The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  They turned north on Guadalupe and walked up the block towards the gas station. As they neared it, gunshots rang out from somewhere close. They dove behind a set of two trash cans that sat on the corner across from the gas station. “What the hell was that?” Tyler asked.

  “Gunfire!” Aeric replied and unzipped the bag on Tyler’s shoulder. He pulled out the bat and one of the shoes then zipped it back up.

  Two men ran out of the store with a garbage bag and hopped into a car sitting in front of the building. The tires squealed as they fled the scene of the robbery. “Oh, geez,” Ty said. “You think they killed somebody in there?”

  “I don’t know—maybe?” Aeric responded. “Let’s go and see if anyone needs our help.”

  They ran across the street to the store and Aeric yelled through the open door. “Anybody hurt in there? We’re here to help!”

  No one answered, so they rushed inside and stumbled upon a scene that would soon become commonplace to both of them. The store’s single employee lay slumped over the counter. It looked like they’d gone around the counter and shot him behind the ear. The small bullet hole belied the damage to his face when the round exited. Blood dripped slowly towards the floor and pooled where customers usually stood in front of the counter. The cash register drawer was open and empty. The man had been killed for a couple hundred bucks.

  Tyler turned his head from the grisly scene while Aeric went up to feel for a pulse. As he pressed his fingers against the employee’s throat, the body slid backwards into the employee area and the man’s brown eyes, surrounded by some slightly yellowed whites, stared lifelessly at Aeric.

  He considered what they should do for a moment. The phones didn’t work and they hadn’t seen any police officers since the truck that killed Amber that first night. Everything clicked in Aeric’s mind; they were on their own, with no place to live and Austin was now a dangerous city with no police presence. They needed food and shelter—and possibly weapons.

  He reached across the bloody counter and yanked several plastic bags away. “Ty, start grabbing the canned food and bottled water.”

  His roommate looked at him like he was crazy. “You want to rob this place, too?”

  “Everything in here will be gone by morning. We’re just the first ones on the scene.”

  “That’s not how I was raised, man. That dude died in here, we need to find the cops.”

  Aeric slammed his hand down on the counter and blood splattered outwards in all directions. “Shit,” he muttered and used the magazines to wipe away the blood. “Ty, this is a really bad situation that we’re in. Austin isn’t safe and we need to leave. Hell, for all we know, the entire country is falling apart, what with the riots, the hackers and the gangs. There are dead bodies in the street, piled up and forgotten. No one gives a fuck about anyone else right now. We need to take care of ourselves. That means food, water and shelter, the three basic necessities of life. Either get that through your head or we’re done and I’m taking off without you.”

  Tyler continued to stare at him for several seconds as the wheels turned in his head. “Fuck it. Alright, what are you getting?”

  “Cigarettes,” Aeric replied and hurried around the counter.

  “What?”

  Aeric reached overhead and began pulling cartons down. “These things are going to be like currency soon, man. Fill your bags with all the canned food and water that you can hold. Maybe we’ll be able to use the cigarettes to pay for a ride out of the city.”

  Tyler nodded and began grabbing canned food off the shelf and putting it into his bag. “Hey, grab toothbrushes and toothpaste too!” Aeric recommended while he continued to pull down cigarettes from the sales rack above the counter.

  The clink of cans going into Tyler’s bat bag was almost drowned out by several other people rushing through the doorway. Aeric searched the counter for some type of weapon and only found the large plastic spatula that had the bathroom key attached to it. He sighed and hefted the cleat above his head. Tyler was more prepared and placed the bat on his shoulder so he could level one of the men if it came to it.

  “Hey, we don’t want any trouble!” one of them said as he glanced at all of the blood and then back at Tyler’s massive figure. “We just want some food, too, man.”

  Tyler glanced over at Aeric for instructions. He shrugged and continued grabbing the cigarettes while keeping an eye on the newcomers, who’d gone to the chip and cracker aisle. The bat slowly lowered and Tyler started shoving more food into the bag. Once he’d gotten about sixty cans of the gas station fare—mostly variations of pasta and meat sauce—he went to the refrigerated section and opened up the glass door to get water.

  Aeric came around the corner once again and grabbed two cheap drawstring backpacks from a display. He pushed the plastic bags into the packs and crammed the rest of it full with packaged beef jerky and some cookies. “Ready?” he asked Tyler.

  “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked confidently, quickly, out of the store and hooked around the building towards the west on 26th Street. At the next intersection, they took Nueces Street north. “Holy shit!” Aeric finally said. “Can you believe that just happened?”

  “I thought that we were going to get in a fight for sure.”

  “If things stay like this, it will probably get to that pretty soon. Right now, people are concerned about staying safe while they wait for the cops to show up.” He lifted the shoe and stated, “We need better weapons.”

  “Wait, we’re not leaving town?” Tyler asked in misunderstanding.

  “Yeah, we’re getting out of here, but we have a long trip ahead of us. Austin is a big town and we’ve got a long drive back to Missouri. That’s about twelve hours in the best conditions. Right now, I’m not sure how clear those roads are.”

  They had only gone north two blocks when the street lights at the corner of 28th and Nueces flickered and then died, plunging the intersection into darkness. Aeric peered as far down both sets of streets as far as he could see and was met with total darkness. Far to the southeast, the clouds that hung low over the city glowed orange with the many fires that burned freely in the conflict zone.

  “Shit,” Tyler muttered. “Looks like we just lost power.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Aeric asked.

  “It means that we need to get off the street and find someplace to hole up for the night. I don’t want to be out here in the dark without any real weapons.”

  “Uh, so where are we supposed to go?”

  They looked around, it was too dark to see much of anything though. Aeric thought he saw the dim outline of buildings and said, “I think there’s as set of apartments to the northeast, along Guadalupe.”

  “Fine by me. How are we gonna get inside though?”

  “Knock? I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when we get there.” Aeric was beginning to wonder if Tyler was up to the task of traveling across the country. His size alone was extremely intimidating and that was a huge advantage, but he didn’t seem to want to make any decisions on his own. He seemed content to follow Aeric’s directions. Aeric didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing.

  As they jogged down 28th Street, the apartments that Aeric had vaguely seen loomed into view. Another set was off to the north, it was slightly taller with a total of seven floors instead of the five floors of the building that stood directly in front of them.

  Gunshots rang out nearby, followed by several more. “We should probably try the taller building right there,” Aeric said as he gestured towards the northern building. “There are more floors, so at the very least we could probably sleep in a stairwell.”

  Tyler nodded and said, “God, this sucks.”

  The apartment complex that they’d chosen had retail stores on the bottom floor and apartments above them. It took some work to find the door leading into the building due to the near total darkness of the cloudy night, but they finally found a glass door that opened.
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  “I don’t know how secure this is,” Aeric admitted. Now that they were on their way into the building, he was already beginning to second-guess his decision.

  “Hold on,” his roommate’s voice floated from the darkness. The sound of a lock twisting into place behind him announced that Tyler had locked the deadbolt on the door. “I don’t know if that will help much, but it might stop someone who’s just checking quickly.”

  “Good idea.”

  They stumbled deeper into the hallway that presumably led to a set of stairs, trailing their hands along the wall to find an opening. Aeric bumped into a small table and something glass fell to the floor, shattering and filling the small space with the boom of the initial explosion and then the tinkling of glass as the pieces skidded across the tile.

  “We need to find weapons and a damned flashlight,” Aeric hissed. He was so mad at his clumsiness that he could have punched the wall—an unfortunate habit that he used to have in high school. A broken hand and loss of an entire summer of training had cured him of it, though.

  “Hey, I’ve got something over here,” Tyler said excitedly.

  Aeric pushed away from the wall that he’d been following and felt his way blindly across the open space as glass crunched underneath his shoes. “What is it?”

  “A door. I don’t know if it goes to the stairwell though.”

  There was a locked handle that snapped off after three solid hits from Tyler’s aluminum baseball bat. Through feel and trial and error, they were able to push out the handle on the other side and open the latch. More blind groping confirmed that they’d found the stairwell.

  “I think we need to secure this door behind us,” Tyler whispered.

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “There was an upholstered chair on my side. We could put that up against the door.”

  The heavy chair was better than nothing. They maneuvered it through the doorway and used it as a weight to keep the door closed. Again, the only thing that they could do was to hope that a cursory inspection was all that anyone trying to get into the building would do.

  They crept up the stairs and were slightly out of breath by the time they made it all the way to the seventh floor. Thankfully, the door leading from the stairwell wasn’t locked and they slid into the hallway without making any more noise.

  “I guess we go as far away from the stairs as possible, that way, in case someone tries to break in, we’ll have some warning.”

  “Aren’t we breaking in?” Tyler asked. Aeric couldn’t see his face, but he knew the look that was likely on his friend’s face. He probably wore a smirk and the eye on the side where his mouth turned up would be squinted.

  “Yeah, okay, you’re right. We’re the good guys, though.”

  “How do you figure? We stole a shitload of food and cigarettes, broke through a locked stairwell door and now the apartments are vulnerable to someone else coming in here and robbing them…or worse.”

  He hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. He’d only been concerned with finding a place to rest for the night, not how his actions would affect the residents of the building after they left. “Shit, you’re right, Ty. I just wanted to get off the street, y’know?”

  “Yeah, man. We can’t always go around only thinking about ourselves. That door wouldn’t have stopped a determined thief, but it might have stopped some random dude walking by the apartments.”

  Down the hallway, a door creaked open and Aeric tapped Tyler on the shoulder to make him stop talking. “You hear that?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on.”

  The darkness of the hallway was complete and total. There was absolutely no light coming in through the window on the far end. They made it about fifty feet along the hallway and a door slammed shut. Aeric rushed forward and felt the slight reverberations in the next door down.

  “This is where that door was open,” he whispered to Tyler.

  “Well, are you going to knock?”

  He shrugged, and reached out to the door’s contoured metal. He pulled his hand back and used his knuckle to knock three times. The sound echoed down the hallway.

  “I’m sure this was the door,” he muttered and knocked again.

  “Go away!” a woman’s voice called from the other side of the door.

  “Please, let us in. We’re just looking for a place to sleep for the night. We won’t hurt you.”

  “I have a gun! It’s pointed right at the door.”

  *****

  Veronica Delgado searched her apartment for a weapon. There were knives in the kitchen, but the men outside would probably hear her move away from the door and use that opportunity to break in. The remote for the television was on the arm of the sofa, so she grabbed that and crammed it into the pocket on the front of her long sleeved shirt.

  The man on the other side of the door said, “Please, ma’am. We’re not looking for any trouble, we need someplace safe to stay the night and then we’ll be on our way tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, find someplace else!” Veronica said loudly, hoping her neighbors would hear the commotion. She was so pissed at herself for opening the door to see what was happening in the hallway. That was stupid. Her father always told her to stay put when the power was out. Darkness hides all sorts of deviants, like the weirdo out in the hallway who was trying to get into her apartment.

  “You’re the only person we’ve seen since the power went out,” he said.

  “You haven’t seen me,” she countered. “Get out of here before I shoot you!”

  Her voice had wavered slightly and she hoped that the door hid the sound. “We’re students at UT. Our dorm burned down a couple of days ago. Please, we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “You’re students?” she asked. That was something different. There had been a string of arsons on campus that seemed to target the dorms and some of the more well-known locations like the LBJ Library.

  “Yeah.” The guy sounded like he was offended that she’d asked.

  Veronica decided to test them. “If you go to Texas, give me the name of one of the Natural Science professors.”

  “Do you know?” the one she’d been talking to asked someone else in the hallway.

  “No, man. I didn’t have science this semester,” another voice answered.

  “We’re both freshmen, ma’am,” the first man said. “I had Sociology, Introduction to College Life, Intramural Athletics, Biology and Creative Writing. I don’t know who any of the science teachers are.”

  She peeked through the peephole and could see the shadows of two large men. On a whim, she asked, “What sport do you play?”

  “Baseball,” he answered automatically.

  Veronica smiled. She followed Texas baseball and could use this line of questioning to determine the legitimacy of the men’s claim to be students who were essentially homeless. “Who’s your first game against next spring?”

  “Texas Christian. Look, we really are students. Can we just come in?”

  “Don’t rush me, asshole. You’re lucky that I haven’t shot you yet,” she said. “What dorm do you live in?”

  “Blanton. But it burned down two nights ago,” he replied.

  “Where did you stay last night, then?”

  “The hospital. Saint David’s.”

  “Did you get burned?”

  “No, I got hit by a truck when we were chasing the arsonist.”

  “You got hit by a truck?” she asked incredulously. “Wait, did you say that you were chasing the arsonist? Did you tell the police?”

  “Yeah. We were having a small party in our suite when the Health Science building exploded and we went down to see if anyone needed any help. That’s when we saw the guy in the lobby setting fires and chased after him.”

  Veronica decided that the guy was either an outstanding liar or he was telling the truth. She turned the deadbolt, leaving the chain engaged and pulled the door open slightly. The candle burning ins
ide her apartment illuminated the hallway, revealing two big men standing on either side of her door. “How many of you are out there?”

  “Just us two.”

  “You, big guy. Come here so I can see you,” she ordered and held up her cell phone camera’s light to shine additional light into the hallway.

  The second man walked into the light from her cell phone. She looked him over and then said, “Okay, I’ve seen you on campus before.”

  “Thanks… I think,” he answered.

  “Alright, at least one of you is a student.” She glanced back at the smaller of the two and continued, “I’m not sure about you yet, but you’ve got a kind face so I’m willing to give you a shot.”

  She pushed the door closed once again and lifted the chain out of the way. As she held the door open, she reminded them, “Don’t forget, I have a gun.”

  The cute one—actually, they were both cute—looked at her hand underneath her shirt and she knew that he doubted that she really had a gun. “We really don’t mean any harm. We need a place to stay tonight and then I promise we’ll be out of your hair.” He tentatively stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Aeric. This is Ty.”

  She grasped his hand with the one that she’d had under her shirt. “Veronica… Oh, dammit! Okay, I don’t have a gun, but I do know taekwondo.”

  He released her hand and held both of his up. “I surrender! We’re going to leave the city tomorrow and just want a good night’s rest.”

  She stepped completely out of the way of the door to let them in. “Come in. My name is Veronica. I go to UT also. Pre-Med.”

  They squeezed through the half-open doorway and she quickly closed and locked the door behind them. Aeric’s gaze wandered quickly over her apartment, appraising everything in the room. One thick candle burned on the coffee table in the living room in front of a large, oversized chair that matched her blue couch. She had a modest television set and a few movies sitting on top of a DVD player underneath it. She’d been cooped up in the room since the night of the dorm fires and she hoped the place looked clean, given the circumstances.

  “Nice place,” he commented.