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

by Schow, Ryan

  “It’s okay, I got you,” he said.

  He reached down to help and that’s when she grabbed his arm and started yanking so hard and in such a fit that it first dislocated, then ripped off completely. Enraged that the Haitian had gotten to her, she flung the arm across the lobby at the others now watching and screamed, “I said don’t touch me!”

  The pressure in her face finally won over and she started seeing spots. The heat in her body moved to a boil and she froze up, curling her body on the stairs, thinking she was now going to be Cletus the fetus if she didn’t figure out what the Haitian did to her.

  She started coughing up blood, the hacking so hard it rattled her already splitting headache. When the coughing fit subsided and she lay there in a daze, the world spinning, the last thing she remembered was someone standing over her telling her she’d lost her freaking mind.

  Danny and Aaron waited until she was visibly unconscious, then Aaron tapped her head with the toe of his boot. He was afraid to get much closer than that. She didn’t budge and that’s when they looked over at Taylor. He was already dead, his shoulder leaking like a sieve.

  “She ripped his friggin’ arm off for trying to help,” Danny told Aaron.

  “I know,” he replied. “Help me get her upstairs.”

  They tried to lift her body, but she was incredibly heavy.

  “What the balls?” Danny belted out.

  “She’s dense as hell,” Aaron said, lowering her back down on the staircase. “Go find Carver and let me see if I can get another guy. I think he’s on the fourth floor shagging Ruby.”

  “He’s what?” Danny stammered.

  “Just go, dammit.”

  Aaron roused Tim from his bed and Danny got Carver. The four of them then hefted her impossibly heavy body up three flights of stairs, coming out on the fourth with nothing left in them to get her up six more, let alone down the hallway.

  She was still unconscious, but she was also sweaty as hell.

  “It’s like she’s burning up inside,” Tim said. “Arms feel like oil slicks. My grip’s so weak now, I swear to Jesus, I won’t be snubbin’ the rooster anytime soon.”

  Carver shook his head and said, “We have bigger problems than your masturbation schedule, Tim.”

  “Yeah. Them next six flights,” he said.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Carver said. “You guys go back to bed, or clean up Taylor, or whatever.”

  “What are you going to do?” Aaron asked.

  “She can take my bed,” Ruby said from the darkness in the hallway. A few of them jumped, but not Carver. He knew she was there.

  The guys went downstairs and Ruby helped him get Maria to her room. It took an act of God for them to get her up on the bed, but they somehow managed.

  “I’m not sleeping next to her,” Ruby said. “Not after that.”

  “We can sleep upstairs, if you want.”

  Ruby agreed to sleep upstairs, but when she got in bed, she said, “This feels super not Kosher.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carver said.

  Halfway through the night, sometime in the early morning hours, Maria stumbled into the room and said, “Carver? Why’d you leave me down there?”

  She was like a drunk who decided to roll in at two a.m. and start a fight by apologizing then blaming everything on you right before puking and maybe crapping herself into a crying fit.

  “You were too heavy,” he said. “We tried.”

  “Move over,” she said.

  “It’s me, Maria,” Ruby said, getting out of the way. “It’s Ruby.”

  “Finally some good news,” she said, crawling into bed.

  Instead of going back to sleep, Ruby scuttled over Carver and came out the other side. “I’m going back downstairs,” she said.

  Carver got up to follow her when Maria called his name.

  “What?” he asked, perturbed.

  “Where’s Sally?”

  “She’s here,” he says.

  “Sally?”

  Carver heard a little grunt. He felt around the couch where she’d been sleeping, but she wasn’t there. A little hand slipped its fingers around his ankle and that’s when he stopped and realized she was asleep under the bed.

  “What are you doing under there?” he asked, kneeling down to be closer to her.

  “She not herself,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay,” Carver told her. “She’s just…I think she’s not feeling well.”

  “Where am I?” the voice said, softer, less…hostile. It sounds like Maria, but it’s not Maria. He stands back up, gets into bed next to her and feels her face. She’s sweaty, her hair damp, a funny smell in her mouth.

  “You’re in bed now,” he said.

  She began to cry, which was something he never thought he’d hear coming from her. He wanted to reassure her that she would be okay, but he didn’t know what happened to her. How she’d gone from hunting for lamb and plotting to take over the world to ripping off a man’s arm and sobbing in bed like a sick child.

  “Who are you?” she asked when the tears died down. “Why does my mouth taste like blood?”

  “It’s me, Carver,” he said. “And I don’t know.”

  “I don’t…I don’t know a Carver,” she said, her voice so small he had to lean in to hear her.

  “Sure you do,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You’re just overheated,” he assured her. “And maybe you’re not healing right.”

  “What am I healing from?” she asked.

  He felt her arms where the shepherd’s dogs had attacked her when she stole the lamb.

  “You stole a lamb tonight. Fought off three dogs. They put up a hell of a fight, according to you, but the wounds should be closed now and they’re not.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she cried.

  If her metabolism was off, if she wasn’t operating properly, perhaps the stability and operation of her system was at risk of failure. If that was the case, she’d be dealing with the more human aspects of pain.

  According to Aaron, she was like this when she’d come home. He’d said she was in this frenzied state when she ripped off Taylor’s arm.

  Is she getting worse? he wondered. If so, could he maybe get her to the open wall, dump her over the side to her death below?

  “I’m so hot,” she said. “It’s like a furnace in my organs.”

  “Maybe you didn’t eat enough, or drink enough.”

  “Where am I again?”

  “In bed.”

  “Whose bed?” she asked.

  “Our bed,” he replied. “Maria, I know this is hard to hear, but you need to just let go, allow your body time to heal itself.”

  “My name isn’t Maria,” she said.

  “Yes it is,” he told her. “I think you’re running a temperature.”

  “My name is Antoinette.”

  He froze. Antoinette? Mother of Mary! Could it be that Maria’s program blinked out completely?

  “Antoinette?” he said. “Not Maria Antoinette?”

  “Why do you keep calling me Maria?” she said. Then rolling over, but paying the price for it, she said, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  And then she rolled back over and threw up all over the floor. When she started crying, she didn’t stop. Carver finally got up and used an old towel they’d found a few days back to wipe up the chunks of meat and hot digestive stew. After he was done, he wadded the towel up and threw it out the opening in the wall.

  Looking down, he wondered again if he could get her out of bed, shove her through the opening. But what if Maria’s hardware had only overheated? What if it came back online as he was trying to kill her?

  Oh, that could be bad.

  He went back to bed and said, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” she said, as if speaking in a dream state. “Her name was Ophelia.”

  She started to drift of
f, then in a whimsical voice, she said, “Ophelia.”

  When she was asleep again, he realized it was now or never. He had to try. He had to do something. Anything. Taking her arm, he tried pulling her up, but her body was so heavy. He’d never tried to lift her before tonight. Never tried to pick her up. He gave it another go, but it was like her body was made of lead and he was dead tired from getting her up four flights of stairs and in to bed.

  “What are you doing?” Antoinette finally asked, groggy, agitated.

  “Trying to sit you up,” he said. “Can you walk?”

  “Room is spinning,” she said.

  “I need you to try.”

  “No.”

  And then she was asleep again. He was about to get up, when a hand found him and took hold of him. It was hers. Maria’s. He felt the strength return in her, felt the insistence. Instead of going downstairs to be with Ruby, he laid down with her.

  “She’s gone now,” Maria said.

  His window of opportunity was now shut.

  When he woke up in the morning, Sally was still asleep under the bed, and Maria was still out cold, her face a sickly color, sweat coating her lovely mocha colored skin, blood crusted to the insides of her lips.

  When he whispered her name, she did not wake.

  He moved several strands of hair off her face, tucked them behind her ear, and still, she did not stir. When he smoothed the hair back over her head in a way she once said she translated as “affection” or “affectionate” she did not bat an eyelash.

  He kissed her cheek, gave her a nudge, squeezed her hand and still, the hybrid lay there like a crash test dummy, immobile, silent, gone.

  It was safe to go downstairs.

  He got up, left the room, made his way downstairs to Ruby’s room. She wasn’t there. Downstairs, the men were still asleep, but there was blood all over the floor. Out front, off to the side, he saw Taylor’s body. It lay there, dead, the soul gone, the ripped-off arm tucked in between the body and the side of the apartment towers.

  Standing there in the street, next to this dead body, his face hurting, itching, stinging, he wondered if Ruby was gone for good.

  He unzipped his fly and urinated in the street out in the open. He felt in his bones that she left in the middle of the night. He didn’t blame her. He would miss her though. There was something beautifully damaged about her, something he resonated with.

  Shaking, tucking and giving himself a zip, he hadn’t realized that he’d grabbed on to her like a lifeline, but he had. Now all he had left was Sally and she was terrified of Maria. Sally hadn’t been scared of her before. Rather, she found a way to mitigate that fear, which for a five year old was beyond amazing. After all, the woman killed her parents, threatened her life, then dragged her all the way from her home to San Francisco and then to Sacramento. Sally was Maria’s hostage. Same as he was.

  Same as all of the world was.

  Back inside, he went to Ruby’s room, crawled in to her bed and curled up to the clean smell of her. Wadding the sheets into his face, he took a breath, sighed it out, then closed his eyes and somehow managed to fall back to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty

  The night of the funeral, the night that Carver showed up and dropped a bombshell on all of them, Rock lay with Maisie talking about the problem, and what they were going to do about it.

  “We have to mobilize to protect the homesteads from sustaining more losses,” he said. “Not just this one, but the second homestead, too. My brothers are worn down from their trip, from losing Orlando, and so many others. Everyone’s worn out”

  “We have to dig in, though,” Maisie said. “We have to protect ourselves from her.”

  “I know,” he said. “You know the saying, ‘The best defense is a great offense?’”

  “Yeah.”

  “We need to be proactive about this situation,” he said. “Not reactive.”

  She rolled over next to him, took his big hand in hers and said, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we need to put this rabid dog down,” he said. “And that’s about as nice as I can be right now.”

  The next morning, Rock realized they were going to have to go after her, but that he needed to coordinate things on the down low. He went looking for Gregor knowing he was most likely in with Jill. He knocked on her door and she answered, half dressed.

  “Is Gregor here?” he asked.

  “Good morning to you, too,” she said.

  He gave her an uneasy smile. “It’s still a little awkward knowing how to talk to you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t make it that easy. I’m just still…I don’t know, getting used to everything.”

  “I get that,” he said. Then he waited, looking at her, hoping she wouldn’t make this difficult.

  “He hasn’t been sleeping much, hardly at all, actually. After what Maria did…” she said, not finishing the sentence.

  Rock knew what she meant. Maria slaughtered all his friends and the only reason he survived was because he was up here in bed with her.

  “I don’t blame him,” Rock said, putting his hands in his pockets. “We’re all still shaken.”

  “How’s Maisie?” she asked.

  He looked down at his feet, then said, “Please don’t, Jill.” Then he looked up at her and in her eyes was not the animosity he’d been seeing, but the hurt of having been left for another woman. “She’s good.”

  “I wish I didn’t like her,” Jill said. “I wish I didn’t still miss the hell out of you.”

  He nodded, then said, “Gregor?”

  The look she wore thinking she would be able to talk through this faded, her frown returning. “He’s working water reclamation at Homestead Two.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He started to leave, but stopped and turned around. She hadn’t moved. She was still looking at him. “There was an idea of a relationship, Jill. This thing we didn’t have but really wanted. Sometimes, no matter how badly two people want something with each other, sometimes ingredients are missing and it’s no one’s fault, it just is.”

  She looked down and said, “I know.”

  “I realize you’re missing the idea of us, what we used to carry as our hopes and dreams. But the ingredients, you’re not thinking about them. We didn’t have the right ingredients, whatever those were. I think you have more in common with Gregor than you and I did, but you aren’t trying him out because you’re still stuck in that dream you once had for us. You have to let it go if you ever hope to have it with someone else.”

  “Did you ever love me?” she asked, her eyes becoming glassy.

  “I still love you,” he said. “That’s why I’m talking to you about this. I love you enough to let you see if you can find the things in someone else you couldn’t find in me.”

  “Does Maisie have those things for you?” she asked.

  He nodded, but didn’t say the word.

  She wiped her eyes, then gave a short conciliation nod and said, “Okay then. I guess I’m happy for both of you, but in the larger sense of things.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  With that he turned and headed outside, across the fields and to Homestead Two where he found several of the other families. The second homestead was a work in progress, but the two thousand foot structure had three completed rooms and a half dozen four man tents. They also had four corners of the roof on and rainwater drains that dropped into four fifty-five gallon water barrels complete with hose bibs and overflow systems.

  Gregor was cleaning the scum out of the bottom of one of them with a scrub brush and some Clorox. The other three were full and Brooklyn was using them to water the drier parts of the garden with. Further away, Gunderson was skinning logs he used to cut for wood on the house.

  “Hey, Rock,” Gregor said, crawling out of the barrel.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, standing up and flicking water off his hands. He had a few white smears on his
pants, probably silicon from resealing the front side of the hose bib.

  “I’m putting together a small team to take down Maria,” he said, but not loud enough for Brooklyn to hear.

  “I’m in,” he said before Rock even had the words out of his mouth.

  “Why don’t you finish what you have here while I head inside and see how my brother and his family are doing,” he said.

  “Sure thing.”

  He left Gregor and went inside where Fire and Adeline were at a small breakfast table eating. The two of them looked like hell and then some. Fire smiled when he saw his youngest brother, as did Adeline, but her eyes were so heavy they looked full enough to drain another hour’s worth of tears.

  “Morning,” Rock said.

  “Hey,” they said together.

  Rock decided that words weren’t adequate, so he went over and hugged his brother where he sat. For a long time he just hugged him, knowing the man was dying inside.

  He was there when it happened, when Orlando died.

  Rock knew what that was like. He still had nightmares from when the building collapsed on him. And he still woke screaming, thinking that when it happened, Maisie had been killed, the same as him. Then he’d wake up and she’d be right there, next to him, not dead on top of him as he thought when he was pinned down in the building for real.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  Fire just nodded and said, “Making do,” but the emotion was riding so close to the surface, Rock felt it hitting him, too.

  He went to Adeline and hugged her, too.

  “I missed you,” he said to her.

  Before Isadoro killed his father and was shot by Rock, the two of them were close. He hated that he’d missed the kids growing up, and that he’d never see Orlando again, but he had to count his blessings where he could.

  “I missed you, too,” she said, crying again.

  When she started, she couldn’t stop. He just held her as she cried into his chest, looking back every so often at Fire who was also wiping his eyes.

  Finally she pulled back and said, “I’m so sorry, Rock. I didn’t think we’d be doing this again.”