The Last War Box Set 1 : A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  Wagner, a Japanese/American kid with a similar mop of hair—his perfectly straight with chopped edges he called geometric funk—said, “Let me tell you what I have in mind. For starters, it’s three choices.”

  He pulled out three clear baggies and some rolling papers. On the baggies were white labels with names inked on them. The big question wasn’t which baggie were they going to smoke. It was which order were they going to smoke all the baggies.

  “Behind door number one,” Wagner announced, “we have Grandberry Skunkhound.”

  “A fine choice,” Chad said.

  “Behind door number two is my personal favorite, Plunkbottom Diesel.”

  “You have fine taste, my friend,” Chad said in a theatrical tone, grinning and staring at baggie number three while rubbing his hands together.

  “Indeed I do. And that’s why I have door number three. Bubblegum Swamp Kush. This little dreamboat,” Wagner said, dangling the clear plastic baggie between them, “is reportedly an eighty percent indica strain from Bulldog Seeds in the Netherlands. Take special care and attention to the frosty, resinous buds.”

  Chad leaned forward for a sniff, but Wagner pulled the baggie back, ever so slightly. “In case you’re wondering, and I know you are, the Bubblegum Swamp Kush has a sour taste and smell to it, and its THC content is a gnat’s hair south of twenty percent.”

  “In other words,” Chad said, “we’d best take this party to the couch, turn on some TV and just chill…”

  “Brainstorming session begins right after we roll up two big fat fatties.”

  Chad and Wagner smoked to relax, but they nearly relaxed themselves into a coma and there was work to do, so they cut a few lines of coke to even things out. Chad ate a bag of Doritos and played Call of Duty while Wagner stayed up all night moving through the dark web in various chat rooms of friends of friends.

  “You buying more?” Chad asked. “Because…wow.”

  “Trying to figure out how to make bombs.”

  “We got plenty of bongs man. One for every strain. Which reminds me…”

  “Bombs, as in kaboom!” Wagner said. “Those kinds of bombs.”

  “Bro, we ain’t like that. Look at us. We’re mellow. Besides, what in Jesus’ name would we blow up anyway?”

  “When you have the problem of building bombs resolved,” Wagner said, his fingers flying across the keyboard about a thousand miles an hour, “finding targets becomes easy. Is your laptop still operational?”

  “Last I checked,” he said, half his body on the couch, an arm and a leg draped over. “Hey, where’d my other sock go?” He just realized his foot was cold. The right one not the left. As it happened, both socks were on his left foot.

  “Your left foot was cold,” Wagner said over his shoulder. “I need you to jump online and see what you can find out about building timers.”

  “I don’t think we can smoke and snort together anymore.”

  “Timers, Chad. Timers.”

  “Yeah dude, I got it,” he said. “Timers.”

  Wagner learned how to make bombs with normal household products and some gunpowder, while Chad finally took on the task of learning how to make the timers.

  Whenever they struck that perfect balance between too chill and too strung out, they brainstormed about how to turn one bomb into a larger bomb by piggybacking onto things that could be turned into even larger bombs.

  “Propane trucks,” Chad blurted out.

  “Not common,” Wagner said with an eye roll. “But your regular everyday car…super common.”

  “Really?” Chad quipped.

  “No, dummy. It’s hard to find cars these days. Especially on the streets and in people’s garages. Of course it’s common. Like looking outside and seeing blue skies.”

  “It’s all smoke these days, bro.”

  “Focus, man,” Wagner said. Snapping his fingers he said, “Eyes on the prize.”

  “Gas stations,” Chad said. “You get like three or four pumps wired up, the explosion would wipe out everything but a person’s shadow.”

  Wagner turned and fired him a look. “Is that a Hiroshima reference?”

  “What else?” Chad asked, chortling.

  “Nothing, just see how to build timers. See what we need. Make a list of parts and stuff. Then we can figure out where they’re sold and go shopping.”

  “Brotatochip, I can’t even walk a straight line. I’m so wide awake and exhausted at the same time, it’s like one side of my head is kicking the other side in the balls.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” Wagner said.

  “You look like your dad right now. It’s…uncanny.”

  “You’ve never even seen my dad.”

  “Whatever,” Chad said. “The point is, I need some sleep, but I’m going to need some of that Plunkbottom Diesel to pump the brakes first.”

  Clicking the window shut, shutting off the monitor, Wagner spun his chair around and said, “I could use a soft landing myself.”

  “So?” Chad said.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” Wagner replied, grabbing the baggie. The two of them smoked and laughed and sank into the couch, an easy haze washing over them, pulling them under to places where their dreams were bigger and more colorful, like something you would see if you were on acid, or a sociopath.

  “I feel like Jeffrey Dahmer,” Chad said.

  “Dahmer’s dead.”

  “Yes, but I’m very, very alive, but also not at the same time.”

  The next day, when they woke enough to smell their filthy breaths and their four day old clothes, they realized the power was out. Wagner was slow to the jump, but steady in his assessment.

  “We’re screwed. Must’ve blown a fuse or something.”

  But they didn’t. Everything was fried: the TV, the computers, their cell phones and their brains.

  “The drones must have hit the power station, or something like that. You have the list, right Chad? The stuff we need?”

  They looked for awhile before finding a list folded to the size of a quarter and stuck in between the double layer of socks that was now on Chad’s sweaty foot.

  They spent the day on their bicycles smoking pot and marveling at how nothing seemed to work. There were people in the streets, abandoned cars, drones littering the ground in some places, as if they’d just fallen from the sky. They dragged one behind their bikes for awhile, but it was too heavy, too awkward so they let it go.

  “It’s like God snapped his fingers and all the commotion came to a stop,” Chad said, marveling at the sheer destruction everywhere, especially to the downed drones.

  “This is Biblical man.”

  “For sure.”

  Over the next forty hours, they smoked even more as they constructed a small stack of pipe bombs. And then they ate the rest of their snacks and decided if they didn’t have munchies, they couldn’t smoke. Simple as that. So then they lit up one last joint and romanced the hell out of it.

  Wagner looked up at Chad and said, “What should we do?”

  Chad shrugged his shoulders, made a face, and then—through the haze of fresh pot smoke and laziness—he said, “I say we take another bong rip, or seven, then start blowing stuff up.”

  “First off, I like your thinking, but I don’t at the same time. What should we blow up?”

  “Dude, where’s your head?” Chad asked, tapping his skull. “If we blow these things up, they’ll explode by themselves. But if we blow up like a car, or a truck, something with a bunch of gas, that’d be way more cool.”

  “Oh yeah,” Wagner said, super baked. “Yeah, I like it. Okay.”

  “Should we just go now?”

  “No way, José,” Wagner said, practically smoking down the last millimeter. He inhaled, held it, then squinted his eyes and blew out a less than enthusiastic stream of smoke. “Let’s go at night. We can turn the midnight hour into sunrise.”

  “Man, when you get wasted, you get totally poetic.”

  Sm
iling, scratching his head, he said, “It’s what I do man. It’s what I motherfreaking do.”

  Chapter Forty

  The bang, bang, bang! of gunshots echoing inside the Walgreen’s puts those of us outside on edge. If Rex and Indigo were fired upon, if they were shot and killed, then any minute now the killers might come running out the front door where Stanton can hopefully take them out.

  We should be so lucky.

  If they don’t come running out, and Indigo and Rex don’t let us know they’re okay, then chances are I’m going to have a mental breakdown right before doing something seriously stupid.

  At this point I’m checking myself for heart palpitations, frantic breathing, hyperventilation. My weapon is in my hand, as awkward and as heavy as it is, and it’s aimed with Stanton’s at the Walgreen’s front door.

  Macy, for a change, is doing exactly as she’s told. She’s staying behind us.

  Out here with little for cover, the three of us are an ocean of perpetual silence. My worst fears are coming true: nothing’s happening. Now I can’t stop the tide of potential scenarios from flooding into my mind. I have to know if my little brother is still alive.

  The guns get too heavy to hold; we lower them to our sides.

  Newly minted vagrants wander by us, looking at us funny, or with dead eyes, then turning their attention to the Walgreen’s. They don’t stop, though, and they don’t talk to us. We don’t exactly look like the most sociable bunch.

  Then again, the way it was raining sludge earlier, how it’s matted in our hair and clumpy on our clothes, you can pretty much assume we all look like hobos who’ve been asleep in our own filth for way too long.

  Then there’s that part of me, the nurse side of me, who can’t stop obsessing over Stanton’s wound. If this crap got in it, if it was packed inside the gash, how long until infection set in? And do they have any antiseptic left inside the Walgreen’s? Because I’m going to need something to clean it once we find someplace safe to call home.

  “What’s taking so damn long?” Macy finally asks.

  “Language,” Stanton says too casually.

  “Dad, this is the end of the world, no one gives a crap if I say damn,” Macy retorts.

  I spin around and say, “I do. And your father does. And if we have any hope of returning to more civil times, it’s going to be in our ability to preserve our respectability. So no bad words and no bad behavior.”

  Beyond killing people and stealing their homes and holding up a Walgreen’s after slaughtering a pack of gangbangers…

  Softly, more reverently, her voice raspy from breathing smoke all day, Macy says, “Do you hear how crazy that sounds right now, Mom?”

  “I do,” I admit.

  “Good manners and civility will get us killed,” Macy says in the same scratchy, patient voice, like she’s the voice of reason here.

  “No it won’t,” Stanton argues. “Poor judgment will get us killed.”

  My mind is beginning to spiral. I’m too worried about Rex to just stand here having such a poorly timed, unproductive conversation. If the girl wants to cuss, honestly, it would be a big improvement over murder, justified or otherwise.

  “We can’t just sit here and wait this out,” Macy says, echoing all of our feelings.

  I shoot her a cursory look. This whole time we’ve been outside the Walgreen’s, waiting, all I’ve been doing is thinking about Macy. About how she killed that man. How it was like she didn’t even stop to think or hesitate. She just acted.

  “Just because you did…what you did back there…to that man, it doesn’t mean you’re some kind of a badass that can just charge headlong into danger. A loaded gun isn’t a get-out-of-death-free card.”

  Macy reels, makes a face.

  “I get that these are different times,” I say, “that we’re really in a life-and-death situation on the daily, but life still matters. Yours more than all of ours.”

  “Mom, calm down,” Macy says. “We’re all still alive, I just want to make sure Uncle Rex is okay.”

  “He’s been to war before, certainly something much worse than this and he’s okay, so—”

  “You realize he was shot?” Stanton says.

  “Dammit, stop. I don’t need you taking her side with everything I say—”

  He raises his hands in mock surrender and says, “I’m not. It’s just…we can’t lose our collective ess aych eye tee right now.”

  “Did you just spell ‘shit’ in front of our fifteen year old daughter?” I ask him, aghast.

  “I know how to spell, Dad.”

  “She knows how to spell, Stanton.”

  We fall into one giant, collective brooding spell, one we might not be able to crawl out from. Stanton, sure—he seems to be coping fine. And Macy? She’s doing fine for now, too. But me? This is all just a little too much.

  “What do we even know about this girl?” I hear myself ask.

  “That she’s amazing,” Macy says.

  “Why? Because she can shoot a bow and arrow and she reminds you of that Hunger Games girl?”

  “Yeah,” Macy says. “Sort of.”

  “Well this isn’t the movies and we’re really in trouble here. This isn’t a joke. It’s not a situation. And if you look around, I’m not really sure we’ll ever see a fix for this.”

  There’s a low rolling smoke cloud covering the city. It’s dark and daunting and settling in like a wet fog. A patch that size is sure to cause more problems in the hours to come, if only in our burning throats and lungs. We have to find some place to stay, and fast.

  When no one says anything, I say, “I’m going in.”

  “No,” Stanton says.

  “Macy’s right, as much as it pains me to say so. We can’t just sit out here when they could be dead inside, or bleeding to death.”

  “I’ll go,” Stanton offers.

  “You’re not a nurse.”

  He falls quiet.

  “Just be careful in there,” he says, “because if there’s any indication of trouble, Macy and I are coming in after you.”

  “Roger that,” I say, starting across the street.

  As I’m contemplating my next moves, as I’m assessing the situation with as much awareness and stealth as I can muster, I’m telling myself that Rex is equipped for war, that he understands the intricacies of combat and control and that things are Kosher inside. I’m also thinking about Indigo and feeling like it’s clear that she can handle herself, so really I’m just being some kind of a nervous Nelly.

  As for yours truly, I can’t say anything other than if I die, it’ll probably be doing something stupid.

  Something just like this.

  Chapter Forty-One

  From the muddy, juicy waters of unconsciousness came a pair of bee-sting pains radiating out from his the gun shot wounds in his arms. Things cleared, but not much. The only thing changing was the levels of pain. Plus, Rex was having a hard time making connections through the drag and pull he was feeling on his body.

  His mind said gunshot wounds.

  His mind said war.

  From a long ways away, he heard the woman sobbing, and the girl fast talking, and then he heard the muffled sounds of shuffling and hitting and a soft yelping. His eyes cracked open, his eyelids heavy, swollen. Bright fluorescent light cut through to his brain making his head hurt. His mouth was making mumbling noises on its own, his body shifting from the pain. Then she was there, in his face: Indigo. There is red splatter on her cheek. Not her blood. Her eyes were wild, but calming for him.

  “Oh my gosh, I thought I lost you for a second,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked from like a million miles away.

  “No,” she said, sarcastic. “You got shot in the arm. You passed out. Now here you are after all the hard work is done waking up like a newborn after his nap. Perhaps I should check your diapers.”

  “They’re probably dirty.”

  His head was clearing fast now, so he tried to sit up.


  “And here I thought you were the professional,” she said.

  “I’m a terrible victim.”

  “Aren’t we all,” she said, helping him sit up.

  The pounding in his head subsided long enough for him to look down and see Indigo’s hostage wearing only a pair of panties. She wasn’t a pretty sight. The girl was slumped over sideways, but she was turned at the torso and sprawled face-down on the cold industrial floors.

  “What did you do to her?” he asked.

  The small room was cold, and it smelled of blood, gunpowder residue and cooked meat. In the corner was a small charcoal barbeque grill. There were bottles of water opened nearby and his arm felt stiff. Looking down he saw it was bandaged.

  “She wasn’t as cooperative as she first led me to believe,” Indigo said.

  “And the bruises?”

  The hostage’s back was lined with them, a bunch of fist sized black and blue marks.

  “She needed some help remembering some things.”

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “You or her?”

  “Her. This situation. Whatever this is you got us messed up in.”

  Indigo’s mouth was a flat line, her eyes devoid of any emotion. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with more than a few loose strands hanging in her face, but she just was as dirty as everyone else.

  “It’s bad. Worse than I thought.”

  “Care to elaborate?” he asked, chewing on the pain and becoming irritated by how cryptic she was being. “I mean, I’d love to have some sort of valid justification for killing that guy, otherwise…”

  “I get it. I can only tell you what she told me, and hopefully that is accurate. She says the Mission District has by far the most dangerous gangs, followed by SoMa.”

  “SoMa?”

  “South of Mission.”

  “Go ahead,” he said, looking at the girl, who finally stopped sobbing and was instead reaching for something to cover herself with.

  “No!” Indigo barked. The girl pulled back. Then, to Rex, she said, “You’ve heard of the MS-13, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Worst gang in America before all this. Imagine a bunch of narcissistic mass murderers on power trips. They have no decency, no respect for life and no respect for age. When they pull you into the fold, you could be ten years old or thirty and it wouldn’t matter to them. Basically, from what this nasty slag is telling me, they practically tear your soul from your body as payment.”