The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  The most serious injury was to one of his Gatherers. The man had been sitting in the rearmost seat of Tyler’s truck. He’d been shot through the side twice and once in the neck. By the time they stopped, Russ was dead. Several others had been hit as well. Thankfully, none of the other injuries were life-threatening.

  Aeric was furious. They all knew that the town was likely going to be a dangerous place. It became real when they’d been shot at, not some imagined scenario during a rehearsal back at the Provisions Warehouse. Although about half of their missions to the various food storage points had resulted in a shootout of some kind, it had been months since anyone flat-out tried to ambush the group. He wanted revenge.

  “Nicole, I want you to stay here with the injured and patch them up,” Aeric ordered. “Darren and Sam, you stay here to guard the trucks and help Nicole. The rest of you, drop your gear, except ammo and water. We’re gonna wipe that town off the map.”

  Tyler stepped over and whispered, “Are you sure? Our mission is to get the supplies from Garden City, not end up in a firefight in some piss-ant little town along the way.”

  Aeric thought about it for a moment, then answered, “Yeah, I’m sure, buddy. We can’t leave these fuckers behind. They killed Russ with some lucky shots as we sped through town going forty-five. What’s gonna happen when we’re all riding our bikes through here on the way back? It’s so quiet now that the sound of our trucks carries for miles. We caught them by surprise this time. You know we’ve got to put an end to them before they figure out another strategy for when we come back through.”

  Tyler nodded his head slowly. “You’re right. You usually are in these situations. You make the hard, but necessary call. Alright, let’s go.”

  The group rode their bicycles back down the highway until they were about a mile from town and then hid them off the side of the road. Since they didn’t really know the layout of the town, except for what they’d seen when they drove through, Aeric sent half his remaining force, just nine men, to the south of the main strip with Tyler and the other half stayed with him on the north side, where the ambush had originated.

  They moved into town rapidly, passing a sign announcing that the pre-apocalypse population had been eight hundred and fifty-three souls. Aeric wondered how many of those people were left alive. Probably not many since they’d been shot at by around twenty or so from the alley.

  He led his group around the first building and stumbled into a man sitting in a lawn chair under the shade of an awning. He started to bring his rifle up and stayed his hand. He smiled and slowly raised his hand away from the weapon. One of Aeric’s Gatherers slammed a spear through the watcher’s throat. He didn’t stand up and fire the gun like Aeric thought he would. Instead, he crumpled backwards into the chair and slid off, hitting the porch with a dull thud.

  Everyone fanned out quickly, expecting an attack. When it didn’t come, Aeric looked back to the man they’d killed. He wore multiple layers of clothing against the chill. Likely he was some kind of sentry on this end of town. He had some dirty brown water in a jug and a book sitting beside his post. The most interesting thing about his position was a rope that ran off towards the direction of the alley where they’d been ambushed.

  Aeric pointed at it and asked, “What do you make of that?”

  Charles, the man who’d speared the sentry, said, “I bet it leads to a bell or an alert system of some kind where the attackers are gathered.”

  Traxx nodded and grunted an affirmative. It made sense. They could post a sentry on either end of town, equip them with a means to communicate and warn the others of danger, then hide in the building. They likely didn’t have enough people to build solid fortifications and any effort would have been a waste, so this was their answer to keeping the place as secure as they could.

  “Hmm, wonder what that means?” Charles asked as he poked the body with the spear.

  “Huh?” Aeric sidestepped towards Charles so he could see what the man was pointing at. He wore a tattered Texas flag bandana around his left biceps.

  Aeric’s mind was thrust six months into the past when he, Tyler and Katie had fled from Austin. They’d all been physically and emotionally battered, nearly starving and barely hanging on, when they came across the remnants of a massive firefight. Bodies littered the highway, about half of them wearing a Texas flag bandana on their arm. They’d gladly taken the weapons and bicycles from the dead, easing their journey to San Angelo.

  Had the survivors who’d fought way out east of San Angelo somehow made it all the way to Sterling City? It was entirely possible that they’d bypassed San Angelo because of the large pseudo-military force that the town boasted and made their way here? If that were the case, what had happened to the original townspeople? They were questions that wouldn’t be answered by staring at the corpse of a dead man, so Aeric had his team follow the rope towards the ambush site, watching carefully for any more sentries.

  They made their way past several buildings until they came to a large, open parking lot where he called a halt. The stone building sat right in front of them and on the other side was the alley. Realistically, he knew that the people wouldn’t still be there, it had been almost an hour since the ambush so they’d probably returned to their homes.

  Everyone looked to him for guidance, what did he want to do now that they’d made it back into the town? He wished that he had a way to communicate with Tyler on the other side of the road. He thought about it for a moment. They had no way of knowing where the alley led on the back side. The anger that had fueled him immediately after discovering that Russ was dead had subsided now that he’d walked back into town. He thought about why they’d came back and what it would mean if they didn’t clean out this nest of villains.

  The idea that they’d have to face them again spurred Aeric into action. “Alright, let’s go around to the back side of that building,” he whispered. “We’ll go two at a time for safety and when we get to the back, we’ll see what’s over there. Try not to use your guns if you run into anyone—unless you have to. Questions?”

  There were none, so he sent the first two across the gravel parking lot. He cringed as the sound of their boots crunching on the rock echoed across the small space. Everyone scanned the area for activity in response to their noise. Nothing else happened until one of the men he’d sent across started gesturing wildly for him to come over to where he was.

  He jogged across by himself, feeling foolish for crouching at a run. It was something that he’d seen in countless movies. Guys always crouched when they ran in the movies, it makes sense, right? he asked himself. When he arrived, he saw that it was Charles who’d waved him over.

  “What’d you see?”

  Charles held his fingers to his lips and replied, “Listen.”

  Aeric did as he was asked, straining to hear what Charles wanted him to hear. Then he heard it. The faint sound of music came from inside the building. It sounded like a couple of guitars and a set of drums. They were having a goddamned concert after murdering one of his people.

  He peeked around the side of the building into the alley. It was empty. All of the rats must have gone back to their nest. His eyes fell on several vacant cars and he had an idea. “Block the back door with as much shit as you can,” he told the Shooter that had been with Charles. “Quietly.”

  He waived a few men over from the remaining group and gave them a mission to go find Tyler’s team and pass a message to them. Then he and Charles jogged back to where the old cars sat and saw that they’d conveniently already left all the supplies that he’d need sitting in the front seat of one of the vehicles.

  *****

  The residents of the town had been siphoning fuel from the vehicles around town, probably to start their fires each night, so he’d filled several jugs with the remaining gasoline and rifled through the trash to find five glass bottles. He kept one of the jugs for himself and sent a man up on the roof of the low building to pour the remaining ones acro
ss the rooftop.

  The sounds continued to drift from inside the building. They were rocking to some old school punk rock. Whoever was playing the guitar hit every chord, but the drummer wasn’t very good. Regardless, it sounded great to Aeric, who’d rarely heard any type of music since the war and reminded him of the people of Eureka Springs that he met on his journey back to Missouri. Not many of the band members from San Angelo State had survived the first few weeks when Mayor Delgado was on the road going after his daughter in Austin.

  The ambushers must have relied solely on their outlooks on the edges of town because no one was guarding the building. Aeric took advantage of their overconfidence and emptied the container he’d kept all over the building’s wooden front porch.

  Once his man was off the roof, he lit the Molotov cocktails that he’d created in the glass bottles and hurled them high up onto the roof. The old tar paper on the roof caught quickly and he lit the gas he’d poured on the porch. Shouts of alarm spread from inside and Tyler’s men, whom he’d placed across the street, shot several people as they burst through the front door. They fell dead onto the flames blocking the doorway.

  Aeric threw the remaining Molotov through the open front door, spreading flames quickly across the inside as the old, dried wood caught fire. The heat from the roof combined with the blaze inside to create a raging inferno. Then the building blew up. Chunks of burning wood and superheated shards of glass flew in every direction. Whatever they’d stored inside with them had exploded once the ceiling collapsed.

  Tyler’s squad fired a few rounds towards the east as the sentry from that side of town came running up to see about the commotion. Aeric assumed that the threat was taken care of since they didn’t continue after their initial volley and hoped that no one else would come out of the woodwork to shoot at them as they left town.

  Aeric watched as the flames engulfed the building. He braved the heat to peer through the partially collapsed rock wall into the old store. Nothing moved inside, they were all dead. He wanted to feel remorse for what he’d done. He was only twenty years old, I should feel terrible for their deaths, he told himself, but he didn’t feel anything except relief that his people were safe. The townsfolk had done this to themselves by choosing to attack his convoy. There would be no mourning from him. He’d grown exponentially during his experiences over the past year. Age wasn’t a factor in the new world; you were either the hunter or the hunted. After his time with the Vultures, he would never allow himself to be hunted again.

  He stepped back and continued to observe the fire while his team scanned the area for any threats. Finally, after ten minutes, Traxx was satisfied that no one would sneak up on them and whistled to bring everyone over to the parking lot next to the burning building. Once his team had gathered around, he took a breath to steady himself and said, “Okay, that isn’t what we were expecting. I didn’t want to kill everybody. I figured that we’d extract a little revenge for what they did to Russ and they’d never try to ambush innocent people again.”

  “You didn’t know that they had explosives stored in there,” Tyler answered for the group.

  “I know,” he mumbled, still wondering to himself why he didn’t really care that every one of his enemies had died.

  “What if there were women or kids in there, just enjoying a concert?” one of the Shooters asked.

  “Stop,” Tyler ordered. “We can’t second-guess what happened. Traxx made the decision to attack and this is what happened. End of story. Beating ourselves up over what we could have done differently won’t change a damn thing. They’re all dead, end of story.”

  Aeric took heart from his friend’s words. The big man could always be counted on to reinforce his decisions, regardless of how horrible their outcome was. He nodded his head, “You’re right, buddy. Let’s leave town and go back to the trucks before all this smoke attracts attention from out in the wastes.”

  They turned westward and began walking towards the edge of town where they’d stashed their bikes. When they reached the building where Charles killed the sentry, Aeric was shocked to see a blanket resting on top of the man with the edges tucked in like a shroud.

  He immediately dispersed his team to check the surrounding buildings. They didn’t find anything so they continued warily back to their bikes. Everyone had the feeling that they were being watched as they made their way out of town towards their bikes. No one said anything as they pedaled hard to put distance between themselves and the strange little town in the middle of the Texas wasteland.

  THREE

  Tyler watched his friend help the wounded back into the truck as they loaded up to continue on to Garden City. Traxx made the decision to keep Russ’s body in the back of his truck instead of leaving it out in the middle of nowhere. It was the right thing to do and while the dead body in the cargo area may have made some of the Gatherers uneasy, they all knew that his family back in San Angelo would appreciate being able to bury him in the city’s cemetery.

  They were back on the road in under an hour. The rest of the trip to their destination was uneventful, except for a small pack of dogs that ran across the road in front of them. Tyler watched in amazement as some type of small furry animal chased the entire group. It took him a minute to work out that it was a badger chasing the dogs. He wondered what that was about. Badgers were known to be vicious, but weren’t wild dogs supposed to be worse? Packs of the damn things had attacked their checkpoints before, how the hell was a single badger scaring the entire group?

  He continued to stare after the strange procession while they drove past. Then they disappeared behind the trucks out into the wastes. A sign said that they were six miles from their destination so he put the odd animal behavior out of his mind and yelled to the men and women in the back of his truck to get ready to go.

  They rolled down the highway until they passed a sign proclaiming Garden City’s pre-war population was only three hundred and twelve. Almost immediately, Tyler saw a large, one story building on the left side of the road with a sign out front that said it was the Garden City Community Center, which is where they were told the food warehouse was hidden. It looked like a typical, abandoned building like they’d seen hundreds of times in their journey. They’d done an excellent job disguising the place.

  Aeric’s lead truck rolled past the building and they made a few turns down the narrow, dusty town streets to check out the town. It looked uninhabited. Their informants had told them that only a few people were left alive when they’d come through, maybe the residents had actually abandoned it. There wasn’t much around in the way of infrastructure either. Even before the war, the residents had obviously been poor. The only highlight that he could see was the football stadium. The town was tiny, but they still had that famous Texas football culture and built a nice stadium. Maybe that weirdo Justin had been correct about the old society’s priorities being misplaced. These people couldn’t have afforded the stadium. Regardless, they still built it in the hopes that their team would do well enough to win an obscure six-man football championship.

  As the trucks continued through the town, no one in Aeric’s party saw anyone, so they returned to the community center. A few trips around the building didn’t turn up any residents, or anything out of the ordinary, so Traxx decided to move in. They dropped a small squad of Gatherers behind the building to secure the back side and then parked the trucks across the street. He wanted to keep their primary means of escape out of the way of stray gunfire if it came to a firefight.

  “Alright, buddy. You ready?” Aeric asked Tyler as the squads were getting off the trucks.

  “Yeah. I know what to do,” Tyler replied. He glanced around the Gathering Squad members until he saw Nicole. The fact that she wanted to get in his pants could be overlooked because the girl was one of the most tactically-proficient Gatherers on the squad. He usually chose her to accompany him on the more dangerous missions. “Nicole, you ready to go see if anyone’s home?”

  She
broke away from the others, slinking over to him. “Are we just gonna walk up and knock?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “We could try and sneak in a door on the back side or go through a window. Hell, we could even breach the side of the building and then storm in. Pretty much anything is better than knocking on the front door.”

  “That’s not how Traxx wants to play this one. We’re gonna try to recruit them instead of attack. If anyone’s inside, he wants to point out that Midland-Odessa is only a little ways down the road and they’re obviously all alone here. He’s willing to offer a spot in San Angelo for whoever’s here if the haul is good enough.”

  “I thought we had a population problem,” she stated flatly.

  “Yeah, well…” Tyler trailed off with one of his trademark shrugs.

  “Fine. Come on, big boy,” Nicole muttered and hooked a hand through his arm.

  Tyler allowed her to lead him across the street while the remaining members of the Gathering Squad and the Shooters spread out around the sides of the building.

  The moment that Tyler and Nicole stepped from the pavement onto the community center’s concrete parking lot, a loud hissing noise came from the building and the clanging of metal grates falling into place over windows and doors filled the silence of the afternoon. He dove to the ground with his rifle pointed towards the building, willing someone to appear.

  When they’d scouted the community center, it appeared totally abandoned. That obviously wasn’t the case. “What the fuck was that?” Nicole asked. She stood above him, exactly as she’d been when the gates were released from their hiding places.