The Age of Embers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  Such was the life of a gangster.

  When he got in front of Freddie B’s enormous home (which stood untouched), he parked the Kia, got out and knocked at the front door.

  “Eric!” his father exclaimed, hurrying him inside. “Are you okay? What happened to you? Where is my son?”

  “That’s why I’m here, Mr. Buhari,” Eric said, somber. “I have some bad news.”

  “Please, call me Diaab,” he said, kind. “Does this have anything to do with why your face looks like it was used as someone’s punching bag?”

  “It was much worse yesterday, but yes sir. Everything has to do with that.”

  After Freddie B had been in school for a few months and they were all comfortable with each other, Farhad (“Freddie,” he said. “Call me Freddie B.”) got drunk at school and started telling Eric and Marcello all about his life back in Sudan, specifically the capital city of Khartoum, which sat nestled into the confluence of the Blue and the White Nile.

  The Sudanese student was tossing back Vodka like it was bottled water as he told Eric and Marcello they were lucky to be able to get alcohol at every corner mart.

  “In my home town, in Khartoum, there is an alcohol ban,” he’d said. “Plus it’s hot and dry and brown almost year round. We don’t really see many trees, or much rain. That’s why we came to Chicago. It’s cold, and it has lots of rain, plenty of trees and a large body of water nearby.”

  “How did you get to America?” Marcello asked.

  Marcello and his family crossed the Rio Grande, went through customs, and were let into the country through the catch and release program. Marcello’s parents both worked for a local grocery store run by a friend they knew in back in Oaxaca.

  “There are lots of ex-patriots in Khartoum—expats—and they told us how to get here,” Freddie B had said. “My father is partners with several of them. They paid for us to come here, just like they paid for our first apartment and all our furniture. My father’s business is doing so well, it now pays for our house, which is big here, but the size of a castle over there.”

  “What does your father do?” Eric asked.

  “We lived in a very nice apartment in Al Amarat. Back then my father did what most men do, they find ways to make money,” he’d said, the slur in his voice deepening. “You tell anyone I told you this, and I swear I’ll gut you two. Got it?”

  Both boys nodded their heads furiously.

  “So my father started moving girls, young ones. It was hard to find them, and hard to get them, and then it was hard to sell them because during the day the Sudanese work, but then most of them go home early. There is no late night life. The government put an eleven o’clock ban on parties, so many potential customers refuse to risk breaking the law for young brown girls. The entire continent of Africa is littered with brown girls! But many of them have never seen a white girl. This is where my father sought to be different from everyone else.”

  “Have you had much sex?” Eric asked, not realizing the full implications of what this twenty-something refugee was saying.

  Waiving the comment off like it was a forgone conclusion, he said, “I have as much sex as I want. Back there. But not here.”

  “Have you ever been with a white girl?” Marcello asked.

  He shook his head, swallowed the last of the Vodka, then threw the bottle onto the activities field and stood up.

  “Time for class, got to be smart,” he’d said, tapping the side of his head as he swayed and almost fell down the bleachers. “Have to go places in this free, free world.”

  That was a long time ago. Now Eric stood in their palace of a home before Freddie B’s father, a man who trafficked young white girls for a living. Right then, Eric realized he should not have gone there.

  But Mr. Buhari—Diaab—had a right to know about his son.

  And maybe, just maybe, he could engender the man to him and get in good with him. If his parents were dead, and he had no where to go, perhaps he could live with Diaab until his eighteenth birthday. After that he could legally get a job and live on his own.

  When Diaab said, “Tell me everything,” Eric spared him no detail, including where his son’s body was and how he got there.

  “Take me to him,” Diaab said, his voice heavy, his hands trembling.

  He and Eric got into his Range Rover and Eric took Diaab to the spot where Marcello and his son now lay. He stood there for a long while in perfect silence, not shedding a tear, not even moving. Eric merely sat in the SUV, watching him.

  When he came back, Diaab said, “The sun looks beautiful through the smoke, does it not?” He was looking at the orange disc in the sky.

  “I…I guess so. Yeah.”

  “Do you know where this Brooklyn girl lives?” he asked, his eyes still on the sun.

  “I know the neighborhood. We used to live there, before my dad got fired and had to get a job driving trucks.”

  “There is honor in truck driving, even if it does not feel like that,” the man said. “So what is the address?”

  “I can’t say for sure. It’s been awhile since I’ve been over there, maybe ten years, maybe a little more.”

  “You can get us to the block though, yes?”

  “I can.”

  “What does Brooklyn’s father drive?” he asked, congenial.

  “Purple muscle car on big shiny rims. It’ll be hard to miss,” Eric said. “But he’s a little…unhinged. He kept freaking out and pounding the steering wheel.”

  “I am not concerned with his mood,” Diaab said. “I only want to speak with him.”

  “Okay,” he said, tentatively. “We’re going to go back down W. Madison, away from downtown.”

  They found Brooklyn’s neighborhood and Eric spotted Brooklyn’s father’s purple muscle car right away. Diaab didn’t stop as he passed by, though. He simply took note of the house, then returned them to his own home where he got on the phone and started making calls.

  Eric sat in the living room on the couch watching the news on mute. It was nothing but the wholesale destruction of dozens of American cities, including Chicago. He wasn’t alone. Two of Freddie B’s younger brothers sat there watching TV with him. They were eating pita chips and red pepper hummus, and they were nice enough to share.

  To Eric, it was a dull combination, but he ate anyway. If he was eating someone else’s food, then he wasn’t touching his own supply.

  Twice he heard things breaking in the other room, and three times he heard Diaab swearing in Arabic, something about the phones not working. Freddie B’s younger brothers didn’t seem alarmed by their father’s fit.

  Then again, they didn’t know their brother was dead.

  Finally Diaab returned to the kitchen and announced that they would eat, and then he and Eric would pay a visit to Brooklyn’s father.

  Eric couldn’t help but look at the large pistol Diaab set on the counter top. It was then that the full extent of Diaab Buhari’s career unfolded in Eric’s mind.

  This man trafficked American girls.

  Putting two and two together because he wasn’t a complete idiot, this man kidnapped white girls from America and shipped them to the Sudan where the expats probably trafficked them to high-end bidders who had never seen a white girl. These girls were likely run through by grown men day after day, probably until they were dead.

  “We call them white dogs,” Freddie B once said as he was smoking a cigarette after school, watching the girls leaving school. “A girl like that one there,” he said, pointing to an attractive eleventh grader Eric knew, “she’d bring a fortune. No tits, round butt, blonde hair. They are everywhere here, but not back home. Back home, the businessmen and government officials crawl all over themselves to get just ten minutes with one of these girls.”

  Near the end, before they did what they did to Brooklyn, Eric was starting to think he needed less of Freddie B in his life. He and Marcello talked about it once or twice, but Marcello said there was no price tag on loyalty and may
be he’d know that if he hadn’t been born here in America. Eric thought Marcello was having his doubts though.

  At least until Brooklyn.

  Before that day, Eric started paying attention the other migrants, specifically those from the Middle East and from Mexico. They were nice, but very different. They were good kids, hard workers, not trouble makers. Having been a Chicago native, never having gone anywhere else, he didn’t understand what they went through to get here, but they seemed happy. It was only Freddie B who seemed to be here for other reasons. This began to bother him. He shouldn’t be here, he thought. He shouldn’t be taking our girls.

  “I don’t want to impose any further,” Eric finally said to Diaab.

  “Nonsense,” Diaab replied. “You brought me to my son, and now you are our guest, so no matter the insanity outside, you will break bread with us.”

  “It’s okay—”

  “In our country, it is rude to turn your back to the generosity of others. This is you stealing away the joy of giving. You don’t want to steal from me, do you Eric?”

  “No, Mr. Buhari,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Please, call me Diaab. And I know you wouldn’t steal from me. So come break bread with us. That is how we establish our loyalties.”

  At the table, after they prayed over the food, Eric said, “What will you do about Farhad?”

  “He is being picked up now as we speak,” Diaab answered, the older man looking at his two sons, both boys lost in their own worlds. “There is no reason he should not be with family now.”

  “That’s good,” Eric said.

  He looked up at Diaab, and for the first time, he got a good feeling about the man. He seemed like a wonderful father, nothing like what Freddie B said. But looks could be deceiving, he thought. And Eric? He was new to this world. A virgin lamb in the house of a wolf.

  It made sense for Eric to let his guard down: he’d done the man a solid.

  But what Eric didn’t know then, what had never even occurred to him, was that this was how he got swallowed into the embrace of one of the most vicious monsters in all of Chicago.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I walk inside the house to a kitchen that smells like eggs and bacon. Adeline is cooking and Brooklyn is curled up on the couch, glued to the TV. This is probably close to their everyday routine, even though this isn’t an everyday world anymore.

  Brooklyn sees me as I walk in, but her smile becomes a frown. I’m not exactly the most presentable looking father right now. Yesterday I showed up beat to hell and damn near losing my mind. Today my skin feels heavy on bones ground down to nothing.

  Swear to God, I could sleep a thousand years.

  And since I’ve been crawling through a half-collapsed building all night long and eviscerating DTO dirtbags in an early morning one-man death squad, well…I kind of look like a soot stained, blood spattered nightmare.

  Adeline pops her head out from the kitchen and frowns as well.

  “What now?” she says.

  My clothes are torn ragged from working in and out of the debris of the crumbling Office of Emergency Management building all night, my knuckles are cut and red, my hair is flat against my head, and yeah, I’m pretty sure my beard still has a bunch of gunk in it.

  It might take steel wool to sufficiently clean this body of mine.

  “Most of the DEA is dead and the Office of Emergency Management building was hit in a drone strike yesterday, so I’ve been pulling bodies out of the debris for the last twelve hours.”

  A genuine hero, right?

  Brooklyn mutes the TV and Adeline says, “Take off your clothes before you head upstairs.” She says this with the utmost lack of affection. It’s truly warming. Like a blizzard, or an ice storm. “I don’t need you tracking all that grime over clean carpet and swept floors.”

  I stare at her, aghast.

  I can’t help it.

  This exhausted unsung hero just stands here looking at her. She plants her hands on her hips and Brooklyn’s eyes move back and forth between us like she can’t believe her mother’s response or my silence.

  Eyes drilled into Adeline, I shake my head back and forth in disappointment. This woman can’t stop stepping on my heart. It’s almost like she’s getting some sort of perverse pleasure out of it.

  “You know he could have died out there,” Brooklyn finally says, looking at Adeline the same way I’m looking at her. “But he chose to save lives.”

  “He could have died a hundred times over the last eight months, Brooklyn,” Adeline explained in a voice that would take a hard Chicago cop to task. “But I learned to stop worrying a long time ago and I’m not about to start back up.”

  “Yeah, well this is different,” Brooklyn says, still not convinced Adeline wasn’t being the consummate ice queen.

  Adeline looks at me and, in a more congenial tone, says, “Do what I ask please.”

  I start to undress, peeling off my clothes down to my sport briefs. My body remains covered from mid-thigh to waist, but the rest of it is out on display, evidence of two nights of mass violence. There’re more bruises, scrapes, scratches and more dried blood. Brooklyn’s jaw drops, like she can’t believe a body can take all that abuse and still function. Honestly, I’m looking down and thinking the same thing.

  “What happened to you, Daddy?” she asks.

  “I’ve had a rough run of it.”

  I head upstairs, each step an act of monumental effort, then turn on the shower, step inside and hope all the grime will come off with soap rather than steel wool. At this point, all I want is to feel clean, to get breakfast and to get a good eight hours sleep. Knowing Adeline, when she’s like this, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fending for myself in the kitchen.

  Whatever.

  I shower until the water runs cold, get out and dry off, halfway fix my hair, then look at myself in the mirror and try to see past all the wreckage on my face. For a second I wonder, is there even anything left of my former self? When I went off the deep end two nights ago, had that been it? Was that a line of delineation that marked the end of DEA agent Fiyero Dimas and the start of criminal DEA agent Fire Dimas?

  Pulling down the lower lid of my left eye, all I see is blood. Good Lord. I blink a couple of times. Everything’s working fine. I can see straight, but the dull ache pulling tight behind that eye doesn’t feel so hot. In time, if I survive all this attack, I’m certain I’ll heal.

  But will the city? Can Chicago survive destruction to this scale?

  In the distance, the bombing continues. It’s a faraway sound, but unmistakable. I think we’ll survive this. We have to. I keep telling myself this as I head downstairs to the kitchen. Predictably, I’m on my own. That’s fine. Whatever.

  As I’m preparing a couple of eggs of my own and staring at a dirty pan by which to start with, the power flickers on and off, things like the lights and the TV nearly going out. Then it’s back to normal, and then it’s gone completely.

  “Dad?”

  “I got it,” I say, heading upstairs (power’s on here) to the master closet where the breaker box is. Adeline is showering, but I don’t look.

  I reset the tripped breaker, walk back out still not looking at Adeline. If she can tell me she wants a divorce and sneak around with some scumbag mob financier, then I can start trying on the idea of a wife-free life.

  Downstairs, I go back to cooking, only to get interrupted by the phone. I check the caller ID, see it’s Xavier.

  “Yeah,” I say, picking up. We don’t connect right away, then “Yo, X…where you at dawg?”

  “Fire?” he finally says through a field of static. His voice sounds different. Ragged.

  “There you are,” I say.

  “She’s gone man,” he says, his voice teetering.

  “Who’s gone?”

  “Giselle,” he says, so much pain now flooding into his words I’m wondering if she left him the way Adeline is leaving me or if something worse happened. “I got h
ome…”

  Then he goes totally silent. I shut off the stove, move the crackling, popping food off the burner, then cup a hand over my ear to hear him better.

  “And?”

  “She’s…she’s dead man. Shot in the driveway in her car. Burned to death.”

  My heart sinks so low, I don’t even remember finding myself a seat or falling into it. As much as I despise Adeline right now, at least she’s alive. At least I have Brooklyn and Orlando. But Xavier, he just lost his reason for living.

  “Oh my God, Xavier,” I hear myself say. I look up and Brooklyn’s standing in the kitchen, looking at me. My face must be ashen. She looks concerned. “Where are you now?”

  “Coming over,” he says.

  “Just come in the front door, I’ll leave it open.” I point in the direction of the front door and Brooklyn nods and goes to unlock it.

  “I’m almost there,” he says.

  “I’m cooking breakfast,” I tell him. “I’ll make extra for you in case you feel like something.”

  “I can’t eat, Fire.”

  “Just come on in when you get here.”

  Xavier has been over for dinner with Giselle three or four times since they got together. We used to break bread together when we were in the PD. When Xavier went to the DEA, then hired me on, things changed. As feds, we had deeper responsibilities, dealt with a new class of criminal, had a different employer with a different set of rules we needed to get used to.

  Homeland Security told us in so many ways that in a city as problematic as Chicago, we could not only take the proverbial gloves off, we were encouraged to do just that.

  Oversight was different. Even the shooting review board seemed chill. That meant whatever we did, we did harder, with more intensity, and with the sole objective to kick the worst of the worst in the uprights over and over again until they broke.

  Of course, they’d never break, but I personally went to far darker places to get things done than ever before. Places so dark, it seemed impossible not to lose yourself. But I have. I did. The first casualty was my daughter’s loss of innocence. The second my wife. The third my clean record. The fourth my conscience. The fifth maybe my sensitivity to violence.