Ash: Rise of the Republic

by Campbell Paul Young

  Once I had signed the receipt we headed back into the warehouse and I dragged a bank of employee lockers in front of the double doors to keep out the still screaming and shooting horde. We split up and started searching for supplies. I found a cluster of pallets of assorted canned food and I dragged them one by one over to the loading dock with a pallet jack. Deb showed up with Tracy in tow. They each had a large flatbed cart filled with cardboard boxes. My wife’s were labeled Winchester, Remington, and Federal. I whooped and kissed her on the spot. The girl’s boxes had lovely words like Miller, Coors, and Budweiser. I almost kissed her too, but she still had that little knife, I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

  Now that we had a real stockpile, we needed transport more formidable than my little Toyota. We pulled open the closest bay door and found a half empty trailer. The receiving crew had apparently given up in the middle of unloading it. The trailer was big enough for our purpose but it was effectively useless because there was no big rig to pull it, and we didn’t have the skills to drive it even if there was. I peeked outside and found our biggest piece of luck yet: a twenty foot box truck was backed up to the next loading bay. I crossed my fingers and ran through the gritty rain over to the cab, hoping for keys. The engine was still warm, but my luck ran out there. I even checked the sun visor like you used to see in the movies. I went back inside, soggy, grimy, and cussing like a sailor. Once I calmed down, I asked the girl if she knew why the box truck was there since it wasn’t the standard issue Walmart hauler. She shuddered and started crying again, looking back towards the double doors that led to the store. We couldn’t get much out of her, but since the question upset her so much I decided I might have a look through her attacker’s pockets. Maybe the scumbag had borrowed a truck to stock up on some things from his store and just decided to start raping his employees.

  I asked the ladies to start loading the pallets into the truck and headed back toward the doors that led into store. I carefully pulled the set of lockers back far enough to get one of the doors open, trying my hardest not to make too much noise. The gunshots and pandemonium from the market section had died off and I was worried the armed gang was moving closer. I peeked out, no one was nearby. I crept back towards electronics where we had left that fat piece of shit, keeping my head down and hiding behind fixtures. He was still there, slowly leaking, and I gingerly stepped around the spreading pool of blood. Swallowing my disgust at the act, I closed my eyes and reached into his pocket, hoping to find keys on my first try. I lucked out, but before I could withdraw them I heard a choking gurgle and a clammy hand grabbed my wrist. I looked over and found him staring at me and mouthing a plea for help. I withdrew the keys and wrenched out of his weakening grip in one motion. He filled his lungs with a sickening rattle and screamed. Out of pure terror I squeezed the trigger on the pistol I had forgotten I was carrying. The point blank shot made a mess of his face and scattered his rapist brains across the bloody linoleum. I’ve killed more than a few people since then, but that was one of the only times I really felt satisfied pulling the trigger, even if it was an accident.

  The sudden shot set off a new round of screaming, much nearer than I expected. I started to stand but quickly dropped back to a crouch when a shotgun roared from the next aisle and the row of flatscreens behind me shattered. I scrambled back to the double doors, followed by shouts and more shots. It was unaimed panic shooting, so nothing came close to hitting me, but I wasn’t about to start a firefight with that group. I slammed the lockers back into place and tossed the keys to Deb, hoping I had found the right set. I helped Tracy load the last couple of pallets and slam the door down just as the truck roared to life. As we made our way outside to join my wife in the cab, I heard the double doors splinter from another shotgun blast. We piled in as she hit the gas, I remember a satisfying squeal of tires as we left the loading dock, but that might just be my old mind embellishing things.

  We circled around to where we had left the pickup and I hopped out. Deb had driven a bus for the university for several years, so she could handle a big vehicle better than I could at the time. Traffic was much lighter on the way back, I guess the worst drivers had already wrecked. We passed a gas station that seemed deserted and I pulled in to try to fill up the cans, but the pumps were shut off. I decided to let it go.

  Halfway back the rain quit. My momentary sense of relief was shattered when the first fluffy flakes of dry ash started hitting the windshield. The fall quickly intensified to blizzard proportions. I started to worry that the engines would choke up before we made it back. I tried to call the wife but cell reception had dropped to nothing, so I stopped and waved her alongside. I threw them a towel from the backseat and told them to rip it down the middle and wrap it around their faces before we had to leave the safety of the vehicles. I made sure they turned off the air conditioning to keep from sucking ash into the cab, and then we set off for the final leg of the drive home.

  It might surprise you to know, but no one really knew how to handle an ash storm. I guess I knew more than most, I was a geologist after all. It had come up in college in a class or two, maybe during a drunken conversation around a campfire on a field project. I had mapped ignimbrites in Big Bend and Death Valley; I had hiked Tuff Canyon; I knew what could happen when a lot of it fell in one place. I also knew that once the rains stopped and the ashfall began in earnest, we would have to be careful about what we breathed in. Back then most people hadn’t even heard of silicosis unless they happened to work in a mine. It didn’t take long for most people to find out exactly what it was. I met an old traveler a few years back who told me that you can still find lung shaped rocks on the sides of some of the big highways coming south out of Wyoming and Nebraska. Thousands of northern refugees dropped in their tracks during the Panic. It gets hard to walk south when your lungs fossilize in your body. A simple paper mask will do wonders, but those poor bastards closer to the pillar didn’t have time to run to the hardware store. In some places the roads were impassible within hours, and vehicles choked out within minutes of exposure to the ashfall. Plenty of people had to just start walking south with whatever possessions they could carry. We were luckier down here: the distance gave us black rain and black rain got us scared.

  We made it without further trouble and I had her back the box truck up to the garage. Luckily it had a hydraulic lift at the back, so we unloaded quickly and got the garage closed before too much ash had piled up. I took a look out at the front yard before I locked the house up: there were already a few inches of the grey stuff and it showed no sign of slowing down. The light was fading, I couldn’t see the sun but I knew it was just about to dip below the horizon.

  We set Tracy up in the spare room. Once we had the bed ready my wife gave me a loaded glance and pushed me out of the room. I left her to her consoling and I set about securing the house. The big rage in home design back then was natural light, and the result was far too many windows. Even if I had been able to pick up a pallet of plywood I would have had trouble boarding them all up. What that left me was an indefensible house. A determined group of attackers could surround us and break through in any of a dozen places. I trusted my neighbors, so I wasn’t too worried yet, but the scene at the store made me realize what we might be in for in the coming weeks.

  I decided to take stock of my small arsenal. I opened my safe and started laying guns on the kitchen table. We had two rifles chambered in .223: my AR-15 and Deb’s small folding carbine. We had the two 9mm automatic pistols, a twelve gauge, and a scoped 30-06 I used to hunt deer with. Not much compared to the collections of some of my friends at the time, but enough for us. I usually kept about two hundred rounds for each weapon on hand, but we were low on .223 and 30-06 after our last trip to the range. I started gathering up the crates of ammo my wife had found in the warehouse, hoping that she had found the right calibers. After sorting through it all, we had over a thousand rounds for each gun. One whole crate was filled with various 12 gauge shells, from bird
shot to slugs. In addition, we had about five thousand rounds of various calibers that we couldn’t use. They would likely be valuable trade goods later on so I set them aside.

  I loaded up all the magazines we had, locked up all the spare ammunition in the safe, and starting cleaning my weapons. Once I had thoroughly gone through each gun with patches and Q-tips and powder solvent, the women came out of the spare room wiping tears from their eyes. I made Deb put her holster on and told her to carry her pistol at all times. I loaded the twelve gauge with 00 buckshot and handed it to the girl, who was calm and reserved now. She had come shooting with us years before and had fired that same shotgun, but I made sure to go through the gun safety stuff again. She settled in to the couch with a death grip on her new weapon. I almost felt sorry for the next guy who thought about coming after her with his dick out.

  I wanted to check on the neighbors, so I decided to get some gear together to keep the ash out. I know you kids bitch about them, but in those early days I would have killed for one of these new ash suits. The best I could come up with that first night was a painter’s respirator, a dive mask, and my rain gear. It did the job, but that shit clung to the material so badly that Deb eventually set up a sort of air-lock around each of the outer doors to keep us from tracking it everywhere. Anyway, I donned my makeshift suit and shuffled through the drifts on the front porch and out into the swirling night.

  We lived in a relatively secluded neighborhood, well out in the country. It was a small development, only about twenty houses on acre lots. They were all mid-sized, three to four bedroom, fairly new homes with plenty of space between them. There was a single street, a soft cornered square ring road with houses inside and out. The neighborhood was bordered on two sides by country highways, and there was a short outlet street that connected the circle with each of them. The lots that backed up to the highways were bordered with an 8 foot stone wall. The rest of the perimeter was tangled yaupon thicket. Our house was in the furthest corner from the main roads, backed up to a dense wooded area with unused pastureland beyond. The people living out there were a mixture of oilfield workers and upper-middle class white collars working mostly for the university. Backgrounds were mixed, but everyone got along. It was a mostly quiet, relaxed, country place to live.

  Walking out to the street, I headed to my left-hand neighbor first. They were a couple about our age with a toddler, Mike and Jackie, our closest friends in the neighborhood. We had passed many a drunken night in their driveway playing washers and eating barbeque. I knew them to be fairly competent and self-sufficient, but I felt it was my neighborly duty to make sure they were set up for the storm. Mike answered the door and immediately started laughing at my get-up. I was confused at first, I had settled into a serious and somber mood since the events at the store and it took me a minute to recognize what I must look like with my respirator and dive mask. I shrugged it off and laughed with him for a minute, sheepishly removing my gear as I walked in the front door. He offered me a cold beer and I eagerly accepted, suddenly realizing how thirsty I was. He was reasonably well provisioned with food and other supplies, having gone to the store as soon as he saw the pillar. I let him know about the huge stock of goods we had lucked into and discussed the dangers of inhaling the ash. He said he had some paper masks in the garage that they could use if they needed to venture out. He suggested we arrange a neighborhood meeting for the morning. He promised to canvas the left half of the subdivision once he had thrown together some protective clothing. Beer finished, I left him and headed out to spread the word to the houses to the right.

  After an hour, I had spoken to everyone I could find and decided to head back home. Of the ten neighbors I had visited, only six had answered the door. I spread the word about the ash and the meeting in the morning. Most seemed at least temporarily well supplied. I trudged back thinking about the empty houses, hoping their occupants weren’t trying to buy food at Walmart a few hours back. They might still be there.

  Once I reached the house I ran into Mike coming back from his slog up the left side of the street. I couldn’t resist poking a little fun at the suit he had come up with: pink child’s swim goggles, a paper respirator, and a yellow slicker. He flicked me off and told me he would see me in the morning. I headed inside to find the women beginning to inventory our haul. I dove in and started counting cans and toilet paper. After two hours we had a huge spreadsheet compiled, listing essentially everything we had on hand. I made sure to print it out; there was no way to know how long the power would last. After a quick meal, I armed the security system and we all turned in. Outside, the ash kept coming down.

  Chapter 2

  May, 31 PC (2046 AD)

  *

  “The rangers were the first line of defense; ruthless men and women, barely more than criminals themselves, riding through the dust to bring brutal justice to brutal men.”

  -Daniel Galloway, ‘Risen From The Ash: A History of the Republic’; RNT University Press, 50 PC (2065 AD);

  *

  Captain Grover B. McLelland, commanding officer of the 1st New Texas Rangers, paused to take a long swig. He had requisitioned the rotgut whiskey from the three outlaws they had hanged that morning. The fiery liquid was foul, but it was better than nothing.

  In a gravelly whisper, he continued, “We’ll leave it there for tonight kiddos. I think everyone is finished cleaning, bring your weapons up for inspection and then get some rest. I want to make it all the way to the beltway tomorrow.”

  One by one, McLelland’s young ranger troop brought him their freshly cleaned and oiled rifles. He was stern with them, pointing out bits of ash they had missed in the dim candlelight, but he was secretly proud at their attention to detail. The new ashcovers were working as well as could be expected, but nothing keeps a bolt moving smoother than good old fashioned elbow grease. There were only a few jams during the firefight earlier that day. He had seen much worse; plenty of men and women under his command had died simply because they were too lazy to take a rag to their weapons before hitting the sack.

  “Just remember,” he said as the last one headed to her pallet, “bullets won’t do you any good if your rifle can’t cycle. There are plenty of outlaws that can split you from groin to gullet before you can even reach for your knife. Most of them have been running wild longer than y’all have been alive. They know their knives won’t jam up with ash. Better to put two in the chest and one in the head and keep moving than to sit there pulling on your charging handle while your guts spill out. Sweet dreams.”

  He sipped the last of the raw whiskey as the first snores drifted across the room. His troop was young; the boy snoring peacefully nearest him was just barely sixteen. Just six months ago the Governor’s office had sent him these kids as replacements after his old troop was annihilated in a single disastrous night. The veterans had been crushed when the roof of their barracks collapsed after a heavy ashfall. The Captain and his wife had been away on some well-deserved leave at the time. When he had heard the sad news, he had tracked down the engineer in charge of clearing structures for safe use and beat him bloody with length of steel pipe. The engineer was a popular man, and the savage assault had earned the Captain some powerful enemies within the Republic bureaucracy. He had almost been stripped of his command, but the Governor had stepped in. The RNT had an outlaw problem, and McLelland knew better than most how to solve an outlaw problem. Unable to get rid of him, his enemies tried to set him up for failure by sending him a pack of raw children. It was widely assumed that they would be slaughtered within a week. The kids were part of a group slotted for service in the government construction and maintenance crews. They were mostly orphans, all volunteers; teenagers with no futures and little to lose. When they had reported for duty, malnourished and untrained, the Captain had been furious. His complaints to the War Department fell on deaf ears, however, and he was left with little choice but to whip the youngsters into fighting shape as fast as he could.

  For six grueling months
he had done just that. He had molded them into a crack team of cutthroats and trackers. A team that now drifted off to sleep on the cold floor of an abandoned bank on the outskirts of what used to be Houston. They had proven themselves in more than a dozen engagements while suffering only light casualties. He was fiercely proud of his new outfit, and treated each of them as his own child.

  Stretching sore limbs and arthritic joints, he stowed his glass and slowly stood up to inspect the pickets. They had been lucky to find a place so suitable for their quick bivouac. Most single-story structures were largely buried in the drifts of ash that had accumulated over the past thirty years. Usually only the top few feet of a single story building was still visible, making entrance difficult. This bank happened to have a hatch in the roof, with a ladder leading down into a back room. The troop could rest peacefully with minimal sentry duty for once. The last week of travel had found them sleeping in the open most nights, they all welcomed a chance to feel secure from bandits and beasts.

  The hatch creaked softly as he slowly pushed it open, and bitter cold washed down on him. He climbed out into a starless, cloudy night. The darkness was thick and palpable; the low clouds seemed to reflect the tiniest noise. He pulled his mask off to fill his lungs with crisp air, there was little danger from the ash in the still night.

  “Have you been lying to the children again?” The gentle voice drifted in from the shadows to his right. “They don’t need to hear about those hard days. They’ve got enough of their own to deal with.”

  He peered into the shadows, trying to make out the shape of her. “Well I’m of the opinion that if they learn what we had to go through then they might have a few more days ahead of them, hard or not. As for me, I know I probably don’t have many hard days left, and it just so happens it’s hard as can be tonight!”