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

by Schow, Ryan

  “So is that a yes?” I ask.

  “If I’m not too tired, then yes,” she says. “I’ll stand watch with you tonight.”

  “I like Draven,” Brooklyn says. “He and Eudora feel like they could be family.”

  “We all see the way you look at Draven,” Ice says.

  Adeline slaps him and Brooklyn blushes.

  “It’s not like that,” she retorts.

  “Before this conversation leads somewhere I’m not ready to go just yet, I’ll help you start cleaning up the bodies,” I tell Brooklyn, hoping a change of subject will cool the fires freshly stoked in her cheeks.

  “Me, too,” Ice says.

  By the time we get the bodies out of the houses and clear the street, dinner is ready. Draven seems disappointed that the woman and three boys didn’t show up.

  Eliana says, “Perhaps they are more apt to survive than we are. Maybe we should have gone to their house for dinner.”

  Draven simply smiles at her, unblinking, his expression neither friendly nor severe. To say the room’s temperature dropped a few degrees would be an understatement.

  The next day, Ice rouses me and says, “It’s time, brother.”

  “It’s still early,” I answer with a yawn.

  “No, it’s not.”

  Adeline and I took the mid-watch last night, which was long and cold, and now my sleep schedule is totally FUBAR.

  “I’m caring out here,” he says, straight-faced.

  Getting out of bed, I head to the bathroom, pour a bowl of cold water over my head, wash the sleep from my eyes and pull on a t-shirt, jeans and boots.

  Downstairs, Ice is rearing to go.

  “You look like you’ve got some extra pep in your step, little brother.”

  “I do,” he grins.

  Outside, we crawl into the purple beast, fire it up and listen to her roar. We only have to wait a moment before Xavier opens his front door and heads our way.

  He’s moving slow, his injuries apparent.

  I like to think we could just as easily scout the neighborhood on foot, but if we don’t find what we’re looking for—the gang that attacked us—Xavier and I talked about heading over to pick up SAC Wright’s body.

  “So how was the sex?” I ask, my hands cold.

  “Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s love or assault,” Ice tells us, causing me and Xavier to burst out laughing. The shaking of Xavier’s torso, however, has him tempering his laugh and holding his ribs where they were kicked.

  Ice continues: “But then she rolls into this magical rhythm I don’t understand. I think it’s her way of giving to herself for all the love she’s been denied.”

  “Do you think of Holly at all?” I ask, wondering about life after his wife. “I mean, when you’re doing it.”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “And?”

  “If she’s up there, watching over me, I sometimes wonder what she’s thinking. If she’s disappointed.”

  “You know she is,” I say, chiding him.

  “I think she’d approve of Eliana, though,” Ice says.

  “I think she’d be terrified of the woman,” Xavier adds.

  Now we’re all in stitches, Xavier going with the pain this time because even God’s afraid of someone like Eliana.

  “Face it little brother, you’re sleeping with a nuclear bomb.”

  “Totally,” Xavier says.

  Isadoro gives the statement due consideration, then he says, “Yeah, I think that actually sums it up.”

  Changing subjects, I say, “Did you get the tarp and shovels?”

  “They’re in the trunk,” Xavier answers. “Do you remember how to get to the house?”

  “Mostly,” I say.

  “I’ll recognize the street if you can get us to the house.”

  “So we’re really going to do this then?” Ice says.

  When I told Ice what happened, how SAC Ryan Wright died and we were on a mission to right some truly awful wrongs, he seemed bothered that we left him there. It’s always bothered me a little, too.

  “We are,” I say. “I appreciate you helping us see this through.”

  “Would he do it for you?” Ice asks.

  Xavier and I laugh together.

  “Hell no,” Xavier says. “He’d call either one of us a casualty of war, then he’d move on and kill some more people.”

  “Do you really blame him?” I ask.

  “No,” Xavier says.

  When it comes to low level scumbags, street gangs and the cartel, the DEA is big on stats. As of summer, 2018, Chicago had fifty-nine active street gangs and more than two-thousand semi-autonomous offshoots. The big city had become a criminal mecca you couldn’t stop seeing the second you put it under a microscope. SAC Wright would have known the specs better than most. If I were him, it’d be pretty hard not to be jaded. Damn near impossible, actually.

  When I was a cop last, Chicago PD estimated more than one-hundred thousand gang members occupied the city. Half of them were encompassed in three gangs: The Gangster Disciples, The Latin Kings and The Black P Stones.

  If SAC Wright wanted to go on a killing spree, it was only because—like Xavier—he’d lost everything important in his life and saw this as a refuge from grief, or at the very least, a way to put down a few of the more rabid dogs without the burden of having to follow the law.

  Now, the truth was more apparent than ever: the shape of this city depended on how many of these one-hundred thousand donkey fluffers survived.

  This is my gravest concern right now. The whole reason I want out.

  If we can just time things right, and if God will lend a hand with waking Orlando, perhaps we can weather this storm long enough to get out before the city’s more nefarious elements converge on us.

  The shotgun blast to the windshield, however, is us clearly not weathering this storm. I jerk the wheel to the right, avoid mobs of people pouring out of several nearby houses. A second later, I smash into someone’s barbecue, then stand on the brakes.

  “What are you doing?” Ice says. “Get us out of here!”

  People are coming from everywhere now, dozens of them circling the car. It’s like we somehow landed in a hornet’s nest not realizing we’d come in through the front door.

  “Just hit them!” Ice says as angry faces crowd the Barracuda.

  I smash the gas while standing on the brakes, a warning. Hands are now violently slapping the hood, the side windows, the back of the car. Nobody cares about my warning. Even though the wheels are smoking, the engine is revved hard and the back end is bucking and primed to go, some guy with a baseball bat cracks the back window near Xavier.

  “Quit messing around and go!” Ice screams.

  Foot off the brake, I stay on the gas and plow through the hordes of people. Bodies are kicking off the bumpers and bouncing off the windshield (further damaging it), some of them rolling over the roof, crashing down on the trunk lid and dropping off the back.

  Something breaks the glass on the driver’s side door—a brick?—and a pair of grabby hands reach in and get a hold of my shirt, and even my hair.

  I shove them off, keep going.

  Before we can truly break free of the converging masses, the purple beast takes a monumental trouncing. The second we break clear, Ice is up kicking out the damaged windshield, which is good because I can’t see squat.

  We hit something else, I’m not sure what, then catch a downed drone and drag that hunk of metal about a hundred feet before I decide to stop. I help push the rest of the glass out of the car, then get out front where Ice and I dislodge a huge chunk of what looks like a downed Reaper drone.

  When we get moving again, the white elephant in the room is that it totally sucks ass not having a windshield. It also leaves us incredibly vulnerable. And not just to bugs.

  “Did you recognize anyone from that group?” Ice asks me.

  I think about all the faces I saw overcrowding the car. None of them looked familiar, but ev
erything happened too fast both there and at the house.

  “No,” I say, unable to bridge that gap.

  Turning to Xavier in the back seat, I say, “What about you, X? Did you see anyone?”

  “Everyone I saw at the house I either shot or scared off,” he answers. “So no. I can’t say any of them look familiar.”

  “Eliana and I will head out tonight or tomorrow,” Ice says, resolute. “We can take a closer look, see what we see.”

  “I’ll come, too,” I say. “Three sets of eyes are better than two.”

  “You need to stay with Adeline,” Ice says. “If you keep running off, it won’t be any different than before when you single-handedly left Adeline to save Chicago from its drug problem.”

  “This isn’t a job, this is our survival,” I say. “She’ll understand.”

  Just saying this is like déjà vu. How many times did I make this argument before? How many times did I make excuses for being an absentee husband? Because even though Adeline said she understood, she nearly ended up leaving me for that knuckle dragger, Caelin Boyle.

  “No she won’t understand,” Xavier says.

  He would know better than most since he was the one I did most of my complaining to. Then again, is he speaking from his own experience? He knows Adeline, but he doesn’t know Adeline. This has me wondering about Giselle. How it might have been between them. It still kills me that she’s gone…

  “He’s right,” Ice says, backing up X. “Take if from two guys who would cross heaven and earth for a second chance with our wives.”

  “Turn here,” Xavier says. “Up ahead, then take the fourth left.”

  Xavier directs us to the neighborhood and I spot the house. It’s the only one that’s practically burnt to the ground. Xavier and I crawl out of the car, Ice staying with the ride as I fish the tarp out of the back.

  When we get around the rear of the house, we see all the dead. Something has been feeding off them. Dogs perhaps? Squirrels? Rats?

  SAC Ryan Wright is where we left him. The smell is so bad, though. Even in the open air, that stink sits in the back of my throat, making me want to gag.

  “You sure you want him in the car?” Xavier asks.

  “Not inside,” I say. “I was thinking the trunk would work, but now I’m rethinking that plan.”

  When I consider traveling cross country with the smell of death and decay in my trunk, contaminating not only the items we pack—especially food or water—but the air inside the cabin as well, I’m thinking I definitely need a plan B.

  “Let’s tarp him up, put him on the roof, find the nearest church.”

  “Good idea,” Xavier says.

  We get Wright’s body in the tarp, haul him around the front of the house and hoist him onto the roof. I see two ladies looking at us through their blinds. One of them waves. I wave back, then gesture for them to come outside.

  A moment later, the door cracks open and she says, “You were the one who killed the guys there, weren’t you?”

  “I was,” I say, not sure if she’ll thank me or curse me out. “I wanted to see if you had a rope we could borrow. We’re going to bury my friend. He was one of the good guys.”

  Without saying anything, the door shuts and the blinds are pulled shut.

  “So was that a yes or a no?” Ice asks me.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  A moment later, the front door opens and one of the ladies throws a length of rope out into her front yard. I can barely get out a “Thank you,” before the door slams shut. Either she’s grateful for what we did when we were here last, or she’s just wanting us to go.

  I suppose I’ll never really know.

  Regardless, when SAC Wright is secured to the roof, I’m happy to be on our way. The nearest church is a Church of Latter Day Saints and it has a big front lawn.

  “This will do,” Xavier says.

  We pull over, the three of us piling out of the car. We untether SAC Wright, then drag his tarped body off the roof and set it down on the grass. Ice gets the shovels out of the trunk. Over the next forty-five minutes, we dig a shallow grave, then put our friend inside. Xavier and I push the dirt and grass back over him. Xavier says a word in his honor.

  When we turn around, there are two kids on bicycles with their heads in my car. How did we not hear them?

  “Get out of there!” I bark.

  Without a retaliatory word, both boys look up. One of them flips me off, the other spits on the hood. I launch the shovel at him, blade first. It almost hits the slowest one.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ice says, looking at me. “He’s like ten years old.”

  “Freaking turds,” I mumble.

  “Do you remember if there’s a precinct anywhere near here?” Ice asks.

  “There’s like three of them,” Xavier says.

  “We need weapons. Or ammo for the ones we have at the very least.”

  The short drive through the urban wasteland takes us to the nearest police department, but the building is just stacks of rubble and we aren’t up for sifting through the detritus in search of scraps. I barely even slow before heading to the next closest PD.

  It’s more of the same.

  “You know, one branch of the Vice Lords isn’t far from here,” Xavier says. “If anyone’s going to have guns and ammo, it’s those guys.”

  “Refresh my memory,” I say.

  “The take down last year where they found the vat of acid? The one with half a guy still bubbling in there?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “That’s only a mile or two from here.”

  When we drive past the house Xavier swears was last year’s bust, it looks suspect for sure.

  “Pull up there,” Ice says, pointing a few driveways down. “I’ll double back and check it out.”

  I pull over and Ice heads out leaving me with Xavier.

  “Are you comfy back there?” I ask. There’s almost no room in the back seat.

  “If only I was a sardine…”

  Ice returns and says, “There’s nine guys that I can count, and a bunch of drugs on the kitchen table and the coffee table. Some girl is blitzed out of her brains on the couch, and another is asleep in the back bedroom with an infant in a crib. There are two teenaged boys in the other room playing Monopoly.”

  “What the ROE on the women?” Ice asks.

  “Shoot anyone who draws on you,” Xavier answers. “Equality among genders means if they pull a gun to kill you, they are fair game.”

  “The kids are off limits,” I say.

  “Did you learn anything from Iraq?” he asks me, flabbergast. “Kids can kill, too.”

  “I’m only shooting them if it’s a last option,” I say. I’ve already seen too many of them die—good, bad or otherwise.

  “No one expects you to shoot them for sport,” Xander replies with a frown.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” I say. None of it. Looking up at Ice, I say, “Are you good with this? I mean, really good with this?”

  “I made a living killing people,” Ice says. “Whatever conscience I had left me long ago. I won’t kill women and children unless I have to, and if you’re going to make that choice, you can’t hesitate.”

  “How many women or children have you killed?” I ask him.

  “Really?” he asks.

  “Because I shot that boy yesterday,” I admit.

  “He was practically a man,” Ice says.

  “He looked thirteen.”

  “Thirteen years old is a man in some cultures,” Xavier says, making me wonder if he’s siding with my brother or trying to ease my mind.

  “We can make do without the weapons for now,” I finally say, “and I can make do without the nightmares.”

  “You sure?” Ice says. “This is the kind of decision that could save our lives or get us killed.”

  “You don’t know that we won’t get ourselves killed going in there!”

  “That’s the world now, brother.”

 
“That may be who you are, but not me. And you don’t have to be that way anymore either. We don’t have to kill to survive.”

  “I’ll be any way I need to be to survive,” Ice tells me. “Know that.”

  “So are we doing this or not?” Xavier says. “Because I’m with Ice on this. And right now I don’t mind taking out a few scumbags.”

  “Was it hard on you?” I ask Ice. “I mean, after you killed your first person. Because I’ve killed a few now and my soul feels disgusting.”

  “Get used to that feeling,” he says.

  “Stop flexing your ego for a second and be real with me,” I tell him.

  “It’s been hard since Holly and the girls died. I hardly sleep. Now, instead of trying to bury the bad with good, like I wanted to, I bury the bad with more bad. After awhile, it all sort of got mixed in the wash, so to speak.”

  “You mean it all feels…”

  “Like the worst thing ever,” he says, finishing my sentence. “That’s why you need to make good with Adeline, treat her like a queen. You don’t know when one of you will outlast the other.”

  “If you want to hit those guys, why don’t you do it. I’ll hold the fort down here.”

  “You’re going to have to come to grips with this sooner or later,” Ice says.

  Getting defensive, I say, “I shot a kid. Orlando’s in a coma. We’re at the tail end of one war getting ready to start another. Forgive me if I’m not gung ho about wasting some drug addicts so we can steal their guns.”

  “I forgive you,” Xander says.

  “Yeah, I forgive you, too,” Ice says with a wink. Then: “Let’s go, Xavier.”

  The two of them go inside while I wait outside. I feel like a douchebag just sitting here, letting them take the risk. But they wanted to. They asked for this!

  Dammit.

  Just then the sounds of gunfire echo and now I’m back on edge. Even worse, I’m wondering what’s happening inside. Across the way, two big guys emerge from a house, which causes me to move toward them.

  “Let it be,” I say, holding a hand up.

  “Who are you?” one of them asks.

  Great, now they’re interested in me. Not smart, Fire.

  “Neighborhood watch,” I tell them. “I was hoping to watch you walk your fat asses back in your house so we can be on our way.”