The Age of Embers

by Ryan Schow

  This reality has me swimming in guilt. I can’t. No one can protect anyone from this. We have no way of stopping the drones, no military response, no President. We’re just one giant sitting duck, and the best we can hope for is that the drones run out of ammunition.

  But if Draven is right, if this has something to do with AI, then I can’t help but wonder if the munitions depots are just fully stocked on ammo, missiles and bombs, or if the system is so fully automated now—same as most everything else these days—that it can operate autonomously to renew it’s weapons’ supply.

  This takes the assault on humanity to new, uncharted levels. And that’s why I can’t lie to Brooklyn. If Draven’s right, then this isn’t a war, it’s an extermination. An extinction level event. That makes me wonder if I should pray for the EMP. And if the President is the only person to issue that order, do I pray that he’s okay, that he can nuke these things?

  “I just don’t know, Brooklyn. I’ve been out in that hellish nightmare, seeing some things I’ve never seen before, doing things I never thought I was capable of doing. This is an unwritten story. It’s like nothing we’ve ever even contemplated in human history. You want me to lie to you, but I can’t and I won’t. That’s the last good thing I have left in me and I won’t give it away.”

  “Tell me about the boys,” she says, changing subjects. “If you can’t protect us from the drones, at least give me some peace there.”

  I tell Brooklyn every last detail of my abduction of the boys who assaulted her. Because she seems to be hanging on my every word, I spare her no details. When I’m done, she slides her hand in mine—that soft, warm flesh—and she says, “I wanted them to die, Dad. I’m glad they’re all dead.”

  “That’s natural to feel like that,” I say, even though I question this.

  Her eyes are overcome with the saddest, most beautiful shine. “When Eric was killed,” she says, “I tried to feel bad, but I couldn’t.”

  “What did you feel?”

  “Elation.”

  “You don’t have to feel bad about that.”

  “When those boys were dead,” she says, looking up at me with the eyes of a little girl rather than the eyes of a young woman, “what did you feel?”

  I take a sip of my coffee, gather my thoughts.

  “I was upset.”

  She looks down as I say this, not realizing she’s not much different than me. We are the same, only my life is much darker and much harder than hers because of what I do (did) and what I’ve seen.

  “I was upset because a drone did what I should have done,” I continue. “More than anything I wanted to kill those boys with my bare hands for what they did to you, but in the end, I couldn’t do that because there were already three dead bodies in my car and three was enough.”

  “What did you feel when you killed those three?”

  “Fear, anger? I don’t know. It all happened so fast. I think I got so mad at the job, not being able to see you and Mom, not seeing an end in sight. Part of me stopped feeling like I’d gone undercover and that I’d started a new life I didn’t want, one I couldn’t give up, this life that was ruining me day after day. In the back of my mind I knew you and your mom were suffering, but I also knew this decision I made was tearing apart our family, my happiness, my sense of purpose…”

  “I had no idea you were going through that,” she says, wiping her eyes and leaning in to me.

  “I took the wrong path in life, Brooklyn,” I say. “Sometimes you can come back from that, but sometimes it’s just too far gone.”

  “Well like I said, you’re home with us now.”

  My face betrays me. Looking up, realizing I just gave myself away, she makes the face. It was the same face she made when I first said I had to leave for a few days to go track down some bad guys. The disappointment on her face looks the same as it used to look on Adeline’s face. Now Adeline has turned into someone else. When will Brooklyn harden her heart against me, too?

  “You’re leaving again, aren’t you?” she asks.

  “Chicago is going down. It’s already lost. Since we’ve dedicated our lives first to keeping the streets safe, and then second to breaking the backs of the DTOs—”

  “DTOs?”

  “Drug Trafficking Organizations. The cartels.”

  “Oh.”

  “Since we’ve dedicated our lives to this, we have extensive tabs on all the DTOs and we’re mopping up what we can.”

  “You need to be home with us,” she pleads.

  “With the lack of law enforcement, and the vanishing of the rule of law, there is going to be a gigantic power vacuum that will get filled. Law enforcement won’t mobilize because they will want to be home with their families, so that void will be filled by a criminal element. If this void stays open for too long, the DTO’s, the street gangs, the mobs, they’ll mobilize and prepare a power grab. This will take us from the hell we’re experiencing and pitch us into a nightmare like you can’t imagine. By the time the drones finish with this city, and it’s just the remaining masses in a veritable wasteland, these groups will make their moves not only on each other, but on those of us who survive. These are the worst of the worst, Brooklyn. These are the leaders.”

  “So you’re, what? Going to just go around killing them?”

  “We hit a house yesterday, found a young girl. She said she was held with other kids. So at first we went out on a mission to help Xavier take his mind off Giselle, but then we found this girl and now there are other little girls that need our help.”

  “Your family needs your help, too,” she says.

  “I’m seeing that now,” I say, even though I’ve been seeing it for years now. “It’s just…your mother, she doesn’t really want my help anymore. I think maybe she has other plans for you guys that don’t include me.”

  “Times are different,” she says, sniffling.

  I feel my own heart aching. I feel that little boy inside me who saw Adeline in school for the first time and fell deeply, madly in love with her.

  I feel that little boy inside me sobbing.

  “When I saw Eric dead on the porch, like you, I was glad he was dead,” I admit. “When we threw him in the trash can like the refuse he became—with total disregard for him as a human being—I wanted to feel something, anything, but all I felt was nothing. Like justice had been served and the matter was now solved.”

  “I felt the same. And now I’m feeling bad for that,” she says. “Like somehow this makes me a bad person, or somehow heartless.”

  “We are all like that,” I say. “The Dimas clan doesn’t do remorse.”

  “Really?”

  “Your grandfather was a mean son of a bitch. Growing up here when he did, he had to be. It was a condition of survival. And your grandmother was every bit as tough as my dad because she was with my dad. Pop raised me, Isadoro and Roque to be tougher than him. Early on, we had our humanity beat out of us and we never really learned to be any different.”

  “Do you miss him?” she asks. “Isadoro.”

  “Every day,” I say.

  And this is why I just want to get my family to safety and die in battle. I can’t take anymore disappointments in life. I can’t stand to fail my family anymore. And I don’t want to think Caelin Boyle has something on me, but the truth is, he has my wife’s interest now, and I don’t, and that pisses me off to no end.

  I don’t do remorse, but I have a penchant for regret. So to someone like me, this is regret and it feels like the end of the world.

  Then I look at Brooklyn, in her eyes where love for me still exists, and I wonder as a man, as a father, if I shouldn’t stay.

  What about Caelin?

  I feel the softer side of me, the weaker side of me, harden up. My frown becomes the start of a grimace, and I wonder if I can find him and end him before Adeline gets to him. But the rage falls away and I realize I can’t just kill someone in cold blood because they managed to succeed where I failed. If I can do something
like that, then I’m no different from the monsters I spent years hunting.

  “You could stay home now, try to make things right with Mom.”

  “Honey, your mother’s moved on.”

  “Didn’t you ever think about being without her? With someone else? I mean, people have problems all the time. You can’t just give up, or quit.”

  “I never cheated on your mother.”

  “And she didn’t cheat on you, according to her. It was a kiss. Didn’t you ever kiss someone you weren’t supposed to?”

  “Not once, not even close. Your mother…she was my world. Then you and Orlando came along and all I ever wanted was to give you the life you wanted, to do right by my family.”

  “You can still do that…”

  A text comes in on the phone. Xavier. I check and it says he got a car and that he’ll be here in a few minutes. Meaning I don’t have to pick him up in the Tahoe.

  “I have to get ready to go, Brooklyn.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she says, sullen.

  “What?”

  “What I just said.”

  “Everything you say matters,” I tell her.

  “But nothing I said even changed your mind, did it?”

  “Not about those girls. But I promise you this, if I can get back home after that, I’ll find a way to make it work.”

  “And we’ll be okay?”

  “I’m not making any promises.”

  “But we’ll be together again, right? Because if we can ride this out together, even if it’s only for a short time and things end up…bad, at least we’ll be together.”

  “Perhaps while I’m gone, you can talk some sense into your mother.”

  And with that, I get dressed, grab what gear I’m taking, then finish my breakfast and stand by the front window waiting for Xavier to arrive. Adeline comes downstairs.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “Out.”

  “You coming back?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “A number of factors,” I say.

  Turning to glance at her, I see a woman who no longer wants me. Brooklyn can’t talk Adeline into anything. No one can. She’s a strong minded woman, something I always loved about her. But now that strong mind is guiding her elsewhere, turning her away from me.

  “Go to Caelin’s,” I tell her. “But tell the kids what you’re doing. If you can be honest with them, then I won’t fight you.”

  “Will you fight for me?” she asks.

  It’s a strange question at this stage in our lives. That’s all I’ve been doing. That’s all I’ve always fought for. If she can’t see this now…

  “No.”

  “Okay then,” she says.

  “I know this doesn’t matter to you because this is not the point, but in the world I live in, it would be easy to cheat. I never once did anything with another woman that would even constitute impropriety in our marriage.”

  “But like you said,” she retorted, “that’s not the point.”

  “More to the point then,” I say, “I left you here to be on the job and we didn’t agree on that. I’m sorry. But by the time I was in, it was too late to get out. Not without putting you and the kids in harm’s way. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have taken the assignment because it’s changed me, ruined me, robbed me of my humanity.”

  “You could have gotten out any time you wanted,” she says.

  “You remember Robbie James? The ginger with a face full of freckles? Always telling off-color jokes, but not so off-color he couldn’t get the guys of every color laughing?”

  “Yeah, I like him.”

  “Two months ago, his cover got blown. MS-13 found out he was a cop, paid someone on the inside to get his home address. Four men went to his house, raped his wife and kids, then gutted them and nailed them upside down to the wall.”

  The horror washes over her face in ways I never wanted to see. I’m only telling her this because I want her to know I was scared. That the DTOs are no joke.

  “They left the video camera at the scene so Robbie could watch it all happen. He watched it twice, then killed himself. And I don’t need to remind you of what happened to my brother…”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I was deep cover in the Sinaloa cartel. I didn’t think I’d be there that long, or that I’d make progress the way I did. I killed those three guys because I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s the truth. All that sitting around, not doing anything, all that observe and report nonsense—you can’t even begin to imagine how these guys think. There is no level of depravity they won’t sink to. I also knew there would come a day when they’d ask me to do that one thing I couldn’t do, that one thing I’d never do, and that would be the day my cover would be blown.”

  “Kill someone random,” Adeline says.

  “Yes.”

  “So you killed them instead?”

  “I did.”

  “So now you and Xavier are going out there to kill as many of them as you can.” She says this as a statement, not a question. She’s a bright woman. Always has been.

  “We are.”

  “That guy who came to our house, was he one of them? Was he one of the guys you worked with? Freddie B’s dad?”

  “No. I don’t know anything about that. I do know this, I have weapons upstairs in the safe, and you need to have one on you at all times. Just in case he comes back. If you see him, wait for the right moment, then just kill him.”

  “I can’t do that,” she says, as if the mere suggestion is preposterous.

  “Then these times will take you,” I say with dead eyes.

  “I’m not going to walk around this house with a gun, Fire. I’m already scared. And the kids are scared. Well, Brooklyn, maybe. Orlando’s too in love with Veronica to be as scared as he should be.”

  “The Dimas men lose all common sense when it comes to a woman,” I hear myself say with a grin.

  The grin falls away fast to the reality of our situation, and that’s when I feel the fullest extent of my ability to feel nothing taking place. If my eyes were dead before, now they’re the cold, lifeless center of deep space.

  “What are you and Xavier going to do right now?” she asks. “Specifically I mean.”

  “Save the world,” I say, deadpan. Outside, Xavier pulls up in some nineties rust bucket and gives a quick honk.

  She looks to the window, knows I’m leaving, then looks back and asks me one last question: “If I hadn’t kissed Caelin, or talked with him about leaving you, would you have fought for me?”

  I can see in her eyes she wants an honest answer.

  Looking at her, sparks of feeling entering my eyes, I say, “To the ends of the earth, sweetheart.”

  With that her eyes start to water. I lean in, kiss her just beside the corner of her lips and say, “No matter what happens, no matter what you did or what you do—or even what happens—I will always love you. You are and have always been my world.”

  With that, I step outside into the cold, throw the Tahoe’s keys to Xavier—who gets in and starts the thing—then make a bee-line for the Barracuda. I rouse the beast to life, then follow Xavier back to the address of the mansion we’re planning on hitting.

  A few blocks out, Xavier motions for me to pull up beside him. I do. His eyes are lifeless, the dark of the dead, like mine. This is something I didn’t know the man was capable of. He’s in the zone.

  “You ready?” I ask.

  “She’s in the ground, Fire,” he says, referring to Giselle. “I put dirt over her. Tried to say good-bye.”

  “I’m so sorry, man.”

  “Do you think she knows how I feel?” he asks, sincere.

  “I do.”

  “Do you believe in heaven, Fire?”

  “All I’ve seen is evil, so if evil exists, then I have to assume there is something contrasting out there, something good enough to balance the equatio
n.”

  “That’s not the question.”

  “I never really think about it because if there is a heaven, I’m not going.”

  “After what we do, if there is a heaven and I have to answer to someone, some higher power, I’m not sure what I’m going to say.”

  “You can always claim broken-heart insanity,” I tell him.

  He harrumphs.

  “What will you say?” he asks.

  “Broken-soul insanity.”

  “Now that that’s out of the way,” he finally says, his face returning to that cold, hard mask, “let’s go step on some cockroaches.”

  I take the lead as planned; Xavier hangs back a few houses and waits. There’s enough room to drive into the driveway, if I ride up on the grass, but I don’t want to announce my arrival just yet. So I pull the purple beast up past the same luxury cars and SUVs we saw here yesterday and shut off the engine.

  Glancing up in the rear view mirror, taking a deep breath, I say, “You can to this.” This is crazy. “Your body is not your own. Your hands and feet are weapons. Your brain is smarter than your enemy’s brain and you’re not afraid to die. You are not afraid to kill.”

  A sudden surge of strength floods my body.

  I’m ready.

  I get out of the car, tuck in the front of my shirt to show whomever stops me that I’m not strapped, then walk to the front door, draw a mighty breath and give the door a hesitant knock.

  This is a death sentence.

  A hard looking Hispanic with no fear of the gym opens the door and says, “What do you want?”

  “I just came from Jorge’s place. Jorge Guillén.”

  “So?”

  “They’re all dead, man. Two guys from, I don’t know, Sinaloa, MS-13…they just burned us. Tossed grenades in the front of the house, caught everyone as they ran out back. They walked into a firing squad.”

  “That’s been happening,” he says, like it’s nothing.

  “Didn’t you hear me, ese? They burned our place to the ground.”

  “How’d you survive, and who the hell are you anyway?”

  “Jorge was grooming me.”

  “For what?”

  “Jorge, he told me to come here if something happened. He said things were going down, just not like this. Everyone’s turning on each other, jockeying for all the turf when these birds settle down.”