The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  “If it was so easy to take over the computer, why would people in the old world have the…” He searched for the word before remembering it, “Why were the bombs controlled by the computer? Why didn’t they carry them around with them or keep them locked up? Why did they have bombs that could destroy the world?”

  “Good questions,” she conceded. “They made the more powerful bombs to keep up with our enemies, each of them making bigger and stronger bombs to intimidate the other. As to why were they controlled by a computer? That’s just how it was. Everything was run by computers. People even had a tiny personal computer in their pocket for communication called a cell phone. Hell, computers were everywhere, now the ones that you still see are ancient pieces of junk.

  “Anyways, the Vultures started the war and made sure that Austin, the city where they lived, wasn’t destroyed. They were led by a crazy man named Justin who took over the city during the war. They tortured people, murdered, destroyed and stole everything in the surrounding area. Aeric Traxx and Tyler—the commander of the Gathering Squad—were taken prisoner by the Vultures and tortured. They’re the ones who burned him and put out Tyler’s eye. They escaped and killed Justin, then came here. The last we heard, the Vultures had crumbled from the inside as they fought amongst themselves to see who would be the new leader after Justin’s death.”

  She took a deep breath. It had been years since she related the story to anyone and it took more of a mental toll on her than she thought it would. “The Shooters were established specifically to fight the Vultures if they came here. Of course, we had thirty or forty thousand residents back then and made a much more lucrative target. We’ve fought raiders and mutants, and turned back people seeking shelter, but we never ended up going head-to-head with the Vultures. If what that little girl is saying is true, then we’re in trouble.”

  “We’re ready to fight, ma’am. I remember how bad it was as a child without much food. We have a stable way of life now. We’ll defend our home if it comes to that.”

  “I know we will.” She smirked and said something that she’d been taught as a brand new officer in school, “The best defense is a good offense. We have a patrol that’s going outside of the ground defense area. We’re leaving in a few minutes if you want to go.”

  This time, the Shooter didn’t deliberate or take time to arrange his thoughts before answering. “Absolutely, ma’am. Let’s go see what’s out there.”

  *****

  The heavy trucks chugged along at eleven miles per hour, belching smoke and steam into the early afternoon. The engineer, Ted Winston, had long ago converted several of the old gasoline-powered trucks into massive steam engines because he foresaw that the quality of fossil fuels would degrade over time and be unusable to power the vehicles. He was right, of course.

  It had been more than thirty-five years since the last tanker of fuel left a refinery along the gulf coast. Gasoline that remained unused was now worthless for transportation and barely even able to be used to start fires. The first thing that Ted converted was the earth-moving equipment—bulldozers and backhoes, primarily—to keep the ever-changing walls repaired. Next were a few flatbed trucks that the Gathering Squad could use to continue their operations as they had to range farther and farther during the lean years of acid rain, and finally, he retrofitted three of the big military transport trucks for the Shooters.

  Lorelei hated riding in the damn things, though. The trucks reminded her too much of what they’d lost over the years. The city was riddled with remnants of the old world, from defunct street lamps to the old basketball arena. Everywhere you looked, one could see what had been lost when the Vultures started the war.

  The rough coughing of men and women from the cargo area made her turn and peer through the missing window into the back. Ten of her Shooters sat along a row of benches in the middle of her truck, facing out. Their mixture of old Air Force uniforms pilfered from the base stores, combined with bandanas and ragged strips of cloth covering their faces to keep the smoke and grit from the engines and the surrounding wastes out of their mouths. Everyone also wore goggles of some type, most were the military-issued ones, but a few of her men had old swimmer’s goggles and one even had a full gas mask, anything they could use to keep the debris from their eyes.

  Nearer to the cab, two men steadily fed a mixture of coal and other flammable material into a chute that led to a fire bin underneath the boiler that Ted had designed for the overly-simplified steam engine. Water in the boiler was converted to steam, which then forced a piston to move through a cylinder, allowing for vehicle movement. The excess steam was then trapped and piped back into the boiler as it cooled. The whole design was much less complicated—and more efficient—than the old locomotive engines that used to run all over the country.

  “You doing okay back there?” she shouted over the roar of the engine. Several of the Shooters gave her a thumbs up without answering verbally, so she turned back around and stared out of the windshield, which was spider-webbed on her side from a long-forgotten battle with marauders.

  The desolate landscape stretched on for miles in all directions. She’d sent two trucks out the Northern Gate, one going north and the other going west to see what was beyond their normal patrol routes. She’d purposefully chosen to take her truck out of the Eastern Gate. Back when they used to get in fights with scavengers and bands of raiders out in the wastes, it was almost always on the eastern side of the city where people had fled from the larger cities of Austin and possibly San Antonio. Even though she knew that they were all dead and gone, she still contributed all of the fights on the east to the Vultures.

  They passed by the remnants of Wall, a small town that the Gathering Squad had dismantled, taking everything usable into San Angelo. The old concrete foundations of the buildings were as far as anyone from the city had been in several years. She remembered the weeks upon weeks of boring protection duty as her Shooters guarded the Gatherers when they tore apart houses and the few businesses. Those times were interspersed with several firefights; she lost two Shooters on the mission. Of course, there were always more volunteers willing to become a Shooter in exchange for steady meals back in those days so it hadn’t been an issue.

  Lorelei couldn’t help that she held her breath as the truck bounced down the jutted highway beyond the town. They used to go on patrols far into the wastes and she knew these areas were more dangerous. They’d stopped going so far once they stopped coming in contact with survivors of any kind. The dwindling population of San Angelo needed more and more protecting at home as they fortified their position and began sustainably growing their own crops and producing small herds of goats instead of eating them right away.

  She glanced through the rear window once again and saw the whitened knuckles on several of her troops as they gripped their weapons, which were a mixture of military and civilian rifles, it came down to whatever ammunition they could find. Most of the Shooters had been with the team for a long time, so they remembered the troubles that could be experienced beyond the ground defense area. Demonbrocs bred and grew to maturity quickly while the insect population had grown in size exponentially. It wasn’t uncommon to see centipedes and scorpions that were three or four feet long once their genetic makeup had been altered by the radiation all around them.

  The last of the concrete foundations faded behind them in the truck’s rearview mirror, causing her to feel like they were truly on their own in the wasteland. Everything familiar to them was now gone.

  The long, dusty road snaked off into the distance. It was so covered by the drifting dirt that if the skeletal remains of trees and the occasional rusted sign hadn’t been present, then she wouldn’t have been able to say definitively where it was. The landscape had changed so much since her platoon had first arrived here. Back then, there was grass and the occasional tree as well as green cacti dotting the roadway.

  The cactus plants were still a staple in the sands, but they’d changed as much as the wild
life. What people used to think of as thorns were laughable little stickers compared to what they’d become. The need to develop larger and more dangerous spikes to keep away the birds and other creatures had caused a rapid evolution in the plant life as the shorter-thorned varieties were quickly consumed for the moisture contained inside of them. A man could be impaled on the forest of spikes jutting in every direction on the remaining varieties of cacti.

  It wasn’t long before the flat, barren landscape lulled Lorelei into a daze. The occasional dilapidated home with the remains of a few trees were the only thing to break up the monotony of the open wasteland. Occasionally, a demonbroc would appear near the road; usually not long enough to get a shot off at the creature, though. It was a tedious task and she couldn’t help but allow herself to believe that there was nothing out here.

  They were almost thirty miles from San Angelo and the captain was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. The other crews must be in the same state out to the north and east of the city. The years of cold weather and acid rain followed by heat and near-drought conditions had done their job in west Texas. No one remained alive outside of the larger concentrations of people and those who did survive certainly weren’t going to leave the safety of their walls.

  She decided that it was time to turn around. There wasn’t any point in being out here anymore. It turned out that Aeric’s fears about raiders had been unfounded. Still, she planned to continue sending Shooters on regular patrols further into the wastes. It was an oversight that could have been dangerous if there were some type of large, well-provisioned force remaining in Austin.

  She studied the tattered map in her lap for a moment and saw that they were almost to the town of Eden. She’d done a few sweeps through there in the early years when there was still a lot of fuel and enough manpower to dismantle an entire town for its supplies. The town had already been brutalized by gangs by the time they got there so they didn’t have to compete with residents for supplies, it was a ghost town.

  Her worst memory from those days was the old prison on the east side of town. The guards had abandoned their post and went to their homes, leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves. Unfortunately for them, the magnetic locks had stayed engaged when the EMP knocked out the electricity, only an electrical pulse could have unlocked the failsafe measure built into the doors in the event of a power outage. The prisoners had starved in their cells, dying by the hundreds. The Gathering Squad didn’t even bother trying to salvage any building material from there. Once they’d cleared out the kitchens and supply buildings, they abandoned everything else. Presumably, the skeletons of those men would be locked away forever.

  Lorelei tapped the driver on the arm. “Hey, Ollie, we’re gonna head back. In about half a mile, we’ll come to the old town of Eden. Take a left on the main road. We’ll go north on that for a few miles, then when we come to a big four-way intersection, we’ll go left and head back west towards San Angelo.”

  Ollie nodded his head and shouted over the roaring steam engine, “There’s nothing out here, ma’am. It’s all just desert.”

  “That’s why I’m calling it. There’s no sense in going any further out this way. There’s only more sand and dirt.”

  The truck chugged into Eden and Ollie followed her directions. It had been a successful and uneventful mission with nothing significant to report. Just the way the captain liked it.

  EIGHT

  He watched the truck turn north up Main Street through his binoculars and breathed a sigh of relief. The watcher thought that he’d finally been compromised. Oh, he knew that he could hide in the prison, the ones who used the dirty, foul-smelling machines of the past never entered his home. His friends scared them.

  The black smoke pouring from the truck had been easy to see for miles—or was it leagues? Maybe even furlongs? The man scratched at the bald spot on the side of his head where he’d long ago rubbed away the hair that grew wildly everywhere else. He didn’t know what an appropriate measure of distance was now that everything was measured in how much water someone could carry. His fingernail slipped under the scab where his fingers scratched and he lifted it away, placing the course disc of skin and blood on his tongue.

  He sucked at the scab while he watched the truck disappear in the distance. Satisfied that they weren’t stopping or coming nearer to his home, he chewed on the softened treat and then wiped away the smear of blood that had welled up at the scab’s former site. He licked the salty red smear from his fingers and waddled over to the guard tower ladder.

  Several painful minutes later, he limped towards Cellblock B, which was his primary home. His right knee bent outwards at an angle, a lifelong gift from his master. He remembered the man who’d maimed him, for all intents and purposes trapping him in the Eden Detention Center. His master had been a young man, so angry and full of hate, even back then.

  Seventeen years prior—or was it one hundred? Maybe forty-one? He could never keep such a trivial thing like time straight in his head either. Anyways a long time ago, Judd Carlisle had been a survivor, living in and around the town of Eden. The soldiers in the trucks searched the town, but they didn’t find him, no they hadn’t! He’d hidden cleverly in the refuse and watched them taking the supplies that he’d stockpiled for himself.

  He didn’t have any weapons besides a knife, so he knew that going up against them would be suicide. Judd may not have had much to live for—even back then when he was healthy—but he was alive and planned to stay that way. He hid and observed in silent rage at the loss of his food and resources. They stayed for days, loading up their giant trucks with basically everything that was moveable.

  After three days, the hunger in Judd’s belly had grown beyond his ability to control any longer. His friends whispered to him in the darkness that he would be safe if he snuck up to one of the trucks and took back some of the food that they’d taken from him. He’d argued that he would be caught. His friends wouldn’t listen to the logic he presented to them. They were convinced that he’d be okay if he waited until the middle of the night—and they’d never apologized for being wrong, he thought angrily as he walked towards his room.

  He’d finally relented to their murmurings of safety and crept up to the side of a truck where he’d seen them place the canned goods they’d stolen from his home. His friends had promised to watch his back for any type of trouble; he’d been foolish enough to believe them. They typically weren’t very reliable and abandoned him when he needed them the most. They’d missed the approach of the youth sneaking up on him in the darkness.

  He was caught off guard by the cool muzzle of the youth’s rifle pressed against his jaw as he reached underneath the tarp. Judd knew instantly that all the years of sneaking and hiding since the big booms had come to an end. He remembered television—oh God, did he miss that!—and the damage that a gun could do. He’d watched a show one time where a group of bikers ambushed a policeman and spread his blood like paint on the side of his car. He definitely did not want his blood painting the truck, so he held up his hands in surrender.

  Judd couldn’t help but giggle at the idea that he was afraid of his blood painting a truck. Was that my inspiration? he wondered as he tapped the nub of his index finger on the side of his head. Out loud, he said, “I never realized that’s where it came from. Wow, funny.”

  He stopped thinking about painting and remembered the master. Judd had turned to the youth who held the gun against his face and tried to smile. Unfortunately, the jagged, rotten stumps where his teeth had broken on cans before he figured out how to use a can opener scared the boy. He lashed out with the wooden part of his gun and knocked poor old Judd to his knees.

  Judd cried out in pain and the youth wrapped a gloved hand over his mouth, dragging him away into the darkness away from the trucks. He was beaten savagely with the rifle and begged for mercy. None came. The youth was relentless in his anger at Judd for trying to steal the things that were rightfully his.

  He’
d passed in and out of consciousness until finally, the beating stopped and he awakened in the prison yard. The youth told him that what he’d experienced was merely a sampling of the pain that he would visit upon the watcher if he didn’t do what he asked. Of course, Judd promised that he would do whatever the man wanted him to. He would have been crazy not to—and that was one thing that Judd was not, no sir, he was not crazy. Those kinds of people, the crazies, lived in the isolation ward. The nurses used to let him walk around outside the ward, even gave him important jobs to do like keeping the windows on the guard shacks clean so they could keep the crazies locked away.

  The youth didn’t believe him that he wouldn’t run away, so he broke Judd’s knee and then left him in the warden’s office. The next night, the youth returned with food and several large bottles of water. He gave Judd a bottle of pills with careful instructions about how many to take and when, he said that they’d keep the infection away and that his leg would heal.

  The trucks left and Judd thought he’d never see them again. The food that the youth had given him ran out so he crawled through the prison to the cafeteria and found enough scraps to last him a long time. He made new friends with the men behind the bars in their old cells, although they never wanted to come outside, so he always had to go to them to talk, which got annoying sometimes. Why did he always have to be the one who sought out their company? Wasn’t he a good enough friend that they’d want to come see him? Kinda rude when you think about it, yes sir.

  Even though his knee flared out at a painful and awkward angle, his leg did eventually heal enough for him to walk unaided. The injury made running or traveling for long distances impossible, though. One day, he was minding his own business, rolling down the cellblock hallway in the warden’s chair when the youth materialized in front of him. He’d aged into a man by that time and asked what Judd had seen since their last encounter.