Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga)

by Matthew Taylor

  “Downward facing dog,” ordered the yogi.

  Hard to say how many’ll be put down this time. She exhaled. Millions homeless, if not from the flooding, then from the fires. Thousands more robbed, raped, or murdered before the Templetons restore order. Hundreds caught in the crossfire as they try.

  “Sun Salutation,” the hologram badgered.

  Fuck it, she thought. She stood up and wiped the sweat from her neck and forehead.

  “Your workout is only half finished, Miss Goodwell,” the flickering Yogi chided. “A centered mind and body are the key to—”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she sighed, suddenly feeling overcome.

  “Namaste, Miss Goodwell,” the holograph offered before vanishing.

  Jasmine toweled off and put on her lounge robe—another treat of the estate—and paced the length of her room several times.

  “There you are,” Angelino beckoned from the doorway. His voice made her heart skip a beat, and she paused a moment to make sure she wasn’t crying before turning around to see him. “Be careful of that yogi; he’s a fucker,” he joked.

  “I’ve arranged a few minutes of comms time for you to call your parents. I figured they must be worried sick.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered, now resenting the idea that comms time was a favor. He noticed her frustration and walked over to console her.

  “Wanna fuck?” he jokingly whispered in her ear. She couldn’t help but laugh, albeit with a sniffle.

  She wrapped her arms around him as he unfastened her robe and leaned in to kiss her neck.

  Chapter 28: Recovery and Preparation

  (Victoria Lancaster)

  Victoria Lancaster opened the storm door and peered out of the apartment building’s shelter. She nearly kicked down the door when the township bells chimed the all-clear to come out. The storm had passed, and the rioting in the afueras was already being put down, though they’d have to be doubly vigilant in the coming days. Weeks of difficult work lay ahead to recover from the storm’s destruction—and that was certain to delay the much-anticipated start of her school.

  Stepping outside, she filled her lungs with the close, muggy air, untied the knot of worry in her stomach, and embraced the surge of energy from her freedom.

  She had been holed up in the shelter during the three-day superstorm with her Uncles Christian and Joshua, her Aunt Honey, and cousin Emily—along with her family’s business partners, Dorian Lee and Shay. With another family, also tied to Shay’s business, confined to the shelter room, it was close quarters, and cabin fever started to set in on her within hours. Only her mother wasn’t there, having been stationed in the Troy Township infirmary to deal with any injuries or medical emergencies. The absence of her mother’s tireless positivity made the lock down that much more insufferable and was the primary source of her own stress and anxiety.

  Her Aunt Honey, prone to episodes of borderline-hysteria, invariably followed by bouts of deep melancholy, consumed most of their attention. It broke up some of the boredom, and the burden mostly fell on Emily and Uncle Christian. Shay, who hardly slept—a trait Victoria had decided partly explained his success in business—spent most of the time with Dorian Lee, catching up on work. They occasionally roped in Christian and Emily with one business problem or another, though Victoria noticed that they only did it when it became obvious Christian and Emily needed a break.

  With them were the Lockhearts, a family that brought its own distractions. Their unusually large family—including young children—took up most of the space in the already cramped shelter, which was segmented into rooms only by curtains, and they made almost all the noise. Fortunately, the Lockhearts were their closet neighbors and had become some of their closest friends. The families worked together, lived side by side in the township, courtesy of Shay, and shared a similar history and motivation.

  The Lockhearts had recently gambled everything to reunite as a family. Ages earlier, Martha Lockheart, the abuelita and matriarch of the family, married and left her family ranch near Galveston when the soil became unfit. Settling in Great Lakes Province, they had two sons, one of whom stayed at home helping make ends meet for the family, while the second and more ambitious son, Henry, set out into the world to make a fortune. He found his way to Pacific Columbia Province, married Gretchen Woods, and they had four children. The oldest, Grimm, was Emily’s age, with Carter following a couple years later. Then twins, Andre and Pauline, arrived just as the lumber industry in the province finally collapsed. In the cascade of misfortune, Henry’s father and brother died of consumption back in the Great Lakes, setting Martha and Henry’s young family on a quest to reunite and stick together.

  Shay came across Henry in much the same way he had found Victoria’s Uncle Christian, and they now followed Shay around to the various construction sites.

  Grimm was handsome, with big blue eyes and dark curly hair. He had befriended her brother Paul before Paul enlisted, and Victoria suspected that Emily had found some discreet comfort with Grimm around the work sites. Of course, neither would ever talk about their little affair, and the logistics of it were a major obstacle to both love and secrecy. Still, Victoria liked the way Grimm struggled to conceal his affection for her overly conservative cousin, and she half hoped it would mature into something that would help Emily break free of the emotional shackles of being so responsible and duty-bound all the time. Plus, she thought they would have beautiful kids if they ever so misguided as to bring children into the sickened world.

  Closer to home for Victoria, the tall and lanky boy named Brady Saussa had also been trapped in the shelter. Brady had been an orphan in the shanties when the township administrator one day discovered him. Just a child, Brady was miraculously making gobs of money with a gambling scheme. Recognizing talent when he saw it, the administrator brought Brady straight into the township and placed him in the Track. His smarts and genuinely kind demeanor—presumably born of gratitude for being saved from life in the shanties—made him a rising star in the township. He now ran some of the orientation activities for new kids on the Track, and he was a freshly minted team lead on a township civil service crew. He had just received his own apartment a few streets down, where Victoria came upon him moving boxes. That was the first time in her life she could recall volunteering for physical labor, and when she had helped him move his stuff, one thing naturally led to another. They were as discreet as they could be, and neither had proposed anything resembling commitments or exclusivity—an arrangement that worked for her with her other lover, Nanner, prone to showing up now and again. But Brady was definitely in her “adorable” category, and she felt butterflies in her stomach whenever she saw him.

  The last occupant of their shelter was a child name Penny Van Der Gott, playmate to the Lockheart twins. She too was an orphan, her parents killed in a marauder attack when she was still in pre-school. Her parents had been full residents in the township, and their rights conveyed to Penny, who was assigned a guardian. Unfortunately for Penny, that guardian provided was Cassandra Prescott, widely known to be cold and dour. The other parents of kids in the Track did their best to compensate, if only because Penny was a delight. She had taken to the Lockheart Twins immediately and spent much of her time in or around the apartment block.

  Despite all the commotion and distraction in the shelter, including her efforts to ignore Brady, Victoria focused on her lessons whenever the power was on—which was thankfully more than for most the township, thanks to her clan’s preparations. She studied basic engineering and construction, for which she had ready help from her extended family. Physiology and medicine, for which she had a leg up because of her mother’s profession. Electronics and coding, already among her proficiencies. Basic robotics and vehicle repair. Chemistry and microbiology, mostly focused on food generation, where she consciously engaged Brady, if only to deflect suspicions. She poured over the material, even the subjects she knew well, just in case there was some new twist or nugget.

  Sh
e was determined to be prepared for her classes, and she wasn’t going to give the township administrators any excuse or opportunity to throw her out. She also wanted to impress Brady with more than her sex, especially after the incident in preparing for the storm.

  Victoria had been less than thrilled to learn that she had been assigned to Brady’s crew to make final preparations for the storm, especially since an hour before they had enjoyed a clandestine rendezvous in an empty tool shed. Still, she took her assignment from Brady with a smile and set off to gather and deliver supplies.

  As the day wore on, though, she increasingly sought relief from the muggy heat by following the patchwork of shade on the edge of her path, where a thin canopy of trees dappled the intensifying sun. In the shade, she savored the warm breeze, the rustling branches swaying above her, and the even the buzz of flies and mosquitoes.

  “Keep moving, Lancaster,” came the saccharine voice of Cassandra Prescott from behind her. Victoria turned in start to find the stout, red-faced woman marched around her and up the hill. Victoria grimaced at the curmudgeonly old bitch until she realized that she had set her wheelbarrow down and was now just standing there in the shade—and she had no idea how long she’d been spacily gazing into the trees.

  Oh my God, I hope no one else saw me, she thought to herself, feeling vulnerable and exposed. Sloth was practically a crime in the township. Any of the elders would be decidedly unamused to see her carried away like that, especially after having just been admitted her to the Track. If Cassandra mentioned it to Brady, and felt bound to report it up the chain, she’d spend the rest of the recovery effort doing much more arduous assignments—maybe even closer to more lawless Outer Edge. They could even offer her up to the Provincial Relief Corps or the Commonwealth’s Federal Disaster Relief Service.

  I could end up God knows where, like Paul, she pined.

  She hurriedly grasped the push-bars of her wheelbarrow and pressed the forward button, but her wheelbarrow immediately sank into a patch of mud and tipped to one side, spilling her cargo of produce onto the gravely path and into the drainage ditch beside it.

  Crap, she gasped. Frustrated, and still recovering from her start, she slowly righted the wheelbarrow and tried to calm herself as she kneeled down to pick up the scattered vegetables.

  Hurry, she willed her limbs. Move faster—Faster.

  In a few moments, which felt to her like an eternity, she had scooped up the last of the spilled vegetables and dumped them into the wheelbarrow. She swatted the dust off her coveralls and wiped the sweat from her church before gripping the handles again and setting off up the hill.

  Stupid girl, she admonished herself.

  By the late-afternoon, the heat and humidity were murder, and she felt like she was wading through soup. Sweat dripped off her brows, stinging her eyes. It pooled in the fingertips of her work gloves and soaked her undershirt. It dribbled from the small of her back and into the crack of her ass. Her auburn hair clung to her head, which throbbed in her mesh hat.

  By the time she reached the top, she was almost relieved when the siren finally sounded to hunker down. She legged it to her apartment building, where she found the rest of her family assembling, along with the Lockhearts and Penny. Brady was unexpectedly there too, and Victoria was certain that Cassandra had reported her. She couldn’t tell at first if Brady had come to castigate her until he explained (unconvincingly) that he had just finished stocking the shelter when the lock-down alert sounded. He was, he claimed, just stuck in place.

  When the bustling in the shelter finally died down, and the storm took hold outside, Victoria sought out Brady for help with her math, reinforcing the appearance of a harmless friendship between them. She noticed her cousin Emily conducting a similar ruse with Grimm and realized that no one in the room could possibly be buying it. Still, Brady was satisfactorily distracted by being close to her. If Cassandra had narced on her, Brady didn’t care, or he was over it.

  After that, the days and nights blurred together, and she did her best to endure her aunt’s drama, the noise of the children, the absence of her mother, and the tempting presence of Brady. She tried desperately to focus on her studies, taking only occasional breaks for snacks from the stash of rations her clan had been hoarding over the past several months.

  The township equipped every shelter with plenty of drought-oat crackers that tasted like cardboard-flavored chalk. The bags of water tasted a faintly of metal from the purification chemicals and preservatives. Even a few nibbles of biotein paste was a relief, and a few sprinkles of Cafecito crystals made the water tolerable.

  Of course, none of the hoarding was permitted under the terms of their residency passes in the township, and she worried about Brady’s reaction when Shay first broke out the food and fired up the contraband generator. Brady just gave her an unsurprised—and possibly even impressed—glance. She was more relieved when he accepted a cup of tea and a cracker with biotein cheese paste.

  He couldn’t know, though he might suspect, that the clan was prepared for much worse than a superstorm lockdown. They were ready for anything, but if they were caught hoarding, they could be exiled from the township. The very thought of having to leave her promising new life made Victoria sick to her stomach. Yet her fear of that possibility steadily increased along with the size of her family’s stores.

  Days later, though, she was more concerned about Brady’s reaction when she realized that the hushed conversation on the other side of the room had turned to Paul’s predicament and the family’s relationship with the Goodwells. The Goodwells created uncertainty for the entire clan, and she was surprised and chagrinned that they would discuss it in mixed company.

  The Goodwells had taken good care of her family, including getting them residency passes in Troy Township. Aunt Honey, forever desperate to find a moment’s peace in her own head, was becoming increasingly interested in the Goodwells’ faith. Emily, presumably unknown to Grimm, had taken a fancy to Alias Goodwell. Both Victoria and Emily saw Jasmine Goodwell as a friend—a friend who was at that very moment shuttling between rival Ellies to get Paul released from the stockade, absolved of war crimes charges, and transferred from his overseas position in the Expeds.

  But there was no escaping the more troubling aspects of the Goodwells and their PetrolChurch. Uncle Christian and Shay dismissed them as crazies. Uncle Joshua, a refugee of sorts from the Goodwell’s ministry, believed the PetrolChurch experiment was tying the Goodwells to something sinister, and he discouraged ties of any kind with the Goodwells and their perverted ministry.

  They are uncomfortably cozy with important—and dangerous—Ellies, Victoria had to concede.

  She scanned the room to find Brady well within earshot when Uncle Christian commented about the Goodwells’ churches being suspiciously co-located with all her family’s construction sites. Then she heard mention of Farid Sherman’s role in both the construction projects and security for the Goodwells. That almost guaranteed some nefarious dual-use scheme, and it wouldn’t be lost on Brady, especially when Shay noted that some of the larger churches had paramilitary characteristics that went well beyond the necessities of self-defense. Secret tunnels and entrances. Odder still, known vulnerabilities that their paymasters refused to address.

  Victoria’s jaw dropped when Emily went on to parrot Jasmine’s suspicion that the frenetic pace of shipments flowing through the churches was contraband drugs and weapons. Her clan had twice probed Victoria for confirmation from whatever pillow-talk she may have shared with Nanner, who frequently showed up with the mystery cargo, but Nanner had never said, and Victoria never asked.

  What can they possibly get out of discussing this now? She didn’t observe Brady getting suspicious, and she didn’t want to call attention to it by telling them to change the subject—or to shut the fuck up.

  “Well that’ll prob’ly take care of itself, once the contract expires,” Shay mentioned.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.


  She tried to ignore the fact that their contract on the church work sites was nearing completion, and for all the prepping her family was doing, there was still no clear plan as to what would follow if Sherman didn’t give them more work. She and her mother were now part of the township citizen structure, but the others had only probationary residency passes. These theoretically gave them some preferential dispensation, but in fact entitled them to nothing once their work was completed. Only Shay was pretty much assured of staying, and only because he had such a long history with the township’s leadership. But even Shay’s next contract would surely take him elsewhere, and Victoria expected that Uncle Christian, Joshua, Honey, Emily—and possibly even her mother—would want to follow.

  I wonder if Brady would take these insights and lobby for permanent residency passes? Even if he did, how would we make a living? Or would he let it slip that my family’s commitment to the township—maybe even mine—is questionable? Even a whiff of that could get me chucked off the Track.

  Victoria became adept at blocking out the questions and uncertainties before this conversation, focusing instead on building a normal life, the potential benefits of being on the Track, and her worry about Paul’s fate. But three days on lock down brought her face to face with the gravity of these considerations. There was no escaping it when the discussions and planning were happening right in front of her. Brady just continued playing with Penny, Pauline, and Andre, throughout, but he hadn’t said a word in a while, leaving her with the impression that he was listening.

  It felt like salvation when the township’s all-clear siren rang out. She consciously made her way over to break up the conversation by busting through her huddled clan on her way to the door.

  Victoria emerged from the storm shelter to find debris scattered everywhere and windows smashed up and down the street. There were gaping holes in several roofs, and a couple buildings with no roofs at all.