The Age of Embers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  “Give me your hands,” Eliana said.

  She took his hands, blew warm air onto them, then rubbed them with her hands trying to create enough friction to get the feeling back.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He started the Civic, put it in gear and left the Camry behind them. The heater took a bit to warm back up, but when it did, the small cabin got extra toasty.

  “Bet you wish you had that extra hour of sleep right now,” Eliana teased.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Davenport was a nightmare to get around, but they managed to get clear of one of the worst traffic jams yet; it was just after midnight. They crossed the Mississippi, leaving Iowa for Illinois and by the time that happened, Eliana was asleep.

  At the four leaf clover interchange taking them from Hwy 80 to Hwy 88 leading into Chicago, he had to make some creative decisions that nearly crippled the car. Eliana jolted awake to the slow sounds of metal scraping metal.

  “You okay?” she said in Spanish. “Are we hit?”

  “Just traffic.”

  “Oh,” she said, resting her head back near the window and going back to sleep.

  “I absolutely wish I had that extra hour of sleep,” he said, although Eliana wasn’t awake to hear it.

  By the time they hit Willow Creek at Hwy 47, Ice was officially done. He’d drifted off to sleep twice, once jolting back awake because he realized he’d nodded off, and the second time because he’d swerved off into the shoulder and started kicking up all kinds of dirt and rocks.

  Eliana sat up fast, awake but looking drugged.

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  “I did.”

  “Pull over at the next stop,” she said. “We’ll find a place to stay for the night.”

  They’d planned for this. If Chicago was in fact a nightmare, then there would be plenty of burnt homes and abandoned businesses, which meant evacuations. If they could find a place in a burnt neighborhood that wasn’t burnt, or wasn’t all the way burnt, then there was a chance the people will have evacuated and the place was empty.

  Willow Creek was their first attempt at finding such a neighborhood. They were not successful. The wandered through the neighborhoods all along 47 until they ran into the town of Elburn. A new Ford dealership had just gone in but the entire line of cars looked torched, as did half the building. The huge glass front of the building was shot out and there were at least ten or fifteen dead people scattered across the lot.

  “Let’s see if there’s a break room or something,” he said. “We can sleep on couches, even if it’s just for a few hours.”

  “That’s a little macabre,” she said in English. “Considering all the dead.”

  “Nice choice of words,” he said, impressed. “But if this works, it’ll have to do, because I’m not driving around anymore.”

  They parked the car on the lot as close as they could, then got out and walked through the scattering of bodies onto a showroom floor with an even greater body count. They couldn’t see very well, but Isadoro found his way to the cashier where they had license plate frames, keychains and mini flashlights for sale.

  Ice grabbed a flashlight, handed one to Eliana, then said, “We’ll grab the rest when we leave. Plus whatever else we think we can use.”

  It took forever and the last stores of his patience to open the hard plastic packaging, but when they had light, they had light!

  Together they headed upstairs, stepped around a rotund woman who’d been shot through one of the windows as she stepped out of the business office, then moved to the far end of the building where a placard on the door read: Employees Only.

  Through the door was a beautiful breakroom with a fridge that wasn’t working. The room was cold, but at least it wasn’t drafty.

  “In the gift shop, I saw some shirts,” he said. “Maybe they have some jackets in back we can use for blankets.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, yawning, her face sitting about as low on her bones as he’d seen it.

  “You try out that couch, and I’ll be back in no time.”

  He found a box of jackets back in the Parts Department’s storeroom. He stacked both boxes and walked them upstairs to the breakroom where Eliana was curled up on one of the couches. He opened the first box, starting covering her body with the jackets.

  “Thank you,” she said in a voice that slurred with sleep.

  He went to his own couch, laid down, opened the other box and pulled those jackets over himself. He was asleep in seconds. He woke some short time later to the sounds of furniture moving. Eliana was wrestling the designer couch across the floor toward him.

  “What the hell?” he mumbled.

  “I’m freezing,” she said, her teeth chattering. It was definitely cold. He got up asked her what she was trying to do, to which she replied, “I’m putting my couch with yours. We need body heat.”

  “We keep sleeping together like this—”

  “And?”

  “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone,” he said.

  “No you won’t.”

  They put the couches together, created an adult playpen, then curled up together and pulled the jackets over the top of them, and then they finally slept.

  When he woke, it was so quiet, the silence hurt his ears. Ice wondered if he was dead. Like if the world was still there, but his life and all the people in the world were gone and he was just on another plane with nothing to do but roam the deserted wasteland.

  At least he had Eliana.

  She woke up beside him, looked up and smiled. He smiled back. She then pushed her head forward and gave him a kiss on the nose before getting up. There was certainly less pep in her step today than there was the previous day, but perhaps there was a lightness about her because they’d made it. Despite the odds, the harrowing journey and the hell they went through to get up into America, they were finally here, in Chicago.

  “Will you help me find Carolina?” she asked. She hadn’t asked him that before. They were traveling companions, but they were not together.

  “You have an address, yes?”

  “I do.”

  “Let me see it,” he said. She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket, handed it to him. “I think I know where this is.”

  “When do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Is now soon enough?”

  She nodded her head and for the first time, her eyes showed him something other than eagerness, distance or anger. What floated through her eyes was fear. Fear of what she might find. Fear of finding nothing. Fear of finding no leads, and by proxy, no Carolina.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m scared.”

  Her vulnerability touched him, made him think about opening up to her. Really opening up. Not with humor, or by sleeping next to her, or even sharing a drink. He went and hugged her tight because she needed it, but he needed it, too. He was scared. Scared his brothers were dead, or that they were comfortable enough with him being dead that seeing him alive was not something any of them wanted. He was also scared of who he’d become, that there would not be a way back to his old self, the only part of him he even liked anymore.

  “We are both here, standing at the edge of forever, at the edge of hell, or heaven,” he told Eliana, “and we cannot know what we will find, or what will happen to us, until we take that last step. For you and for me.”

  “What is your last step?” she asked.

  “Seeing if my family loves me enough to forgive me for something I didn’t do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Willingly kill my father.”

  She took a deep breath, her eyes changing, softening.

  “Tell me your story,” she said, not in a demanding way, but in a truly curious way. Ice finally opened up and told her everything. Now it was her turn to come to him and pull him in a hug that he needed.

  “Will you promise me something?” he asked, his face against her neck.

  “Yes
,” she said, stepping back and slipping her hand into his.

  “If things don’t go well for us today,” he said, turning the words over in his mind to find the best way to say it, “can we stay together? Because we might be all the other has.”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. Then, standing on her tippy-toes, she leaned forward and kissed him slowly on the mouth. He kissed her back, the world falling away for just that moment. “That one was because I like you.”

  “I like you, too,” he said, realizing with full clarity that he was dealing with a woman who had really never been with a man before. “How old are you, by the way?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That’s a good age,” he said, taking her hand. “You know, when we get there, if there are people there—”

  “When I get my Carolina, if I can, I’m going to kill them,” she said, not waiting for him to finish. “I’m going to kill all of them.”

  “Just don’t miss.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “The minute I see the lights of their eyes, I will be doing everything I can to extinguish it. I’m just going to let go and shoot.”

  He nodded his head, knowing that if he wasn’t turned on by this woman before, he sure as hell was now. If she could pull this off, if they could find Carolina and slaughter the cretins who stole her, that might be the start of a new chapter for them both.

  “If you do find Carolina, do you think you will go back to Guatemala right away?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s find her first.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I’d rather sleep in bed with Adeline, but the couch isn’t bad. The cushions hold me like an ambivalent lover, but when you consider the hard line Adeline’s drawn with me, the couch seems like the better alternative.

  If I learned anything in my time at Chicago PD, it’s how to stay out of the line of fire.

  The truth is, our bed is big, but it’s not big enough for me, Adeline and all her resentment, and I’m not interested in sleeping next to a person who doesn’t want me there anyway. To me, that’s like being in the bathroom while someone else is pooping.

  It’s just uncomfortable for all parties involved.

  So now I’m laying down here by myself and I can’t help the part of me that wants to lament this wildly unpredictable turn of events. In the end, however, I wonder, what good is any of this really doing? Is it changing anything? No. Is it making anything better? Absolutely not.

  So what’s the point?

  Eventually, the sheer amount of emotional “noise” in my head falls to a whisper and I manage to fall asleep. The nightmares are there almost immediately. Most of the night through, they seem to run on a loop. Dead bodies, killer drones, gunfights, cheating wives…

  When my mind finally breaks free of the grip of this looping madness, I sink into a deep, restful slumber that is quickly cut short by a small hand, gently waking me.

  My eyes open against my will, the light of the day drilling down straight into my brain. The first thing I think is: Brooklyn. The second thing I think is: holy God, I hurt. This body wasn’t meant to suffer so much abuse. Then again, I spent the last eight months not working out, not running, not grappling or even hitting the heavy bag, so what did I really expect?

  “Daddy?” Brooklyn asks, her expression wrought with worry.

  “Yeah, sweetheart,” I mutter, sleep still pulling on me.

  “Why are you sleeping down here and not up with mom?” she asks.

  “You know why,” I say, yawning.

  “Is it about this guy you mentioned yesterday?”

  “If it wasn’t him, it would be another,” I tell her. “It’s not so much a condition of her cheating because of a guy as it is me being gone. People need other people. She needed me, only I couldn’t be there.”

  “But you’re here now.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “I haven’t been able to sleep since those boys…did what they did,” she confesses.

  Now I’m sitting up, looking at her. “You suffered something scary, something abusive. These people that do these things, guys like that, they’re the exception, not the norm.”

  “I know, but still.”

  “Are you having nightmares?” I ask.

  “No, it’s just, my mind keeps going. Like I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “What part?”

  “All of it,” she says. “But mostly I want to know how Freddie B and Marcello died.”

  “Violently,” I say.

  “I want to know the details,” she says, her eyes pleading. “I think if I know, maybe I can stop wondering. Maybe I’ll feel better.”

  My body is overcome by the mother of all yawns and it reminds me how little sleep I’ve had, how much stress my body has endured, and how raw my throat still feels from all the smoke I took in dragging people out of the fallen Office of Emergency Management building.

  “Who’s making coffee?” I ask, coughing up some smoky phlegm.

  “That would be me,” Brooklyn says. “Are you alright?

  “Yeah, I think so. Can you get me a cup, maybe give me a second or two to wake up?” I ask. “I’ll tell you everything then.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  My daughter heads into the kitchen to make me coffee. Damn, it’s cold. Rubbing my hands together, I’m thinking at least it’s not as cold as it could be. The coffee maker is still on, and the heat is still on. I turn on the TV and that works, too.

  For now…

  I have to channel surf through a ton of emergency alerts from the city of Chicago and from Illinois Emergency Management Agency before I find a news broadcast out of Springfield. I turn the volume up, but not too much. Bad news this early in the morning won’t help anyone.

  “—this will be our final broadcast here in Springfield until further notice,” the morose sounding newscaster says.

  This stressed out talking head is an average looking forty-something man with gray hair, big veneers and jumpy eyes, and honestly, there’s no reason for him to be on set.

  He should be at home with his family.

  “Our sources in Chicago say the city has finally succumbed to the drones, but the current rash of bombings has completely cut us off from our sister stations there, so we can’t really confirm that. Regardless, it appears as though Illinois’ biggest city will be going the way of Aurora and Rockford, if it hasn’t gone there already.”

  Aurora and Rockford had apparently sustained two mega bombs each yesterday, neither of them nuclear, both presumably quarter-ton bombs dropped on the heart of city by the military’s new Reaper drones.

  I mute the TV, then lean back and stretch. The same footage has been playing almost non-stop, like it’s the worst of the worst looped into one long reel. From the distance, Aurora is being bombed. Sitting here is absolute horror, I watch this all unfold. Rockford is now in ruin. There is no aerial footage, obviously, but viewer footage makes the reel and it’s terrifying.

  Breathe…

  On the screen, a host of survival tips appear. They’re pretty basic, and even I know these tips aren’t going to save anyone. The talking head returns. I unmute the TV and the sound returns. Truthfully, I don’t care what he has to say next. I just don’t want to sit in silence in my own home anymore.

  Brooklyn returns with a cup of coffee and a couple of English muffins, both damn near dripping with melted butter.

  “Oh my God, you are a saint,” I say, taking a bite of the muffin. Talking with my mouth open—nothing but a flagrant disregard for proper manners—I say, “I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed these things until just now.”

  Brooklyn laughs, but turns her attention to the TV. “Can you unmute that, please?”

  I oblige her.

  “We still have no word from President Dupree, and at this point all we can do is hope for the best. We’re all praying he was safely evacuated, but there are now unconfirmed reports circulating saying he’s dead. T
o be clear, this has not been confirmed. The only thing we can say with any certainty is that the first family was able to escape Washington D.C. by helicopter. We still have no word on where they went or if they managed to get to safety. All we know is that the last of the D.C. broadcasts just aired and we’re preparing to do the—”

  The broadcast’s set suddenly shook around the show’s host, causing him to grip the desk and look up and around in a blind panic.

  “Oh no,” Brooklyn says.

  The split second before the broadcast goes to blue screen, the entire ceiling caves in on the host. Shaking my head, I shut the television off and say, “On a lighter note, this coffee is amazing. You made it perfect.”

  “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Do you think that guy thought the same thing?”

  “Probably.”

  “So do you think we’re going to die?” she asks. “C’mon, be honest.”

  When I don’t say something to reassure her that everything is going to be alright, I realize this is the first time I’ve ever considered outright lying to her.

  “Say something,” she says.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” I tell her. “I don’t think so.”

  Honestly, I don’t expect to live through this because I died inside a long time ago. First when I lost my mother to an aneurysm. Then when my father went and disgraced our family and was killed by Ice, who was then killed by Roque and the fire. Whatever life I had left inside me that day all but winked out. I went into the DEA for the chance to go deep cover as a means of escape. But now everything is spinning wildly out of control. I don’t know who I am anymore. It’s fair to say I’m in the middle of an existential crisis.

  “Well can you at least lie to me to make me feel better?”

  “I wish I could.”

  “With all the things you’ve done, you can’t manage that?”

  “I’m not a good person, Brooklyn,” I tell her. “I wish I could lie to you and tell you that we’re going to be okay, but the truth is, I don’t know.”