The Age of Embers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  “You and I may not be honest with each other, but I refuse to lie to Brooklyn or Orlando.”

  Adeline looked back and forth between Fire and Brooklyn, completely humbled now that pieces of the truth were out there. To Brooklyn, she said, “And you’re okay with that?”

  “He wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t have to,” she said. “And it sounds like self-defense to me, even if he says otherwise.”

  “There are always other alternatives,” Adeline said.

  “Not this time, Adeline,” Fire replied. “But you didn’t have to kiss Caelin, or tell me on the first day back from eight months in that crap that you wanted a divorce.”

  “You kissed him?” Brooklyn asked, wounded.

  “Don’t act so hurt, your dad’s been gone almost a year. People have needs, one of which is the need to feel taken care of, appreciated, wanted…”

  “Another need is for too nice of a home for one’s salary, or the need to destroy your family before at least trying for one day to see if it’s—”

  “Stop it, dammit!” Brooklyn screamed. “Eric is out there dead on our front porch. The old lady across the way just shot someone in our front yard. The cops are going to be here anytime now.”

  “No,” Fire said, “they’re not coming. Which means the sooner we clean that trash off our porch, the better we’ll feel.”

  “You want to just get that kid and put him in the garbage can?” Adeline said. “See if they’ll pick him up on Tuesday?”

  “That’s actually a good idea,” Fire replied.

  “What about his parents?” she asked, not appreciating his sarcasm. “What if that was Brooklyn?”

  “Brooklyn would never find herself in this situation because she’s not a pervert!”

  “His father’s a jerk,” Brooklyn said, “and his mother works all the time. If she was alive, if either of them were alive, do you think Eric would be here with Freddie B’s dad?”

  “Do you know where he lived?” Adeline asked.

  “No,” Brooklyn said.

  “Can you find out?” she asked, looking at Fire, who was looking at her, stewing.

  “There are a lot of people dead, Adeline. There are a lot more who will be dead by the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the year if this persists. So as much as I appreciate your sense of humanity, this kid will never get a proper funeral.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “His mother is likely dead, and half the police stations or more are lying in smoking ruin right now. Meaning we have bigger problems than one dead deviant voyeur.”

  “He was still a person.”

  “Stop defending him like his death is somehow tragic!” Brooklyn snapped. “They did this to more than just me, Mom. They did this to other girls. If Dad hadn’t stopped them, they’d continue doing this, so stop acting like he’s your brand new cause!”

  “I’m not…” she started to say, but then she realized Brooklyn was right. “This is all too much right now. I’m sorry. My head’s…my head’s in the wrong place.”

  “It’s about damn time you admit that,” Fire grumbled. Then to Brooklyn, he said, “I’ll roll the garbage can around front. Brooklyn you get a bowl of cold water to wash the blood off the porch.”

  “Are you serious?” Adeline snapped.

  “It was your idea.”

  “I didn’t think you’d take me serious!”

  “Oh, and here I thought you were finally getting with the times.”

  “Which are?”

  “The world is tunneling into oblivion, Adeline,” he said, that tone tempered again. “You’d best pull your head out of your ass and realize we’re in the middle of hell here. Not just Chicago. The nation.”

  “My head is not up my ass.”

  “It’s going to get really rough and we’re going to be tested here, so if you want to have some giant bleeding heart for every fallen soul, trust me when I tell you, you’re in for the worst ride of your life!”

  “Dad, stop,” Brooklyn said, her voice low, sincere.

  Fire stood there fuming, his eyes bulging, his chest puffed up and full of blood. He took a deep breath, stilled himself, and then he said, “You broke my heart, Adeline. And it sucks that as much as you want to move on, I still love you so much.”

  With that, he walked upstairs and left her there feeling like the worst wife, and the worst mother on earth.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Eliana stirred to the distant sounds of thunder. Her head was confusion. Her heart was sorrow. Sleep was not easy and she woke twice with tears in her eyes. She wasn’t sure why at first, or even where she was, but then she remembered why she was so sad. She and Ice were in a hotel, a different room now, and the boy she’d traveled with for weeks was dead, wrapped in a sheet and stuffed into a bathtub in an abandoned room.

  She managed to get back to sleep, but that’s when everything went from really bad to catastrophic.

  “Eliana,” Ice said with panic in his voice. A second later, the entire building rocked with noise and fury. She sprung out of bed to Ice grabbing what few things they owned. In the hallways, they heard the sounds of screaming and then the sounds of things falling away.

  Ice screamed, “We need to go, now!”

  Another massive explosion tossed Eliana and Ice sideways. The window-side of their room broke away, a huge portion of the wall and some of the floor falling into the void below. Muted light poured into the room.

  Moving on unsteady legs, her equilibrium teetering, her hearing like a high-pitched tone, Eliana wandered left and right in competing clouds of dust, her expression flat, that of a person who was not sure if they were still alive.

  Ice was on the ground, flung backwards from the explosion. She walked to him, knelt down, tottered against waves of dizziness, then shook him.

  “Isadoro,” she said in a voice she couldn’t quite hear because of the ringing in her ears.

  He stirred, blinked back bewilderment, focused in on her. He must have felt himself returning to his senses as awareness crept into his expression.

  “Are we dead?” he asked.

  She didn’t hear him as much as she was able to read his lips.

  “We have to go!” she said, hoping to hear herself speak this time.

  The building was hammered again; the foundation began to sway beneath them. If they took too many more hits like this, the entire structure was bound to collapse.

  The next attacks seemed to come from the other side of the building. The floor was still shifting, rocking ever so slightly beneath them.

  Isadoro got up, staggered to the hotel room door and opened it up only to find everything on that side of the door had crumbled in on itself. From the debris below, he saw someone’s leg and a bloody outstretched arm. Eliana was behind him, seeing the same thing.

  Her breath caught.

  They didn’t see the rest of the body.

  Eliana felt the scream building inside her, but she swallowed it down realizing the gravity of the situation. If she let herself fall apart, she’d die.

  Simple as that.

  “We need to go out the side,” she said, even louder than before, desperately trying to hear herself, hoping she wasn’t permanently deaf.

  Eliana turned to the open side of the room, the side that once had a wall but was now a gigantic opening to the parking lot three floors down. That would have to be their exit. Outside, the drones were banking hard, circling back around as people below scurried from the hotel exits toward their cars in droves.

  Eliana peeked over the edge of the floor, saw the room opened up below, their wall gone as well. The edge of the downstairs room extended out a foot further than their room.

  They could drop down.

  Just then an old but beautiful Cadillac sedan (big trunk, big roof, big hood) haphazardly backed up over all the fallen debris, then hit the brakes. The door was pushed open and an old man hustled as best as he could back inside the hotel looking like he was maybe fetc
hing the grandkids, or collecting the missus.

  Her senses tunneled for a moment when she had something practical like a car to show her just how far up she was.

  With her stomach in her throat, and a new sheen of sweat mapping her neck and forehead, Eliana swung herself over the edge gripping the floor where she could. The surface beneath her hands, however, gave way the second her legs swung inside the room below. She dropped like a stone to the surface below, hit something hard that whooshed the air out of her and kicked her over the edge where she dropped out of the side of the hotel completely.

  Her body was in freefall for what felt like forever; in reality it was only a few seconds at most. She couldn’t breath, much less scream.

  She landed on the roof of the older Cadillac, her back taking the brunt of the impact.

  Ice watched Eliana drop her body over the edge, time slowing to a crawl for him as he saw the floor crumble and give way beneath her fingers. He lunged for her, reaching out to grab her hand, but she was already gone.

  The effort, along with the weakened structure, nearly sent him over the edge right after her. As he hung there, teetering in mid-air, he saw everything. She hit the second story floor hard enough and just right; this sent her toppling out of the hotel completely. The way her body dropped two stories and hit the Cadillac below, he was sure she was dead.

  She’d slammed into the roof of the Caddy, the metal caving in, the windshield splintering out and a side window exploding in a blast of broken glass. A few of the fleeing masses slowed for a glance, but kept on going because the drones were taking another pass.

  Ice took a breath, slid over the edge, landed on both feet on the floor below, much to the chagrin of his knees. Wasting no time, he then sprung his body over the edge and dropped down below, landing hard on both feet on the hood of the Cadillac. His knees buckled and he rolled with it, dropping down into the rubble, which immediately dug into his body in all the worst ways possible.

  He heard shouting and turned to see the Caddy’s owner shaking his fist. Getting to his feet, albeit slowly, Ice dusted himself off then waved off the old man’s conniption fit. The owner was on a tear, though. Now that Ice’s hearing was coming back, he could hear just how irate the man was. He fell into a cursing spell harsh enough to make a trucker blush.

  Ice turned his attention to Eliana.

  She wasn’t moving.

  Wincing hard and wobbling, he managed to steady his knees as another drone ripped by not thirty feet overhead. The missile it loosed struck the side of the hotel’s top floor in a fiery explosion that had him grabbing Eliana by whatever he could get a hold of.

  It happened to be her armpit.

  No longer concerned with himself or his ails, Ice sprung into action. With a mighty surge of will, he yanked Eliana’s small body toward him, spinning in time to anchor her to his back.

  He dug in and made a run for it.

  The almost demonic roar of the building collapsing hit him with a blast of both fear and adrenaline. His legs absolutely railed in protest as the building came down on the Cadillac and the old man behind them. He hadn’t gotten far enough away to clear the inbound wreckage. A huge, hot wave of dust and debris washed over them both.

  Ice’s legs finally folded. He stumbled forward, Eliana now heavier and more awkward than ever, and then they both went down.

  Using what momentum he had to his advantage, he rolled over the top of her and covered her mouth as best as he could with his hand. He needed to keep the potentially toxic dust from getting into her lungs and choking her.

  Eliana came to in a jolt. She opened his eyes, saw him, then gave a hearty buck to get him off. He shifted his weight, kept her pinned to the ground beneath him. She didn’t have the strength to fight him. Awareness slowly hit her: he was doing this to protect her.

  When she was alert enough, he removed his hand, then coughed and said, “We need to get out of this.”

  She nodded.

  “Can you move?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  He finally rolled off her, grabbed her hand and helped her up. The two of them made their way through the zero-visibility cloud of airborne debris as best as they could. When they cleared it, the two of them were overwhelmed with such a massive fit of coughing, it became runny eyes, snotty noses and eventually vomiting.

  Eliana stopped first, sitting down on the side of the road and groaning. She looked like hell. He felt worse than she looked.

  “My head is splitting in two,” she said, gingerly running her fingers over the back of her head.

  He sat down beside her and said, “Give me a second and I’ll check you out. You took a nasty fall.”

  “I can check myself out,” she said, brushing him off.

  “Stop it.”

  She didn’t fight him. He looked over at her and smiled. “How the hell did we make it out of there?” he asked.

  In front of them, then entire hotel had come down. The fleet of drones left the scene, presumably moving on to other targets.

  “You are only thinking of us,” she said.

  She was still broken up about the boy. Isadoro was, too, but he wasn’t going to feel bad for narrowly escaping, even if others didn’t. The breeze shifted, blowing clouds of smoke and debris away from them. The scene of destruction cleared, rendering them speechless.

  Where they landed, the Cadillac and the old man were buried in rubble. This was not lost on him. It was, however, something he didn’t see Eliana thinking about. He imagined she was wondering about the boy’s body.

  “You realize we would have been in that mess either buried alive or dead, right?”

  “I know,” she said, her eyes clearing.

  “You think you could maybe act like we just survived something crazy and be grateful for maybe a solid second or two?”

  She turned and fixed him with a gaze. He was as powdery a mess as she was. Somehow, seeing him and the shape he was in, changed her. She managed to eke out a smile, which he liked immensely. No surprise there...

  “You’re so pretty when you smile,” he said, spitting the grit from his mouth.

  “So are you,” she replied, softening for the first time.

  “How’s your neck?” he asked.

  “Sore.”

  “Are you dizzy at all?”

  “No.”

  “Problems with your eyesight?”

  “My eyes are dusty is all,” she said. “And watery.”

  “That’s normal.”

  “Do you do this kind of thing regularly?” she asked, sarcastic.

  “Only on days that end in Y.”

  Looking away, lost in the destruction, her mood soured again and she said, “Well you just worry about you and I’ll worry about me and we’ll get along fine.”

  “There you go, taking the words right out of my mouth,” he said.

  He stood and looked down at her. She reached up for his help, but he just looked at her hand. “I helped me, you help you. I’m going to find the car. Hopefully it’s not buried. Walk your broke ass over if you want, or I’ll pick you up on the curb.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply; he simply headed toward the parking lot hoping the Civic was still intact.

  Thankfully, it turned out it was.

  He started dusting himself off when he felt the extra set of hands patting him down. He turned and Eliana was there, patting his body to shake off the dust.

  He started to turn around, but a hand on his shoulder turned him back around while she worked on his back.

  So maybe she isn’t completely ungrateful...

  She patted harder and lower, working her way to his lower back, then to his butt. He didn’t say anything. She continued down, slapping his legs and then his shoes. Eliana then worked her way around the front of him, patting his shins, his knees, and his thighs. She put four solid shots on his family jewels, making him wince, but he said nothing and she didn’t slow her pace.

  When she got to his stomach and chest
, the hitting became harder, and still neither of them said a word. Ice merely looked at her and wondered what was going on in that dirty, pretty head of hers. Her face was dogged, determined, focused only on the task.

  But behind that face, he thought he saw the stirrings of anger.

  When she was done with his chest, he opened his mouth to thank her and that’s when she slapped him hard across the face. Stunned, he said nothing. She hit the other side of his face, rattling his brain.

  When she finished, she smiled and said, “Now don’t you feel pretty?”

  “Like a princess.”

  She turned around and said, “Now do me.”

  He paused a second, then told himself it was so they didn’t bring toxic dust into the car. He started to pat her back.

  “Do it like a man,” she said. “Not like a pretty princess.”

  Smiling, trying not to laugh because it hurt his lungs, he started patting her with the same force she’d applied to him. She winced mightily when he struck her back, but said nothing.

  “Too much?” he asked.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Just keep going.”

  When he got to her butt, he skipped it and went to her legs. She stopped, turned around and said, “Are you sweet on men or something?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My butt is dirty, no?”

  “It is.”

  She turned back around and he spanked the dust off it. His heart took off in his chest for an entirely different reason. The only way he could get through this was to tell himself she was acting in a purely utilitarian manner when she’d cleaned him, and that he should do the same.

  It didn’t feel that way, though. For him, it felt more like anger and a bit of attraction mixed together. But then again, the girl was a virgin and way out of her element. That would cause anyone to act a bit…off.

  He moved to the other side of her, patting the dust off her shins, knees and thighs, and then he looked up and raised an eyebrow in question. She give a nod and he patted her privates, working his way up to her stomach and over her chest. By the time he got to her shoulders he was sufficiently turned on and privately ashamed for feeling like this while so many people were dead in the hotel behind them.