From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  Randy didn’t require urging. One glance at the speaking guest was enough to quiet him down immediately.

  “Oh Great!” Sarah said, rolling her eyes. “We’re about to lose Randy.”

  Denise looked reproachful, but she said nothing.

  Oh my god, it was Angie! And she was wearing shorts! Whu…? And a tight T-shirt that showed off her... her smooth, thin arms! A weird clenching punched Randy in the stomach, and his heart fluttered like a butterfly hit by lightning.

  “You know, she’s never going to notice you,” Sarah told him. “She’s too old for you anyway. She’s not a kid like us.”

  No, she wasn’t! Randy tried to look away from the flawless legs that now inhabited his imagination, but the wrenching sensation in his abdomen had become almost painful.

  “Children. Today we have a guest speaker. You all know Angie. Along with Marshal and Luca, she has been responsible for helping in some way to rescue every last person in this community. As you may also know, she is a mistress of disguise and deception, and she uses those abilities to sneak past the monsters, even when there isn’t any drone support or surveillance. Most recently, when Marshal and Luca went missing, she accepted a mission to hike out into the city, unsupported and alone, in hopes of a rescue. Not only did she succeed, she aided her targets in achieving the Don Valley Rescue, doubling our population and saving the lives of many people in this room today. And she’s here to help teach us how she does what she does, just in case we ever find ourselves trapped out of shelter and in need of a miracle. Okay?”

  And she was so beautiful, Randy swooned, his gaze finally trickling upwards from Angie’s legs to her… her perfect face. She wasn’t beautiful like supermodels were beautiful, all shiny and plastic and… and ordinary. Angie was a different kind of beauty. Those women were like… like… Randy struggled to find a comparison… like hockey and baseball. The best and the best. But Angie was like race car driving, a different kind of awesome that played by different rules, and left them all in her dust.

  Up until that moment, it had somehow never occurred to Randy that Angie had legs. Now, with her shorts on and the glorious appendages visible for all to see, he could see how wrong he was, and his stomach wrestled itself into yet another knot. There was no doubt in his mind now that Angie was the most beautiful girl in the world.

  “Hello!” Sarah snapped at him. “Earth to Randy!”

  He snapped an irritated glare at her. “What?”

  “Oh nothing,” she said. “It just looks as if your bottom jaw is glued to the ground. Pull yourself together, Randy! She’s probably dating much older guys than you. You’re only ten. She’s thirteen now! I heard she had her birthday a couple of weeks ago. What could she possible see in you?”

  It was true. “I’ll be eleven soon,” he answered, knowing it wasn’t enough.

  “Yeah. In February,” Sarah sniffed. “Just forget about her. I know a couple of girls closer to your own age who really, really like you. If you promise to smarten up, I might even tell you who they are.”

  Denise turned to glare at Sarah.

  “Whatever,” Randy said, suddenly sullen.

  Angie stepped up onto a makeshift stage, which was little more than a raised, one-step landing. Her bearing was shy and uncertain.

  “Um,” she said, looking out at all the eager faces.

  And her voice, Randy thought, shaking his head. It was like listening to the throaty, lush sound of a rock starlet.

  “Why don’t you tell us the story of how you came to find Marshal, dear?” Ms. Wyatt said kindly, flashing a warning look to a rambunctious boy named Barry, who subsided immediately.

  “Actually,” Angie answered. “Marshal found me. I was starving and filthy, crawling through the streets alone, when… there was this zombie. Marshal called him Frank, and he was just about to find me when…”

  “You see, Randy?” Denise whispered timidly over her shoulder. “She was in as much trouble as the rest of us.”

  Randy didn’t answer.

  Blushing slightly, Denise added, “I’m not saying she isn’t great. One day, I want to be just like her. Except… I know I’m not pretty like she is…”

  She paused for a rebuttal, but again, Randy didn’t answer.

  Up on stage, Angie was pulling out her ‘garbage-dress’, holding it up so that the crowd could see what it looked like when she wasn’t wearing it.

  Denise ducked her head slightly. “What I meant to say, Randy…”

  “He’s gone, Den,” Sarah said suddenly, sounding surprised.

  Denise whirled around, but just as Sarah had stated, Randy had vanished.

  The two girls looked at each other.

  “Bathroom?” Denise guessed, and Sarah shrugged, returning her attention to the girl on stage.

  “So,” Paul said, once they were in the hallway. “What’s this about?”

  “We’ve decided to do a little deeper investigation into the suicides of Denise Cooper and Patty Jenkins,” Krissy said, folding her arms across her chest and leaning against the wall. “It could be nothing but, well… some things don’t add up.”

  Paul seemed to turn this over in his mind.

  “All right,” he said. “How can I help?”

  “Start with Denise. What made you conclude that her death was a suicide?”

  Paul hesitated only a second, his gaze flickering back and forth between Krissy and Luca. Then, he let out a big sigh and scratched his head.

  “I… I don’t know,” he admitted. “The truth is that it was just a guess, I suppose. You may have given me a badge, Kris, but I’m no police detective. She was seen in the common area, where Hanson was stuffing all the refugees at the time. This was back when he was still planning his coup. I talked to her for a bit. She told me she was depressed over a guy… she wouldn’t tell me who. It was right in the middle of Mathew’s move to undermine the Administration’s credibility with the group, so I had to leave her. Later, a witness reported her being seen in a service hallway with an unknown male.”

  “What witness?”

  Paul concentrated. “Eileen? Eileen Burrows? Older woman with reddish hair, going to white. Later, when the cameras malfunctioned, everyone was supposed to rush to the camouflage shelter, someone in the crowd – again, I didn’t see who it was – shouted out that they’d seen Denise going down one of the stairwells. Seeing as I was the only cop available, even if it was sort of pretend, I felt it was my responsibility to go after her. But I never caught up. From the emergency exit – which is still torn wide open – I got a pretty good look at the street. There were walkers - not nearby but they were there – and there was a sizable bloodstain on the ground about thirty paces from the door.”

  “Bloodstain?” Luca asked.

  Paul nodded. “Along with some rags that used to be Denise’s clothing. After I saw that, I decided I had to get back upstairs because the shutdown was causing a lot of chaos. I reported it as a suicide because, at the time, that’s what it looked like.”

  “Bloodstain,” Luca repeated, frowning.

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “And what about now?” Krissy asked.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘at the time’,” she pointed out. “What do you think now?”

  “The same, I guess,” Paul said, looking uncertain, “…only… well, I’m no detective, but… I guess if I was being thorough, I’d want to get the ID of the man she was supposed to have met in the stairwell. Otherwise…”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “All right,” Krissy said. “Now onto Patty. You said that witnesses claimed that she was acting depressed also. Specifically, you said that God reported her as being depressed. But we spoke to God, and he said he’s convinced that Patty didn’t kill herself.”

  Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re saying you think she was murdered?”

  “It’s crossed my mind,” Krissy said. “Tell me about Patty.”

  “Well,
” Paul said, “Patty was more of a… I don’t know… an assumption? There were a couple of other people who reported her as being depressed. I knew she’d been talking to God, so I went to him for confirmation that she had been depressed. Again, there was this bloody stain in the streets below, so combined with the suicide note -”

  “There was a suicide note?” Krissy said sharply.

  “Well… yes. Sort of. More of a suicide confession, actually. I found this handwritten paper in her cubby on top of some books that quoted a line from Romeo and Juliet: ‘Oh happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die’. Not conclusive, but with Denise going out the same way, it seemed open and shut to me. Didn’t I mention it in my report?”

  “No, you didn’t. Do you still have the note?”

  Paul scratched his head. “Maybe. I mean, I’m not a real detective, right? I don’t have anything like an evidence locker. It might still be lying around my cubby, or I might have thrown it out.”

  “Never throw anything out,” Krissy snapped, uncrossing her arms and starting to pace. “Crap! If Patty really did commit suicide…”

  She stopped pacing and looked at Paul.

  “Nothing about this goes out to anyone, okay? This investigation is strictly confidential, understood?”

  “No problem,” Paul said. “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “Find that note,” Krissy said. “And try to remember who said they remembered seeing Patty Cooper acting depressed. Regardless of any notes, I’m still treating this as a homicide.”

  “You got it, Kris,” Paul said.

  Krissy turned to go, followed by Luca.

  The elevator slid open on the ground floor and, stealthy as a ninja, Randy slipped out and onto the stained, marble surface. Sunlight streamed in through the twenty-foot tall open spaces where windows used to be, lending a cheerful air to the cold, winter wind that blew across the rubble-strewn floor.

  He’d stopped just long enough to obtain his prefabricated, garbage-camouflaged outfit. It had taken him weeks of painstaking effort and secrecy to construct it, as well as hours of practicing its use in the mirror. Now, it was ready for its test run, out in the streets where the stupid zombies were waiting to be fooled.

  Let Sarah question his worth after that! He knew just the place. He’d seen it on the camera monitor once when Crapmobile had driven past a small jewelry store. In the wreckage that had once been its front window there was still a mannequin head, and still hanging around its neck was the most beautiful pendent with a sparkling stone like a pale blue diamond.

  It all played out in Randy’s imagination. He’d find the store and claim that pendent. Then, later, with a graceful bow, he would present that pendent as a gift to a surprised and grateful Angie, and she would know that he was a talented scavenger just like her. Then, he could be her apprentice, and maybe that could evolve into something more.

  She might even kiss him. For that reward, Randy was prepared to risk anything.

  And so, with cautious, slow-moving stealth, Randy made his way across the empty lobby of what once was the tallest building in Canada.

  On the outside, Paul contrived to maintain the expression of calm concern and thoughtful reflection as Krissy and Luca departed. With that façade in place, he distractedly went through the business of putting his gloves back on as he returned to the butcher shop.

  Inside, however, he was in a panic.

  Damn, damn, damn! It had all been going so well! He should have known better than to allow his romantic side to rule his better judgment. What happened to the fresh start he promised himself? What happened to that bright new future where no more hunting was required? What had he been thinking?

  The answer came in a chorus of eager voices, the crooning of his harem of lovers, pleading that they not be forgotten.

  No! He’d made a mistake! Well, not the first one. The one in the slaughterhouse, Amber. She’d practically begged him to take her. Such damaged beauties, like broken sapphires, they were his to harvest, refashion, and enshrine upon their pedestals. Amber had been perfect. But Denise and Patty? They were products of his ego, pure decadence of the mind.

  Now, he would have to fix the mess before things got out of hand.

  T-Bone. There was another problem! T-Bone’s sister had been one of the names that the police had red-flagged during the early parts of the investigation, back when Krissy had still been masquerading as a prostitute on Jarvis Street. Krissy knew Bethany Bonham’s name! Did she know that T-Bone was the brother of a missing prostitute from an three-year old, unsolved case file? Probably not. There was a lot going on in the world these days, and little time to spend thinking about ancient news.

  However. If Krissy were to learn from a distraught T-Bone that Paul had admitted to knowing one Bethany Bonham around the time of her disappearance, it might not seem so harmless. She had seen Paul’s face in those days. She might not remember it now, but with two new missing women under review…

  He threw the gloves aside with a curse.

  There was no choice. Paul was going to have to nip two separate problems in the bud before either one of them blossomed into full-blown hanging-trees.

  He stood there for a full two minutes, considering his options and the very little time he had to make use of them. Eventually, the faint outline of a plan took shape in his mind. After another two minutes of patient consideration, he knew what he would have to try to do.

  He pulled out his personal tablet and opened a directory.

  He didn’t have Kumar’s skill or talent, but Paul was a passable programmer too. When he used his position to discover Kumar’s passwords (a simple matter of looking over his shoulder at the right time one blurry morning) and then anonymously passed them on to Peter Hanson’s crew, that had been only half of the subterfuge. The second half had been the act of hiding a sub-routine (somewhere in the endless lines of code that Kumar had written or imported over the last couple of months) that offered the person who knew the access code a back door into the operating system. It had given Paul entrance, without Kumar’s awareness, to the entire network of cameras, the databases… everything.

  He could see T-Bone and Henley in the butchery, chopping up meat without speaking. He could see Ramirez, on guard on the Bastards’ Floor, falling asleep on his chair, and the rest of the floor empty. He could see the main floor, and three idle, new-generation Camoucarts sitting like out-of-place garbage heaps in the main floor lobby only a short dash from the elevators.

  It was child’s play to make his way to the Bastard’s wing and, using his tablet, slip past Ramirez. Once arriving at his destination, it only took him a few minutes to do what he had to do.

  The best tool at his disposal was still unused. It was represented on his screen by a big red exclamation mark icon in the top left corner. It was the mechanism that would allow him the freedom to make things better, and he pushed it now.

  Total shutdown.

  All at once, the surveillance, the network communications, all went dead.

  Back at the apartment, Kumar cursed, his fingers a blur of motion as he sought to track down the source of this new aggravation.

  “Shit!”

  Valerie, who’d been getting herself a coffee, looked up with alarm.

  “That bastard’s done it again!” Kumar shouted, furiously typing.

  “What? What’s happened?”

  “Total shutdown,” Kumar said. “Our community is blind, deaf, and mute, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do to stop it! Or at least…”

  His fingers were a blur.

  “… not right away. I’m going to find you this time, you son of a bitch!”

  “Kumar!”

  The programmer turned to face Valerie.

  “Can we inform the other outposts?”

  He turned back to the computer and resumed typing.

  “Already done,” he said. “After the last couple of times, I installed a hair-trigger that would…”

  Val
erie jumped as, somewhere, a lion roared.

  “There it is,” he said, going back to typing. “The alarm.”

  “I’m still not sure I agree with your sound choice,” Valerie muttered.

  “I could have made it an AC DC song or the sound of bubbles popping,” Kumar explained, “but Marshal wanted something that scared people, but not something associated with humans, like alarm bells or buzzers, that the zombie group-think might have experienced before. Lions were my idea. I think they do the trick.”

  “Or incite heart attacks,” Valerie said, sounding unconvinced. “So. Our mysterious hacker is back, is he?”

  “He’s not a hacker,” Kumar said coldly. “He’s a fucking opportunist that somehow managed to compromise my system back when everything was all screwed up. But I’ll get him, even if I have to go through every last piece of code to do it. Believe me, Valerie. I’ve had it! Today’s the day.”

  “At least there shouldn’t be too much danger,” Valerie sighed.

  Angie stopped in mid-sentence at the sound of the lion’s roar.

  “Oh crap,” she said.

  Children looked terrified as guttural snarls continued to thunder from all the loudspeakers. Some children looked ready to cry, even as some of the older boys laughed. Ms. Wyatt jumped up to take center stage.

  “All right, children,” she said, clapping her hands for attention. “You all know what that means, right? Remember your drills? Everybody line up for a head count.”

  Groaning like little zombies themselves, the children dutifully stood up and lurched off to their positions. Ms. Wyatt had made them practice this drill three times that week, and they were already bored by it.

  “I know, I know,” Ms. Wyatt said loudly. “You’re all suffering, I get it. Franklin? I think your place is over here by me. Sarah? As our drill captain, you’re supposed to be on the very end of the line, not standing in the middle talking with your friends. Angie? If you wouldn’t mind getting through to Kumar and finding out what this is all about.”