Fireside

by Brian Parker

  “Hello, sister,” a frail child’s voice drifted from the blanket when the group neared her.

  “Uh… Hello?” Veronica answered. “Are you Maria?”

  “Yes. I am. I’ve been waiting for you and the masked man to come.”

  Veronica was already beginning to get freaked out. She’d scared herself with the dreams that she’d been having. What really made her skin crawl was that the girl hadn’t looked up from underneath the blanket and she knew that Aeric Traxx was there. Surely, the “masked man” was her husband. The scars that disfigured his face could certainly resemble a mask to a child who’d never seen him before.

  “Uh… Hello, Maria. My name is Veronica.”

  “Oh, I know who you are,” the girl replied, still hidden in the blankets. “You run the food kitchen for the city. I’ve seen you surrounded by death, it’s not pretty.”

  “Jesus!” Aeric exclaimed as he stepped over to the blanket. He snatched it off of the girl’s head and admonished, “I know you like to be mysterious and creepy, but you don’t open a conversation with how someone is going to die.”

  The girl blinked up at him. Her dirty face was framed by stringy, black hair that likely hadn’t seen soap in months, if ever. Up close, Veronica could see that she was probably closer to eleven than the nine that she’d originally thought. The girl was just skin and bones, although it was hard to tell with the way she was huddled up. She seemed entirely ordinary except for her eyes. They were the strangest shade of blue, almost like she wore purple contact lenses like the girls at the university used to wear before the end of the old world.

  “I didn’t say that she was going to die,” Maria corrected him. “Death follows closely beside her.”

  “Maria, we came to talk to you about—”

  The girl’s face snapped back towards Veronica. “You’ve been having them too, haven’t you?”

  “What are you—”

  “The visions. Death. Destruction. Torture,” she intoned. “The city is going to fall and everyone living here will die.”

  Aeric looked to his wife and mouthed, What the fuck? Veronica squinted and made the face that her children knew well. She was silently telling Aeric to get control of the situation and do it quickly.

  “Maria,” Aeric tried to get the girl’s attention.

  “You’re all dead! You’ve stayed too long.” Maria began to thrash about in the blankets. She was going to hurt herself.

  “Maria, stop!” Aeric’s voice boomed across the grocery store. Several tiny heads peeked around the corner at the edge of Veronica’s peripheral vision. They had to get this under control before the other children started to panic.

  “They’re going to eat us and use our skin as coats. You!” she pointed at Aeric. “You’re the masked man that caused all of this. It’s your fault! Everyone will die because of you. The walls will fall and the city will burn. Everyone who survives the fire will become the playthings of the giant birds!”

  Veronica had heard enough. That didn’t take long, she thought. They’d come to discuss her dreams, but that wasn’t going to happen. Maria was clearly disturbed and incoherent. She could pity the girl, but they weren’t going to get anything useful out of that little head.

  “Aeric, this has to stop,” Veronica ordered. “She’s scaring the other children and their parents are all at work. We should just go.”

  He nodded and stepped in close to stop her crazy rant. Maria avoided him by standing up quickly and backing against the vacant shelving unit. She twisted her head back and forth and then lunged towards Aeric, grabbing both of his wrists.

  “But wait!” Maria yelled. “The colossus can save one of the tribes if he chooses to abandon you!”

  “One of the tribes?” Aeric asked.

  “The Birds!” Maria screamed, changing her grip to grasp his forearm. “The Birds are coming!”

  As she finished yelling, she collapsed against Aeric. He caught her to keep her from falling. “What the hell was that?” he muttered as he held the limp figure in his hands.

  “She’s gotta go, Traxx,” Joseph stated. “I doubt that she’s been screaming like that around the others. If she did, you can bet that they’d beat her to death for it. The Barrio is no longer safe for her.”

  Aeric’s eyes searched his wife’s face for a clue as to what they should do. She certainly didn’t want the responsibility of caring for this crazy person. She was probably going to have night terrors and interrupt their way of life. Then, Veronica’s heart softened. Maria was just a little girl and she needed help; help that they could give her.

  “I guess we can take her to our house and figure out what to do with her,” Veronica finally conceded with a sigh.

  Aeric agreed, so they gathered the few belongings that were in the immediate area and Joseph carried Maria from the refuse.

  SIX

  Once they arrived safely at the Traxx home, Joseph took his leave of them to return to the Shooter’s barracks over near the old Air Force base, which had been annexed to the city after Colonel Henshaw’s death. It didn’t make any sense to anyone to maintain two perimeters, so they cut off the worthless old airfield and tore down the student hangar for construction material, which also gave them excellent fields of view to the east.

  Maria had woken up after they left the Barrio, choosing not to say much of anything besides mumbled words of acknowledgement when they tried to talk to her. Although she seemed more coherent than she had been inside the grocery store, Veronica wouldn’t let him ask her about the visions until she’d been cleaned and fed. While his wife took the girl upstairs to take a lukewarm bath and outfitted with a new wardrobe of their grandchildren’s clothing, Aeric busied himself with rekindling the fire to heat the stew that his wife had made the day before.

  He didn’t know what to think of the girl’s outburst in the grocery store. There was definitely something off in her head, unfortunately, they no longer had the medical staff that they once had—the last round of the flu had ensured that. There were several other children in San Angelo that he’d heard of who had a touch of the Gift, as they called it, although no one else was as vocal or open about their talents as Maria.

  Her warnings about the birds scared him. He obviously had no clue how her visions came to her, whether they were voices or only images, but a vulture could easily be mistaken for another type of bird. The Vultures were the bastards who’d tortured him and Tyler, while their leader, Justin, turned Kate into a sex slave. Justin’s final parting gift to Aeric before his death had been to get her pregnant, which had ultimately killed her during childbirth.

  The Vultures were a vicious, dangerous gang of murderers who’d taken power in the former capital city of Austin. The last he’d heard, they were heavily involved in a civil war between Sanders, the former Army officer whom Justin had bribed to come work for him, and some upstart looking to unsettle the balance of power.

  That had been more than ten or twelve years ago. He hadn’t learned the outcome of the fight for the gang’s leadership. Not knowing about the Vultures, along with Veronica’s questions from the previous day about what lay beyond the San Angelo defense zone, haunted him. He honestly had no clue what was out there beyond those ten miles anymore. With the smaller population, they had plenty of supplies and simply didn’t need to continually expose themselves to the dangers of the wastes far away from human habitation.

  Maybe they needed to begin patrolling again. Hell, maybe a scouting mission all the way to Austin was needed as well.

  The sounds of feet scraping on the stairs brought him back to the present as the girl appeared in the kitchen doorway. Veronica stood behind, leaning against the doorjamb with her arms crossed over her chest.

  Aeric was shocked at Maria’s transformation. The bath had done wonders for her. Underneath the layers of dirt had been a pretty, olive-skinned little girl. Veronica had given her a haircut, likely because the hair had been too matted to wash. Now her hair was the length of her chin all
the way around, giving her a softer appearance than before. Except for her eyes, which were still a strange purple color, she looked like a child and not a psychopath.

  “Hello, Maria,” he said softly.

  “Hi, Mr. Traxx,” she replied dutifully. Her eyes darted towards the metal pot suspended above the fire.

  “If you’re hungry, we have some stew for you.”

  Maria smiled and Aeric noticed that she even had a dimple on her cheek. “Oh, please!” she exclaimed. “I’m so hungry. I hardly ever got to eat all of my food before someone else took it from me.”

  He busied himself with preparing her a bowl of the stew from the pot. It hadn’t gotten as hot as he liked his soup to be, but figured that the lower temperature would be good for the girl. She waited eagerly at the head of the table, holding her spoon expectantly like she planned to fight off others for the opportunity to take a few bites.

  When he set the bowl down, she plunged the spoon and began to shovel the food into her mouth. He chuckled and held up his hands to catch her attention. “Maria, you can slow down. Nobody here is going to take the food from you. Take the time to taste the food; we won’t get another meat ration for a few weeks.”

  She made a visible effort to slow down and take her time. Aeric used the ladle to scoop out two more bowls of stew and then sat them down on the table across from each other. Veronica padded over softly in her old house shoes and took the seat nearer to the fire. Everyone ate in silence until Maria finished her stew and burped, causing them to laugh.

  “There, wasn’t it better when you slowed down?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. It was delicious. Thank you.”

  He pointed across the table at Veronica with his spoon, “Don’t thank me. Veronica made it yesterday while I was out inspecting the fence line trying to figure out where the demonbrocs were getting in.”

  “They’re not getting in, they’re getting out,” Maria replied nonchalantly as she looked around the small eat-in kitchen area.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The demonbrocs,” Maria answered. “You said they were getting in. A few of them have escaped the pens recently, so you’re probably finding those.”

  He set the spoon down on the table. What the hell was she talking about? “What pens?”

  “In the Barrio. They eat demonbrocs and some of them got out.”

  Her words hit her like a brick to the forehead. Those idiots in the Barrio were keeping demonbrocs for food? He remembered the meat that the gang members outside the grocery store were eating and thought it was dog or maybe a goat. Aeric would never have thought that anyone would be stupid enough to keep a demonbroc inside the city walls. Except for today, his inspections of the Barrio were always announced ahead of time to avoid any problems with the residents. They must have hidden the evidence each time. No wonder that kid, Bull, had been against him being there.

  “How long have they been keeping demonbrocs for food?”

  She shrugged, “I don’t know. They’ve been there the whole time I’ve lived here.”

  “That’s been more than a year, Aeric,” Veronica stated.

  “Yeah, I know. What are those idiots thinking?”

  “They want the meat, so they’re willing to risk it,” Maria replied with a simplicity that only a child could assign to such a major issue.

  “It’s not just them,” Aeric countered, speaking more to himself than to Maria. “They’re putting the lives of everyone in the city at risk.” He turned back to the child and asked, “Do you know who’s keeping them?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s Mr. Edward. He keeps them down in the tunnels. I think he has too many though and that’s why they’re getting out.”

  “Too many? Wait, I thought you were talking about a couple of them. How many does he have?” Well, that answers Veronica’s question about why he keeps going back down there, he thought.

  Maria stared intently at her empty bowl. “I wasn’t supposed to go down there. It was an accident that I saw them, I promise. I don’t want any bad things to happen to Mr. Edward; he’s nice and has kept all the boys away from me, except Claw. He tried to do things to me, so I beat him up.”

  Aeric wondered how she made the connection between emasculating the would-be rapist and “beating him up.” It might have something to do with her mind protecting her from the reality of what could have happened if she hadn’t fought back.

  Veronica cleared her throat and asked, “So, Edward Huerta is breeding demonbrocs in the tunnels under the city for meat?”

  Maria nodded her head. “Oh sure. They make them fight too, that’s how a couple of them escaped. They were betting on which ones would win and they got out. I was hiding up in the rafters and saw the fight.”

  Shit, Aeric thought. If they were betting—he assumed either food rations or ammunition, both were used as currency these days—it was likely that other citizens were involved, not just the residents of the Barrio. You can only trade so much amongst yourselves before it became stagnant. The residents worked all across the city, they could easily have been bringing select individuals to the fights. How had the police who patrolled the Barrio missed it?

  “Maria, do the police officers who work inside the Barrio know about the demonbrocs?”

  “Oh, the police don’t come into the Barrio,” she uttered. “Mr. Edward pays them in meat to stay away and we take care of things ourselves.”

  Once again, her revelations about what was currently happening rocked Aeric. They’d get to the girl’s future predictions soon enough. First, he had to take care of the here and now. He thought back to the police reports from the Barrio. It seemed like he got one every few days and the officers who “patrolled” that neighborhood constantly dragged Huerta in front of the magistrate. Was it all an elaborate ruse to keep him in the sewers so he could further his business? Aeric wondered how he could have been so stupid.

  “Do you know who else goes to the fights or gets meat?” he asked.

  “No, I only saw the fights that one time. I know that the boys deliver meat all over the city, though.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Aeric muttered. That meant it was a systematic problem, not an isolated event or two—and confirmed his fear that it was spread across the city, not just to the residents of the Barrio. The demonbrocs multiplied much faster than the goats that he’d brought in for the same purposes, so it made sense that people would try to breed them for meat. It was just colossally stupid.

  He let his simmering anger subside. There was nothing that Maria could do about Edward Huerta and his collection of crooks. He would definitely have a talk with the police officers and the Barrio’s chief degenerate to put a stop to it immediately.

  For now, he wanted to talk to Maria about Veronica’s nightmares, the girl’s visions, and what she called ‘The Birds.’ If there were any truth behind the idea that the Vultures were still out there, he sure as hell wanted to know about it.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to Huerta—Mr. Edward,” he amended. “We’ll get to the bottom of things and find out what’s going on. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Maria. I would have been walking the walls looking for holes or ways over for weeks without any luck.”

  She stared blankly at him with her strange eyes. “Ahem, well… Veronica, has been having some dreams,” Aeric began.

  Veronica adjusted her chair and the loud scrape of its wooden legs across the tile ran up his spine like a cold winter blast that caused him to shiver. “Let’s talk about your Gift, Maria.”

  SEVEN

  Captain Griffith looked up to see Shooter Joseph come through the door to her office. She cinched the strap on her bag down tight and then used the side of her desk to surreptitiously help herself up. Her features remained controlled and blank while she looked at the newcomer. There was no way that she’d let one of the young guys see that her old body was stiff just from packing her backpack with supplies.

  She laughed to herself. Before the collapse of the old world, she wouldn
’t have batted an eye at facing life at fifty. Now, with a serious lack of diversity in their diets and all the multivitamins long gone, her body felt like she’d been beaten repeatedly. Standing for too long hurt her, then again, too much sitting was painful as well.

  Thirty-five years ago, she was a young, married lieutenant in the US Army, intent on getting out as soon as her five year commitment was up. Then the Vultures initiated World War Three and destroyed the future of mankind. Her husband was killed, along with everyone else she knew, when Fort Hood was obliterated by a small-yield nuke.

  She made her way to San Angelo with her platoon and joined up with the Air Force commander at Goodfellow Air Force Base. Her team made do for a little while under the Air Force as guards on the gates, then eventually separated to form the nucleus of the Shooters, an organization that worked directly for the city’s mayor. The Shooters were a hybrid of police SWAT and an army infantry platoon, tasked with keeping the wastelands surrounding San Angelo safe. Over time, the commander of the base died and the military base was annexed into San Angelo. The Shooters took over one of the buildings near the walls that cut off the runway and expanded operations to be in charge of both the ground defense area and manning the gates.

  Lorelei Griffith promoted herself from lieutenant to captain as the commander of the Shooters and established several platoons with lieutenants in charge of each. She’d become more of an administrator than an operator after that, only going out on operations sparingly. She was in the final preparation stage of an operation now.

  Aeric stopped by in the morning to discuss operations beyond the San Angelo defense area and to borrow a Shooter to escort him into the Barrio. She’d been as surprised as he’d been when they started looking through the patrol reports. While it hadn’t been five years like he thought, it had been more than two years since they’d conducted a patrol outside of the immediate area around the city. That was way too long, she told herself.