The Age of Embers

by Ryan Schow

  “It’s been a long journey here, if you could—” she started to say.

  He whipped out a gun, stuck it to her head and said, “If you don’t get on that rope in five seconds, I’m going to pull this trigger and throw you in myself.”

  He started to count. She grabbed the rope and walked to the edge of the canal, crying already.

  “If you slow down, I will shoot you in the back. If you stop, I will shoot you in the back. If you fall I will shoot you in the water. Now shut up and set a good example for the others!”

  Behind them, three people turned and ran away while half of them just stood there, terrified, not sure what would happen. The other half looked prepared. Confident.

  “Go, woman!” he said, pulling back the slide and chambering a round.

  Ice looked at the man. Was he serious?

  The rotund woman shoved off and started across with the encouragement of the group. She was halfway across the canal going hand-over-hand when she started to slow.

  From across the way, everyone listened to the whimpering pleas of a woman who’d used her final stores of energy.

  The scout fired the gun into the air and she got moving again, the grunts and cries of a straining, dying will loud enough to touch every single one of them.

  She was nearly across when she missed her grip and fell sideways into the canal. On the other side of the canal, the American liaison grabbed a rope and life preserver and tossed it in. The woman grabbed the floating donut and held on as she was dragged to the other side of the canal. The concrete surface was steep, though, and it took a concentrated effort on both her part and the liaison’s part to pull her up.

  Turning around to the group, the scout said, “You didn’t think I’d actually shoot her, did you?”

  A few people looked at him, speechless.

  He laughed, then said, “I just wanted to see how far she could get.”

  “You’re sick,” Eliana said.

  “Well you’re up next, stinky. See if you can get all the way across. Leonardo’s arms have to be killing him right now.”

  Looking down at the boy she was with, she said, “Have you ever been on a rope before?” He nodded his head yes. “Good, so you can make it?”

  He nodded again.

  Looking at Ice’s chin (still not his eyes), she said, “If it looks like he’s going to shoot me, kill him.”

  Ice gave a slight nod of acknowledgment.

  “Relax Pig Pen, I will not shoot you. But I promise to laugh a lot if you fall. Besides, it might be the first bath you’ve had in weeks!”

  Without another word, Eliana grabbed the rope and crossed to the other side, hand over hand without slowing. The boy followed and made it across without incident.

  “What happened to your face?” the scout finally said.

  “The guy who got Héctor, this is his blood all over me,” Ice said. Technically he wasn’t lying since he was the guy who got Héctor.

  “Let’s go,” the jovial man said, waving him on with the loaded gun.

  “I thought you said women and children first.”

  “Just go, culero.”

  Isadoro was halfway across when his arms began to tire. He hadn’t realized how much the beating had taken out of him.

  “Get the rescue rope ready!” the scout called out to Leonardo, following by uproarious laughter.

  Isadoro picked up the pace, trying to ignore the mounting pain or the scout’s taunting. His head was bleeding again, the blood dripping in his eye. He shut it, tried to blink it out, but the blood got in there anyway. Steadying his breathing, going hand over hand, he kept his calm.

  Not falling into the canal was now a matter of pride.

  By the time he got to the other side, Eliana was there to greet him. She took a cloth from her backpack that looked moderately clean and said, “So much for the pretty face.”

  He nodded, but said nothing as she cleaned him up. Finally he looked up at her and she was looking directly into his eyes.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” she said with a knowing grin. “I wonder the stories they could tell if I could read eyes the way you do.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You’re kind of slow on your feet for a sicario,” she finally said, wiping away the last of the blood.

  His heart was this massive hammering force in his chest.

  She finished what she was doing then looked right at him, not hiding her eyes or her attention on him. The jig was up.

  “I like the new look,” she said. “If I was into your type, I’d be impressed.”

  “Don’t pretend you aren’t,” he grumbled. “It’s unbecoming.”

  “Oh,” she said with a spot of humor in her voice, “he’s arrogant, too.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “You’re not as sly as you think,” she replied, stuffing the bloody rag back into her backpack. “Let’s go now. I don’t like sitting out here in the open.”

  “There’s a bus waiting across the street at that stadium,” Leonardo said.

  They headed for the stadium, which required crossing the freeway. There was hardly any traffic, though. Most of the cars in the road were either shot, disabled or charred black.

  The winds shifted, blowing smoke their direction. Eliana covered the boy’s nose and mouth with a fresh rag, then handed Ice his bloody rag back.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  He folded his rag into a square concealing the blood, then handed the clean surface of it to Eliana. She waved a hand and said, “I don’t want to breathe your AIDS.”

  “I don’t have AIDS,” he laughed.

  “Still.”

  “You don’t really know someone until you’ve bled together,” he said.

  “I don’t want to get to know you,” she said. Pointing to the smoky skyline, she said, “I just want to find my niece.”

  “Are we taking the bus?” he asked.

  “Hell no.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” he replied.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Same place as you.”

  “What’s in Chicago for you?” she responded, looking at him.

  “My past.”

  “Can you steal a car?” she asked, pulling the boy closer toward her to avoid some idiot in a white Dodge Charger driving like he had all of hell on his tail.

  “The older ones, yeah. Not these cars with smart keys and impossible door locks.”

  They only had to wander into the edge of town for a short while before they found a red Honda Civic with enough wear on it to let him know the import had clocked more than a few miles. Because he was smart, the first thing he did was check the doors. It was open.

  He gave Eliana a knowing grin.

  “Are you surprised?” she asked, appraising his choice of cars.

  “A little.”

  “The owner was probably hoping you’d steal it.”

  “Well I’m happy to oblige him.”

  “Or her.”

  Shaking his head, he got inside, checked the visor, the glovebox and then the cup holder for the key. He found it under a stack of old gum wrappers, held it up, smiled again.

  “Beginner’s luck.”

  “Get in before we draw too much attention,” he said.

  “Start it first, see if it’s going to blow up.”

  He started it as she was standing back, then laughed when he saw she was serious and that he didn’t give her enough time to clear the car if it had been wired to blow.

  “Let’s go, poopy pants,” he said.

  “I wasn’t scared.”

  “Tell that to your dirty face,” he laughed.

  The three of them piled into the car. He checked the gas tank, found it more than halfway full, but saw the “check engine light” and the SRS light on.

  “Might want to sit the kid on your lap,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Your airbag doesn’t wo
rk.”

  Slowly she shook her head, not at all appreciating his amazing sense of humor. The kid got in back. Apparently, she decided to take her chances.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The eight block drive from Garfield Park to The Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management in Chicago’s Near West Side district would usually take no time at all, but a lot of the businesses and multifamily residences along W. Madison were either destroyed, on fire, or currently under attack.

  The three story brick building on the corner of Kedzie and W. Madison holding the cleaners, a small deli, the family dentistry center and a Boost mobile looks like it was hit by artillery fire and collapsed onto W. Madison.

  A young Hispanic woman and a black man are standing over a black woman receiving CPR from a man in a butcher’s apron on the street, while a group of regular looking folks appear to be risking their lives to head into the ruins in search of survivors.

  Everything inside me is screaming for me to stop, to get out of the car and head inside to help. I push on though, because that’s not the kind of hero I’m going to be today. If I’m going to redeem myself for murdering the three idiots I’ve since dumped into Garfield Park’s lagoon—not to mention Freddie B and Marcello—it’s going to be in working with my surviving DEA family. They’re currently hunkered down in the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM) building on W. Madison and S. Loomis.

  Getting past Kedzie, though, isn’t going to be easy considering W. Madison is blocked by debris and several smoking cars.

  I back up, go through the back parking lot of the CVS Pharmacy and the Dollar Tree, passing crying people and one woman puking with another woman holding her hair back. I roll up the window, turn on the CD player even though I’ve listened to the CD inside about a gazillion times, but mostly because it’s been stuck in there since the DEA gave it to me. It’s Slayer’s Reign in Blood, which is the kind of thrash metal I’d listen to if I was twenty. Being in my early-forties, trust me when I say, it took some getting used to. Now I want it to drown out the sounds of this city’s destruction.

  Yeah, it’s hitting me now. In the world of “one catastrophe at a time,” getting to the OEM building is my next task. Looking around, cruising past a parking lot of scared people with no information and dead people across the street, I’m starting to wonder what the hell is really going on.

  I was so mad earlier, so destroyed by Adeline’s betrayal and Brooklyn’s attack, that I couldn’t think straight. Now that I’m coming out of that fog, the sinking feeling in my gut for what I did has only worsened because of the state of the city.

  These aren’t just a few rogue drones…

  Winding around the Dollar Tree end of the building, I’m met with a big group of homeless people gathered together with their shopping carts, their bicycles, their dogs. I ease up to a cluster of shopping carts blocking the way out of here. Stopped in front of the row of carts, the motor rumbling, I wait.

  No one moves.

  I take a deep breath thinking I don’t need this crap right now. Can I backtrack? Find another way around?

  Most homeless people in this town aren’t bad. They’re just hard luck cases, some of them downsized out of jobs or bankrupted by the city, others mental cases from birth, bad marriages, bad jobs, old wars they can’t leave behind.

  But these people?

  Why the hell aren’t they moving their carts?

  My foot eases off the brake. I inch the ‘Cuda up a few feet, kissing a garbage-filled cart with my damaged front bumper. Turning, I level the group of twelve or thirteen of them with a hard glare. My eyes fall on one man in particular. An older fella with shrewd eyes, challenging eyes.

  “Really?”

  In between cigarette-stained fingers is the last inch of a smoked cigarette. His hair is mangy, his beard unkempt and long. He puts the smoke to chapped, liver-colored lips. Beside him is a small black and white Chihuahua. It’s baring its teeth, probably growling, though I can’t hear him over Slayer and the reverberating engine.

  The old guy takes one last drag of his cigarette, flicks the butt at the car and just sits there. My eyes drop to the front seat, to my gun. I grab it, show it to him, then raise my eyebrows as if to say, you don’t bring bad breath and a Taco Bell dog to a gunfight, pal.

  He shows me his middle finger in return, then lets the rat-sized dog off its leash. The little yapper runs around the front of the car and to my window where it starts barking furiously.

  If I show the dog my gun, he won’t get it.

  Finally a woman sitting next to the steely-eyed vagrant walks her emaciated body around to the cart, (Jesus, about time!), but instead of moving it, she looks straight at me, frowns, and fishes a granola bar out of that mess.

  Without a care in the world, she goes and sits back down next to the dude with the nasty beard and cold eyes.

  The dog keeps yapping.

  I switch feet, use my left foot to hold the brake pedal down while my right foot hits the gas, revving the engine. The dirty guy just yawns and no one pays attention. I push the gas harder, the brakes barely able to contain this purple monster. The car starts to push into the carts and all the sudden, all kinds of things start hitting the sides of the car: garbage, a bottle, someone’s poop.

  And the dog…

  I might actually hear that thing yapping over the roar of the engine! Mr. Mangy is finally struggling to his feet and now kicking my passenger side door, and that’s when I let off the brake and blow through the carts thinking, enough is enough! Ahead is a swinging metal gate that’s locked. At this point, I’m committed. The second I hit it, the lock breaks and the fence swings open wide. A half a second after that, another beer bottle explodes on the back window, spider-webbing the glass.

  “Son of a bitch!” I scream, frustration exploding out of me unchecked.

  Cranking the wheel hard, two people jumping out of the way, I slam into debris from the destroyed building kicking all kinds of crap into the fender well. It sounds like hell on the car, but this purple T-Rex will take a bigger beating than most so I keep on going, pedal to the metal as I charge through a few unobstructed blocks of open road.

  Up ahead, however, is a massive inferno. It just got going, by the looks of it. Between S. Washtenaw and an open field in front of the train tracks are seventeen long homes stacked side-by-side, like sardines on zero lot lines. Ten homes line the street and seven are behind the ten separated by a concrete alley.

  They’re all burning. People are everywhere. It’s like some scene out of hell.

  That sick feeling inside me is now spreading. Seeing a family huddled together and looking like zombies—seeing a dozen families like this—sends fear and grief crashing through my soul, causing my already bad mood to nosedive.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” I say. But these eyes of mine connect with a young girl who’s in the middle of a crying jag in her mother’s arms as I drive by.

  Suddenly I can’t breathe.

  When I get past the scene, I roll down the window, drawing in several deep breaths even though the ash-gray air is tinged with smoke and doesn’t feel good in my lungs.

  A few blocks up I’m stopped by a FEMA road block. There are about seven cars in front of me. I wait, seeing no other way around. They’re in front of the United Center, the gigantic stadium that’s the home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks, so I know what this is going to become: a refugee center.

  When I get to the roadblock, I badge the woman in charge.

  “You okay?” I ask the FEMA employee. She’s a young woman who looks scared, not just about what’s happening to the city, but for the people coming in.

  “I am.”

  “You got here quick,” I say.

  “We self-mobilized. Our command structure is MIA; half the phone lines are down, and if we get one more cold snap, half this city will be without power and we’ll officially be FUBAR.”

  “That’s a mouthful,” I say. Her eyes suddenly clear up, like she’s seeing me for
the first time.

  “Sorry,” she said, her emotions barely contained.

  “Are you set up inside or outside the stadium?” I ask.

  “We broke the locks on the main door when the drones roared through here. DMAT and MERS are inside,” she says. Disaster Medical Assistance Team and Mobile Emergency Response Support. “Both teams are in tatters. We’re here without orders. Do you know what that means?”

  The woman is on edge. I can feel it.

  “Yeah. We lost most of the DEA in the strike. Our building came down on the Post Office and we’re setting up in the OEM building now.”

  Looking right at me, her overly emotional eyes suddenly going flat, she waves me through and says, “Be safe out there, and good luck.”

  “Roger that,” I say, heading past the United Center and on to the OEM.

  By the time I reach the OEM building, my mind is a soft, elastic mess. To say I’ve seen too much in a single day feels like the understatement of the century. I don’t even want to think about how badly this day has gone to crap.

  With my cell phone, I call Xavier. The call goes through, then cuts to a fast-busy signal. I send him a text (OUTSIDE) then I wait a few moments.

  I try calling again, but the fast-busy signal is all I get.

  A few minutes later, Xavier heads out front looking frantic, his eyes wild with emotion. This in itself is telling considering the stability of this man. To say he has an iron spine and a rock solid constitution is like saying the sun is bright or the moon is full of craters.

  Seeing him rattled like this compounds my fears.

  “What took you so damn long?!” he asks. Before I can answer, he sees all the blood and dirt all over my face and says, “Is that yours?”

  “No,” I say, offering no explanation. To admit that drones killed two kids I’d taken hostage and that I’m wearing their blood will only make matters worse.

  Shaking his head, he turns and stalks inside. I follow Xavier into the building, past a literal bullpen of activity, down a long hallway and into a back room with about thirty other agents.

  “This is it?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”