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

by Schow, Ryan

  “Good luck, I guess,” he replied, his face hollow, but not malnourished looking.

  “That dead guy over there, he’s got a gun and keys. Get the keys and help me start unlocking these cages, please.”

  The man’s gratitude was nearly overwhelming. He jumped into action, doing exactly as she asked. When she was just about done with the cages, she saw Rock going back toward a room someone said was a bathroom. That was the prison Bradshaw alluded to. They place he’d taken the three dissidents. Although he referred to them as malcontents.

  She handed the keys to a competent looking woman and said, “Can you finish opening the cages for me?”

  The woman nodded, then took the keys and started to help out.

  Jill walked back to where Rock had gone, went inside what looked like an industrial sized bathroom, immediately got hit with a stench of human feces so bad she nearly vomited.

  She recognized the girl immediately. The teenager was part of the group of six that had come in when she and Gregor first toured the sight. Her name wasn’t Amber; Amber was the mother. For the life of her she couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

  Looking around, there was a wall of floor-to-ceiling solid metal doors. All three were open. It seemed these three cells belonged to the girl’s friends.

  Amber’s friends.

  The young girl with long brown hair was down on her knees before the last door. She reached inside, touched something, her body visibly wracked with pain.

  “Oh, my God,” the girl said, whimpering, unable to stop the rush of tears.

  Jill stepped inside, past Rock to where she saw the body curled on its side, naked, all skin and bones. The woman didn’t make it. She watched the girl reach in, put a hand on her ankle, her body now convulsing with grief. The woman didn’t move.

  “Sweetheart?” Jill said to the grieving girl in as sympathetic of a voice as she could muster.

  “She was my friend,” the girl said, snuffling.

  “Bailey?” one of the guys called out, his voice gravely, guttural.

  Jill turned around, looked inside the door Rock had opened up. Lying on the ground, his body wrapped around the toilet, she saw the one who’d looked like a surfer. This was the guy who called out for Bailey.

  Was she the woman in the third cell? Bailey?

  He sat up, looked right at her. Jill recognized that look in his eyes. He was scared, disoriented, about to panic.

  “Easy, sir,” Rock said. “Don’t try to stand, I’ll help.”

  There was some bumping around, but the guy with the long hair was apparently trying to get to Bailey.

  “No,” the teenager warned through wet eyes and a lump in her throat.

  “Bailey, please,” the man said again.

  His voice was broken, desperate for possibility, for some reason not to completely fall apart. He stood and pushed past Rock, stumbling, shading his eyes as he tripped and staggered toward the last cell. When he was there, he stood over the dead woman, then broke into a sob Jill felt so deep in her core, all she could do was fight back tears of her own.

  Her heart shaking, seeing this, she turned to Rock. His eyes were bone dry. Hers were moist.

  This man obviously loved this woman. The woman who now lay lifeless in a cage, having gone from a beautiful woman to a victim, and then finally to a statistic.

  “Bailey,” he said one more time, looking down at her as he held onto the wall for support.

  His legs were shaking, his body wavering. The teenager helped lower him to his knees before the woman. Only a sliver of light entered the cell, but he moved inside the enclosure. It was small inside, barely big enough for the both of them.

  “Bailey,” he said, sniffling and crying. “Bailey, it’s time to go. Baby you have to get up now.”

  Jill’s heart was crushed. She could barely hold back the tears any longer. The girl looked up and saw Jill, saw how this was affecting her, and she started to cry again. Before she completely gave in to her emotions, she stepped forward to the man in the bathroom with Bailey and said, “Um, I think I need you out of there.”

  He started to back out, and that’s when they heard the low raspy sound come from deeper inside the stall. Jill pushed past the man, got in there in spite of the filthy conditions, her composure returning.

  “Do you know where you are?” Jill asked the woman.

  “Jail,” the voice mumbled.

  “Do you know your name?” she asked.

  “Bailey.”

  “Good, Bailey. My name is Jill and I’m going to get you someplace safe, okay?”

  “Nick,” she whispered. The long haired guy.

  Nick was standing over her, his emotions teeming.

  “I’m here, Bailey. Marcus, too. We’re okay,” he said. “We’re going to be okay.”

  “Bartholomew,” Jill said to one of the two surviving doctors they’d found earlier, “get a stretcher and prep an IV.”

  When did he get here?

  “Got it,” he said, then turned and broke into a run

  “Thank you so much for what you’re doing, Jill,” Nick said, unable to tear his eyes off Bailey. He couldn’t stop staring at the skeletal look of her.

  “I’ll be right back,” Rock told her.

  A few minutes later, Oscar, Kane and Bartholomew returned with Rock. They had three blankets and a stretcher.

  “The other guy you met, the other doctor,” Bartholomew said, “he’s prepping the IV drip in the Humvee.”

  “His name is Victor something or another,” Rock said.

  “Victor Burke,” Jill said, chiming in.

  Oscar and Kane lowered the stretcher and attended to Bailey. “Careful now,” Jill warned them. “She could go into shock.”

  Gregor’s guys were extra careful as they arranged her limbs and lifted her onto the stretcher. Oscar got a blanket over her body while Bartholomew draped a cloth over her eyes.

  “It’s going to be so bright it hurts your eyes,” the doctor told her in soft tones so as not to startle her. “This will help minimize the sting.”

  Bailey made a small noise of acknowledgement, a murmur at best.

  The cute teenaged girl moved away from her friend Marcus to the stretcher next to Bailey and said, “Bailey, it’s me, Corrine. We’re here for you. Marcus and Nick. All of us.”

  Corrine touched Bailey’s arm, a loving, reassuring gesture.

  Rock said, “We’re hooking up an IV, Bailey, to help restore your fluids.”

  “Thanks,” she managed to mumble.

  When Bailey was secure, Oscar and Kane lifted her, then moved her out of the foul smelling bathroom-turned-prison and into one of the Humvees.

  Corrine, Marcus and Nick walked with her. Nick and Marcus were moving okay, but they covered their eyes against the bright light of the warehouse.

  When Bailey was loaded into their newly acquired Humvee, Jill said to Marcus, “We’ll meet you at base camp. I want to see you and Nick in the infirmary as soon as you arrive. We have to get you fed, hydrated and checked out.”

  “Yeah, sure, no problem,” Marcus said.

  He looked like a lumberjack who’d spent time as an operator. A good combination, Jill thought. When the first Humvee left, Rock moved up beside her and the two of them watched the mass of former prisoners depart.

  “I don’t know if that’s the saddest sight ever,” Rock said, “or if I’m so happy I’m on the other side of emotion.”

  She reached down, slipped her hand into his and said, “We did a good thing here.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you miss me?” Jill said.

  He turned and looked at her, his eyes as empty as ever. “I miss the dream we had together. I miss your laugh. But so much has boiled to the surface of me I don’t know how to sort through it all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking of my brother and his family.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “Yeah. Fire called me.”


  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “I told him to get out here if he could. Now I don’t even know if he’s alive. I’m thinking I’ll probably never see him again and that kills me.”

  She watched emotion crowding his eyes for the first time in a long time.

  “I guess I’m thinking that everything that was important to me before the attack and the subsequent EMP no longer matters.”

  “What about me?” she asked.

  “When you and Gregor are running things,” he asked, “is there any friction between you?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She thought about this, then said, “I think he likes me. And because of this, he lets me lead.”

  “Right,” he said. “You need to lead.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “So do I,” he told her. “Now I have to do it a different way and I don’t like that.”

  “What is it with you men wanting to control everything?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “You’re as much of a man as the rest of us. You just have different plumbing.”

  She shook her head, but sadly, he was right.

  “I thought if we could share responsibility, you’d see I was willing to go fifty-fifty with you on the leadership thing. But you need more. You have to run the show, Jill. Well now you can.”

  She let go of his hand, realizing what he was saying. They were two chiefs in a tribe meant for one. Was there even a way for her to let go of the reins?

  “I am who I am,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he replied. Then: “You want to ride back with me in Gregor’s SUV?”

  “It beats walking,” she said.

  He started in that direction and she followed him, discretely wiping her eyes as they left the compound they’d just liberated. Of all the horrible things she’d seen back there, of all the sadness and death, the death that hurt her most was the death of her and Rock.

  She wasn’t sure she could survive that.

  When they got back to the compound, they buried Alfie, gave him a proper service, then tried to get back to business as usual. Gregor didn’t say anything about Rock killing Alfie, and Rock didn’t act like it was a big deal. She wondered if it pissed Gregor off that Rock was at the funeral, or that he was buried on Rock’s property.

  Janice got Bartholomew and Victor up to speed on their medical supplies and equipment, Robert and Cole set up tents for the new survivors and Gregor realized it was time to expand even farther. He told Jill he was going out to see if there were any other vacant residences in the area.

  “Are you mad at Rock?” Jill asked, taking Gregor’s arm before he left.

  “Hell yeah, I’m mad at him,” he said.

  “If you want to stay here, you’ll have to get over that. I can’t have there being bad blood between you two.”

  “He killed my guy,” he growled.

  “Your guy broke protocol and hit Rock’s former girlfriend, me. He hit me right in the face no less,” she said. Gregor nodded, stewing on his anger. “The difference between you and Rock is he’d die to protect me, even though he doesn’t love me anymore. And you…you’re concerned about a guy who killed without provocation, a guy we all agreed to vet first. Alfie had things wrong with him upstairs, Gregor. Don’t you see that?”

  “We all have something wrong with us upstairs,” he said.

  “Well Rock has his priorities right.”

  “How long are you going to hang on to him?” Gregor asked, his tone changing.

  “Do you still like me?” she asked.

  “You know I do.”

  She nodded, letting that sink in. It was nice to get such an easy confirmation. Rock would have talked his way around his emotions for an hour if pressed.

  “You know how there are those dumb girls who get dumped then sit there and think about all the good times and just cry to themselves hoping to somehow get the guy back?”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled a sad, painful smile and said, “I’ve somehow become that girl.”

  “You need a fresh start,” he said.

  “And you think you’re that fresh start?”

  “I do.”

  “You might be right,” she said. “But I’m not so sure these days.”

  “Well when you figure it out, let me know. In the mean time, I’ll be trying to get us another house.”

  She didn’t see a lot of Gregor over those next few days. She did see a lot of Amber, Abigail and Corrine though. The three of them were hard workers, eager to pull their weight. Marcus and Nick were healing up as well and starting to help where they could. She was worried about Bailey for awhile there, but the girl was finally coming around.

  She saw a lot of Maisie as well. From the second she found out the girl had slept with Rock, that she was Amber Gunn, Jill hated her. She often fantasized about beating the girl to death, shooting her, drowning her.

  She told Gregor he had a problem, that there couldn’t be bad blood between him and Rock, but maybe she had a problem, too. Maisie was here, and she hated the girl. Still, she was working hard, pulling her weight. And by the look of it, Rock was rejecting her as much as he’d rejected Jill. Did that make her feel better or worse?

  Worse, she thought.

  Rock was right. Jill had become a control freak. Although this was her nature, she knew she’d have to learn to share responsibility, to trust more, to forgive people for their mistakes.

  Harder still, she knew she’d have to learn to forgive herself for her own mistakes.

  Could she do that? Was something like that even possible? It had to be. If it brought her back to Rock, she knew she had to try.

  She was thinking these things as she was looking across the property at Maisie. Jill headed her way, then stopped. The girl was in the garden, pulling weeds, checking the lettuce and tomato plants for aphids, tomato worms, grasshoppers. What was she going to say to the girl? What could she say? When Maisie was done, she glanced up, saw Jill and stopped.

  Jill held Maisie with her eyes, making sure she knew she was there for her. Dusting off her hands, she walked up to Jill, unafraid.

  “Thank you for all you’re doing here,” Jill said. These were the most painful words she thought she’d ever uttered.

  “I appreciate you not making me leave,” Maisie replied.

  “Where would you go?”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “I guess I’d figure it out.”

  “I just wanted to tell you I don’t like you, but I’m glad you’re here. You’re a good addition to the community.”

  “Thank you, Jill.”

  “I thought a lot about you and Rock, and though I’ve been blaming you, I realize I pushed him away. That I forced a break. I’m telling you this because I also realize it’s not your fault. You did nothing wrong.”

  “I still feel terrible.”

  “Rock is a big boy, he makes his own decisions.”

  “Right now it seems as though he’s decided to freeze us both out,” Maisie said.

  “I think you’re right.”

  Jill looked at Maisie for a long moment. Her face had healed completely by this point. It was a nice face, simple yet pretty. She could see why Rock liked her.

  “I like you better as Maisie Sullivan.”

  “As opposed to Amber?”

  “Yeah,” Jill said. “I thought Amber Gunn was a twat.”

  She broke into genuine laughter. “Isn’t that the truth,” she said.

  “Probably not, but I like to believe it anyway,” Jill admitted. “It’s supposed to be healthy, confronting your demons.”

  Maisie held onto the smile a little longer that she would have for anyone else. Jill appreciated that.

  “Unless there’s anything else,” Maisie said, “I’m going to help the Amber who’s not a twat. We’re going to brush and feed the horses.”

  “How do you like her?” Jill asked about the woman they’d rescued from t
he Walmart.

  “She’s super sweet,” Maisie said. “And I just love Abigail. I never thought I wanted kids, but when I see the way Abigail loves her mother, and Corrine, I wonder if kids will be our salvation.”

  “That might be the only way we’ll survive as a species,” Jill said.

  “Do you know how all this started?”

  “No,” Jill admitted, “but I’d like to get ahold of the son of a bitch who killed our world. I’d like to find him and tear his spine right out of his body.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something,” Maisie said. Then, “I’ll see you later?”

  Jill nodded her head.

  When the girl left, she didn’t know how she was feeling anymore. Maisie was a likeable girl, and though she knew she’d messed up with Rock, that he hadn’t cheated, she still needed someone to hate, someone besides herself. She was a little sad thinking she no longer wanted to hate Maisie. She was a little sad thinking she no longer wanted to hate at all.

  “Hey, Jill?” said a masculine voice. She turned and saw Marcus. Smiling, she caught a glimpse of the man in his former glory. With a lot of his weight coming back, he was handsome but in a rugged, loner sort of way.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I just wanted to thank you for your help and your hospitality. I also wanted to tell you that Nick, Bailey and I are going to take off. We need to get Nick back to his daughter in San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco is a wasteland, Marcus. You don’t want to go there.”

  “I know, but we have to try.”

  “What about Amber, Abigail and Corrine?” she asked.

  “I want to see if they can stay here with you guys. They’re incredible women, all of them, and they’re hard workers. You’d be lucky to have them.”

  “Of course,” she said. “If you find Nick’s daughter, are you coming back?”

  “Her name is Indigo, and yes. If we find her, I think we’ll come back here, but only if it’s okay with you.”

  “You know my rules by now,” she said with a warm smile.

  “Pull my weight, don’t steal, don’t start any fights and don’t talk any crap,” he said. “I’m clear on them.”

  “Well then you know the answer. You’re always welcome.”

  He stepped forward and gave her a hug, something she didn’t expect from the big man. He was a lot like Rock, not only in his size and look, but in his ability to make you feel at ease around him while never really knowing anything about him.