The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  “I read a lot, Sergeant, I think the lucky ones were the people who died right away,” Sergeant Cantrell stated.

  “Fuck you, Cantrell! That was my family down there,” Foster shouted.

  “What the fuck did you say to me, Private?” Cantrell yelled back.

  “At ease, both of you!” Sergeant Jimenez thundered. “Tensions are high, I get it. We all lost friends and family, if not here at Hood, then probably back home as well. There ain’t shit that we can do about it right now, so shut your damned mouths.”

  The lieutenant waited a moment before speaking, “I’m sorry, guys. Like Sergeant Jimenez said, we’ve all lost loved ones. We’re soldiers, though, and we need to keep moving. I’ve been told about another community that might need our help. We can travel there after we search the wreckage.”

  “Oh, not that bullshit those two were trying to sell you a week ago,” Cantrell moaned.

  “Sergeant Cantrell, I swear to God, I will beat your ass in front of everyone if you don’t shut your damned pie hole,” Sergeant Jimenez threatened. “Let the lieutenant speak.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Lorelei replied. “Yeah, it’s the same place. San Angelo is a pretty small city with a small Air Force base right next to it where they train airmen on intelligence gathering. They may have information about what the status of the nation is. Hell, if nothing else, it’s our duty to try and report to another military command.”

  “How do we know that they didn’t get nuked too?” one of her female soldiers asked.

  “We don’t. I hope that it’s small enough to have escaped targeting. Fort Hood was the home to America’s largest armored force, so it makes sense that it was targeted. That little Air Force base out there? I don’t know. The only thing we can do is go there and see.”

  There was some grumbling from the group, but overall, the chain of command still held firm and they mounted up in their trucks to go search for survivors before traveling further west. The drive would be slow through the valley since the devastation was complete.

  They couldn’t make it any closer than Harker Heights before the roadways became too clogged with debris and wreckage. The platoon split up—three trucks in each group—and went cross country both north and south of the main highway. Both groups returned quickly when they couldn’t make it around obstacles in their way. They backtracked as a group and tried several other roads to get closer to the base, but everything was hopelessly blocked.

  Their search for survivors, even on the perimeter of the devastation, proved to be useless. They saw lots of bodies. Some of them crushed, twisted and generally mangled beyond belief, all of them were burned from the massive fireball that must have spread outwards from the blast. After several hours of witnessing the carnage, Lieutenant Griffith finally called off the search and directed the platoon to head back east so they could work their way around the blast zone outside of the valley.

  The platoon suffered its first casualty as Private Foster abandoned his truck and ran westward into the wreckage to search for his family. They tried to call him back, but he was gone and Lorelei had to make the hard decision to leave him so they could move out of what was surely a heavily contaminated area.

  It was a tough choice to abandon the disturbed soldier, one that made her sick to her stomach. It was a vital decision, though. She wanted her troops to know that the safety of the entire platoon was more important to her than one individual. It was a lesson that she would rely on in the coming days as the discipline in her platoon threatened to tear the organization apart in the wasteland.

  EIGHT

  The miles disappeared rapidly on their first travel day after they made camp a few miles from the Red River Army Depot. Southeastern Arkansas along Highway 41 was mostly flat, resembling its southern neighbor until they reached the town of De Queen and got onto Highway 71 north. The terrain began to change slowly. The long, gently-rising foothills told them that they’d soon be in the mountains.

  De Queen was small, only about a mile across in the main section of the town. Highway 71 took them through the smaller eastern side of town, but Aeric could feel the eyes of the survivors in town watching him. The streets were vacant and silent, there weren’t even any dogs barking as they rode by the abandoned buildings. When they passed a large construction supply store, all hell broke loose as people started shooting at them.

  They put their heads down and pedaled as fast as they could. They only had to sprint for a block before buildings obscured them from the view of those shooting at them from the construction building. Thankfully, the people hadn’t given chase and they continued on unmolested through the quiet town.

  Running quickly through an ambush was a technique that Aeric’s uncle had told him that they used in Iraq and Afghanistan when they got hit by an IED or ambushed. Leaving the area in a hurry made the most sense instead of trying to stop, seek cover and engaging in a pitched gun battle with people who knew the local area better than you did. Plus, they could have booby trapped the sides of the road, so it was best to high-tail it out of the area.

  An hour’s ride past town, they found an old forest road off of Highway 71 and made camp in the tree line. They marveled that neither of them had been hit. The people at the construction yard must have been interested in scaring them off rather than causing any real damage, otherwise they would have been riddled with bullet holes at that close distance.

  After De Queen, they decided that it was best to keep a watch at night instead of both sleeping at the same time. It was inconvenient, but a necessary requirement after their long days of riding. They could always rest longer and leave an hour later each morning since they weren’t on anyone’s timeline other than their own. Arriving in Springfield a few hours later likely wouldn’t make any difference.

  The terrain became rougher with each mile they traveled past De Queen. The inclines were shallow enough to keep the men from walking their bicycles, but the change in elevation was enough to leave them heaving for breath by the end of each stretch. The painters’ masks didn’t help either. They’d considered them a godsend when they found them. Full face shield, double filters, easy to don and doff. Now they hated them. The filters that blocked out the harmful ash—whether radioactive or not—also made it difficult to breathe and it was especially difficult to take deep breaths when they exerted themselves on the uphill climbs.

  Over the next few days, their daily mileage decreased, but they still made much better time than they would have without the bicycles. They’d done a decent job of avoiding towns until they came to Mena. They spent a full thirty minutes pouring over their well-worn road atlas to see if they could skirt the city. Nothing presented itself that didn’t involve either miles of backtracking or routing them through potentially bigger cities, so they decided to follow the highway through town.

  Mena wasn’t a large city, maybe four miles across with a prewar population of about six thousand people. Their route took them directly through the heart of town with buildings pressed up close alongside the road. De Queen had been a larger city than Mena, but they’d been able to avoid the majority of the town’s structures and population by staying on the highway. After the near disaster there, they weren’t excited about the prospect of going into the city during the daytime.

  They timed it so they’d break camp and travel through town at first light in order to try to avoid most of the residents. Their hope was that people would be slow getting around in the mornings without the use of alarm clocks. Aeric had the final watch that night and spent his time filling pockets with ammunition and rechecking bolts and straps on the two pull-behind carts. When he thought the dawn was about fifteen minutes away, he woke Tyler and they took down the tent.

  Once the tent was tied to the top of Tyler’s cart, Aeric looked at his friend and asked, “Are you ready for this, bro?”

  Tyler pulled the pistol from the shoulder harness that he’d picked up at the Walmart in New Boston and pulled the slide back slightly to ens
ure that a round was in the chamber. Then he slid it back home in the nylon pocket and snapped the strap across it. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”

  Aeric gripped the big man’s hand and shook it firmly. He wanted to say something about Tyler’s steadfast loyalty and how the man didn’t need to follow him on his quest to find his parents. The words wouldn’t come and seemed much too fatalistic. Instead, he nodded his head, dipping his chin sharply and then got on his bike. Maybe one day Aeric would be able to tell Tyler how much his companionship meant to him.

  They pedaled out from their campsite, easing the bikes with their carts onto the pavement. Within minutes, they passed a sign telling them that they were entering the city limits of Mena. They increased their pace to go faster than they normally would have, although not at such a breakneck pace that they couldn’t stop if they had to.

  They began to head steadily uphill once again, minor buildings passed by alongside the road with long-abandoned cars in the parking lots. The first of the detonations had happened sometime in the late morning, so it made sense that there’d been cars already at the various businesses after they’d opened. Their pace slowed considerably as they pedaled hard against the weight of their overloaded carts and Aeric’s sense of dread that something would happen increased.

  Eventually, they made the top of the rise and their bikes began to pick up speed as the road stretched before them at a downward angle. They had to use their brakes liberally to veer around cars that had stalled in the road and been left for eternity where they’d died. They made extremely good time on the downhill and the buildings thinned out, causing them to believe that they’d made it through the city unscathed.

  By the time the road had leveled out again, they realized that they weren’t out of town yet as another Walmart loomed off the road to the left and a squat, ugly strip mall sat on the right side. Cars had been pushed across the entrances and exits of the Walmart parking lot along the highway, effectively ringing the front of the building in steel.

  White bed sheets were spread across the sides of the cars every few feet. They’d been spray painted with the words, “GO AWAY!” and phrases like, “OUR SUPPLIES, YOU WILL BE SHOT!” It was more than enough to cause Aeric to nearly panic at the thought of being stuck out in the open once again.

  Then his worst fears were realized as the pavement three feet in front of his lead tire splintered upwards and the distinctive ping of a round ricocheting echoed into the stillness of the early morning. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted as he buried the pedals.

  More rounds hit close to them, carving long, straight divots from the pavement perpendicular to the Walmart. The thousand feet of highway along the front of the store where they could be seen was the most scared that Aeric had been in a while, even more so than when he and Tyler had snuck out of Veronica’s apartment to kill the band of thugs in the parking lot.

  When they finally cleared the line of sight, they passed another construction supply center on the left and his sphincter tightened once again. “Keep going!” he gasped as he tried to suck in air through the respirator’s thick filters and continued the fast pace to get out of town as quickly as possible.

  Soon, they came to the long, northward curve in the road that Aeric knew from their map recon to be the actual end of the town. He allowed himself to slow the bicycle down to his steady and sustainable pace while his heart hammered in his ears, threatening to pound his brain into mush.

  They passed a few small houses and some type of medical park and finally Tyler said, “I could hear them. Those assholes were laughing at us.”

  Aeric glanced over at his friend. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, they were laughing like hyenas. I don’t think they were trying to kill us. They could have nailed us with the rifles they were using. I think they were trying to have fun with us and fuck with our heads.”

  The thought of a bunch of drunk rednecks taking pot shots at them from the roof of the building infuriated him. What was the point of shooting at people? What purpose could it possibly serve other than pissing people off and starting a war? He certainly was mad enough to turn around and sneak up on them from the side. They could kill them all before they even knew that they’d been duped.

  “Not worth it, man.”

  “Huh?” Aeric asked.

  “I can tell what you’re thinking. It’s not worth it. Let’s just get away from this place and leave them behind. They did their job of making us go away, we survived. It’s a win-win and we should count our blessings that nobody was hurt—on our side or theirs.”

  He took a moment to regain his composure and let his blood pressure drop while he pedaled slowly. “Okay, you’re right. I’m just having a hard time getting used to the messed up world that we’re living in.”

  “It is a fucked up situation, isn’t it?”

  Aeric decided that if they weren’t going back, then he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “What’s our next turn?”

  “Hell, we’ve got thirty or forty miles to go,” Tyler replied. He stuck his hand inside the flap of his jacket and pulled out the Arkansas map that he’d folded to their little area so he could look at it while they rode. “We probably won’t make it today, looks like the terrain begins to get really mountainous soon.”

  “Tell me about it,” Aeric muttered as the peaks of the Ouachita Mountains loomed ahead.

  “Okay, I was wrong,” Tyler muttered as he slowed his pedaling to a crawl and brought the map up close to his face. “We’re gonna turn off of Two Seventy-One in about, what, twelve miles? We’ll turn left onto Seventy-One towards Fort Smith and then we’ll turn right on Two Fifty. That will take us as far as my map fold can show without stopping.”

  “So we’ve got a ways to go still, right?”

  Tyler chuckled, “Yeah, think of it as Coach Harris’ rapid weight loss plan.”

  Thinking about their baseball coach, who was likely deceased now, made him sad. There was a possibility that he was still alive though, since he lived in Austin and besides the gang violence, the city had survived relatively unscathed. It probably wouldn’t stay that way, though. There were too many people and not enough food to go around. It had been over a week, so even the most timid residents were probably fighting for resources to keep their families safe and fed.

  The line of thinking about the state of affairs in Austin made him wonder about Veronica. Was she alright? When they left, she had enough food and liquids to last her several weeks if she rationed her supplies like he’d recommended. Had her father come to the city from San Angelo to take her back home like she was convinced that he would? Obviously, he wouldn’t know and he longed for the capability to simply pick up a phone and call. That would have made everything so much simpler.

  Of course, that also brought up the issue with San Angelo. Veronica had made it seem like the perfect place and a location that they’d be able to possibly go to for safety as time wore on, however, if she was gone and didn’t vouch for them, would they be turned away? Like the setup in Tyler, if San Angelo was secured, they’d likely have guards far from the town to keep the vagrants away.

  Vagrant. A wanderer. Was that what they’d become? The two of them were on a fools’ errand across the lower half of the country to ensure that his parents were alright. What did he expect after that? He didn’t know if his parents would be willing to leave their home to make the return trip with him and he sure as hell didn’t plan on staying in Missouri with all the nuclear winter stuff that Tyler talked about.

  He didn’t have many of the answers that he sought. What he did have was a bicycle and cart, a good companion and a long way to travel, so for now, he would have to be content with making it through each day, and deal with events as they came.

  *****

  The days flew by as they struggled up the rough Ouachita Mountains and then once they were past those, the Ozark Mountain Range loomed ahead. Battling the mountains took a constant physical toll on their bodies. The uphill stretches were br
utal and they often had to push their bikes until the crest in the road. The downhill jaunts were terrifying as the overloaded carts threatened to tip over at the speeds that they traveled.

  Aeric was concerned about the brakes, they’d been abused on the mountain roads and he wasn’t sure that they had enough padding left to be effective. The combined weight of each man and his cart were easily pushing five hundred pounds. The brands of bike that they sold at the Walmart where Tyler had picked them up were never designed for that kind of weight or sustained use. They needed to switch out the bikes with newer ones and they got their opportunity in Eureka Springs.

  The northern Arkansas tourist town of Eureka Springs was famous for the quaint Victorian style houses that had been built there in the 1800’s. The entire town had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places before the war. Everywhere they looked as they topped the final hill that led down to the city had an older home or brick business. Capping it all off was a massive white hotel on the top of a hill overlooking the city below. It was the picture-perfect postcard town and Aeric could imagine that the city was experiencing its first snowfall as they gazed down instead of the ash that drifted from the sky.

  It was easy to believe that the city was harmless as they looked down on it from the ridgeline. Maybe it was the way it reminded them of what an older American town was supposed to look like, a glimpse into the past before all the modern inconveniences that were now useless pieces of junk. The Victorian village set against the brilliantly colored fall leaves was breathtaking.

  They were ready for a break. They’d been relatively alone for over two weeks and most everyone that they’d ran across had tried to kill them. Surely not everyone in the world was crazy, right? Aeric hoped. Hell, it might have simply been the fact that the town had been spared the massive amounts of ash that covered most everywhere else that they’d been.