The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  Then, he realized what he needed to do. The answer was right in front of him in the housewares section. It would be so simple. It wouldn’t take much in her current state. It was the humane way to do it. “I’m so sorry that this happened to you, uh, Kami,” he said as he read the name tag pinned to her deflated chest.

  Aeric reached over and grabbed a throw pillow off the shelf in front of him. It was a ridiculously happy, fuzzy, purple pillow with pink flowers and butterflies, meant for a little girl’s room. He adjusted his leg so he could use it as a stable base and lifted her higher.

  He looked into her eyes and whispered to try and comfort her. “You’re going to a better place, Kami. Somewhere where the pain will end and you’ll always be happy. I wish I could have met you before all of this. You’re an amazing person and everything will be over in a few seconds. Goodbye, Kami.”

  In truth, he didn’t know if she was an amazing person, whether she’d been nice or if she’d been mean and spiteful, but it made him feel better to tell her those things before he killed her. He placed the pillow on her face and pressed down hard over her mouth and nose, all the while whispering into her ear that she was going to a better place and how sorry he was.

  Kami didn’t have enough energy to fight him and it didn’t take long for her to die. Her soul fled quickly from the ruined body that it had been trapped in for the past week. Aeric cursed the people responsible for this. It didn’t matter if the Vultures had initiated the attack by hacking into the nuclear network. The governments of the world had developed the weapons that did this. They were ultimately to blame for what happened and he was glad that they’d blasted each other into oblivion.

  Aeric moved his legs and gently set her lifeless body on the concrete floor. As an afterthought, he put the pillow under her head like she was resting, instead of lying dead on a Walmart floor after a week of suffering unimaginable pain and loneliness. He didn’t know anything about her, but he knew that she didn’t deserve what had happened to her. He opened a package of bedsheets and covered her with it in a final, futile show of respect for her death.

  He walked woodenly over to where Tyler made noise in the hardware area. He’d taken a cart from someone and had a small pile of gear in the basket. “Alright, let’s do this and leave. This place is evil,” Aeric muttered.

  Tyler looked up at him and nodded curtly in understanding of what Aeric had done. “Sorry, man. We can’t save everybody.”

  He surveyed Tyler’s haul. He’d found the painter’s masks that they desperately needed for defense against the radiation and ash particles suspended in the air. There were three full-face respirators and three boxes of filters. The masks were awesome because they didn’t have the small eye goggles like the military masks that Lorelei’s platoon wore. The entire face shield was hard, clear plastic, which would eliminate the glaring blind spot issues inherent in the military version of the masks. They also didn’t look as heavy or bulky. Then again, the military masks were designed for prolonged use in a nuclear, chemical or biological environment, whereas the respirators were designed to keep airborne paint particles out of painters’ lungs.

  Aeric started to set the third mask back on the shelf thinking that Tyler had gotten it for Kami, but decided better of it and put it back in the cart. They might run across another survivor somewhere who needed one or they might even need to replace their own if it got damaged. He searched the shelf and grabbed another mask and box of filters.

  “Whoa, where do you think we’re gonna store all this stuff?”

  “I had an idea,” Aeric responded. “Let’s go to the sporting goods section and get two of those pull-behind carts for the bikes. We can put a lot of gear and supplies in them.”

  “You mean like those little trailers that people put their kids in to pull behind them?”

  “Yeah, one of those,” he answered. “If we take advantage of the empty store here, we could get a few weeks’ worth of supplies and not have to risk going into another store for a long time.”

  “That would be helpful. We could set up, like, bug out bags in case we need to run quickly…” Tyler trailed off in thought. “We’d lose some speed hauling all that weight behind us and probably some maneuverability, but yeah, I think it’s a great idea. Being in that Walmart in Corsicana was one of the scariest moments of my life. The less time we can spend in places like that, the better.”

  Aeric pumped his fist in the air and said, “Awesome!”

  “We should set them up in here, where it’s been shielded from a lot of the radioactive fallout. Plus, there will be tools here that we’ll need.”

  They pushed their cart over to the sporting goods section and walked down the aisle. There were only two of the bicycle carts left on the shelf, which was all that they needed. The boxes were heavy, but they were able to maneuver them out to the larger back aisle where there was a little more light from the opaque skylights above.

  They retrieved their bikes from outside and over the course of the next two hours, they put both carts together. One was red, the other yellow, and they both had reflective tape all over them. A few cans of black spray paint from the hardware section made quick work of that problem though and soon they were ready to continue shopping.

  They added a lot more everyday equipment to their shopping cart that they never would have thought about without the added carrying capacity of the bicycle carts. Tyler found four bicycle locks which they could use to lock all of their tires to the bikes for the night, which would help to avoid the theft of their gear. He also added a set of medium-duty bolt cutters so they could cut locks if they needed to. Two smaller backpacks, two pistol holsters, several coiled lengths of rope, four tarps, a camouflaged rain coat for each of them, two tire pumps, more spray paint, padlocks with matching keys for the trailers, two collapsible fishing poles with some lures, a shotgun that promptly got the barrel sawn off with a hacksaw and then filed down, and lots of ammunition rounded out their shopping list in the sporting goods section.

  They’d done a good job of getting the essentials in the camping section of the first store that they’d visited, so they didn’t need much more. However, both men looked wistfully at the hunting bows. The silence that they offered would be nearly unbeatable, too bad neither of them had ever learned to shoot. Aeric had tried several times as a kid in high school gym class. The bowstring had constantly hit his forearm and he didn’t like it, so he stopped taking the class. His coach tried to get him to use a forearm guard, but he’d already decided to quit so it hadn’t made any difference. Nothing could be done about it now.

  They picked up a can opener on the way towards the food section and once again, the smell of rotting vegetables and soured dairy products assailed them. Aeric opened his respirator mask and put it on. Amazingly, the smell almost disappeared completely behind the mask. He gave Tyler a thumbs up and his friend followed suit.

  Behind the masks, the world seemed distant, like they were insulated from the dangers it posed. Their ears were still uncovered, so hearing was unimpeded, but the face shield would keep the floating ash—likely radioactive—away from their eyes and help to keep them from breathing it in. Once they bundled back up in some clothing, they’d be able to keep their skin mostly covered and they should be fairly well insulated against the worst of the radiation particles as long as there weren’t any more missiles.

  “I think we’ll be good to go now,” Aeric said. His voice sounded detached from his body. It was a strange sensation because he heard how he normally sounded in his head, while simultaneously hearing the muffled words from behind the mask.

  “You sound funny,” Tyler laughed.

  “So do you!” he responded and then examined the signs hanging above the grocery aisles. “Ok, canned goods are this way.”

  “Got it, let’s get as much of the stuff as we can fit in the carts and then get a few changes of clothes, and then we’ll get out of here.”

  “Aren’t the clothes gonna have radiation on t
hem too?” Aeric asked. He was fine with the jackets and gloves that they’d picked up, but those weren’t next to his skin. Did the fabric retain the radiation that had killed these people?

  “I don’t know,” Tyler admitted. “The killing radiation that a nuke emits immediately has a half-life of a few seconds. The other types of radiation that stick around for a long time are distributed through fallout. Since we’re inside a sealed building, there shouldn’t be any of that other type of radiation.”

  Aeric regarded his friend. The guy had obviously watched way too much television. “Okay, we can pick up some clothes for temporary use and then go to a clothing store somewhere down the road. A place that only sells clothes will probably not be as dangerous as a grocery store.”

  “Yeah, okay. Food first, then the clothes?” Tyler asked. Aeric nodded in agreement and they turned down the canned goods aisle.

  They picked out canned vegetables, canned meats and more of the canned pastas that they’d grown sick of. As long as they wiped the lids to ensure no accidental radiation transfer, they would be fine with the contents of the cans. They piled the carts full of more canned goods than they thought they could eat in several months, but they both knew that the future was uncertain and that they needed to take advantage of the empty store and take everything that they could. Thankfully, the water filters that they’d picked up in Corsicana made it so they didn’t have to pile the carts with heavy cases of water, just extra filters for the tubes.

  Finally, they grabbed some changes of clothing, focusing where they could on fabrics that were sealed or covered in plastic. When they were done, the carts easily weighed the same as each of them, essentially doubling the weight that they’d be forced to carry on the bikes. The extra weight was worth it, though, to avoid the constant need to raid grocery stores for supplies. The less interaction that they had with people in the near future, the better off they’d be.

  A few quick adjustments of some nuts and bolts on their bikes and they had the carts firmly attached. Aeric decided to keep the few tools that they’d used for the job so they could disconnect the trailers if they needed to. He also thought they needed some type of quick disconnect system so they could ditch the carts in a hurry, but he was stumped as to how to do it. They had a couple of weeks to think about it as they rode, so maybe something would come to him on the road.

  They hopped on their bikes and began to pedal. It was tough to get the heavy contraption moving initially, but once it was rolling, it wasn’t too much of an effort on the flat surface of the parking lot. Aeric knew that when they made it to the mountains, it would be a different story and the simple mountain bikes that they rode would struggle to pull all that weight. He thought they’d likely end up pushing the bikes on the long, curving uphill slopes and riding them down the backsides into the valleys.

  Looking back on it, he’d been foolish to believe that they could make it to Missouri and back in two days when he left Veronica’s apartment. Of course, they had no way to know that there would be a nuclear war that fried all of the electronics across America, but he should have thought about the likely shortage of fuel. So much had happened in only a week since he’d left her that he felt like he’d been a child back then.

  He didn’t feel like he was a hardened killer, but he hadn’t hesitated to shoot those men in Corsicana either, and he sure as hell would have fought with Tim to make it around Tyler instead of being turned away. He’d even killed Kami, although that was an act of mercy, not one of anger, he told himself. Aeric hoped that he hadn’t gone too far down the path towards chaos to return. Surely the madness would cease and then the world would need people who weren’t completely consumed by it to help rebuild society

  *****

  “Stop!” she screamed to her driver as their Humvee topped the hill and almost slammed into a car resting on its roof sideways across the highway. Lieutenant Lorelei Griffith stared in shock at the devastation that used to be her home. Her platoon was still fifteen miles from the Killeen/Fort Hood area, but they knew that there was nothing left of her base except for the swirls of ash that obscured her view into the valley below.

  Her little convoy of vehicles skidded to a halt behind her and one by one, her soldiers began to step out of their vehicles to see the wreckage for themselves. They were still too far away to tell the extent of the damage for certain. But she knew that her husband was dead, her neighbors and their families were gone—vaporized in an instant. She’d prepared herself for it while they sat on that goddamned checkpoint. However, seeing it with her own eyes was like some cosmic asshole was tearing the bandages off of her emotional wounds and she began crying again.

  The general lay of the land had the installation in a large bowl, which must have stopped the worst of the bomb’s blast pressure from making it far. She thought back to the mandatory classes that she’d been subjected to in ROTC back at Wisconsin University and decided that the base must have been hit with a small-yield ground burst. It would have wiped out everything in the immediate area of the impact, but the ground burst meant that terrain had a much greater effect on how far the damage would spread.

  Her platoon, 1st Platoon, Bravo Company from the 115th Brigade Support Battalion, had sat at the checkpoint for more than a week after the one-day war that had killed millions, possibly billions, before she decided that they’d followed orders long enough and packed up the checkpoint. They’d only seen a few people since the war, and no military traffic whatsoever on the interstate, so they’d completed their mission.

  During the week, her communications sergeant was able to determine the reason that their hardened military radios still worked, but weren’t able to communicate with anyone. The explosions had knocked out all the communications relays in the area, so they couldn’t talk beyond their line of sight—which basically meant that all they could do was talk to each other and didn’t have any further instructions than what she’d been given almost a month before by her commander.

  When she made the call to leave the checkpoint that morning, it had been difficult for her. The platoon still had enough food and water on hand that they could have stayed for another week or longer if they rationed their supplies properly. She’d gathered her soldiers together and laid out the situation. She didn’t think that their higher headquarters even existed anymore and most of the troops had agreed with her. She wasn’t the only one with family at Fort Hood that had been wondering what happened to them.

  They’d been on the road the entire day. Before the war, the trip back would have taken about three hours. They were forced to travel back roads to avoid the massive pileups on the larger highways and were flagged down multiple times by people asking them if they were part of the government response to provide relief. Each time, she’d had to break the news that as far as she knew, there wasn’t a larger government response being organized. Of course, she had to caveat her answers each time with the fact that she didn’t know anything about what had happened beyond the first several detonations. Each of those had been a singularly devastating event, combined, they were catastrophic.

  What really tore at her soul was the way the population looked at her. At first, she was heralded as a savior of some type, the harbinger of salvation. Then, when they discovered that she was just as in the dark about events as they were, the men and women would stare daggers at her. On one occasion, they’d even been shot at after it was discovered that they weren’t there to provide relief.

  Lorelei pulled her protective mask away from her face and wiped the tears from her cheeks. It wouldn’t do for the troops to see her crying, regardless of her personal feelings of sadness and loss about her husband. She tried the radio uselessly for a minute, more a show for the men and women gathered around her truck than in the actual hope that they’d find anyone. After a few unsuccessful tries on multiple emergency radio frequencies and then with the radio scanning across all frequencies, she sighed and opened the heavy door on her armored Humvee. It was time to face her
platoon and decide what they were going to do.

  “Alright, Bulldogs, gather round,” she called out. Her platoon sergeant shouted out her orders so all could hear. She waited while everyone except two men from the rear truck who were on security formed a semicircle around the hood of her Humvee.

  “It’s as bad as we thought it would be,” she started. “We figured that there wouldn’t be much left of the base since we hadn’t heard anything from them. Well, it looks like there’s nothing left.

  “I know that about half of us had families either on post or in the community. There’s no way—” She took a ragged breath to steady herself before continuing. “There’s no way that they survived…that.”

  Lieutenant Griffith gestured weakly over her shoulder towards the bowl below them. “It looks like Fort Hood got hit with a ground burst nuke, which means all of this shit in the air is probably radioactive, so keep your gear on.”

  One of her soldiers made an exaggerated point of removing his mask and tossing it to the side. Private Foster’s face was beet red from crying. “Foster, put your mask back on, didn’t I just tell you that this stuff was toxic?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “My wife and kid were down there. If they’re dead, then I don’t care if I live or die.”

  “Foster, put your damn mask back on. Committing suicide won’t honor their memories,” the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Jimenez, ordered.

  “Maybe you don’t think so, Sergeant, but I do. I’m not putting that mask back on.”

  Lorelei waved her hand at her platoon sergeant and said, “It’s fine. If he wants to develop cancer and die a horribly painful death in a few weeks, let him. We need to figure out what we’re doing.”

  Sergeant Jimenez looked at the thirty soldiers assembled and then said, “I think we should drive as far into the wreckage looking for survivors as we can, ma’am. It will help the platoon feel like we did everything that we could. If we find anyone, we take them with us—wherever we’re going—and if we don’t find anyone, then be thankful that you weren’t one of the casualties in the blast.”