The Age of Embers {Book 3): The Age of Reprisal

by Schow, Ryan

  Mumbling almost to herself, Eudora said, “Look at all you snowflakes. Not a backbone between you.”

  Back to the present. Well, back to the almost present.

  Draven had just finished doing his thing, his face red and sweaty, but his body feeling about a million times worse, or better depending on your outlook. He walked out of the closet feeling three feet tall and shaking his head. That’s when the bedroom door burst open and an armed man stepped inside. He took a breath to tell them to put their hands up or gather in the corner or something, but the smell hit him right in the face. He turned and started to gag.

  Curling his nose, succumbing to the stench, he was forced to turn away. This gave Draven the split second advantage he needed to get the jump on him.

  He didn’t put up much of a fight, and Draven was quick, taking out his post-poop anxiety on the man. Eliana grabbed a printer cable out of the closet and bound his hands behind his back.

  The good news was they secured the intruder. The bad news was there could be more. Either way, Eliana and Draven decided they were sitting ducks not doing anything.

  While they were deciding they needed to go out and be sure, Brooklyn was pulling off the man’s dirty stock and stuffing it in his mouth. Orlando used an extension chord he found in the closet and to wrap the sock in place, further insuring he couldn’t spit it out and call to his friends, should he be with others.

  “I like your thinking,” Draven told Brooklyn and Orlando. Brooklyn smiled at him. Hers was a disarming smile that positively melted him.

  “It’s going down, isn’t it?” Orlando asked, dampening the mood.

  Brooklyn’s brother was holding Veronica close, the two of them each other’s rock while they dealt with the EMP and the deaths of Veronica’s grandparents. The nerdy-hot girl cried a lot over the last few days, and truth be told, some of them cried along with her, probably for her loss, but maybe for their own losses as well. Now Veronica was dry eyed and alert, ready to not join her family in the afterlife just yet.

  Brooklyn stepped away from the unconscious man, and instead went and pulled Alma and Constanza into her arms. Both girls had come from the rail yard where Brooklyn, Veronica and Orlando had been held hostage by child traffickers a week ago. All of them were being flown to Sudan where they’d serve as a sexual commodity to the most depraved men that society had to offer. This blew Draven’s mind. To think of what almost happened to all of them positively chilled his soul.

  Alma was eleven, Constanza thirteen. He wondered if they even knew what they’d narrowly escaped. Perhaps, on some deeper level they did. But were they old enough to understand what almost happened to them? Maybe they did. Maybe this was why they clung to Brooklyn for safety. And perhaps this was why Brooklyn was drawn to them.

  They’d been ripped from their homes and their families, stolen to be sold like meat on the open market, and now they were stuck in a foreign land with no promise of returning to their old lives or their families.

  Looking at Brooklyn, he marveled at the supporting side of this high school girl. His eyes had dipped to the faces around her. These sad, vacant faces. Brooklyn could nurture them for now, but he had to protect them all from danger.

  He and Eliana.

  Draven was thinking about the girls when Orlando looked at him with those big concerned eyes, eyes that held back some of the strength he hoped the boy possessed.

  “It’s going down, isn’t it?”

  That’s what he said. Little did he know…

  Draven simply said, “It’s already gone down. We’re now in the thick of it and it might get bad.”

  “I’ll head next door and rally the forces,” Eliana said. She didn’t wait for him; she just slipped out the door, closing it behind her.

  “I’m heading upstairs,” Draven told Orlando, “see if I can get eyes on the perimeter, specifically a street view.”

  He hustled up two flights of stairs, now overlooking the street, and that’s when he saw them. That’s also when he realized everything was worse than he imagined. He grabbed his 30.06, started feeding it rounds.

  He hoped Eliana was mopping up any riffraff downstairs, but he wasn’t sure. He had to trust in the virtues of fate, even though he wasn’t stellar in the trust department.

  Keeping his eyes on the neighborhood below, he counted a good two-dozen people. They were pouring through the streets and the houses like ants devouring large crumbs of food. They were looting everything, everyone.

  “Good God,” he heard himself mutter.

  A gunshot out back stopped this parade of human ants. The harsh report had everyone in the street below them looking in the direction of the house.

  His house.

  “No,” he whispered.

  Draven didn’t want to shoot anyone, but things were about to go from bad to worse. The people most knowledgeable in human behavior had predicted a grisly outcome for this kind of event, an EMP. The projected loss of life was near abysmal. One thing he knew for sure was that to survive, you had to do the unthinkable. He was prepared to protect his group, but that didn’t mean he wanted to participate in wholesale slaughter. He still wanted to be able to sleep at night. Then again, if it came to it, he’d already resolved himself to the notion that it’s either kill or get dead, and he wasn’t ready for death just yet.

  That was about the time Veronica belted out a B-List scream-queen shriek and he realized he was spot on when he told Orlando they were in the thick of it and it was about to get worse.

  Rather than picking off strangers, he set down the rifle and headed downstairs, his footsteps light, his mind and body preparing for war.

  His only hope was that he wouldn’t find a pile of bodies downstairs, namely the bodies of those people he’d come to care about most.

  Chapter Three

  The second Ice and Eliana got control of the man she attacked, a woman appeared in the doorway. She saw what was happening and rushed Ice. He stepped aside as she hit him with a flurry of rudimentary punches and kicks. Even though she was no seasoned fighter, she did catch him a few times, leading him to believe she was of the cardio kickboxing crowd.

  Ice dodged a kick, slapped aside a punch, then spun her around and gave her a decent shove toward the front door. If she hadn’t put her hands up at the very last minute, she would have hit the door frame teeth first.

  Pushing off the door, she turned and went after him again while Eliana locked up her guy.

  “Quit messing around and knock her out,” Eliana growled, her much larger opponent refusing to concede.

  “I can’t hit a woman!” he barked, nearly getting clobbered the second his eyes danced off this wild woman and onto Eliana.

  One of those wild kicks connected loosely with his hand, jarring his wrist. Snapping into awareness, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Stepping in fast, he ducked a telegraphed haymaker, slid behind her then grabbed a fistful of her hair, causing her to reach for him. He snatched her wrist, hauled her arm behind her back. She squirmed, forcing him to crank the arm so hard she yelped out in pain.

  “You are so stupid!” Eliana yelled over the man she now had under control.

  Her opponent was cursing, swearing and threatening extraordinary violence upon sweet little Eliana, but that didn’t concern her. Ice knew she wanted to know that he wasn’t going to get soft when she needed him to go hard and protect them both.

  “I told you I’m not hitting a girl!” he flashed back, still holding his girl’s arm halfway up her back in spite of her tortured squeals.

  “You need to let that go,” she said, her eyes every bit as severe as her mouth.

  When the guy she was with wouldn’t stop cursing and spitting, Eliana grabbed hold of his Adam’s apple from behind and made a fist that had him gagging. In no time flat, she produced a blade, hooked his throat and pressed the sharp edge into thin skin.

  “You move one way or the other and I’ll cut you a second mouth. You’d be dead inside of a minute, but to
you it will feel like a lifetime. Say yes if you understand.”

  Breathing heavy, the first layers of skin split against the blade, big beads of sweat pouring down his forehead. “Yes,” he said, defiant.

  Eliana had the knife’s edge so tight against the skin that speaking that word alone drew a small, blossomed line of blood. Eliana wasn’t messing around and now he knew it.

  Ice knew it, too.

  “How many of you are out there?” Eliana asked in a less than congenial manner. “Just a number, nothing else.”

  “He’ll kill us,” Ice’s girl groaned.

  “What do you think she’ll do to you?” Ice said in her ear. She started to fight him, so Ice wrenched her arm a little higher up her back, bringing her to her toes and grimacing.

  “One wrong move, and your arm rips out of socket,” Ice said. “Ligaments tear, things get irreparably damaged. I hope you understand.”

  “I do.”

  “Good,” he said, loosening the tension. “Then stop squirming.”

  “How many?” Eliana asked again.

  “Twenty, maybe thirty,” Eliana’s hostage said, the blade cutting even further into his neck.

  “Do they like you?” Eliana asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s find out, shall we? We’re going to walk right out that front door, and you’re going to tell these nice people to leave and never come back.”

  “What about me?” Ice’s woman asked.

  “You, too.”

  The second the man started to move, even knowing his neck would suffer most, he tried to get away. Eliana quickly changed her position. She grabbed his trousers from the back and pressed the tip of the blade in to his kidney.

  “I feel you move against me, or if you fail to do what I ask, I bury this thing to the hilt and start twisting it around. That means you’re dead, but it also means a tremendous amount of pain.”

  “You know,” he hissed, touching his neck, then pulling back his hand and looking at a fair amount of blood, “you’re a walking nightmare.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” Eliana said. “Now walk before I start digging.”

  The second they stepped out onto the front porch, Eliana and Ice saw masses of people going through everything in sight. Out back, a gunshot stopped everyone and had them looking their way.

  Great, Ice thought.

  Eliana’s guy wasn’t lying about the size of his group.

  Out front there were twenty five people at least. And whomever fired off what sounded like a shotgun in back alerted everyone to their presence. Movement near the cars grabbed Ice’s attention. Some dirtbag was trying to hotwire Fire’s Barracuda. Another had already hotwired the bus and was trying to crank the engine. It turned and turned and turned until the engine caught and sputtered to life, a few coughs of dark smoke puffing out the back.

  Not the bus…

  The driver got out of the seat, popped his head out and said, “We got ourselves a ride!”

  “Get your ass out of that bus!” Ice roared. His hostage winced. In his jump to anger, his grip tightened, lifting the woman’s arm and putting an impossible amount of pressure on the joint. She started to howl, and then she began to cry.

  The guy stood up at the foot of the hammered yellow bus’s stairway and yelled, “This is a finder’s keeper’s world pal! I found it, we’re keeping it!”

  “Well I found this little lady in my house, so I’m keeping her!” Ice shouted back.

  “You can have her, we got more.” Then to the people, he said, “Load me up, then let’s roll!”

  Ice hadn’t expected this. He hadn’t expected any of this.

  Another shot erupted from behind the house and he started to wonder about his brother. If Ice was up here dicking around with these yahoos while his brother was in back, shot possibly, or dying, he would never forgive himself.

  “LOAD UP!” the bus driver barked.

  Just then another shot rang out, this time from across the street where Xavier had appropriated himself a home. The bus driver’s head bucked sideways, his body dropping like a bundle of river rocks.

  This stalled everyone. The pause was only momentary. People start running for cover and firing backwards at Xavier, but also at Ice and Eliana. Several rounds slammed into the door and the walls behind them; one of them struck Eliana’s guy right in the cheek.

  He dropped dead, leaving Eliana exposed. Wasting no time, she ducked inside, tucking herself into the doorway.

  “These people are crazy!” she belted out in Spanish.

  “This block is not your block!” Ice boomed when everyone was sufficiently hidden and the retaliatory panic had calmed. “This part of town is not your part of town!”

  Someone brave stood with a sling shot, fired off a rock that had Ice ducking. The gumball sized rock slammed into the house behind him leaving a pocket of damage and rightly startling him.

  The shooter loaded up another rock, drew the pouch back. The second shot from Xavier’s house cracked a hole in the afternoon silence. The guy with the slingshot crumpled, his rock firing off, but far away from Ice.

  The next round that was fired was not from behind the house or from Xavier across the street. It wasn’t even fired from the group pinned down in the street behind cars and sides of homes and the occasional bush.

  This shot was deadly.

  When Ice put his hand to his face, he felt the warm, slick wetness of blood. He let go of the woman, glanced over at Eliana, saw the fear in her eyes.

  Staggering back a step, his legs gave and he sat down hard, the true meaning of this apocalypse now as clear as it would ever get.

  Chapter Four

  I roll out the back door hot on Xavier’s six as he’s taking fire from a shotgun. I pop up and dump three rounds into the shooter, who turns out to be a teenaged kid wielding a shotgun.

  Time slows in situations like these. They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. This does the same thing. For a second, I stand up and just stare at the kid.

  I can’t breathe.

  A shabby, middle-aged woman runs out of the house—Eudora’s house—sees the boy and starts shaking and shuddering. She falls to her knees before the child, calling his name through what quickly becomes a fit of wailing.

  The boy’s name was Trevor.

  Her cold, yet fiery eyes look up and find me. These are the wet, hostile eyes of a woman on the verge of going nuclear. There is unbridled rage, and worlds of hatred for me. But beneath that, I see a bottomless ache for the loss of this boy.

  Putting up a hand in surrender, trying to calm the storm I know is coming, I swallow hard and reach for the words of consolation that refuse to come.

  Half my brain feels wounded by this horrible turn of events while the other half is saying, “Stopping means dying, so kill her already.”

  I can’t.

  But I know I need to.

  As I’m standing here having these long thoughts in a matter of precious seconds, I realize battlefield reasoning is about to be overshadowed by grief. What if that was Orlando laying there? Or Brooklyn? When did surviving mean killing kids?

  I can’t stop the shine coming to my eyes as this woman cries over this boy. Is this her son? Her nephew? Or is he just someone the woman adopted in the midst of all of this pandemonium?

  My eyes fall to the child I killed, to the red holes in his chest, that empty gaze in his eyes, his mouth as it hangs open.

  I watch as a slow drizzle of blood leaks out of his mouth.

  “I’m so sorry,” I manage to say.

  Her head turns in my direction, the agony in her eyes changing to something hard, something spitting and vile.

  “You killed him!” she roars, pawing at her eyes like a madwoman.

  Holding up my hand, I say, “This is my house, and my kids are in the house you’re breaking in to. He fired on me. I was only acting out of self-preservation.”

  Tears rolling, her body rigid, she g
rowls in the back of her throat like a rabid dog and reaches for the shotgun.

  The second she gets it, I say, “Don’t! Please, just put it down.”

  She racks a load, a spent shell ejecting.

  “You KILLED HIM!” she shrieks.

  “No!” I say, my heart aching for what’s about to happen. The second the shotgun is up, I fire on her, clipping her in the shoulder. She spins and falls, a harsh, squawking sound blasting out of her mouth.

  I cross the alley over to Eudora’s house, kneel down beside her and say, “Be still, you can recover from that.”

  She swats at me with her good arm, screams in my face even as tears of pain mix with tears of agony. I can hardly stand the sight of her grief knowing that today, whether I was justified or not, I caused this anguish. This is on me.

  These noisy bursts of pain continue in an ugly, downright hideous display, one that’s chewing on the ends of my already frayed nerves. The jump from fear to extreme sadness at what I’ve done, what I’m becoming, quickly becomes a transition into untempered rage. If these people weren’t here, I wouldn’t have had to do this. This isn’t on me, this is their fault!

  Her fault.

  In situations of high stress, the difference between pain and rage can measure out in small, nearly microscopic proportions. People are breaking into our homes, they’re trying to steal our things, even kill us. Now they want to blame us, too?

  I don’t think so.

  On the other side of the house, gunfire rings out. Standing up, I appraise the narrow space between my home and Draven’s home. There are no invaders, no obstacles.

  There’s room for us.

  There may even be a way to stop this.

  Grabbing the manic, injured woman by the back of her collar, I drag her bucking and squawking down the small alleyway. She’s frothing at the mouth, vomiting up every sick obscenity in the book at me but I don’t care. She did this to me, to us, to herself.

  She did this to the boy…

  Chapter Five