The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  “No clue. Get down!” He pulled on her arm to bring her down to his level. Dammit, combat training 101 was that when you get fired on, you either take cover or get down immediately, he thought. What is she doing standing up?

  “I’m fine. That wasn’t gunfire,” Nicole whispered in his ear.

  He ignored her and continued watching the community center. Besides the metal grates that now covered every possible entrance into the building, it seemed just as abandoned as before the commotion. Tyler rolled slightly to his side and looked down the length of his body to where Aeric and the Shooters waited.

  Aeric raised both hands up to shoulder height with his palms up in an exaggerated motion that could be seen from all the way across the road. Tyler took it to mean basically that he didn’t have any fucking clue what to do.

  “Okay, somebody’s home. I guess we still try to go up and see if anyone wants to talk.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nicole snorted. “They’ve probably got the parking lot wired with explosives.”

  That made him pause for a moment. He didn’t know if the EMP that wiped out all the non-hardened electronics in the US also knocked out things like detonators. He wondered if the old school box and plunger-type detonator from the Old West would still work. About the only thing he knew was that it created an electrical charge by pushing the plunger downward. Did the EMP destroy things that created an electrical current via kinetic means or what about items that were constructed after the EMP?

  Then he remembered the old truck that he and Aeric had seen driving in Corsicana those first few days after the war. The driver had been able to get that old beast to crank, so the EMP hadn’t knocked out everything. Tyler wished that he’d paid more attention in his high school shop class or that he’d signed up for an engineering class at the University of Texas before things went to shit. It was the simple things that he’d overlooked as a kid that could end up saving his life now that they were living in the apocalypse.

  He thought for a moment longer and shook his head while he pushed himself to his feet. “There’s nothing that we can do. We can’t just sit here, and then go back to San Angelo, with Russ dead and nothing to show for it. I’m going to the door.”

  The big man stormed towards the metal grate covering the entrance and smiled to himself when he heard Nicole’s boots scrape against the cement a step or two behind him. “Hold on, Tyler. I’m coming,” she breathed heavily.

  They reached the door and saw that the grate was comprised of two large pieces of metal that collapsed into place from either side of the door. The large, fake plants in the planters flanking the door had hidden them from sight while they were on the road. He glanced off to the right, the ones covering the windows had slid down from above. By hiding the security gates, anyone driving by wouldn’t have noticed that there was anything different about the building. Hell, he’d had his own doubts about the community center as a place holding a lot of food. He would have thought to look in a school cafeteria, gas station, bank, or a grocery store, not the community center. The person who’d set this up knew how to deceive others.

  It was also fascinating to see the ingenuity in the metal grates’ construction. Whoever built them had drilled holes through the thick metal rods to allow bolts to pass through. They used large bolts with the ends bent over and wrapped the joints with heavy wire, finally securing everything with some type of soldering so the joints couldn’t be easily broken. The molten metal would ensure that nothing short of a large hacksaw, and hours of hard work, would get past the grate.

  They stared at the door for a long time until Nicole reached around him and pounded the flash suppressor on her rifle into the door. It echoed loudly outside, Tyler could only imagine what it sounded like inside the large cinder block building.

  After a full minute without any indication that anyone was inside the building, Nicole banged on the door once more. This time, in response to her knock, a small metal plate set high in the door opened.

  “What is it?” a man’s voice drifted from the hole above their heads.

  Tyler tapped Nicole’s arm and said, “Hi, sir. Do you have a moment to talk about your lord and savior, Jesus Christ?”

  “What the hell?” the voice asked. “No, I don’t want to talk to you. I’m doing quite fine on my own. Please go away.”

  She slapped him hard across the bicep. “I’m sorry. My idiot friend thinks he’s funny. We’re from a city called San Angelo. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it. What do you want?”

  “We’d like to talk to you about becoming a member of our community,” Nicole continued.

  “Why on earth would I ever do that? I’m perfectly safe here.”

  Tyler recovered from his amusement and interjected, “Did you know that the residents of Midland-Odessa are out, actively looking for supplies?”

  The man inside the community center snorted, “They should be. We’re all so stupid for living out here in the middle of nowhere without any resources or way to replenish what gets used.”

  “Do you have many people living with you?” Nicole questioned.

  The voice didn’t immediately reply, prompting Nicole to ask, “Sir, did you hear me? Are you alone?”

  “I… Yes, I heard you. I’ve been alone since my wife was killed back in December. One of the pumpjacks collapsed on her.”

  Garden City was surrounded by the useless pumpjacks—the large, above-ground pumps that pulled oil from the ground and fed the crude into a storage container nearby. Tyler absentmindedly placed a hand on the metal grate blocking the doorway. The metal could have come from the oil pumps.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Nicole answered quietly. “What was her name?”

  Tyler nodded; she was trying to appeal to his emotional side. “Her name was Emily,” the voice in the door responded.

  “That’s a very pretty name. What’s your name?”

  “Ted,” he replied. “What do you want?”

  “We’d like to talk to you, Ted,” Tyler replied.

  “Is that why you brought your army?” Ted asked bitterly.

  “We didn’t bring an army,” Nicole stated. “We brought a few people to help protect us. The world is a dangerous place nowadays.”

  “It sure is. I’ve heard some stories from people passing through. That’s why I chose to hole up in here.”

  “There was a group of people that came to us in April, led by John Pavlik and his wife. They met you and told us that you would be a good addition to our community.”

  “The Pavliks made it?” Ted asked, obviously relieved.

  “Yes, sir,” Nicole affirmed. “John said that you had a brilliant mind and could help us in San Angelo.”

  “They said that, huh?”

  “Yeah, they said that you know your way around machinery.”

  Tyler nudged her and mouthed, What are you doing?

  Nicole held up a finger and smiled when Ted replied, “Yes, ma’am. I’m a trained mechanical engineer, worked on the pumps in the oil fields for more than fifteen years.”

  “Ted, can we speak face to face instead of through the door?”

  The man behind the door paused and Tyler began to feel uncomfortable. How much had he even interacted with the Pavliks? For all they knew, he could have turned them away like he was trying to do to the two of them. Nicole had taken a major leap to say that John Pavlik had recommended him to them.

  The silence was almost palpable until finally, they heard a crank turning behind the door. The metal grate stayed in place while the door into the building opened inward, revealing a thin, wiry man who Tyler guessed to be in his mid-thirties. It was difficult to tell though because the skin on his face and arms had seen years’ worth of damage under the harsh west Texas sun. His head was bald with a few spots indicative of skin cancer, and he wore a faded rock band t-shirt and jeans over standard work boots.

  He opened their face-to-face conversation abruptly with, “My finger is on
a button right now that will dump a hundred gallons of crude oil on your head and light it. It’s highly flammable. The good news is that it will kill you in only a few seconds, so you won’t suffer much.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Ted,” Nicole replied. “I’m Nicole and this is my friend, Tyler.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he replied. Tyler mumbled a likewise response that he didn’t feel since he was potentially moments away from a horrible death.

  “So, like we were saying, we want to offer you the safety of living in San Angelo.”

  Ted snorted once again, “Safety! You folks don’t have any idea about safety. I can already tell your type. You think rolling around with overwhelming firepower is the way to go. Strongholds, that’s what will see us through now.”

  “We agree,” Nicole replied adamantly. “We have basic walls around the habitable parts of our city, but we need an expert to help us make them better.” She pointed at the metal grates covering the doorway. “You’re obviously the expert that we need, Ted. You did all of this by yourself and without any power tools.”

  He beamed under the pretty young woman’s compliments. “Yeah, I guess you could say that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.” His laughter at his own joke seemed a little off to Tyler. Maybe the months of living alone in his fortress had slightly unhinged the man.

  “There’s something else, Mr.… I’m sorry, what’s your last name?” Tyler asked.

  “Winston. Ted Winston,” he replied.

  “You may have been safe before, Mr. Winston, but the cities are running out of food. Depending on how many people are left, they may already be starving. I guess you could say that San Angelo was lucky because we had our revolution early on, only days after the war. More than two-thirds of the population was killed, so we have a lot more food than other places. I traveled to Missouri right afterwards, and a little more than a month after the nuclear bombs fell, the people in Springfield were starving to death. They did some pretty awful things to each other.”

  Tyler tried to shut away the memory of baby Kayla’s mother. He and Aeric had been outside on the street when they heard her screaming. They rushed in and interrupted her rape, but she was shot and killed during the fight with the two men who’d attacked her. They brought Kayla back to Aeric’s childhood home and she’d been a part of their family ever since.

  He focused his thoughts and heard the end of Nicole’s comment, “And it will happen to you too.”

  Dammit! What had she said? he chided himself. “Yeah, she’s right. You’re in grave danger living here all alone.”

  “I don’t know about that, Tyler,” Ted answered. “I can pretty well take care of myself. You guys wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

  “What if I strapped some C4 to the wall and blew a hole in the cinder block?”

  The engineer seemed to consider it for a moment and sighed, “You’re right. This place won’t stand up to explosives. Holed up in this building, I don’t have any sort of stand-off distance to keep marauders away. So far, I’ve relied mostly on staying hidden. If you folks knew where I was, then that probably means that others do as well.”

  “It’s a good bet that they do, Mr. Winston,” Tyler replied. “We can take you back to San Angelo, where you’ll be safe, in return for your help with designing our defenses.”

  It certainly wasn’t the mandate that they’d been given when they were told to go clean out the warehouse in Garden City, but Tyler thought that the engineer’s addition would be a huge help to the city. He obviously knew how to design defensive systems and had done all of the work on the community center himself, imagine what he could do with a force of a couple thousand workers.

  Ted Winston thought about it for a moment longer and made an exaggerated effort to remove his thumb from the button that would have coated them in oil. “Alright, I’m listening. What do you propose?”

  *****

  The rest of the day went by quickly as the Gathering Squad loaded the two trucks with food and supplies. Mr. Winston had amassed quite a bit of food from all over the town as the former residents left Garden City for the safety of Midland-Odessa, abandoning what they couldn’t carry. They stacked water off to the side, if they had room for it, then they’d take it, otherwise it would be left behind and they’d have to continue to use water from the lake.

  Once they’d cleared enough space on the floor, Traxx moved the trucks inside the community center’s cargo doors and closed them so they could secure the location against the coming darkness. Their experience in Sterling City showed them that they didn’t know much about this part of the country and all of them thought it was best to take as many precautions as possible. The crews worked long into the night to ensure that everything would be ready to go by morning.

  Aeric had been prepared to offer Ted Winston a home in San Angelo, so he was fine with Tyler and Nicole’s offer to the engineer. Ted seemed to be the real deal when it came to engineering—the type of person they desperately needed. The security upgrades to the building would have been impressive back in the old days, when there was electricity and scores of people to do the work. The fact that he’d dismantled oil pumps, dragged those parts here and turned them into near-impregnable gates on the doors and windows was amazing. And hiding the defenses so the building looked to be abandoned was a stroke of genius. If Ted could apply his expertise to the walls and checkpoints of San Angelo, it could improve the city’s security a hundredfold. The possibilities were nearly limitless.

  Aeric was sure that he could convince Mayor Delgado to allow Ted to stay, even with the current ban on new citizens. The city was overpopulated and the addition of another person wouldn’t help. However, with the death of the Russ, it would technically be a zero sum gain in population for the city. Semantics.

  Early the next morning, everyone was ready to go. Ted went through the building that had been his home for almost ten months one final time, ensuring that he hadn’t left anything behind. He paid one final visit to his wife’s gravesite where he’d buried her in the grassy area of the business next door. The town didn’t even have a cemetery, but they had the damn football stadium. When Ted was satisfied, the group mounted their bicycles and began the long, slow journey back to San Angelo.

  The trip was seventy-five miles, only about a two-hour trip in the vehicles. However, the men and women riding their bikes expected to be on the road for at least six or seven hours—if nothing out of the ordinary happened. Aeric considered trying to avoid Sterling City by traveling through the desert and ultimately decided against it. They’d been through the town after they burned the convenience store and other than the strange feeling of being watched, he felt the route that they’d already cleared would be the safest bet.

  His estimate of the group’s travel time was off. Including breaks and being overly cautious as they went through Sterling City, it was nearing nightfall by the time they made it to San Angelo’s Western Gate. Aeric was surprised to see Lieutenant Griffith on duty. It was odd since she almost always worked the day shift. He greeted her warmly as his bike coasted to a stop near the barricade.

  “Hey, Lorelei! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Aeric and the lieutenant had met each other only a few days after the war when he and Tyler were on the way to Missouri to find Aeric’s family. He’d been the one to tell her and her Army platoon about San Angelo. Her soldiers were given the mission of guarding the interstate entrance in Richland, Texas before the war started. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for them since their base at Fort Hood was hit with a small nuclear missile that devastated everything in the valley where the base sat.

  “Traxx! I’m glad that you’re back. You’ve got to come with me.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in alarm as Tyler’s bike skidded to a stop beside his.

  “Kate went into labor yesterday a few hours after you left.”

  Aeric did the math in his head, she was somewhere between seven and eight months pregnant. Not good. “Is she
alright?”

  “No,” Lorelei stated. “She had the baby—a boy—and except for being small, he seems healthy. Kate isn’t doing well, though. When I left this morning to come here and pick you up, she was barely holding on.” Aeric appreciated that about her; she would tell it to him straight without trying to sugarcoat bad news. Information passed more efficiently that way.

  Aeric glanced at Tyler. His friend’s face showed concern for Kate. “I’m gonna go with Lorelei to the hospital.”

  “Don’t worry,” Tyler said. “I’ll get the trucks to the Provisions Warehouse and make sure everything is unloaded. We’ll send the trucks back to Goodfellow as soon as we’re done so we don’t burn that bridge if we need them again.”

  Traxx nodded and accepted his friend’s hand, “Thanks, brother. Come to the medical center as soon as you can.”

  Aeric sat heavily on the passenger seat of Lorelei’s tan Army Humvee. It was the same truck that she’d been in when he first met her over a year ago. They’d ripped out all the computers and the monitor that showed them where the other units were located. They were all alone now, there wasn’t anyone left to see. They’d left the military radios installed so they could talk across the city for rapid dissemination of information.

  The military equipment was designed with an EMP in mind, so it had been fine after the war. The lieutenant’s platoon initially thought that their radios were damaged in the attack, but realized that their gear was good. It had been the repeater towers that were wiped out from the blasts. Once they made it to where Fort Hood had been, they’d understood why nobody answered them at the base.

  Except for the low hum of static from the radio speakers, they rode in silence through the city towards the hospital. Aeric watched the houses fly by as Lorelei expertly maneuvered the big vehicle around obstacles in the streets, taking note of violators the entire time. Even though almost everyone was using bicycles and the occasional horse to move around town, the mayor still wanted the streets clear of debris so they could respond rapidly to emergency situations with the few working vehicles that they did have.