Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga)

by Matthew Taylor

  Alias now affirmatively liked everything about their new recruit and found still more appreciation for his father’s talents.

  Before he knew it, the truck was packed to the gills, and they squeezed into the narrow spaces they had left for themselves. Minister Goodwell turned the truck into the alleyway behind the church and hit the accelerator. Alias watched his father stare conspicuously straight ahead, never looking back at the Silver King Cathedral.

  No point in looking back, Alias admitted.

  Minister Goodwell had long missed the “principled” life of transitory evangelizing, and Alias wondered if his father’s feverish mental state allowed him to appreciate the magnitude of the loss he had imposed on the entire family. All the success and comfort they had built. The formal education that Minister Goodwell had always wanted for him and Jasmine. The regular showers and good meals. The soft beds. The air-conditioning in the spring, summer, and fall. Heat in the winter. Getting to see the beauty of the last green parts of the Commonwealth. The relative safety of being under Consortium protection.

  The deeper they drove into the mountains, the more Alias anguished at the return to a nomadic life and the perilous search ahead for his sister—all made worse by their impending status as wanted criminals.

  Chapter 52: Captured

  (Ali Ibn al-Rashid)

  Ali Ibn al-Rashid searched his mind for where it all went wrong and regretted every step.

  I should have fled.

  He had been myopically focused on concealing the plans of the cabal and mitigating the risks when the situation first spiraled out of control. The Consortium’s lead diplomat to the Chief Regent and emissary from the Pan-Islamic Caliphate, it would do him no good now. Flee the country? But to where? It was inconceivable that the Nautilus compound would actually be overrun.

  But then the White Light of Christ broke from its position in Salt Lake City, moved up the mountain pass, and blitzed the Consortium’s Compound. It was only when the guard towers on the outer perimeter went radio silent that Rashid thought to scurry as fast as his aging legs would carry him to the tarmac in search of an escape.

  Two tiger-shark jump-jets were already airborne, their sooty exhaust trailing behind them as they rocketed away up the mountain pass. The one ship on the landing pad was overflowing with people, most of whom he recognized as low-level consortium officers.

  Mercifully, Steven Wittenberg, a Tier 3 worker whom Rashid had favored for years, saw him. Being Caucasian, Wittenberg had the best chance of surviving the White Light of Christ’s coming bloodbath, and despite the risk to him and his family, the young man jumped from the belly of the airship to help Rashid squeeze onto the vessel just as it lumbered grudgingly off the ground.

  Safely inside, Rashid turned to find Saanvi Raman sandwiched next to him. She had been stuck at the Nautilus compound for days, waiting for the fighting to subside so she could get her next assignment after her trip to Indonesia went up in flames.

  “We need to have a chat with the people scheduling your assignments,” Rashid shouted over the roar of the engines, hoping to assuage the fear he could see in her eyes.

  She pursed her lips as she tried to smile. Trips to hardship areas were part of otherwise-lucrative careers with the Energy Consortium as the scramble for natural resources among the world powers became acute. But the Consortium generally tried to avoid sending executives into “hot zones,” and he knew Saanvi was more than nonplussed to be hopping from one hot zone to another.

  “I am glad to see you made it out,” he added leaning in and giving her a reassuring rub on the back.

  “I’m glad to still have Gajah,” she answered, trying to put on a brave face. “He’s arranging passage to the Baumgarten Estate.”

  Baumgarten, Rashid pondered, unsure his erstwhile ally in the cabal was any less dangerous than the trip she would have to make to get there.

  “Is that where this ship is headed?” he asked. She shrugged her shoulders, signaling that any destination would be better than the Nautilus, now being overrun by the White Light.

  Seeing his furrowed brow, Saanvi added, “I’m glad you made it too, Sir. You should come with me.”

  Rashid smiled and gave her an appreciative nod. “I’ll have to thank Gajah. …After I arrange a nice garden assignment for you.” He was pleased to see a smile pass her face.

  Their niceties were cut-off, though, by a deadpan voice crackle over the intercom.

  “Hold on.”

  Then the click-tink sound of bullets piercing the hull made the passengers crouch instinctively. Peering out the tiger-shark’s open side door as the ship growled low over the compound’s fence line, Rashid flinched at the sound of a terrific bang. The ship’s rear fuselage tore open, setting nearby passengers afire and sucking them screaming through the hole. The airship listed, then began to spin, casting more people out of the open gash. Rashid gripped an overhead strap with one hand, Saanvi’s arm with another as the aircraft sank, reared, and crashed.

  When Rashid came to, his senses filled with shouting, screaming, and the crackle of gunfire. He tried to focus on the blurry phantoms scurrying in all directions, before landing on the sight of Saanvi laying flat on her stomach, unconscious. He crawled as fast as his aching body would allow and curled up next to her, trying to shield her head with his body.

  Time flowed like a stream, and he couldn’t tell how long he lay there before he was pulled to his feet and dragged off by two men twice his size. With a desperate backward glance toward Saanvi, he was relieved to see two other men in battle gear carrying her limp body behind him.

  In an instant, it seemed, he was bound and loaded into the cargo hold of a large combat lorry. The men bound Saanvi’s wrists as well before laying her gently on a stretcher next to him, one of their captors huddled over her providing first aid. He panned to another soldier, face concealed by a gas mask, sitting at the rear of the cargo hold, unleashing fiery bursts from his assault rifle. Another prisoner lay in a heap at the soldier’s feet as the truck roared to life and lurched forward. Rashid glimpsed column of black smoke being licked by orange flames—the remnants of the airship—before the truck smashed through the chain-link perimeter of the compound and onto the highway leading into the mountains.

  The clitter-clack of gunfire gradually faded, and the truck rumbled and bounced all day and well into the night.

  When they finally came to a stop, the medic and the guard jumped out the back, zipping the canopy door-flap shut behind them. Rashid and his fellow prisoners were cast into complete darkness. He listened intently at the quiet speed and efficiency of his captors as they set camp.

  As silence soon descended on the camp and darkness enveloped him, he drifted into and out of consciousness. In the moment’s when he came to, his heart pounded in his chest and he gently stroked Saanvi’s blood-crusted hair. It felt like hours before he was startled at the rear flap being unzipped—albeit slowly. A moonlit face, faintly recognizable to Rashid, appeared in the opening and gestured for Rashid to come closer.

  “Doc says she’ll be fine,” the young man whispered with a nod toward Saanvi. He removed Rashid’s shackles and grasped his arm to help him up and over the tailgate. He led Rashid to a thicket of chaparral at the edge of the camp.

  “Ben Holland,” Rashid uttered, finally connecting the name and the face.

  “Not the way I thought I’d see you again,” Ben offered.

  “Do you know where Alias is?” Rashid asked, knowing they were short on time and keen to ally himself with his young captor. Rashid hoped the homely boy, love stricken with Alias Goodwell, would open up with details of what was happening. Ben shook his head and crouched lower to further conceal their discussion.

  “I’d’ve thought you’d be more worried about yourself,” Ben said, coolly.

  “You were the last one to see him,” Rashid persisted.

  “I left him with his folks at the Cathedral. Surprised you don’t know that.”

  “I think
it is pretty clear that I do not know much at this stage,” Rashid quipped.

  “This situation is beyond fucked, from top to bottom,” Ben noted.

  He blames me, Rashid realized. Rightly so, I guess. I must be a monster in his eyes. But why pull me aside? …Best to address this head on.

  “I never envisioned anything like this, much less planned it. This is something altogether different and more horrible.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Ben bit back. “I’m familiar with your scheme. If it spun of out of your control, that’s just a difference of degrees. Now we’re all knee-deep in blood.”

  Rashid was taken aback by the urchin’s defiant tone toward an Ellie, and he realized his situation was more dire than he imagined.

  “You were sent specifically for me, then?” Rashid asked. “Me and Saanvi were the only quarry?”

  “There were four others. One was dead on the scene. Couldn’t get to another.” Ben paused for a long moment. “And them,” Ben said with a nod to the truck.

  “And you shot us down? I guess they wanted us dead or alive.”

  “Nope. Actually, you’re lucky we got there when we did. The White Lighters took down your ship. We just made sure they didn’t make off with ya.”

  “I figured it would happen eventually,” Rashid admitted. “Someone getting to me. I guess I just didn’t expect it to come without so much as a fight on my behalf—and hardly a trace of me left behind. I must give credit to whomever is behind all this.”

  Ben gave him a puzzled look, as if unsure what to think or believe, and Rashid took the opportunity.

  “Someone betrayed us,” Rashid added, overcoming his reluctance to expose the cabal. “Almost no one knew of the plan. Instigate a handful of rebellions in the Desert Plains. Discredit Mosino. Make it hard for the Domestic Security Service to intervene. Turn the Chief Regent on his nephew. Then trade the Consortium’s support for mineral concessions and roll back the Chief Regent’s reforms. It would all be over a in a couple weeks. Balance of power restored. Enemies of the Commonwealth squashed. We get rich.”

  Genocide was never part of the plan.

  “I should have known it was going wrong when the fighting started earlier than planned, and so soon after the attacks overseas and the landfall of the megastorms,” Rashid sighed. “But it was working at first. The Chief Regent convened the war council, including special advisors—everyone on the cabal. He openly suspected his nephew of plotting for independence. He even asked about using the PetrolChurch to calm things down. He was getting desperate and open to help from allies.”

  Rashid shifted in his seat, quietly acknowledging it had all gone wrong from there. Rashid’s little cabal had opened the floodgates. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of civilians and migrants lay dead. From the desiccated border regions to teeming cities throughout the country, and all the way to the Green Belts, large swaths of the country had descended into mayhem and murder.

  The long-banned Free Texas Volunteers rose up in the Southeast Coastal Province and the Southern Desert Plains Territory, calling for a reborn Texas Republic. The Mormons followed suit, announcing secession and a new theocracy. He had heard rumors of incursions over the border with the Meso-American Republic, which had unleashed its own fighters. Drug cartels, criminal syndicates, street gangs, warlords, and mercenaries jumped into the fray.

  With the Expeditionary Forces engaged overseas, the Domestic Security Forces in disarray, and provincial militias overstretched, there was nowhere near enough force to stop the bloodletting. At least two provincial militia brigades had been completely routed. Half a dozen cities were being razed to the ground in the effort to put down the rebellion.

  As panic set in, the Chief Regent initiated detonate-in-place protocols to prevent the nation’s ancient arsenal of weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of its enemies. Large chunks of the country would be forever uninhabitable. Rashid couldn’t shake the image of Washington DC, Palo Alto, Hollywood, and Manhattan, still uninhabitable—decades since the Quad-Bomb attack decades earlier.

  Three companies of Consortium Security forces that the cabal had planned to barter, outgunned and outnumbered, were overwhelmed before they could even be deployed. The rest, those who hadn’t deserted, were pinned down protecting the company’s assets.

  As he reflected on the scope of the disaster with Ben, Rashid knew this was no accidental escalation. He was clearly being kidnapped as part of the betrayal.

  But who? Rashid wondered. Ben works for Sherman, but Sherman was too small time to orchestrate something so huge. Sherman was, he thought, just a pawn of the cabal and the Consortium. Someone must have promised him a lot more to take such a risk.

  The Chief Regent will eventually regain control.

  There will be an investigation. …And what better scapegoat than a foreigner? A Muslim. An agent of a foreign power—and a despised and distrusted power at that. I will be offered up. Only then will I know who betrayed me.

  He and Ben were silent for a long while, until the soft crunching sound of footsteps on gravel approached through the darkness.

  “Oy, Sparky,” Felipe said in hushed rasp. “We’ve got a long-assed road ahead tomorrow, and you can’t be bleary-eyed from gabbin’ all night.” Felipe glanced at Rashid and smiled respectfully before returning his eyes to Ben. “Plus, you’ll be in a world of shit if the boss hears you’re havin’ secret chats with the pris’ners. –No offense,” he added quickly to Rashid.

  Ben acknowledged Felipe’s warning with a nod and reached out to help Rashid back to his feet. Rashid, though disappointed with the conversation ending before he knew if he had secured Ben’s sympathy, felt exhaustion overtaking him and complied without protest.

  Rashid climbed back into the rear of the lorry and laid down on the plasti-foam mattress unfurled on the floor of the truck next to Saanvi.

  If I ever get out of this alive, I promise to change, he whispered to the Heavens. He hadn’t communicated with God—not sincerely—in years, and he felt a tinge of guilt in knowing it was as close to a deathbed conversion as he could get. He had always been disdainful of the world’s sinners coming to God out of last-minute fear for their lives or their immortal souls, but he now understood the phenomenon. He pushed past the remorse and felt closer to God now than he had ever been. All this for money and power. I have been an agent of evil. I have taken everything that is left of what you gave us and used it against humanity, just to get more still for myself. He considered for a moment the love he felt for his wife and family, for Alias, Saanvi, and Steven Wittenberg. He resolved to extend that love to as many people he could.

  Rashid fell asleep for the first time in years with a sense that peace and selflessness were getting the upper hand on his self-loathing and ambition.

  He woke up early the next morning to the truck’s roaring engines and the clattering of gear fastened to the outside walls of the truck. Saanvi was awake, but visibly afraid and keen to stay still where she lay. He shuffled over to be near her. The other prisoners somehow slept through the jolts and the noise, huddling in the far corner until the truck’s breaks let out an ear-splitting squeal and shuddered to a stop.

  Rashid rested his head on his knees and closed his eyes, as he waited for—he wasn’t sure what. The truck’s deafening noise hung in his ears through the next several minutes of quiet. Beyond the canopy of the truck’s cargo hold where he lay with his fellow captives, only the occasional crunching of hastened footsteps on gravel signaled activity.

  Finally, the canopy flap unzipped and flew open, letting in a rush of cold, fresh air, which swirled and mixed with the lingering stench of sulphur, sweat, feces, piss, and body odor. Rashid gagged and vomited a little onto himself. Wiping his chin, he watched Ben’s face peer over the tail gate, only to take on a peaked color and turn away with a dry heave.

  “Ben,” Rashid ventured, “we need to relieve ourselves. And we need to clean up. If we’re at a safe location—”
>
  “Yeah, OK,” Ben agreed, but with an unexpected reluctance in his expression. “Up and out,” he said, gesturing for them to make their way over to get down. As Rashid, still bound at the wrists, waddled his way toward the tailgate, Saanvi close behind, Ben leaned in to check her bandage.

  An encouraging sign of humanity, Rashid thought.

  Rashid’s eyes strained in the morning light as he looked around for clues to where they might be. But he didn’t recognize the expansive courtyard where they were parked, or the old stone building in front of them. Its double doors swung open, and Felipe Arrivillaga emerged, pushing a small group of grousing men and women into the cold morning wind. Felipe went back into the building briefly, and re-remerged with more hand-bound workers, a stream of shabby-looking children in drab and tattered uniforms following behind.

  Rashid tried to catch Ben’s eye for some explanation of the odd scene unfolding before him, but Ben was deliberately avoiding eye contact.

  “C’mon,” Ben offered instead, leading them single file past the frightened men and women now being forced to their knees by Ben’s crew, weapons at the ready.

  “Ben,” Rashid appealed, squeezing past the throng of disheveled children in the doorway. “What is going on here?” The silence that met his overture disquieted him as much as Ben’s straight line to the restrooms—as if he knew the place from memory.

  “Three minutes,” Ben finally said flatly, gesturing impatiently for them to enter the echoing, institutional bathroom. Rashid and Saanvi paused and frowned their objection to forcing a woman into the same toilet area. But Ben was unmoved, gesturing indifferently for them to get cracking or risk losing the privilege.

  Rashid, who knew from experience not to trifle with armed men in the grasp of adrenaline, abandoned his appeal and led Saanvi to the one stall with a door still attached. He then found his way to an open stall on the other end of the room, its missing door denying him any dignity. His status as a prisoner fully crystalized for him, and his heart went out to Saanvi, whom he heard weeping with humiliation as her bowels released a tempest of stress and anxiety. He tried to focus on his own business, though his body refused to cooperate with the pressure of a ticking clock.