by Ryan Schow
“Do you really think so?” I asked.
“I do. But the most important thing is this. If we’re going to survive—not the warring, the foraging, the day-to-day monotony of existing in a world like this—it’s going to be with that thing that makes this and any other life worth living.”
“Which is?”
“The love for ourselves and for those closest to us.”
We were all sitting in her living room after a long day and a warm meal. But Eudora, she had a lot to say and she wasn’t done.
“That said, Eliana, if you’re not going to make your move on Isadoro,” Eudora said with a sly grin, “then I’m going to because this old lady is smitten and you have to know that.”
Everyone laughed, but now the cat was officially out of the bag. Eliana leaned toward Ice, resting her head on his shoulder and said, “I’ve already been making my moves, and though he wasn’t smart enough to see them at first, I’m happy to say Isadoro Dimas is officially a taken man.”
The second she heard this, Eudora’s face fell still. Then she looked Ice dead in the eye and said, “What’s she got that I don’t have?” and we all completely lost it.
Eudora’s right. We need each other. We need each other and we know this, for a life out of balance is no life at all, and struggle only has meaning if there is some reward at the end of all of it. Adeline is my reward. Same goes with Orlando and Brooklyn. Veronica’s grandparents didn’t make it, so now she’s with us, too. She is Orlando’s reward and he is hers.
People used to speculate about the apocalypse. They used to wonder if they could survive this, if they’d want to, and I can tell you, without a will to live and people to love, I wouldn’t do this for a single day, let alone ten minutes.
But we’ve begun to adjust, to think like survivors, to consider all the angles in a way that gives us hope for our future. Maybe not much, but enough to last the day, maybe even the week.
Better yet, we have purpose.
All week long we function as a unit, each one of us a cog in a very large wheel. We get to know the surrounding neighborhoods, which homes are occupied, which are abandoned.
Ice, Eliana, Draven and I case the neighborhoods at night, forcing open the doors of abandoned homes, bagging up the contents, bringing them home under the cover of darkness and inventorying them the next day in the light.
We don’t do this randomly, although we’ve collected a fair number of things we can use if this assault never ends. We have food, water stores, some rudimentary weapons (baseball bats, knives, a slingshot, a bow and arrow set, brass knuckles), firewood and tons of toiletries (toilet paper, shampoo and soap, lotions, toothpaste and floss). We also have matches, flashlights and batteries. Xavier found a gas generator; Brooklyn found several five gallon gas containers she and Carolina filled up to keep the generator running for awhile; and Veronica found about a dozen low voltage space heaters she and Orlando now have working overtime to keep the house warm.
No matter how much we collect, though, there is the pervading notion that it is not enough. I told the group I didn’t think we could stop foraging for food and supplies, that maybe we could never stop. But mostly I said we’d need weapons and ammo because no one brings a bat to a gunfight and fares that well.
The only Chicagoans guaranteed to have the guns and ammo are the criminals, and so in the coming days and weeks, Xavier, Ice, Eliana and I are going to see if we can run down some of these dirt bags, rob them blind, then put their asses in the ground.
Survival of the fittest, right?
Eventually we have to get out, though. That means we get everything we can from this city, come up with a solid exit strategy, then hit the road the second the violence tempers and the weather breaks.
Everyone’s hard work and productivity give us a great start, but Ice has come up the big winner of the week. He found an old school bus, this rusted out wreck he managed to get running a few days back. He, Draven and Orlando got it back to the house and they’re now trying to get it modified for travel. If we have any hope of getting to California, it’s going to take a God-sized amount of courage and some serious strategy. It’s also going to take a ton of good luck, and I’m not sure how to measure ours at this point.
Either way, we’re making it work. Rather we’re determined to make it work.
I just hope it will be enough.
Outside, a drone whirred overhead, a mini drone with four small propellers and an all-seeing eye. Another drone flew beside it through the unseasonably damp air. Amidst the moisture, there were pockets of smoke, as well as long ribbons of it hanging around closer to the ground. In the distance fires burned in many of the neighborhoods, creating more smoke, more ash. A few mild snow flurries started here and there, but by and large, the bigger storm was still a few days away and no one was sure if this would be cold enough for snow, or just right for a cold rain.
In the distance, Chicago lay crumbling and in smoking ruin.
The drones passed over a group of people looking at an old school bus, the hood open, several of them pulling the seats out of the back of it. The drones were fifty feet up, and quiet, but they weren’t so far up they couldn’t see someone working underneath the body of a purple muscle car not far from the well-worn bus.
The drones continued on, no reason to stop.
A few blocks up, there were hundreds of people pouring through the streets, kicking in doors, breaking windows in search of anything they could use to survive this war. They were not criminals or deviants, or even deranged people. These were regular people driven from their work and homes. They were hungry and scared, and nothing was off limits anymore.
The drones slowed, measured the humans. Seconds later they transmitted the estimated crowd size and an exact location for extermination by the larger drones.
A few blocks down, dozens upon dozens of drones converged over one home. There was nothing special about this home. The miniature drones were simply ordered to meet at those specific coordinates because a centralized message was coming in.
All of them hovering in a pack, buzzing together like the world’s nosiest bee hive, they received the message. In unison, their rotors tilted just enough to allow them a skyward glance. The explosion in the sky directly above Chicago was bright before it was boisterous. The drones knew their time was over because the signal had been sent out by The Silver Queen.
The signal said D-Day.
The force of the one hundred megaton explosion not only blew radioactive dust into the atmosphere, it detonated with a strength that could be measured at seventy-six hundred times the force of Hiroshima. There was nothing like it before on earth.
This was civilization-ending.
The clouds overhead suddenly blew earthward in a huge gust, the atmosphere changing so drastically these same clouds literarily dissipated in seconds.
The mob of people looked up, shielding themselves from the gust, grabbing what they could get a hold of to protect themselves from the force of the atmospheric blast.
To their absolute horror, they watched the snow around them literally turn to water. No one knew what to make of this sudden, unexplained melt, because this was uncharted territory.
“Get inside!” people were screaming. “Radiation!”
No one knew for sure if there were radioactive particles now in the air they were breathing, but they didn’t want to take that chance—most of them, anyway. There were some who just stared up into the sky, either in shock, in awe, or just unconcerned with their lives anymore.
What those wind-blown people were looking at was a temporary hole ripped open in the atmosphere. Through that hole over Chicago, the sun burned bright and fiery; it also burned hotter than normal, which felt good after the cold snap they’d been having.
“Get inside or you’ll die!” someone shouted.
Three people ran inside, but a fourth—a woman in her twenties—she dragged a blade across her neck then fell down in the street, dead inside of a minute but
still emptying out.
This was not uncommon.
It was a reaction.
In cars and homes and garages, these survivors whispered amongst themselves, unsure of their conditions but aware that something massive had changed and it probably wasn’t good.
“Is this temporary or permanent?” people started to wonder out loud. “Are we being cooked right now or is this just a flash in the sky?”
There were enough people who knew a nuclear EMP had exploded, but those people didn’t say they were better off having the grid and being attacked by drones than not having to face the drones because the grid was down.
They didn’t want to scare the uninformed masses.
All they knew at that point was to run and hide, and to hope fallout from the nuclear bomb wouldn’t touch them, because just one touch was death, and death was still somewhat less preferable to survival, for now…
Brooklyn and Carolina are removing the big bolts mounting the seats of the school bus to the floor when a huge explosion shakes the skies and earth around us.
“Get inside!” Xavier yells.
Ice pops his head out from under the hood of the bus and I push myself out from underneath the Barracuda. We all make a mad dash inside. We knew this was coming. We knew it was near. For this very reason, we feel we are ready.
All of us stand inside the downstairs office in our house. The walls are lined with aluminum foil Adeline and Eliana put up earlier that week. It’s unsettling being inside such a shiny room and standing in silence together, just waiting for the end of the world to claim us, but that’s the plan so we’re executing it as intended.
Next door, Draven, Eliana and the children will be in a similar room, waiting.
That’s when we hear the nearby explosion. A second explosion that hits so hard it shakes the floors and walls. I don’t know what the hell that was, but I know it’s not a second EMP.
This feels like something nearby. Taking a second to consider the consequences, I make my choice.
I open the door, slip out. Ice calls to me, then follows me, shutting the door and saying, “This isn’t safe.”
“We don’t know that,” I tell him. “Besides, what in the world was that?”
Ice and I waste no time rushing outside.
We’d heard rumors in these last few days of a couple of boys at the end of the block cooking meth, but we didn’t give it much credence because there were a thousand other things that needed doing. Now I feel ashamed for having overlooked it.
Some DEA agent I am…
The big explosion had indeed come from the suspected tweaker’s house. It had to be the lab. That’s when the front door of the home bursts open and a screaming body comes running out into the street. He drops down on the asphalt and rolls, trying to put himself out, but there’s no way he’s dousing those flames. He’s literally engulfed in fire!
“Sweet Jesus,” I hear myself say.
“The house looks fine, brother,” Ice says. “I don’t see any flames but on that kid.”
“We should do something,” I tell him.
“Yeah,” Ice says, grabbing my arm and pulling me from my horrified trance. “We’re going to head back inside and hope we didn’t get any radiation poisoning.”
We return to the Aluminum foil room and tell everyone what happened.
Eudora says, “Was the house on fire?”
“Not that we could see,” Ice says. “We’ll just have to stay alert and be ready to move if something happens.”
The last thing we need is for the house to catch fire and burn the whole neighborhood down.
“Was that the EMP?” Eudora asks. “The first explosion we heard?”
“It would seem so,” I say. “High-altitude as we suspected.”
“What do you think that means for us, now that it’s here?” Eudora asks. By the looks on everyone’s faces it seems they’re wondering, too.
“It means this is finally the beginning of the end,” Ice says. Looking at Eudora, he says, “Are you ready?”
Stern faced but determined, she says, “Hell yes, I’m ready.”
END OF BOOK 2
The journey continues in The Age of Reprisal…
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Afterword
Savannah Swann. Yes. The girl the AI God/Maria Antoinette met outside Oren’s Hummus shop in The Barbarous Road, but also in Café Venetia on University Avenue in The Age of Embers. Savannah is my first literary love. She is the main character in the Swann Series, which is set in Palo Alto and the San Francisco area in the same time. If you’ve read the entire series, you’ll know how she can be here, and honestly, I love Savannah too much to leave her out of this series! In The Barbarous Road, her cameo wasn’t planned at all, but for my loyal readers who crossed over from the Swann series, this was a fun surprise. For those of you who have not read the series, Savannah is a genetically modified teen from my first series (Swann), an Urban Fantasy/SciFi series that’s vastly different from The Last War series, but tends to get quite a bit of fanfare from this audience. Before you rush out to read it/buy it, please be warned, Savannah’s story is not post-apocalyptic fiction and it should not be read by readers sensitive to more mature themes, including violence, sex and some coarse language. In other words, Swann is by no means a “clean” series. However, for those of you who have read this series and still want more of Savannah, I hope you’re pleased!
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