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

by Ryan Schow

  “What?”

  “I still miss my wife and girls. I still cry at night. Why? Because what you’re doing, how you’re obsessing over this animal who took Orlando and Brooklyn…” He stops himself mid-sentence, then gathers his thoughts and says, “We need to remain as calm as we can, find a way to find them and get the hell out of here before it’s too late.”

  “Look around man, it’s already too late,” I say, stretching my back. Ice doesn’t say anything, which doesn’t surprise me. My younger brother has always been firm in his opinions. “What did you do in Juarez? After that, I mean?”

  “I killed the right people for good money.”

  “Like a hitman?”

  “Exactly like a hitman. That’s what I’ve done for the past year and a half. Kill people. And you?” he asks, slapping his arm. “What did you do besides get soft?”

  “I took on four guys and won, and you robbed me of the fifth then stepped on my knee and told me I’m soft,” I say, standing up.

  I reach down; he takes my hand and stands up, brushing off his backside.

  “I let you fight through those idiots because you needed to,” he says. “Because you had to get all that hostile anxiousness out of you before you’d listen. Are you listening now?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. We can’t go in on this half-cocked. If you want to find your kids and end this man, we will fight on our terms, not like fools running into a firefight with all their bravado and not a single brain cell. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I hear myself say. “But when this is over, when we’ve both got plenty of rest, you and me are going to fight.”

  “I don’t fight,” Ice says. “I kill. There’s a distinct difference. And if you need to be the tougher brother, because you’re older and still have either an ego or an attitude problem, then I accept that you are the better fighter. Do you feel better now?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Regardless, it’s time to go find your kids. After that, we will feel better and you won’t need to fight. You’ll need to heal.”

  Before going, I pull him into a deep hug. Something hitches in my throat, my chest shaking because this part of me has chosen to come out now.

  “I died when you died, when your family…” I say, unable to finish.

  “Love you, brother,” he says. “I missed you like crazy.”

  Standing back, drying my eyes, I still can’t believe he’s here. If there’s ever a reason to live, to not go off half-cocked like he says, it’s so that I can make up for lost time.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The school isn’t far away, but due to the conditions of surrounding neighborhoods, the drive takes longer than normal. Already I’m feeling my injuries. I look at Ice and he’s massaging his neck, but still on lookout.

  When we pull up to the school, Ice says, “My god,” in the most humble tone I’ve ever heard from him.

  Bodies are strewn out everywhere and part of the building is burning.

  I see it in his eyes, how he doesn’t want to be around dead children because of his girls. They were machine gunned to death, along with his wife, a couple of years back. Now seeing all these kids, parents and school administrators laid out all across the campus sends us both into small, emotional fits.

  “I got this,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” Ice tells me, his face pale but resolved, “I can come with you.”

  I turn and say, “Ice, you don’t have to…”

  “Every day is a journey, brother. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes downright unbearable. But I’ve got to keep walking, even if it means it’s going to drudge up old memories.”

  “Yeah, but these are kids.”

  “And yours are missing,” he says, getting out of the car, “so let’s just get on with this and we’ll sort out our feelings later.”

  We both climb out of the car, sidestep the carnage, hold our noses as the wind shifts and smokes swirls up around us. Inside, it’s not as bad. But in the east wing there is a fire. We move quickly through the school, find the administrations office, but see the flames spreading nearby.

  “We don’t have much time,” I say.

  “What’s the little douchebag’s name again?” Isadoro asks.

  “Farhad Buhari.”

  After a minute of searching for physical records of the students, after a long minute of praying not everything has been transferred online, Ice says, “I think I’ve got it!”

  But now smoke is starting to permeate the air. It’s seeping in under the administration office’s main door. Outside I can hear the crackling as it spreads our way.

  “We have to hurry,” I say as I watch Ice’s fingers drift over the back of the B section.

  “Here it is,” he says.

  “Let’s go,” I tell him as we head for the door.

  I put my hand to the door, feel that it’s hot. Looking back, Ice moves behind me, out of the way of me and the door if I open it and it blasts inward. Admittedly I’m not a fire person, so I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or just wasting time. I feel the door handle and it’s warm but not hot.

  Squinting, tightening up, I pull open the door and the heat and smoke washes over us. I peek outside and there is fire in the hallway.

  “We can make it!” I say.

  Ice is first through the door, I’m hot on his heels. We step into a three-quarter pocket of flames, then duck and run through the opening just as something at the back of the school explodes. The school is now completely consumed in flames and we’re holding our breaths as best as we can. We’re still breathing in the smoke though, and coughing.

  When we burst through the school’s front doors, both Ice and I hit the ground hacking up smoke and debris. I don’t know about Ice, but my eyes are watering and my lungs feel a bit singed. Glancing back over my shoulder, I see the school is now one giant inferno.

  Getting to my feet, I grab Ice and pull him up, then walk us both to the car. He has the file in his hands, and I’m praying this is the lead we need to find Diaab Buhari.

  We get inside the ‘Cuda, grateful for shelter from the outside air. It’s getting pretty toxic now, the breeze not working in our favor.

  “Do you have any water?” Ice asks.

  “Wish I did.”

  He rubs his eyes, rolls down the window and spits the grit from his mouth. After a second, he rolls the window back up and starts flipping through the file.

  “It’s here.”

  He gives me the address. I know the area. Just then, a drone appears from overhead. Not one of the big ones, but a small one with four overhead propellers. It’s bigger than the ones you can buy at an electronics store, but seemingly unarmed. It drops down in front of the car. I am scared to even take my eyes off it.

  Ice gets out of the car, armed, but not shooting it. It drops down literally two inches off the hood, a camera lens zooming in on me, focusing. Then it spins to Ice. My brother now has his gun trained on it, but he’s not shooting it and it’s not being aggressive toward my little brother.

  Slowly it makes its way over to Ice, hovers literally six inches from his face, the camera adjusting itself into focus.

  “Why are you doing this?” Ice says.

  He’s staring at the baseball-sized housing holding the camera. This is situated just beneath the propellers, under the flat body of the craft. Thankfully, the drone isn’t armed. Ice sees this, too. Lightning quick, he snatches it out of the air, grabbing it by the underside landing arms. The thing buzzes in retaliation, squirming hard in an attempt to break free of Ice’s grip and get away. Ice isn’t letting go. The drone’s four high-pitched propellers are hissing and buzzing louder than ever, almost like the thing is angry.

  Ice holds it before his face and growls, “Not today, turdpipe,”

  The drone bucks hard, then dips its front two arms, lurching at Ice’s face. Ice pulls back hard, nearly loses the thing, which is now whipping his arm around and almost free. He puts a singl
e round into the unit’s housing, then whips it down to the ground and stomps on it.

  “Like I said…”

  “Will you quit sacking around with that thing and get in?!” I yell. He keeps stomping on it so I lay on the horn until he stops what he’s doing and gets in.

  “That thing went for my eyes!” he says, horror-struck.

  “Whenever you’re done with your bro-bot romance,” I say, stomping on the gas and rolling out of there with the back end getting loose, “I’ve got a family to save.”

  “What do you think is controlling these things?” Ice says. “Because that wasn’t military grade. That was the kind of drone you use to spy on your neighbor’s house. Or what realtors use to do aerial shots for their listings.”

  Moving at a decent speed, I spin the wheel and power slide around the corner, but the second I see the much larger drone, I slam on the brakes and try thinking of a way out.

  “Oh crap,” Ice says.

  I’m already finding reverse, barking the tires and whipping this Barney colored Detroit monster around.

  “Get off the streets!” Ice says.

  “No kidding,” I hear myself grumbling.

  Whipping the wheel around, I bump up on a rounded curb, fly onto someone’s lawn, then smash the gas and plow through the wall of an older home. The whole time, I’m praying for a living room rather than a bedroom.

  The Plymouth crashes straight into a large room, smashing into a dining room table and chairs. The chair disintegrates, the table’s legs breaking. In a fraction of a second, the tabletop rides up the hood, hits the windshield and rushes up over the roof.

  “We’re in,” I tell Ice.

  We hold our breath, praying the Predator drone will pass over, leave us alone. That’s when a gun taps on the window and I see a thirty-something white man staring at me, really, really pissed off.

  I roll the window down.

  “Sorry about that my friend. We had a drone on our six and this seemed like an appropriate escape.”

  “You destroyed my dining room,” he barks.

  In a show of force, he pulls the slide on his weapon and I say, “You know having a gun in Chicago is illegal.”

  “Everything’s illegal in this town,” he says, shoving the weapon my way.

  I grab it by the barrel, give it a yank. The thing goes off, nearly deafening me. Pissed off, I rip it free. Now my ear’s ringing and I’m agitated again. “You can either be part of the solution or part of the problem,” I yell at him.

  “He already ran off, tail tucked between his legs,” Ice says, loud but not loud enough. “By the way, all I hear is high-pitched ringing.”

  I look back to where I thought the round went. Sitting in the black, cracked leather of the passenger-side seat—not an inch behind Ice’s arm—is a small hole where the stray round went. He follows my eyes, then feels the seatback, his fingertip finding the hole.

  “Brilliant,” he says.

  “I was operating on instinct,” I explain.

  “You were operating on limited intelligence.”

  “Whatever, be quiet.”

  When we’re sure the drone is long gone, and the homeowner isn’t returning with a knife, or pepper spray or anything, I find reverse, bury the accelerator and manage to bump and shake my way out of the house, across the lawn and back onto the road.

  By the time the car is right and ready to go, the owner is chasing us out of the house with something large and black in his hand.

  “Is that a bowling ball?” Ice asks.

  “I think so.”

  He hurls it with all his might and it lands on the hood, denting it but doing nothing to harm us.

  “Just go,” Ice says. By then, I’m already on the gas.

  “Nice idea, driving into the house,” Ice says, the sarcasm thick.

  “We didn’t get dead, did we?” I ask, leveling him with defensive eyes.

  “Sure, it was just lacking originality,” he jokes. He’s referring to him and Eliana driving their beater Civic in to Sergio Villarreal’s house.

  “Well now I get the appeal,” I say, eyes on the littered road and the dirty, charcoal-colored skies ahead.

  Within fifteen minutes, and without any more resistance from drones or the local bowling league, we arrive at the Buhari’s very upscale neighborhood.

  “Is your head hurting?” Ice asks. “I mean, besides where you got beat up by those guys.”

  “I didn’t get beat up, Iced-Tea,” I say, using the nickname he hated most as a kid.

  “Your face says otherwise, Fire-retardant,” he says back.

  “It feels like my eyes want to explode out of my skull right now,” I tell him. “Other injuries notwithstanding.”

  “Is your hearing better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mine’s coming back, too. There it is,” Ice says pointing at an impressive spread two houses down.

  Parked out front of the six or seven thousand square foot house is a shot-to-hell Range Rover, but not much else. For the air being dirty and dry, full of ash and a fine soot, even the streets look cleaner here than everywhere else.

  “I think the mayor used to live in this neighborhood,” Ice says.

  “Yeah, he does. I was out here a few months ago, paying him a visit,” I tell him. “That’s how I know my way here.”

  About three months ago, a disgruntled housecleaner called the DEA, saying something about finding a pound of coke in the master closet of the mayor’s residence. A colleague and I went to the mayor’s home with a police escort, but if there was any coke, we never found it. The truth is, we never searched his place, nor did we intend to. According to the mayor, the housecleaner made a false claim. Apparently he’d knocked her up and refused to pay for the abortion. Freaking politicians…

  “I can’t believe how clean it is,” Ice says.

  In neighborhoods like these, the trashcan is barely even allowed outside on garbage days so as not to lower the comps.

  “You think they’re in there?” I say as we cruise past the mansion.

  “Let me out here, pull up a few houses, I’ll do a quick recon. Just watch your rear-view for my signal. And be ready.”

  And with that, he hops out of the car and heads for the house. I park a few houses up, refuse to wait on him and head for the house anyway. I meet him around back where he’s watching a couple of boys sitting on the sofa watching TV through a large sliding glass door.

  “Did you do that?” he asks, pointing to a dead boy laid out across the kitchen table.

  “Yeah.”

  I try the sliding glass door leading into the kitchen; it’s open. I say, “I’ll secure the boys, then we’ll clear the house.”

  He gives a stern nod, liking the idea.

  As quietly as I can, I ease the slider open, then creep inside. Farhad is on the table, and he’s stinking up the air, but there’s no way I’m going to look at him. That’s when I start to wonder how these two kids can just be chilling in front of the TV with their dead brother laid out on the table. Shaking my head, pushing out such thoughts, my focus narrows.

  When we’re behind the boys, with the butt of my gun, I club them both, the two of them slumping sideways into each other.

  “Glad to see all that DEA training taught you to knock out kids,” Ice whispers.

  I turn and fire him a look, but he’s already off to clear the downstairs. I head upstairs, gun at the ready, my feet silent, my eyes alert. Within a few minutes, we both return more relaxed, but also more agitated.

  There’s no one here.

  Not Diaab Buhari, and definitely not my kids.

  “Scumbags like these always have the best homes,” Ice says. “Even the fireplaces are real.”

  I’m not even listening. My eyes are on the refrigerator. I make two glasses of ice water, head back into the family room and throw the water into the boys’ faces. Startled and moaning, they both regain consciousness.

  “That your dead brother on the table?” Ic
e asks.

  The two boys nod their heads in unison. One is rubbing his head where he was hit; the other one is chewing gum and glaring at me. He’s the youngest, but he also looks like he’s got a mean streak in him. I’m not into hitting kids, but this kid’s eyes are asking for it.

  “You know who did that to him?” Ice presses.

  The boy’s eyes come up blank.

  “I did,” I tell them, my gaze locked in on the youngest boy. He blows a bubble, doesn’t blink, further hardens his expression.

  “What’s your name, bubble gum?” I ask.

  “Nasr,” he says.

  “And you?” I ask, looking at the older boy.

  “Kamal.”

  “Where’s your father?” Ice says. Neither of them speak. “Why is there an entire storage closet full of duct tape and zip ties?”

  “My father’s business doesn’t concern you,” Kamal says. He says this pleasantly, his tone in stark contrast to the message he’s sending.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Thirteen.”

  “What about you, ankle-biter?”

  “Seven,” he hisses.

  “What’s the duct tape and zip ties for?” Ice asks again.

  “It’s for taking your girls,” Nasr says. “The duct tape keeps their screaming down and the plastic ties make it so they stop moving when we break them in.”

  “You talk like you’ve got hair on your balls, kid,” I say. He flashes me a sharp grin and I put my pistol right in his eye.

  “My father threatens to kill me once a month,” Nasr says, his unobstructed eye watching me. “Do you have hair on your balls? If you do, go ahead and pull the trigger. But I don’t think you do. I think you’re too scared to kill a kid.”

  What the hell?