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

by Schow, Ryan

  “Do you think they’ll come back?”

  He laughed a bitter laugh, then said, “Not those guys. Not ever again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m one thousand percent positive.”

  She seemed to think about this. What he said, it could have so many implications.

  “I want to die, Draven,” she confessed.

  “Well, you just might get your wish,” he told her. Then: “Are you coming over tonight?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I mean, I said yes, so yes, I guess. It’s just…your grandmother scares me.”

  “That’s because she’s got no filter and she’s had a difficult life. When you’re older, those things shape a person. A tough life shaped her. What we’re going through now, this is going to shape us, too.”

  “What if I change my mind in the last minute? What if I just want to be alone?”

  “If you do, it will be okay.”

  She nodded her head, seemed to want to say something, but then gave up on that and just turned and walked back to her house.

  As he watched her go, he found himself thinking of her. She lived across the street from him for as long as he’d been there. She had a boy and two girls, no husband. How did he not know more about her? And what did she think when she saw him? Did she even see him? Or did she only see a world where everything she ever loved, everything that defined her, was now just gone.

  He gave her a week, ten days tops. After that, she’d either get on board, or she’d kill herself. For some reason, this had him thinking of his parents.

  Were they even alive?

  Last he heard, his father was in jail and his mother was with the third love of her life in Philly. He hadn’t seen her in six years. He didn’t expect to ever see her again. As for his father, it had been ten years. He didn’t blame them anymore for the decisions they made. Then again, most people can’t understand how a parent can just leave their child. He wasn’t one of them. He understood just fine.

  Parents or not, some people just suffer so much they have to abandon everything. His father’s boisterous, harsh outpouring about life and all its ails finally wore on his mother and she ended up leaving them for some other guy. That guy ended up dead and his father in jail for it. He never laid a hand on Draven’s mother, but the things his old man did to the guy is still talked about in some circles.

  Back to Morgan. She was a few years from fifty, and he was almost thirty. Nearly half her age he assumed. With nearly half her experience. He couldn’t understand what it would be like to bring kids into this life, then lose them.

  “Hey!” he called after her as she was about to go inside. She stopped and turned to him. He jogged over to her and said, “If you get lonely, and just need someone to talk to, my bedroom is downstairs on the backside of the house. I’m a good listener.”

  “Why would I talk to you? You’re just a kid.”

  “Maybe, but my ears work.”

  She gave a slight nod and said, “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.”

  “No one is going to be fine, Morgan.”

  When he left, he saw Chase sitting out front with a baseball bat. He was hammering finish nails in it, then using tin snips to cut the exposed ends back to a sharp point. When he looked up and saw Draven, he gave a nod. The kid was going to grow up fast.

  “Dinner is at sunset,” Draven called out.

  “Heard you already,” Chase said.

  “If you need extra food…” Draven said. Then: “Sundown. We’re cooking up the last of the steak.”

  With the weather patterns being erratic following the EMP, Eudora thought the meat would be fine at night, but that it might spoil during the days. It was hotter than usual, and no one could explain why. So instead of hanging out inside and enjoying a nice candlelight meal, they barbecued the rest of the meat outside.

  At first Draven wondered if that was such a good idea, but Ice said they had plenty of guns and ammo now, and lookouts at the four corners of the neighborhood.

  Much to his delight, Morgan brought a can of beans and half a potato and the three boys brought over hot dogs. When the meat was cooked up, everyone ate. After that, Draven brought leftovers to the crack head.

  He was sweaty, cursing, and he’d soiled his pants.

  “I’m going to give you some very good meat,” Draven said, “but if you throw a tantrum, I won’t bring you anything else. Got it?”

  He nodded his head. Draven eased a slice of steak in through the hole in the plastic bag where his mouth was. He got his lips around it, drew it in, chewed it and sighed in ecstasy.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “My name is Tim, by the way.”

  “My dad’s name was Tim,” Draven said.

  “My dad was a dick.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “I dumped in my pants,” Tim said, sweating through his shirt.

  “I can smell that.”

  “I’m not all excited about staying in them all night long, if you catch my drift, bro.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Tim.”

  He expected the kid to start screaming and cursing; instead he started to cry. Draven left him there.

  Out front, he sat with the boys and said, “Have you got everything you need for the house?”

  “Yes,” Phillip said.

  “My big brother’s got an orange belt in karate,” Ross added.

  “You’ll need it,” Eudora said. “Ain’t no room for sissies in the apocalypse.”

  “How are you going to survive in a wheelchair?” Ross asked.

  Chase socked him in the arm.

  Eudora said, “I survived a lot to get to this point, young man. So to answer your question, I’ll survive until the day I don’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Night fell fast and everyone turned in for bed. Instead of joining them, Xavier slipped on a warm jacket, grabbed a hunting knife and the Kimber 1911 they’d confiscated from the Vice Lords and set out into the night. His destination? The neighborhood where he and the brothers were ambushed earlier that day.

  The walk seemed longer than it should. It gave him too much time to think. As always, his thoughts returned to Giselle.

  When he thought about her, he could not imagine this life. Sometimes he thought about walking and not stopping, just walking until he dropped dead of starvation, dehydration, a broken heart.

  At night before drifting off to sleep, he often forgot she was dead, expecting to hear her voice any minute telling him she loved him. Then he’d fall asleep, not realizing that sometime in the middle of the night, in his sleep, he woke up crying. Other times he got so mad that she was gone, he felt like breaking things, hurting people, taking his own life.

  Yes, Xavier knew this life was not going to work for him.

  The grief was crushing his heart.

  Before he got too lost in his thoughts, before his emotions dragged him further into the mire, he saw them. The men standing guard. There were two that he could see. A third caught his eye.

  It looked as though they were keeping a perimeter, but they didn’t look professional.

  He locked down on the nearest man, waited for the second to move out of sight, then tried to calculate the distance and trajectory of the third guard’s path.

  He approached the first guy, walking almost like he was minding his own business. He didn’t realize the guard—a tall, skinny man with hair that had been buzzed recently and was now growing out—had been drifting off to sleep.

  Could a man do that? Fall asleep on his own feet?

  “Excuse me,” he said, causing the guy to startle so hard, his baseline reactions took over. He took a wild, tired swing at Xavier.

  Xavier suppressed a laugh as he backed away from the shot. His hands were casually in his pockets. He made no move to take them out. No sense in spooking Rocky Balboa even further.

  “You scared me,” the guard said, hocking up a loogie he spit on the side of the street. “You got no busi
ness sneaking up on me like that. What the hell are you doing out here anyway?”

  “I’m looking for the small guy here, the one in charge…”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s got the 323 and the 312 tattooed on his knuckles?” Xavier prompted.

  “Yeah, Demon,” he said.

  That was all the confirmation Xavier needed. He attacked the man, took him down fast, knocked him out.

  Moving quickly, aware the other two guards were still out there, he dragged the unconscious man behind a hedge of bushes and searched him for weapons.

  To his surprise, he found none.

  Is this guy just a look out? Xavier wondered. Do they not even arm their guards? Or are they running low on weapons and ammo?

  So many unanswered questions…

  Moving into the shadows cast by a low moon, he circled back around, checked to see if any of the other guards had appeared. They hadn’t. Heading back to the unconscious man, he waited for him to regain consciousness. When that was taking too long, he hastened the process with a mighty slap across the face.

  The guard winced at first, then started to stir.

  Xavier watched him very closely. When his eyes fluttered open and he opened his mouth to either ask a question, complain or let out a moan, Xavier covered it with a cupped hand and said, “Not or word, or I’ll end you. Got it?”

  The man slowly nodded his head.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions,” Xavier asked. “If you answer them truthfully, you get to live. If you don’t answer them, or if you lie, I’m going to make you into a stew that me and my people are going to eat on Sunday night. It’ll just be pieces of you, potatoes and carrots. Nod if you understand.”

  He nodded.

  “When I take my hand off your mouth, if you scream, you die,” he said, showing the man his hunting knife. “We’re clear on that, too, right?”

  He lifted his hand and the man said, “Yes.”

  “Good,” he responded. “You stay laying down and I’ll stay right here beside you, and this will be that until I say different. Clear?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Crystal.”

  “How many of you are there?” he asked the guard. “In your group, not out here keeping watch.”

  “Close to fifty. Why do you want to know?”

  “Because you attacked my people and if you do it again, I just want to know how many of you I’ll have to kill.”

  “We’re not bad people,” he said. “We’re just trying to survive. And in case you forgot, you killed more of us than we killed of you.”

  “You can’t just storm a neighborhood like that and not expect retaliation. There are a lot of people still in their homes, waiting for the lights to come back on and life to return to normal.”

  “This is the new normal,” the guard said.

  “Which means if I start by killing you the way your people killed that woman in the street, and I kill my way through this entire encampment—which I’m tempted to do—then I’ll be free of worry. That’s the new normal, right? Kill when it suits you?”

  “Demon’s a different kind of leader,” he said in low tones, almost like he was scared.

  “People said that about Jim Jones.”

  “This isn’t a cult,” he argued, unconvincing. “We’re going to resettle Chicago. Build our own community.”

  “Not if you don’t survive,” Xavier whispered, his eyes and ears alert to his surroundings. When he heard nothing of concern, he continued. “If our lives are about survival, there will be enemies and we’ll have to take them out to feel safe, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So why shouldn’t I take you out? You say it’s every man for himself, that no law is the new law, that this will now be the status quo, right?”

  “Within reason,” he said.

  “Oh, so now there are parameters?”

  When he didn’t know how to reply, when he saw the trap Xavier set for him, he opted for silence over what could possibly be the wrong answer. Just laying there in the dirt next to a scrabbly row of bushes, he looked like he couldn’t feel less at ease.

  “Freedom of speech, bro,” Xavier prompted. “Feel free to speak your mind.”

  “I was just getting a good look at you.”

  “Oh? You into good looking black guys?” Xavier teased. The guard didn’t know what to say. It was obvious his sense of humor was lacking. “How many of you are out here?”

  “Just me,” he said, his first lie.

  Xavier pressed his arm into the man’s throat, shifted his weight forward, really started to lean on that arm, but slowly so as to ratchet up the pain as well as the pressure. When he tried to speak, when the grunting noise of ill-formed words sounded rough and constricted, Xavier let up.

  “Three,” he finally said, “There’s three of us.”

  Xavier leaned on him again.

  “Three, I swear!” the man groused, his windpipe all but smashed shut.

  When Xavier let up again, he said, “Where are they?”

  “We run a four point perimeter.”

  “With only three people?” Xavier questioned.

  “We aren’t exactly Blackwater here,” he said. “We’re just guys from the city. I used to work in sanitation. We sit around a lot.”

  “What about the other two?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just regular guys, I guess. One of them did car detail, the other, I don’t know. He ate freaking hot dogs for a living. How the hell do I know?”

  “Shut up,” Xavier finally said.

  The two of them laid there for a long time, The weight of his torso across the man’s chest. It was about as uncomfortable as one could get on a cold, dark night.

  “You gonna get off me?” the guard asked. “I can’t really breathe that well.”

  That was the point. Xavier didn’t answer the man but to stay put. This way Xavier could stay low, use his eyes as lookout, then feel the man the second he tried to move or protest. He could feel any movement right down to the twitch.

  “This is starting to feel a little gay,” Mr. Sanitation said.

  “Save it.”

  Xavier was on the Varsity wrestling team. He was good, but not great. Right then, good was all that mattered. Good allowed him to wait for at least one of those two clowns to return. Sadly, they were taking their time and the garbage man was right, it was all starting to feel a bit gay.

  “Are you going to let me go?” he asked. “Or have I become your new Lazy Boy, the man on man edition?”

  “See I’m thinking two things,” Xavier turned to him and said. “One, I don’t like that look in your eye. I’m thinking that putting an end to you might be the wise decision. Lord knows this is where the hero gets it wrong in every single movie.”

  “Oh, you’re the hero now?” he asked.

  “Of course I am. Clam up while I’m pontificating. So one, I put you down just to be safe because that’s the smart move. It’s morally reprehensible, but my morals died the day my wife died. Then again, if I do that, your absence could set off alarms inside your group. Unless people just think you got scared and ran away like a sissy bitch.”

  “I ain’t no sissy.”

  “Or two, I let you live, adequately warn you, tell you to do your thing, just not on our block.”

  “I don’t call the shots,” he said, his eyes darkening.

  “That’s why I’m going with option one.”

  Slowly he pushed his knife into the man’s side, covering his mouth, leaning his weight on him to stop him from squirming or making noise.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered into the garbage man’s ear as his wide-eyed gaze cut through the darkness. “Just let it go. It’ll be easier this way.”

  He felt the fight in the man waning. It was like this when you cut someone and they took too long to die.

  Twisting the knife, moving it around to really open things up, he tried to hasten the process. When he slid the blade out, the guard
inhaled, his eyes settling. Xavier pushed the blade in once more, just beneath the first cut.

  Mr. Sanitation Man drew a sharp breath, gave a weak, involuntary jolt. He’d already lost a lot of blood and most of his will to fight. For a second, Xavier was having flashbacks of yesterday, in his kitchen, the last of the four victims going down.

  If anything, killing could not become a habit. He couldn’t be that guy.

  “If you are a good man,” he whispered, his face close enough to the garbage man’s face to talk in quiet tones and still be heard, “then where you’re going will be better than this.”

  The man’s eyes tried to focus on his. Xavier didn’t even flinch.

  “When you’re gone, you’ll thank me,” he said. “If you see Giselle, tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I’m sorry for everything.”

  And then he cut down and pushed sideways. The man gave one last writhing gasp, then sagged, his chest no longer moving.

  Xavier eased his hand off the man’s mouth, then stood, grabbed him by the boot and dragged him down the street. It wasn’t quiet, but he had the Kimber out, ready to shoot anyone who came after him.

  About two blocks down, he leaned the dead man against a car, his body slumping sideways, his torso a bleeding reminder that the war was not over, only the enemies had changed. First it was the drones, then it was humankind itself.

  Eventually the war would be in his head.

  The early morning was approaching its coldest hour which meant he only had a finite amount of time before sunrise. Time to work. He scouted out the block, found there were three more men, not two as the garbage man insisted.

  What a liar, he thought.

  If he was going to get all this done by sunrise, he’d need to move quick. He slipped off his shoes, stashed them where he’d remember where he’d put them, then crept up on the next man in his socks, making almost no noise at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chase sat out on the porch, freezing beneath his winter clothes, the inside of his nose raw from breathing in the slightly smoke-tinged air. Winter wasn’t that far away and it would get cold. A lot colder than this. He told himself he needed to start building the tolerance first if he expected to survive.