The Age of Embers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  “You don’t want to see if the shower works?” he asked.

  “I’ll check in the morning.”

  He checked anyway. The water was off. So no lights, no water, and no heat. The good news was it was cold as an icebox and getting colder by the minute. He put the beers outside so they could really cool off, then went back inside, took off his shoes and socks and crawled into bed.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “Pants and shirt off, too. It’s cold. We need body heat.”

  He did as she asked because she wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t know where this was leading, if anywhere, and even if it did lead to them being together, he wasn’t in the mood. After speaking about his wife and kids, he couldn’t stop thinking about how much he missed them. Sharing a bed with a half-naked woman wasn’t his idea of honoring her memory, even though he’d done plenty to dishonor her in the years prior.

  When he crawled under the sheets, she scooted next to him, her skin warm against the cool fabric, her body spooning his from behind. He felt her naked torso on his, specifically her bare chest. He was about to say something when she spoke.

  “Before you go and think this means more than it does,” she said, “consider this a matter of necessity and not desire.”

  “I was wondering how your back was doing,” he said.

  “Not as well as I’d hoped.”

  “How is your head?”

  “Better.”

  He closed his mouth, and before long she was fast asleep while he was mapping out the rest of the trip in his head. If they got an early start, if they didn’t run into much in the way of pile ups or drones, they had just under seven hundred miles left, give or take. They could make that in the day if they had enough gas and the stamina they needed.

  Slowly rolling over on his back, her body still on his, she shifted with him, her arm and leg draping over his chest and thigh, her breasts pressed into his side.

  Only in the middle of a nightmare like the end of the world could he sleep under those conditions, but he did manage to sleep, and he did manage to stay warm.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Somehow, against all odds and reason, I manage to get a few hours sleep before Xavier returns with Ryan and a small arsenal of weapons the former SAC requisitioned from Westchester PD.

  The loud chatter of voices below wakes me up.

  I drag myself out of bed, throw on some clean clothes that will easily pass for cartel attire, then gingerly walk downstairs. I haven’t seen my son in nearly six months. I can’t stop the smile from forming on my face at the sound of his voice.

  Orlando sees me coming down stairs, his entire face breaking into a huge grin. “Dad,” he says, grabbing me and pulling me into a bear hug that honestly feels a dozen times worse than it should because of my injuries.

  “Hey, buddy,” I say, looking up to see an attractive young woman standing behind him. She’s got stylish glasses and a smile on her face. She has that look like she’s ready to formally meet Orlando’s father. Me.

  “And you are?” I ask, stepping out of Orlando’s embrace.

  “I’m Veronica Deantonio, sir,” she says, reaching out to shake my hand.

  “You look older than Orlando,” I say, taking her hand in mine.

  “Actually I’m younger. I just look older because girls mature at a faster rate than boys,” she says to the delight of everyone around. “But no, I’m eighteen. We’re exactly one year apart.’”

  “You two share the same birthday?” I ask.

  “We do,” she said, smiling at Orlando.

  “Do you have your license?” I ask, letting go of her.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just call me Fiyero,” I say, “or Fire, if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “And do you have a car?”

  “I’m working to save up for one,” she says, “same as Orlando. We met at work.”

  “Where do you work now?” I ask Orlando. “Your mother neglected to tell me you’d taken a job in lieu of pursuing college.”

  Adeline wasn’t amused, but I refused to meet her eyes, so the statement just hung out there in the open.

  “Uncle Julio’s,” Orlando says, ignoring the college comment. “It’s a Mexican restaurant. Remember my friend, Matt?”

  “I do.”

  “He and I carpool out to Westchester three nights a week.”

  I give a semi-approving nod, wanting to stay in this moment forever, but Xavier gives me the look. It kills me not to be able to stay with Orlando and Veronica, but clearly the kid is going to be alright. And the fact that he’s in love? That doesn’t hurt either.

  “I’ve got to run,” I tell him right before I hug him one last time. Then, leaning forward, I kiss Brooklyn on the cheek, and whisper into her ear, “You’re going to be alright.”

  “I know,” she says with a smile. “We’ll be fine.”

  “It was nice to meet you, Veronica,” I say.

  “Likewise, Fiyero,” she says.

  Orlando walks me out to the car and says, “What do you think, Dad?”

  “About?”

  “Veronica!” he says, excited. “She doesn’t usually wear glasses, because she doesn’t need them, but nerdy hot is in these days.”

  “First off, you should find your way back to college. Second, I think she’s amazing and you should make sure you do right by her. A good woman can turn nasty if you neglect her. If you pay attention to her though, treat her right and be the man as opposed to some wimpy soy boy, she’ll appreciate you and travel to the ends of the earth with you.”

  “Is that how it is with you and Mom?”

  “No. That’s why I’m giving you that advice. So you can do what I have failed to do.”

  “You didn’t fail, Dad.”

  Smiling, trying not to be sad, I say, “I wish that were the case.” Ryan put the Chevy Tahoe in gear in time for me to say to my son, “Take care of the girls. You’re the man of the family while I’m gone, got it?”

  “Got it,” he says, anxious to shoulder the role.

  When I get in the SUV, Ryan takes off and says, “Sorry to rush you like that, but we have a small window of opportunity and God only knows when it’s going to close. Or how long it’ll take to get there. Or if we’ll even get there with these drones laying waste to just about anything that moves.”

  We navigate through two police checkpoints, badge the officers who bid us good luck, then pass through a third. The third has a burning Chicago PD cruiser and two dead officers. We slow down and drive straight through the wooden barrier, the SUV barely even registering the commotion.

  “Good freaking God,” Xavier mumbles as we drive by the fallen cops. “I think I can see what that guy was thinking when he died.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about until I get a closer look. Each officer looks like he took about thirty rounds to the body. One of officer’s head, half of it came off in the attack. My stomach lurches and I turn away. A few minutes later, I wipe the sweat from my forehead and realize that as fearless and as dogged as I have become, I’m still human, I have a breaking point and this war on Chicago is really starting to cut to the heart of it.

  “Are you alright back there?” Ryan asks, his eyes on mine in the rear view mirror.

  “I didn’t need to see that,” I hear myself say.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” he asks.

  I know what he’s asking. I know enough about these two guys I’m heading into war with to know this is a one way trip and we’re going to ride it for as long as we can until we’re just as dead as the cops we just passed.

  “Yeah man,” I tell him with eyes that now feel completely devoid of life, “I’m cherry.”

  This is how I get ready to work, I let myself die inside. I kill myself to save myself. Where I got tripped up in this whole thing, what ultimately doomed me when I was deep cover, was that I stopped learning how to come out of this destructive frame of mind. I’d been in it for the last eight mont
hs. By refusing to risk my family the way my brother Isadoro had risked and lost his, I stayed deep cover, cutting off almost all communications with Adeline and the kids.

  The only exception had been Brooklyn and an emergency call from Orlando six months ago. The big emergency was that he wanted me to come home.

  For some twisted reason, I’m glad to be back in the mire. This should concern me. What should concern me more, however, is that this is not an intel gathering assignment as much as it’s a do-everything-you-can kind of assignment. A no-holds-barred assignment.

  This is me with the green light.

  This is me in go mode.

  As we pass through too many neighborhoods with too much destruction, it all starts to look like hell with the lid kicked off. The row houses blend together, the cars are all low-rent beaters; even the dead bodies are starting to look the same.

  “It’s like nobody cares,” I hear myself say.

  “This whole town is paralyzed with fear,” Ryan says. “No one wants to chance going out, and they’re terrified to stay inside. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Everyone smart stays inside,” Xavier says. “Only the idiots roam the wasteland out in the open.”

  “Enter three clowns on a mission from God,” I say.

  Ryan laughs, then says, “There’s more than a few things wrong with us.”

  “The list is long and distinguished,” Xavier replies, to which all three of us repeat the famous line from Top Gun in perfect unison: “Just like my Johnson.”

  A moment of reprieve feels good, but it’s back to the dead eyes, the mental preparation, the release of everything I’ve ever cared about. If I die here, I’m okay with that. My kids will understand. Their father won’t be their mother’s burden anymore. He’ll be their hero.

  “I’m a hero,” I say aloud.

  “Not yet,” Xavier says, “but soon.”

  Up ahead, Ryan slows down for a shootout between two groups of people in front of a grocery store that’s still being looted. Two people fall, a third walks out in the middle of the street with a shotgun blasting at a couple of kids.

  The shooter looks like a scumbag.

  Ryan stomps on the gas, the Tahoe’s big 5.3L motor digging in. The shooter stops firing the second he hears the motor and turns. Ryan mows him down with the front of the truck, then yells, “Stop shooting at kids!”

  And then we’re back on track, albeit with a damaged front end.

  You could not even hope to cut the silence with a chainsaw in the truck, it was that thick. I can’t believe what Ryan just did. I’m still wondering if it even happened when my former SAC turns around and says, “Civility is gone man. All we have is each other and what’s left of this city. If you haven’t got the stomach…”

  “I do. It’s just…”

  “It’s just what?” he asks. “These are the end times, brother. Act accordingly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There isn’t even a command structure anymore, Fire. This is the wild west and we’re cowboys. You got that? There isn’t any law anymore. We don’t even have badges, except for when we need them, and even then, they don’t mean dick. You see what’s happening?”

  Up ahead, downtown Chicago is encased in one massive cloud of smoke brought on by the culmination of city-wide destruction.

  “The fire that gutted this city in 1871 burned for three straight days. It’s been three days. Three hundred people died. We’ve got a hell of a lot more than that dead, I’ll tell you that! And there’s more than three miles of this town that are toast. You hear me, Fire? There ain’t no coming back from this. You know why? Because the fire of 1871 started in a barn and was fueled by a drought and strong winds. This fire is caused by unmanned planes operating on an agenda of their own, blowing up the city on purpose. This is a hard op meant to end us.”

  “It’s starting to look that way,” I say.

  “It is that way,” he says, taking a right, swerving to avoid a wounded dog, then taking another quick left into a dead end. He curses, finds reverse, backs up and takes an alternative route. “I’m pretty sure it’s up ahead.”

  My body tenses. I breathe and tell myself there are no repercussions. That I’m giving my body to this fight for the good of the city and those left living here when I’m gone. This is me doing one thing to make up for the murders, the neglect of my wife, my failure to protect Brooklyn. What I’m doing is not against the law because there is no law. There are no more cops, no more lawyers, no more courts—it’s now just good against evil, and supposedly we’re the good guys.

  We pull up to a neighborhood that looks like every other neighborhood in this city. The homes we see aren’t exactly row homes because they don’t share a common wall, but there’s only a couple feet between them, so it feels close. They’re nice, the neighborhood clearly revitalized maybe two or three years back by the look of it, but that doesn’t mean anything right now.

  “Three houses up is where these guys tend to hang out. These dirtbags are falcons, basement dwelling toilet bugs, but maybe there’s a lieutenant or two in the mix. The point is we leave at least one of them alive so we can find out who’s left in the command structure before we lop the head off this DTO.”

  “How many are we going after?” I ask, referring to the Drug Trafficking Organizations.

  “All of them,” Xavier says.

  I like his thinking, but this means we go from federal agents to unchecked assassins and that’s a big pill to swallow. I can do this, though. I want to do this.

  “Who are these guys?” I ask.

  “The rest of Los Rojos,” Ryan says. “Let’s go.”

  The three of us roll out of the Tahoe, head around the back of the SUV to vest up, gun up and sack up.

  Ryan hands me a grenade and says, “This goes in the front window on my signal.” I already have my own grenade, but I don’t tell him that. What would be the point? Next he tosses me a mini walkie-talkie then says, “We don’t talk, we click. One click says we’re in position. Two clicks mean you kick off the war. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I say.

  “Toss your grenade through the front window and Xavier and I will be out back making every last one of these maggots dance,” he said, tapping his assault rifle. “Are you ready?”

  “Locked and loaded, boss.”

  Ryan and Xavier head into the neighborhood, keeping low and sticking as closely to the houses as possible. Four houses down, they give me the signal. I follow the same route, make my way to a Nissan Sentra in front of the two story target with the large front picture window. Against the window is a couch back with two heads, both adult with thick black hair.

  Falcons. Low level scumbags.

  Xavier and Ryan squeeze into the narrow space between the homes, working their way toward the back yard. Both are strapped with AR-15’s. I’m behind the Sentra with a modified AR and two Glocks.

  My walkie-talkie clicks once. I wait a moment and then it clicks twice.

  From behind the Sentra, I stand, pull the pin on the grenade then chuck that nugget as hard as I can through the front window. The glass doesn’t break, and the grenade bounces down behind a propane barbecue.

  I swear under my breath, get on the walkie-talkie and say, “The glass didn’t—”

  The explosion is like a bomb going off.

  The window shatters, but not before the propane tank on the barbecue blows outward and into the Sentra I’m standing behind. Glass blasts out everywhere, rocking the car and damn near rendering me deaf.

  I stand, see the smoke and ruin and empty my first mag into the people I see dazed and standing in the living room. There must be six or seven. I grab another grenade, my own this time, and lob it inside. The second grenade brings down the front of the house.

  That’s when I hear the rattle of gunfire coming from behind the house.

  As the second story collapses into the first, the front of the house sags and all kinds of things, including people, come pouring out
the downed portion and onto the front lawn.

  I light up everyone I see.

  When I’m done, I trot around back, ready to clear the place with Ryan and Xavier. The back yard is a veritable blood bath. Bodies are laid out everywhere, maybe nine or ten of them. One guy is breathing, but badly wounded and crawling to his gun. I kick his gun away as I walk past him toward Xavier, who is down on the ground with Ryan.

  Ryan’s laid out on his back, his vest stitched up with slugs, two clean holes in his neck. He’s spurting blood, his face pale and scared, his eyes seeing the start of another world.

  “Well this is a crap start,” Ryan manages to say, blood burping out of his mouth as he speaks. He coughs a few times, then blinks slow and slower still, and then his eyes lose focus and he’s gone.

  “How the hell did thi—” I start to say.

  Gunfire from above hits me, three or four shots, and I go down hard, unable to breathe, unable to compose myself under fire. I’ve just been shot. I haven’t been shot before. Certainly not like this.

  How did I hit the ground and not know it? My eyes clear. The grass beneath my face is dry, brittle. There are patches of dirt, and there is debris littered everywhere. The sound of a few drones buzzing overhead comes into awareness, but they sound distant, unconcerned with us little worker bees.

  The retaliatory burst of gunfire around me no longer matters because I knew this would be it. I knew we would only get so far because real life is not like the movies. One guy doesn’t get to be Rambo. Rambo took out an entire army in the third Rambo movie in what was maybe a ten or twenty minute finale. Guys like me, real people, we don’t get to be heroes for long, because the best heroes die in battle and the best heroes dream of a good death.

  Death doesn’t feel so good. This isn’t a good death.

  My body is suddenly rolled over and Xavier’s face is down in mine. He’s frowning, almost like he’s pissed off.

  “You dying?” he asks, irritated.

  “Yeah.”

  “No you’re not, weaksauce,” he says. He then pats my vest three times, and each time he might as well be hitting me with a sledgehammer. “Your vest absorbed the shots, Sunshine. You’re fine.”