The Age of Hysteria: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (The Age of Embers Book 2)

by Ryan Schow

  To this day, however, he still couldn’t be sure.

  Under heavy fire, Jareth ran back into the warehouse and carried out four more men, all of them dead. He didn’t realize he’d started crying, or that he couldn’t stop, until someone asked if he was okay. He just sat there in the dirt on the side of the road with half his unit turned into hamburger meat while one of the worst firefights in the city ensued. A stray round caught him in his helmet a minute later and it was light’s out. That was a bad day.

  This was shaping up to be a bad day, too.

  What he was thinking about telling Pugh as they watched the video was that he was a janitor working in a state building and that he shouldn’t have to take crap from a fat-headed sow with a big mouth and an opinion about how he should feel about menses. Yesterday was his breaking point. He felt the heat rising in his face already. And that’s why he did what he did: he couldn’t take her anymore. Not MaryAnn and not her three boorish friends—Jeanne, Pepper and Audrey. If there was one of them, there were four. The ladies ran in a pack. Like elephants on the Serengeti. Or hyenas if they walked upright and came out only in the light of day to harass the natives.

  “What’s in that bag you’re dumping out?” Pugh asked, as if he didn’t know. He’d paused the video just before yesterday’s version of him overturned the contents of the bag onto MaryAnn’s desk.

  “Tampons and maxi-pads from her floor and the floor above it.”

  “How many of them?”

  “All of them.”

  Pugh resumed the video. On the monitor, the contents piled out everywhere. MaryAnn jumped up in a fit and started cursing at him.

  “You have issues Janitor Man! If you can’t take a bit of period blood without freaking out, you have no business working around sane people, and most especially women!”

  He stared at her. She didn’t look so sane. Not then, and certainly not now.

  Jeanne, Pepper and Audrey stood from their various desks, wandered over to MaryAnn’s desk then went to town on him with their disgust, their scorn and their ridicule the second they saw what he’d done.

  He deserved that. He wouldn’t even try to deny it.

  In that moment, though, Jareth remembered feeling that whatever words he said to MaryAnn and her friends would be used against him, but if he stood there listening to her—to all four of them—he couldn’t get into trouble.

  Later he realized that was a terrible plan.

  “You’re the one who’s got issues with dried blood,” he finally barked at MaryAnn in the video. “Maybe you need therapy and a muzzle, then the rest of us sane people can go about our lives without having to always suffer your dimwitted analysis!”

  He thought he’d said this calmly, but now that he was looking at the video, he realized he had started screaming. So yeah, this was bad.

  What came next was worse...

  The second he took a fresh maxi-pad and wiped it across MaryAnn’s forehead, the woman launched into a spasm of hysterics.

  Hendrix Pugh, the dry fart (not the rock star), paused the video and pretended to compose himself for effect. Then: “So you wiped that thing on her, unloaded in a firestorm of profanity, and scared the living daylights out of her.”

  “I have an aversion to blood. She knows this. My former boss knows this, too. I was very clear about that when I was hired here.”

  “Look, none of us like knowing about that kind of thing, or seeing it—I’m talking about a woman’s cycle—but we pay you good money to do this job, as we have for years, and as you know, it takes a lot to get fired from a state job. Short of killing someone, you can pretty much always work here.”

  “I can’t effectively do my job with people humiliating me, Mr. Pugh. I mean, I fought and bled for this country so obnoxious creatures like MaryAnn Armstrong could voice an opinion.”

  “I am grateful that you did.”

  “But I didn’t make those sacrifices so I could be told by someone who isn’t my boss to get accustomed to cleaning up after their…well you know.”

  He’d cleaned up Prudence’s messes for years. Mostly he’d done it to get the shouting to stop. She hadn’t screamed at him in years. No one had. Jareth insured against this by learning the rules. By following the rules.

  But MaryAnn…

  “I’m going to have to let you go, Jareth. Not because I want to, but because you have some unresolved issues from the war that are clearly effecting you and your interpersonal relations.”

  Mr. Pugh, Mr. Fancy Fartman, now took off his rectangular designer glasses, cleaned them with a cloth, then looked up and smiled with what he would call “a disarming smile.”

  “You can’t just fire me for that. I was dealing with MaryAnn Armstrong for heaven’s sake! You saw how she was, how she treated me!”

  He clicked through to another page. It was a file in Pugh’s company email. He opened up the email, clicked on the pic. It enlarged. It was a screenshot of MaryAnn’s Twitter page. Now Jareth held his head down in shame.

  “So when you post pictures of a dead guy all over her Twitter account, it kind of starts to make one wonder...”

  “I wanted her to see what I see,” he admitted in a small, sheepish voice. “I was very clear about that.”

  “I’m not sure she got the message you were hoping to send, Mr. Gates,” Pugh said, more formal now. He waited patiently for Jareth’s reply, but right then Jareth’s brain became scrambled eggs. “We’re not going to have a problem with you leaving, are we?”

  “No, Mr. Pugh,” he said. Pugh as in stink.

  “Alright.”

  And with that, Jareth started signing paperwork. Pugh handed him a final check, Jareth took it. He stared down at a paltry sum of money. He would be able to pay rent this month, but he wasn’t sure about next month, or food, gas and utilities.

  Before Pugh could ask, Jareth began taking the keys off his key ring. There were a lot of keys on there, but only three he was required to surrender.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to post anything else to Mrs. Armstrong’s social media accounts, do I? Because after today this would move from a company squabble to serious criminal charges. Perhaps even a visit from the police.”

  “I understand.”

  When Hendrix Pugh stood, smiled and said “Good luck,” Jareth simply sat there and held his tongue. He knew if he got up he’d have to leave, and when he left, he would officially be unemployed.

  When Pugh extended a hand as some sort of conciliatory handshake, Jareth finally stood and said, “Put your hand away, Mr. Fartman. I’m not interested in your parting formalities.”

  And then he left. He left and didn’t look at another soul. He left the building and he told himself it was for the best, even though it wasn’t.

  When he got home, Prudence was on the couch asleep, the cat on her lap, one of her books on the table. He looked at the cover. There was a half naked cowboy holding another half naked cowboy and Jareth just shook his head.

  “Don’t look at my stuff,” she said, her eyes opening.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why you home?”

  “I got fired.”

  Prudence shoved Cinnamon off her lap and tried to sit up. She had a hard time because all her weight was piled in the center and she didn’t like moving too much because it exhausted her. Jareth usually helped her up so she wouldn’t get angry, but her eyes were extra mean that morning and he wondered if reaching out to help her might just cost him his arm.

  “Whadju git fired for?” she snapped.

  “I dumped a bunch of used feminine products on MaryAnn Armstrong’s desk.”

  Shaking her head, grumbling to herself, she leveled him with a vile, insufferable look, one he knew well and hated. She finally got to her feet, then turned and said, “Thanks for helping me up!”

  “I’m having some pain in my arm,” he lied.

  “I’m having some pain in my ass,” she said. “Its name is Jareth Gates. Well, Jareth, how soon can yo
u get another job? And what will you say when they ask why you were terminated?”

  “Why don’t you give me a minute to process all this,” he replied, calm as he could manage, considering the circumstances. He really should have taken his pills.

  He didn’t really need them though, did he?

  “I mean, what kind of an idiot gets fired from a state job?” she said as the final blow.

  She hobbled into the other room while he sat on the couch to think. Somehow, his eyes landed on the cowboy-on-cowboy paperback (Step-Brotherly Love: A Cowboy Love Story) and it made him think he would never please his wife. That she was not only unpleasable but perpetually unkind. Worse off, she was mean.

  She was mean, like MaryAnn and her friends.

  When Prudence walked out of the bedroom dressed to leave with the cat in a carrier and a small suitcase in hand, he said, “Where are you taking Cinnamon?”

  “We’re going to stay with my mother ‘till you get your head straight. Just seeing your face right now gits my blood boiling. You’re supposed to provide for your wife! How are you going to do that on unemployment checks? At least Momma’s get some good retirement.”

  “Leave Cinnamon here,” he said, standing up.

  “This ain’t your cat!” she hissed, dropping the suitcase to snatch up her book. “This little kitty cat is mine.”

  It was their cat and he loved her. He could yell at Cinnamon when it was required, call her stupid when she did stupid things—like climb the drapes with her claws—even smack her on the butt when she was bad. He didn’t relish doing these things, but he loved Cinnamon because she didn’t yell back at him, or hit him, or even abandon him.

  The cat loved him and he loved her.

  The last thing he saw when Prudence left was her gigantic rear end and Cinnamon’s big brown eyes looking back at him, knowing. He cried when they left. And he cried when he thought of losing both of them and his job.

  He’d collapsed on the couch, tried to make sense of all this. From that point on, he would never see Jen in Specialty’s Café and Bakery again, and Will Crabtree would no longer get his coffee and muffin. He’d never wipe down another mirror, polish another floor, empty another trashcan. All these things depressed him immensely, but he didn’t cry over them specifically.

  It was all of it.

  The culmination of so many things, just gone.

  Eventually he stood and moseyed to the bedroom where he spent the next four hours field stripping his M9, reassembling it, then dry firing it. When his mind finally broke the trance he was in, he found he was holding the 9mm round from his pocket. It was the last round he had in his pistol after he left Fallujah. The one he took with him everywhere.

  Coming home from Iraq was the worst. The nightmares wouldn’t stop, and he was jittery, jumping at everything, seeing everyone looking at him. But not everyone was looking at him. Others were looking away from him, or staring too long at him, or whispering. God, the whispering!

  Honestly, he couldn’t take it.

  Prudence said she was happy to have him back home, so happy she made him meatloaf. But then she spent all night snoring and farting in her sleep and all he could do was lay there with his memories, wondering if today was the day he ate that bullet.

  But then he got his job at the BOE and this gave him a reason to function. He was providing for himself, Cinnamon and Prudence and so he had self-worth. The MaryAnn Armstrong’s of the world, though—the Hendrix Pugh’s—they were the toxic end of the spectrum. God’s blights on corporate society.

  Now he was staring at the bullet. The exact 9mm round he removed from his Army issue M9 just before he left Fallujah. This had been the bullet he was going to put through his brain when he got home. The second he got settled back onto US soil, he’d purchased his own M9, then chambered the round for when he was ready. It took him two years to remove the round, but the day he did it, Jareth felt like he was making an agreement with God to live.

  But God never took the pain away. He never cleansed Jareth’s mind of the memories, and to that day, those same memories continued to haunt him. The ones from fifteen years ago…

  He’d been part of Regimental Combat Team 7 (RTC7), in the Army’s 2nd Battalion/2nd Infantry. The strike commenced on November 6th, 2004. Regiment Combat Team 1 (RTC1) assaulted Fallujah from the western end while RCT7 took the eastern side and joined forces with about two thousand Iraqi forces. They contained most of the city, but when RCT7 turned their attention to the industrial end of the southeast quadrant, the heavy fighting took its final toll.

  That day seemed to never end.

  When Jareth looked down at the weapon in his hand, he realized he wasn’t holding the round anymore, that it was now chambered in the weapon.

  When did that happen?

  Chapter Four

  The day before the attack…

  Jareth’s broken brain sometimes had him thinking the worst things. Other times it made him feel like life itself wasn’t worth living. That’s why he had his pills. The pills left him in a dull haze though, so he’d stopped taking them. He felt better, but maybe he didn’t. The restlessness in him was building, making him think pacing the room might give him something to do. He started cleaning the toilets, took a shower even though he didn’t need one, vacuumed everything. When he was done, he took the vacuum cleaner, walked it out back and threw it in the garbage can. Standing out front and across the street from him was a big Rottweiler.

  The dog stared at him; he stared at the dog.

  He was standing at the trashcan in front of his house. Only ten feet of driveway separated them, but the dog…it wasn’t moving, it was just staring at him.

  “Knock it off!” he shouted.

  The dog growled, its expression flicking. Jareth started tapping his head, then gave it a pounding with the heel of his hand. Maybe he needed to go back on the pills. The dog barked at him, so he took the vacuum cleaner out of the trashcan and hurled it at the dog, startling it.

  The dog barked; he barked.

  The dog barred its teeth so he barred his teeth, and then Jareth took chase, screaming at the Rot because it scared him and he was not one to run and hide in the face of fear. He chased the dog all the way up the street until he realized the dog was never really there.

  Standing in the road, chest heaving, his breath short, he tried to remember what was happening. Someone appeared at his side, seemingly from no where.

  “Sir, are you okay?” she asked.

  This was a middle-aged woman, plain looking, but pretty because her expression was one of concern. No one was ever concerned about him.

  Maybe never in his entire life.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said, sounding far away. “My brain is just acting on its own these days.”

  “Do you know where you live?”

  “Yeah, I do. Thank you so much, I just…I need to maybe—”

  He didn’t know what else to say. He was having a panic attack, or a mental breakdown. It had happened before, but not like this, not where he started seeing things. All he knew was that he needed to go back home and lay down. Maybe leave a sign on the inside of his door saying not to come out without taking his meds.

  As he walked back home, all he could think about was Prudence and Cinnamon. They needed to come back home.

  They needed to stabilize him.

  In the kitchen, he fixed himself a bologna sandwich with some old deli-sliced pickles and a diet Dr. Pepper. He plopped back down on the couch, ate his lunch and watched the news. His eyes were seeing the TV screen, but his brain was still on MaryAnn. She had a wart on her face that always bothered him. It was bothering him now. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. How it moved when she yelled at him, how her face had makeup on, and she obviously smelled clean, but that eraser-head wart needed removing because no amount of face paint helped. When he thought about how to remove it, he thought about an ice cube and some nail clippers—the big toe nail clippers, not the small ones. But then he put
that thought out of his mind because it was not productive.

  When it was time to sleep, he crawled in bed and looked over at Prudence’s side. Would she just come home, slide in bed and not tell him? He needed to close his eyes. He did, but sleep came hard because he was alone. No cat, no wife, no sense of peace.

  It had been an eternity since he felt this bad!

  The nightmares started in from the time he dozed off and ran on near psychotic loops right up to the time he woke up in a blind sweat. He looked at clock, saw it was after seven in the morning. Throwing the blankets aside, he flew out of bed, already late for work. He had just started the shower when he realized he didn’t need to be at work. That he had no work.

  He shut off the shower, went to find the cat.

  “Cinnamon!” he called. He looked everywhere before realizing the cat was gone, that Prudence was gone.

  “She didn’t come back, Jareth,” he said out of one side of his mouth. Out of the other side, he said, “That’s because she left you.”

  He fixed himself some breakfast cereal, cracked a beer, turned on the TV to The View. His eyes saw the television, but his mind was stuck on Hendrix Pugh. He wished he had not been rude to the man after he left.

  “He fired you,” one side of his mouth said.

  “That’s because you went psycho on that insufferable pack of heathens,” the other side of his mouth answered.

  “Be quiet!” he yelled because he was trying to hear what Whoopie was saying. A few hours later, he stood and called out for Cinnamon, but the cat didn’t come.

  “She’s gone, dummy,” one side of his mouth said.

  The thought of being alone had him practically in tears, almost like a manic fit. He drew a deep breath, but it was difficult because he usually breathed from the top of his chest. The deep breath scared him. Made him feel like he knew he was losing it.