The Age of Embers (Book 5): The Age of Defiance

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The Age of Embers (Book 5): The Age of Defiance Page 16

by Schow, Ryan


  Shaking his head, he said, “If only you knew the problems that woman…never mind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stepped forward, pushed the bedroom door almost shut, then said, “She knows our greatest weaknesses. For men it’s sex, and for women it’s safety. All I’m saying is guard yourself with her. She might not be safe.”

  “We’re not that black and white,” Ruby said. “Sometimes all women want is sex, too.”

  “I know, but my point is, she knows what we need and that’s how she’s going to get us all in her personal army.”

  “What are her intentions?” Ruby asked. “What’s the big plan?”

  “World domination, I guess,” he said, straightening up.

  This caused her to laugh, and then she said, “Who doesn’t want world domination? Besides, that would be a great substitute for sex.”

  “Yeah,” he said, grim, “well she actually believes she can have it.”

  “In that case,” she said, “we should let her try.”

  They took a scant bit of treasure back to the apartment towers, stashed it where it wouldn’t be stumbled upon by vagrants, then headed back out on the road. When they got to the scene where Maria said she fought half a dozen or more men, there were no bodies, but the blood evidence of a fight was everywhere.

  “Looks like someone slaughtered a few cows out here,” Myron said, toeing one of the dried circles.

  “You should have seen it,” Aaron replied.

  “Yeah,” Maria chided. “Aaron got to sit in the safety of the truck and watch it all.”

  Aaron fell silent, uncomfortable with the dig. Rather than respond directly, he said, “I’ll show you where they went.”

  When they got to the building where the men were supposedly holed up, she said, “Carver and I will go in the front door. Myron, Danny and Ruby, you three and One will man the other exit. One stays out of the line of fire, got it? If she gets hurt under your watch, I’ll kill both of you. Do you understand?”

  “So not Ruby?” Danny asked.

  “Not Ruby.”

  “If you’re so worried about her, why bring her then?” Myron asked.

  “Because this is the new form of Kindergarten,” Maria replied. When the human can opener didn’t seem to get it, she said, “This is her education in warfare and survival and it’s starting today.”

  “Ah,” he said, getting it. “Okay, fair enough.”

  “If we don’t run in to any issues, we’ll open the other door from the inside. But if it gets hot in there, if we’re under attack, we’ll mop up or die trying. Aaron, you’re on our six. Danny and Myron, if you hear gunfire, come in through the front door and assist. Wait only until we open the door or you hear gunfire. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Aaron said. He looked back at Myron who nodded. Then, back to Maria, he said, “But we have to get through the door first. You remember I tried already, right?”

  She turned the knob, gave it a shake. It was locked and didn’t budge.

  “See?” he said.

  They had bats and knives, but nothing they could shoot the lock with and nothing they could use to pry open the door.

  “Get ready,” she said.

  Maria took a short step back, then launched forward and hit the door with a ferocious kick that punched the metal inward. The door didn’t just bust open though, it ripped apart the metal casing as well. Someone might have said “Holy Jesus,” but it didn’t matter. She was already ducking in through the gap. She led and Carver followed.

  Aaron followed suit.

  Carver knew the men would be impressed by her, by her strength. It was all a trap though, a big ruse. They would be in awe of what she could do long before they were smart enough to realize the danger they were in with her.

  Downstairs was clear, so Maria went to open the other door and that’s when gunfire broke out from above. Everyone sunk down and dug in.

  Maria could heal herself, but it wasn’t without repercussions. Carver thought she was getting tired of overheating and not showering, bleeding and not being able to fully clean herself up, being so thirsty and hungry she got a little lightheaded then had to sleep long, uninterrupted hours. So she took cover with the rest of them.

  “We’re reloadin’ and we got tons more ammo!” came the booming voice from above.

  Carver didn’t wait. He hustled up the stairs, throwing caution to the wind.

  “Wait!” Maria hissed.

  He wasn’t waiting for squat. There was no reason to wait! At the top of the staircase, a pistol and a face appeared. He ducked hard and fast to the left just as the shot went off. The bullet smashed into the wall behind him. The boom nearly rendered him deaf, but he pushed through the barking noise. Ducking the other way, he knew the next shot was coming and was accounting for it. It came. And it had teeth.

  Nipping at his ear, the round took a bite out of him. But that didn’t matter because now he was in the nest and there was only one gun on him. He slapped it away, started firing off shots of his own. Not bullets—punches, kicks and elbows.

  Then he got cracked. Slammed in the side of the head with something hard.

  Bodies barreled into him, blasting him so hard and so quick there was no way to be sure of the attackers or their weapons. He was kicked and shoved off his feet, thrown to the ground. Turtling up to weather the storm, he pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his shins. Then someone turned him over and cracked his shin with a bat, causing him to howl out. Another kick hammered his arm so hard it temporarily went numb.

  Enraged, he scrambled to his feet, but the pummeling he took as a result wasn’t worth the effort he expended. That’s when someone’s ham-sized fist caught him in the chin and everything went black.

  When he came to, his head was in Ruby’s lap. He wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not, or where he was, and he wasn’t sure how he got there, but the fog of unconsciousness wore off and things became clear.

  Ruby was stroking his hair back, not like a lover, but like a mother whose child was just kicked in the teeth by a bully twice his size. Maria’s voice was loud and unclear at first, but then awareness set in fully and everything became crystal clear.

  “Ruby?” he said, looking up at her.

  She looked down, smiled and said, “Enjoy the reprieve?”

  “It was peaceful,” he told her, his lips ripping open where the blood was trying to coagulate.

  He sat up, fought a sweeping wave of dizziness, then crawled up to his feet, cursing wildly to himself.

  “Alright, which one of you twats had the bat?” he said, wobbling a bit as he walked.

  There were seven of them lined up. They looked like prisoners of war the way Maria had them situated. On their knees, they had their hands behind their head and fingers laced together.

  “I did,” a man said defiantly. He was on his knees in a line with the others. Carver walked over and drove a fist into his jaw so hard, the man nearly fell over.

  “All you had to do was let us through,” Maria said, referring to yesterday’s events.

  “Tried to make a hole,” one of the other men said, while the one Carver hit rolled over and spit a glob of blood on the floor.

  “Nothing like a good sucker punch, eh?” Carver asked.

  In that moment, the man went on a tirade of cursing that caused him to turn beet red and nearly run out of gas. That’s how hard he took to swearing.

  “Get up and get back in line,” Carver said, “or the next shot won’t be so nice.”

  “Tell you what,” Maria said to everyone while looking at Carver. “We’re going to take everything you have here. It will be our personal stash. Call it the victors claiming their right to the spoils. But you don’t have to stay desolate, hungry and beaten. You can come with me and you will live under my protection. But you will also fight with me, beside me, for me.”

  She looked down the line at all of them and then the guy Carver hit started to laugh. He laughed and co
ughed and spit out more blood and then he laughed some more.

  Maria looked at Carver, raised a brow, almost as if to ask permission. He nodded, surprised she was asking for his opinion. And that’s when she hit Mr. Funnyman so hard, his jaw bone both dislocated and cracked in half. He opened his mouth to scream, but not before Maria had two hands inside said mouth, prying it open with a force that scared even Carver.

  Taking a step back, he gasped.

  In a swift yet barbarous display of aggression and dominance, Maria tore his jaw almost all the way off his face. Only the unripped skin and some muscle and sinew that refused to let go of the bone remained. And the tongue…oh dear God…the tongue. It just hung down like a limp pecker, blood showering down from the mangled upper half of his face.

  Standing back, Maria lined up a kick, then drove it in so hard that several of the man’s ribs broke through the skin, jutting out at odd angles as he fell over and died on the spot.

  “I’d like a show of hands,” she said, brushing her hair back, then wiping her bloody hands on her pants. “Who’s coming with me?”

  All the hands rose up, and that was how they went from five warriors and a little girl to eleven warriors and said little girl.

  “Good,” Maria replied, a look of satisfaction on her face. “Gather up your things, everything you think might be useful to all of us, and then meet me outside. That means all that ammo you were bragging about earlier.”

  “We were bluffing about the ammo,” one of the men said. “We were hoping you’d surrender, or go away.”

  Shaking her head, Maria said, “Just do what I said.”

  “What are you going to do with us?” one of the men asked as all of them climbed to their feet. This particular man had a wet stain in his pants. It wasn’t a four alarm flooder, just a nervous piss blossom.

  “I’m going to turn you into men,” she said. Then, glancing down at his pants, she added, “Maybe even you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Carver helped get everyone situated in the third floor rooms, as Maria instructed. As he did, he looked each of these monkeys in the face and knew that every mark on his body, every violent beating, was these guys’ doing.

  They apologized half-heartedly to him in passing, but his reply was the same for all of them: F off.

  He was tired of excusing Maria’s bad behavior. Tired of being told he had to have sex with her, even if he happened to want it, which was less than he imagined. And he was tired of feeling like she was using him only to have her human experience, something he was barely even part of anymore.

  Now, looking at Ruby, seeing a real live female again, he tried to get a sense of her. She was a curious thing. So curious, in fact, that when Maria went to bed, he snuck down to her room, knocked lightly, then went inside when she said it was alright.

  “What do you want?” she asked, laying in bed. It was hot in the room, but not stuffy. The window was open to let in the cool air, and from what little starlight came in from outside, he could see only a shadow of her body. She wore a bra, but little else. Her hair was loose, the ponytail gone.

  “If I’m intruding…”

  “You are,” she said quietly. “But it’s alright.”

  “Are you okay here?” he asked.

  “I…I lost everyone, Carver,” she said, her voice cold, like she was biting back on the emotions so hard she went to the other side of the spectrum.

  “I heard,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” she asked. “Not sex, just…proximity?”

  “You’re into girls, right?” he asked.

  “More than I am guys,” she said. “But who knows. Right now I’m into survival, and that trumps everything else. If I ever start thinking about sex again—and that will probably be never—if you’re still alive, maybe we can form an arrangement.”

  “I already have an arrangement with someone prettier.”

  “Yes, and scarier,” she said. She pulled back the blankets as an invitation. The bed was large, a queen-sized bed. Room enough for two without the incidental touching.

  “Clothes on or off?” he said.

  “You freeballin’ it?”

  “No.”

  “Pants and shirt off, giblets strapped and wrapped.”

  He took off his pants and shirt and slid in next to her. They laid there for awhile, talking to each other, telling each other about their lives before all this. It was refreshing to talk to a real woman about real things that didn’t involve strategy and warfare.

  Then, when she told him about her family (three brothers and her parents) and how they all died in a plane crash when the power went out, he felt a deep and profound sadness for her. It wasn’t just her words, the story…it was the tone in her voice, how the hurt broke through the tough exterior, revealing more of a scared little girl than a hardened young woman.

  It turned out she wasn’t all that hardened after all.

  Carver wasn’t close to his own family. He was always in his own world. He thought this was a bit of a blessing, considering the times. Everyone else lost people they loved. He’d insulated himself from the heartache of life by pushing away most of his family. Now he had no one, so he had no one to lose.

  Then again, he had no one to live for, either. Well, besides Maria. She had his attention from the very beginning, messed up and dysfunctional as it was.

  Ever since she killed his friends and walked out of Stanford, Carver obsessed over her, who she was, if there was a way to kill her and be the big hero. Now he knew he couldn’t kill her. He thought maybe as a transhuman—part human, part machine—she could embrace all the beauty of the human mind and body while becoming smart enough to right all the wrongs of the world.

  Alas, this was not so.

  She wanted to become a better human—smarter, stronger, and more cunning—but only so she could survive. That meant growth and change for her in this new world, this new body. When she told him about machine learning, how it was machines evolving on their own with the help of software and capable hardware, he became intrigued. With her exceptional looks and body, evolving meant eclipsing humanity. For a brief moment, he wondered if he could let go and be by her side as she came to power. He’d also hoped she’d learn what it meant to be human, and not be so cruel. Things didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped and now he was stuck.

  “I love how real you are,” he finally said to Ruby, his voice sluggish from sleep, his knobbed shin throbbing from the beating it took earlier.

  She snuggled up against him, but not like Maria. Not because she wanted sex. She did so because she knew he wouldn’t make a move on her. That’s the way they slept. And when he woke in the morning, she was gone. The sun shined in the window, the vibrant morning upon him but not in an overwhelming way. A cool breeze walked its invisible fingers over his bare chest and face, coaxing him awake. He yawned, stretched and then looked out the window.

  “How’d you sleep?” Ruby asked, walking in the room dressed and ready for the day.

  “Good, actually.” Then, sitting up, he said, “In fact, I think I slept better last night than I have since this whole nightmare kicked off.”

  “Really?” she asked, surprised.

  Nodding his head, feeling alive for the first time in a long time, he said, “Yeah, actually. It was amazing.”

  “Well you look like hell with the shine rubbed off.”

  He touched his face, felt the tight flesh, then pulled off the blankets and looked at his still-throbbing shin and the goose egg on it.

  “It is what it is,” he finally said, pulling on his pants.

  Upstairs, he joined Maria and One, unable to keep the smile off his face and the pep out of his step.

  “Looks like you and our new pet are getting along famously,” she said, pleased.

  “She’s not a pet, she’s a person,” he said.

  “You say tomato—”

  “So what’s on the agenda today?” he interrupte
d, watching as One picked at the loose skin on her hands where the drained blisters had turned a pale white.

  “I didn’t want to do this, but I’m thinking we need to go back to Loomis, to Rock and Jill’s homestead and maybe take their supplies. Then again, if the best we can hope for out here is a strand of Christmas lights and a pack of morons, it might be worth it just to kill everyone and take the entire property.”

  “You want to kill all those people?” Carver asked in utter disbelief. “They took us in when we needed a community, embraced us with little judgment.”

  “You’re wearing the abuse of dissidents,” she said, touching his face. He pulled away, but she didn’t act like she minded. “I would have thought you would understand. To build an army, and then a community, you need to rule by fear because subservience is paramount. And you can never ever get too attached.”

  “Let me guess, first we disarm them, then we silence them, and if they speak out, we execute them in front of others.”

  “Exactly,” she said, pleased.

  “Can I call you Adolf then? Because that was Nazi Germany and no one ever looked back on that time and said, ‘Wow, that Adolf Hitler sure did love and care for his people.’”

  “What did you say yesterday?” she said as she prepared to make a point. “What did you say when you asked who hit you with the bat?”

  “I asked which of the twats hit me with the bat.”

  “Yes, well look at you, all concerned about what others will think. Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black? Isn’t that you being a giant twat?”

  “You have a lot to learn about humanity,” he grumbled, furious that she shoved him into that dark place so quickly after such a good night.

  “I have more up here,” she said, tapping her skull, “than you do there.” When she tapped his skull in return, he stumbled backwards, his head a little rattled.

  “Did I touch a nerve?” he asked with a menacing scowl.

  “Look Miss Maria, I got them all,” One said, showing Maria her palms. There were four very red circles on her hands where she’d pulled off the once blistered skin. It was almost like she was proud.

 

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