops sitting atop a spaghetti pile of modem wires. More M15s were hanging off the coat stand beneath the big painting. And everywhere on the floor were junk food wrappers, soda cans, blankets, empty ammunition boxes, newspapers, and cigarette butts. Li was shocked. The room was a freaking mess, far worse than anything downstairs.
    â€œJesuzz!” she finally gasped. “How long have you people been up here?”
    The embarrassed reply from Fox was: “Three days, going on four … .”
    Then she spotted another pile of refuse down near her feet. Empty packages of Jell-O gelatin. Bright red shotgun shells emptied of their gunpowder. A box of thumbtacks. An empty package of Ivory soap