From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  “Stupid idiots probably didn’t even make it this far,” the man said. “And we thought we’d have to beg to be let in. It’s ours now.”

  The man was slightly built and not too tall at around 5’8”, wearing a faded high school jacket, blue jeans, and running shoes. He carried a flashlight, which he turned off as he entered.

  “There’s plenty of light,” he said.

  A taller man followed him in, his eyes looking around the room dubiously. At about 6’2” and thickly-built, the second man cut a more imposing figure than his companion, though he carried with it a layer of fat that made him look soft.

  “Dave’s not here?”

  “Naw,” the first man said, flinging himself into one of the rooms comfortable chairs. “He had that family to weigh him down. It doesn’t matter, Tom. This place belongs to us now. It’s the law of the jungle, right?”

  “It’s his bomb shelter, Mike,” Tom said ponderously, stepping inside.

  “Doesn’t matter!” Mike insisted. “It’s an apocalypse. If he comes back, he’ll have to bargain with us now, if he wants inside.” He paused, lost in the ethical economics of the situation. “Maybe we let the kids come in for free, ‘cause they’re kids, and you kind of have to let them in. Dave… well, we probably let him in for a while, since we owe him that favor, but Nancy-”

  “What about Nancy?” Tom asked, examining the smashed-in door.

  “Well, it’s an apocalypse,” Mike said, getting up and opening the freezer. “She’s got one thing she can offer as payment, right? We let her in, but she’s gotta do each of us in exchange. That’s free market! And she’s so hot, I’d be like, ‘Hey, Nancy! Bring that mouth of yours over here.’ It’d be awesome!”

  His face lit up.

  “Shit! Tom! There’s ice cream!”

  He reached in, removing the whole carton, and went looking for a spoon.

  Tom didn’t answer. Nancy was pretty hot, but he was certain that David would knock some teeth out before he’d let anybody hold Nancy up for sex. Moreover, Tom couldn’t help questioning the morality of his brother Mike’s scheming. Law of the jungle or not, Nancy was good people. And anyway, there were the kids to think about. No WAY you did something like that while the kids were around.

  He considered the door, knowing he’d have to do something about it. They’d only survived this long because their apartment next door had a closet that looked like a part of the wall. For a while, he and his brother had hidden out there, trying to decide what to do. Well. Tom had tried to figure out what to do. Mike spent most of his time complaining that the government hadn’t come to save them yet.

  It was only when they remembered Dave’s ancient bomb shelter that they’d found the guts to sneak out. Mike had eaten almost all their food stores in the first hour, and had started complaining that he was starving all through the second. Tom had stuck mostly to booze. That too had disappeared quickly.

  So, they’d found the place, intact and unoccupied, but it didn’t take a genius to tell that the creatures made a point of smashing down every door and window they could find. It was even more obvious that they’d ripped the door off of this place, which made it pretty piss poor as a hiding spot.

  He poked his head outside to make sure the coast was still clear, and then scanned the contents of David’s basement. Couches, bookshelves, a Ping Pong table that both Mike and Tom had enjoyed during their many visits...

  Hmm.

  Maybe the table, turned on its side, along with the couch… Set up right, it could hide the doorway to the bomb shelter. Tom felt reasonably certain that he could re-attach the door, or at least some kind of door, if he had too. He knew where David kept his tools.

  “What the fuck?” Mike snapped, already about a quarter through the ice cream and propped up in front of the shelter’s wide screen television. “He doesn’t even have a game system in here! You call that prepared? What kind of an asshole has a bomb shelter without any kind of game console? The guy has two kids, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Come on,” Tom said, ignoring his brother’s comments. “Give me a hand moving that table. We gotta hide the entrance to this place. Can’t you hear all the craziness outside?”

  “You do it,” Mike said, having discovered the archived Star Trek, Next Generation, on the television database. “I got to finish this ice cream before it melts. And anyway, my back is giving me problems today.”

  “Mike,” Tom said ominously.

  “All right, all right.” His brother got up, wincing like a martyr. It was his alleged back problems that had enabled Mike to apply for disability, earning him a fat eight hundred dollar a month government check, which was in addition to the fourteen hundred dollar per month that he and Tom received for welfare. Their mom had coughed up the money for the expensive basement apartment next door, which had enabled them to apply for the maximum amount. Neither had worked a job in four years, having become masters at giving the appearance of looking for work, which was all the government required. On the other hand, Tom actually had looked for a job, though he confined all his honest searches to twenty dollar an hour or more opportunities. Both Tom and Mike felt that minimum wage jobs were somehow beneath them.

  They spent the next thirty minutes camouflaging the door, and listening to the horror show that was unfolding outside. Tom was sweating by the time they were finished, knowing for certain now that, camouflage or no camouflage, the door would have to be re-attached somehow. Mike seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut, no matter how many times Tom warned him about how talking might summon monsters. If he didn’t get the door up soon, his brainless brother would bring the world crashing down on top of them.

  “Ooh! I’ve got to go upstairs and go through Nancy’s underwear drawer!”

  “Shut up.”

  “No, seriously! Think about it. Her naked ass stretched them out! And her breasts! They got fucking huge after she had kids. Remember how they used to be before she had kids? They weren’t small, but afterwards…? Whoa. I gotta get them. I’m getting horny just thinking about it.”

  “I’m serious, Mike. Shut the fuck up! Something’s going to hear you!”

  Eventually, working together, they managed to get the door up, and Tom breathed a sigh of relief. Mike could blab on to his hearts content now, and Tom could get back to his usual role of ignoring him.

  The days passed quietly after that, save for one panicky morning when Tom woke up to find that Mike had snuck out. He returned an hour later in triumph, carrying their X-box and several games, which he’d risked his life to recover. Tom wanted to give his head a smack but, despairing of it doing any good, had settled down with a long suffering sigh to play some HALO.

  Weeks passed with no signs of life coming from the short wave radio.

  “What? What is it?” Mike asked, when Tom placed an ear to the door, opening it up by just a crack.

  “Shh!” Tom hissed.

  “What is it?” Mike whispered, as loud as it was possible to talk while still being a whisper.

  Eyes wide with murder, Tom turned to glare at his brother. Wordlessly, he gestured with one hand, pointing at the door.

  Quiet shuffling could be heard outside.

  The blood drained from Mike’s face, and the can of lentils he was eating almost slipped from his fingers.

  The shuffling noises stopped, and for a moment, there was nothing but silence.

  Then quietly, but distinctly, they heard a whispering voice.

  “Don’t come out,” it said. “They’re just outside and might hear you. We’re coming. I have to get clear to let Marshal know. Maybe an hour. We’ll clear the area and send someone to rescue you.”

  The hairs on the back of Tom’s neck stood up. Even as a whisper, the voice sounded young. Was it… was it a girl’s voice?

  “Understood!” Mike whispered back loudly, and Tom resisted the sudden urge to strangle him. Instead, he quietly shut the door.

  How had they found them? What had given them awa
y?

  “They’d better not try and take our stuff,” Mike said out loud, as soon as the door was shut. “This place and everything in it belongs to us.”

  Tom grunted, still mystified.

  “I just hope they have some food,” Mike went on, looking longingly at the pile of empty cans and wrappers that had collected under one of the kids` beds where necessity had forced them to stash their garbage. “We’re down to the canned lentils, chic peas, and lima beans. What the fuck did David put that shit in here for anyway?”

  “We ate most of the good stuff already,” Tom said. “All that’s left is the canned vegetables. I think we were supposed to spread it out.”

  “Yeah?” Mike said, taking another bite from his can of lentils. “I can’t stand this shit. If it had been me stocking this place, I’d have filled it up with nothing but the good stuff. You sure we don’t have any of those canned stews left?”

  “Yeah. Pretty sure,” Tom said, thinking about the four cans he’d hidden away a week ago when it looked like Mike was going to eat them all in just a couple of days. Not that he’d gained even a pound. One of the things that annoyed Tom the most about his skinny little brother was his propensity for eating everything in sight without gaining even the slightest bit of weight. Meanwhile, Tom could gain five pounds of pure fat if all he did was stare at an ice cream sign a few minutes too long. “What I can’t understand is how they found us.”

  “They probably saw the sign I put up,” Mike answered through a mouthful of lentils.

  “What sign?”

  His brother swallowed painfully.

  “My sign,” he said, spooning another bite. “About ten, fifteen days ago, I snuck out of the shelter to-”

  “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do that anymore,” Tom said, fuming.

  “Yeah, well, you were asleep,” Mike said, “and I couldn’t stop thinking about Nancy’s underwear drawer. We don’t got any internet, so I can’t surf for porn. This was the only option I had left. I mean, is it my fault that David didn’t stock this place with porn movies or magazines? You call that prepared?”

  “You really are one stupid son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “Fuck you,” Mike said, tilting the now empty can over his mouth so that the last of the juice could trickle down his throat. “Turns out, you’re fucking lucky that I did what I did. It was raining, and all the zombies were out in the street swaying under the storm, so I took some of Nancy’s lipstick and smeared out a message: Bomb shelter downstairs. Help. Bring food. What the fuck’s the problem with that? Thanks to me, the government or whatever was able to find us. Asshole. Anyway, they better have some fucking answers! I’m a fucking taxpayer. They owe me.”

  With a heavy sigh, Tom put his head in his hands and wondered at how genetics could have left him like this. Meanwhile, Mike was industriously opening up another can of chic peas.

  Carrying the two new passengers, Jackie steered Crapmobile down the city streets. She paid close attention to her instruments, watching the monitors, the readings, and very much trying not to be a part of the discussion unfolding in the rest of the vehicle.

  “So who makes these things?” Mike asked, watching the screens with excitement. “I’m only asking ‘cause as soon as I can get one for myself, I’m going to go out and, y’know… ‘Hey you! Undead shithead! Get out of my fucking way’, just like you did with that one zombie, only I’m going to run him over again and again, and say, ‘Take that, motherfucker’. But like, isn’t it true that the whole world is free now? Like, if I go into a Wal-Mart, and I want all the mattresses to make, like, a gigantic house of mattresses-”

  “Hold it, hold it!” Marshal interrupted. “First of all, I didn’t ‘run over’ that zombie, I gently nudged into one, and if you ever try something like that, I’ll have Luca adjust your head with a tire iron. Do you have the first idea of how dangerous these things are? They only let these garbage heaps go by because we tricked them into thinking that they wouldn’t ever find any humans inside. If you go running them over, then that won’t matter, because they’ll perceive you as a threat and start wiping us out wholesale. See any dogs in this apocalypse? No? That’s because too many dogs tried to defend their masters, and now the zombies attack any dog without the good sense to turn tail and run.

  “And second, with respect to-”

  “Then how do you kill them?” Mike frowned with displeasure. “Haven’t you even figured out how to kill them yet?”

  “We can’t kill them,” Marshal answered patiently. “As near as we can tell, they’re unkillable. I think there were some early reports that suggested it was possible to nuke them, but that was understandably hard to verify. Heavy ordinance isn’t entirely ineffective. Bombs still blow them apart, but they just congeal back together again, or their… their ‘stuff’ gets eaten by another zombie. Fire doesn’t work at all. First blast of flame they get hit by scorches the outer layers, but like wool, those scorched outer layers become an insulating heat shield and they effectively become fireproof. Extreme cold is even less effective, since they appear to be able to generate biochemical heat. No. We survive by hiding from them, and if we-”

  “That’s stupid!” Mike said in exasperation. “You can’t-”

  “Mike,” Tom grumbled. “Just stop.”

  “No way! You can’t leave these things to wander around killing people! If I were in charge, I’d be all like, `Eat explosive shell, dirtbag!` Like they’d do in America. What a way to pussy out! First chance I get-”

  “Mike!” Tom shouted, sensing the mood of their rescuers.

  Marshal and Jackie exchanged thoughts with a glance. This one would need to be watched closely.

  “All right, already,” Mike said, looking annoyed. “But it’s cool to think about. Hey, Jackie! Are you and Marshal, you know, together? ‘Cause if you’re not, I’d like to know if – when I get a car of my own – you’ll drive around with me. You know? We could have a lot of fun together.”

  Then, as if already sensing that Jackie was out of his league (or maybe not even playing the same sport), he asked. “Are there any other girls where we’re going? Because-”

  “We’re real grateful that you guys came to help us out,” Tom said, drowning out his younger brother. “Anything we can do to help out, you just ask.”

  “Just start out by obeying the rules,” Marshal said, trying to control his irritation. “And one of our most important rules is that everybody helps out We have, at this point, roughly twenty people in our community, which will hopefully include a doctor if his health keeps improving. We also have a number of specialists. I’m an electrical engineer, for example, and we have a police detective, a programmer, a construction tradesman, a botanist, a nurse - we’ve been very fortunate on that score. But Rule #2 deals expressly with what will be expected of you. Everybody pitches in. If you don’t contribute, or do the jobs we assign to you, then we will make you contribute. This is not a democracy.”

  “You can’t do that,” Mike protested. “This is Canada!”

  “This was Canada,” Marshal corrected him, “but not anymore. Any vestige of a government is gone, and we’re forced to do as best as we can. To this end, you obey the rules, just like everyone else. Is that understood?”

  There was no response from the back seats.

  “It’s not really as bad as it sounds,” Jackie assured them both. “Think of him more as a Sheriff, and it’s in our best interests to help him out.”

  “But what if we don’t want to do what you say?” Mike demanded.

  Marshal frowned. “Well, then… things become complicated.”

  “Being a citizen grants you all sorts of perks,” Jackie explained. “We all pitch in, and we all reap the benefits. Remember. There’s strength in numbers.”

  “The rules are this,” Marshal said, explaining them at length.

  Mike and Tom were mostly silent as Marshal outlined the social contract. They seemed to perk up at the promise of a safe home, c
omplete with all the amenities. This disappeared quickly when the heard what would be expected of them.

  “I have a disability,” Mike protested. “My back is all fucked up, and I can’t do no heavy work. I got a stipend from the government to help me function in society. Do I still get all those perks you was talking about?”

  “No problem,” Marshal answered, though he had already watched Mike use several trips to load as much stuff into Crapmobile as a strong man could carry. “We have a doctor, and Gladys was a part-time nurse. They’ll perform an evaluation that will give us a sense of how much you can handle. If they confirm your disability, we still have all sorts of jobs that don’t require any physical effort. Are you any good at programming?”

  “Not unless it’s downloading computer games.”

  “How about science? Electronics? Hydroponics?”

  “Nah. I never finished high school. That was for losers.”

  Jackie coughed lightly, but didn’t actually say anything.

  “What about construction?”

  “Not with my back,” Mike said, feigning regret.

  “I worked some construction,” Tom said, raising a hand. “Mostly, I was general labor, but I did get into some carpentry.”

  “Fantastic,” Marshal said. “Torstein could use the help, and he’s willing to train. He and his crew are the people in charge of renovating all our hidden habitats. As I said, there’s still a lot of work pending there. Plus, being a part of the construction crew will give you a little more leeway when it comes down to building your own place.”

  Jackie turned on him. “That’s good, Marshal. ‘Hidden habitats’. Did you just think of that?”

  “I did, actually.”

  “We should keep calling them that.”

  “What does she do?” Mike asked, indicating Jackie with one thumb.

  “Jackie is going to be given a partner and vehicle,” Marshal said, “and will be expected to go out into the streets to do search and rescue. She’s just new to the job, so the job title is still up for debate. How does ‘Scavenger’ sound?”