The Age of Embers (Book 4): The Age of Exodus

by Schow, Ryan

  We’re met with weapons in nearly every occasion, and twice we’re shot at. Fortunately we were either great at dodging bullets, or the people firing on us weren’t taking kill shots. Either way, we manage to cover a lot of ground. Which is to say my feet are in a ridiculous amount of pain, I’m exhausted and I would drink a bottle of warm piss if that was all that was available, that’s how thirsty I am.

  By the time we get back, Draven and I haven’t talked much, but we’ve been together long enough today that I’m comfortable with him. We get back to a minimal meal, the start of a campfire, and eighteen eager faces.

  It sucks to tell everyone we’ve come up empty. Not because we’re embarrassed, but because it’s easy to see the hope burning bright in everyone’s eyes. It’s even easier to see that light go out with our report of what we didn’t find a place to stay.

  After a deeply dissatisfying dinner, Eliana and Morgan tend to the sick children, Morgan gets the boys situated for the night, and Carolina handles the girls. Only the adults are up now, but that’s so they can decide who takes the first watch.

  Draven and I are exempt due to our physical states as a result of the work we did today. Xavier offers to cover the first shift. Everyone else lays out their mats and sleeping bags before calling it a night.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I’m awakened to a ruckus. Some freaking maniac is back at the trailer grabbing the sick kids in their sleeping bags and throwing them into the dirt. Two more men are in our cars and one is rooting through the bus.

  I wake up and see Morgan with a gun to her head. It’s dark out, but our campfire is smoldering and these guys have flashlights, although they aren’t very good ones at that.

  “Any a you git some bright idea to be a hero, chubby here gets popped.” The guy is a hillbilly through and through, and the air wafting around us smells like butt sweat and hard liquor. There’s no telling whose stink is clogging up the air worse—theirs or ours—but we don’t have any alcohol on us, so it would stand to reason that what we’re smelling isn’t us.

  “I’m not chubby,” Morgan grouses. The guy thunks her on the head with the tip of the barrel and says, “Shut it lady.”

  In her defense, Morgan no longer has the extra weight on her. She’s just got a little more meat on her bones than the rest of us, who are starting to look too thin for our own good.

  One of the intruders hops off the bus, a bigger shadow of a guy with broad shoulders and meat hooks for hands. He looks mean, not just his silhouette, but by the way he carries himself. He walks with confidence, a kind of surety that says he’s in charge and will have no qualms about doing whatever it is he wants.

  I think to myself, I have to kill him first.

  It won’t be easy, though. My skin breaks out into goosebumps just looking at him. Adeline scoots closer to me, but I wish she wouldn’t have moved. I want no reason whatsoever for either of us to garner the attention of this creep.

  “I need the keys for all the vehicles or I start killing the kids,” he says in a tone that’s so devoid of emotion it can hardly qualify as human. And his voice? Good God. His voice is like grated asphalt.

  At the back of the trailer, a couple of the kids are crying.

  Looking up at him, shadows dance across a big beard, an angular face, and eyes tucked away in the blackness of shadow. Everyone’s digging for their keys, me included. Action takes my mind off fear, but that initial chill never leaves me, nor does the distress that first inspired it. I pray he takes what he wants and leaves. By the time we’ve handed over our keys, I count five of them.

  Ice will be measuring them up the same as me. These don’t feel like normal rednecks with shaky gaits and moonshine smelling breath. These guys have that backwoods mentality. The gun finally comes off Morgan’s head and the five of them get into our four vehicles and take off.

  The women and children are now crying alike, but the men stand and watch where these guys are going. If I know anything about my friends and my brother, it’s that we’re going to find our cars and we’re going to make this dope army pay.

  “I want the one who put a gun to Morgan’s head,” Eliana growls.

  She’s next to me and I didn’t even know it until she snapped out this demand. I glance over at her and in the firelight, I can see her eyes are dry and her jaw is set. This is a woman who believes in payback, but it seems she’s also loyal, and to me loyalty carries a lot of weight.

  “He’s all yours,” I mutter.

  She looks at me like it’s a forgone conclusion. Suddenly Draven takes off into the night at a run, and then a sprint. Eliana takes chase, both of them headed in the direction in which the vehicles left.

  If it had been anyone other than those two heading out, I would have gone with them. I won’t lie though, I’m dog-tired and out of energy. Looking over at my brother, he looks the same. He’s about to tend to the others when I say, “After your stint in ICE, I bet you never ran unless you were being chased.”

  He gives a nod, then turns and says to Morgan, “How are the kids?”

  He’s referring to the sick kids now crawling out of their sleeping bags. Constanza is having some kind of whooping-cry fit, Kamal is bawling and Ross is just sitting there, stunned.

  “They’re scared,” Morgan says, sitting down beside us.

  “How about you?” I ask, looking at her.

  “I’m fine.”

  Right then it hits me. The guys who stole our trucks, they stole our medication, too. Meaning no more antibiotics for us or the kids. Fear suddenly spirals into a sinking pit of dread, one that slowly begins simmering toward rage.

  How had this not sunk in earlier? Why are the effects of this heist not hitting me harder? I suppose you learn to roll with the punches. You always have that thought that says “hit me with your hardest and watch me bounce back and thrive.” Thank God Draven and Eliana still have some gas left in the tank.

  Draven and Eliana return an hour later, both of them quietly picking at each other. Most everyone is asleep now. Not me. I’m still awake listening to coyotes yapping in the distance and wondering what the hell we’re going to do.

  “What did you find?” I ask Draven.

  “We lost them.”

  “We saw the direction they were headed, though,” Eliana says.

  A few of us gather around the fire, stoking it and talking quietly about what to do. In the end, though, we’re too wiped out and feeling too defeated to be rational.

  “I say we go to sleep and try to tackle this in the morning,” Adeline says. It’s hard to think of sleeping while feeling this devastated, but honestly, sleep is tugging at me hard, and I know if I don’t yield to it now, it may forsake me, leaving me in this perpetual state of in between. As in too tired to move, but just awake enough to earn no reprieve.

  When I finally nod off, it’s to the sound of someone crying. I’m not sure who it is, but at that point, I’m too tired to care.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Day 12…

  We break off into three groups: those holding down camp, those scavenging for food and supplies, and those looking for the alleged inbreeders who stole our cars, food and supplies.

  Originally, Eliana wanted to go with Ice and me to hunt these guys down, but in the end, she decided to stay with the kids and fortify the camp. After all, now that our caravan of vehicles is gone, we’re out in the open, without protection and totally exposed.

  Draven offered to go scavenging with Xavier, but then Morgan pulled him aside and asked him if she could go with Xavier instead.

  “I need to get away from the kids,” she’d said to him, a pleading to her voice Draven could not ignore. “I…I can’t take their suffering any more.”

  Draven asked to speak with me for a second in private. When we were just out of earshot of the others, he told me what Morgan asked for, and then he looked at me, perfectly serious, and said there was something deeply concerning in her expression.

  “What do you think you s
aw, Draven?” I ask.

  “It looks like she’s coming apart.”

  I nod my head and assure him I’ll take care of it. I track down Xavier, clue him in on the situation, then ask him to take Morgan with him. He understands the situation and agrees. A few minutes later, I ask Morgan to go with Xavier. I watch her eyes as I say this—I take in her entire countenance—and the woman all but melts with relief.

  “Thank you,” she says, clearly grateful.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her, quieter, more serious.

  “Yeah, I just…I just need to get away from all this, you know? I don’t really like a lot of people, and I don’t do well with sickness. It’s because I see it and I start to wonder when I’ll get it, and then I start to panic. But not just for me. I worry about them. About how I’ll feel if they…if they don’t make it.”

  “I think we all feel a little bit like that,” I tell her. “That’s why I want you to get away, try to reset your mind.”

  “Yeah, but now I see those things, Fire. I see them everywhere. In my sleep, in the back of my mind—those little black pustules—and then I think maybe I feel them under my skin, wanting to come up, to pop out…”

  “Get away for awhile, Morgan,” I reiterate. “See how you feel.”

  A small, desperate smile creeps over her face, and for a second there’s a hard shine in her eyes she somehow wills away. She leans in kisses me on the cheek, then pats my shoulder and says, “You’re a good man, Fiyero Dimas. I wish I would have known you before all this.”

  “Me, too,” I say. “Me, too.”

  Ice and I set out toward the location Eliana gave us. She’d called this “the furthest point,” and “the place they lost the glow of taillights.” From there Ice and I try to surmise where the hillbillies might have gone, which direction and how far.

  “Obviously they were local,” Ice says. “This was a hit, not something random. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have headed this way. They would have taken the freeway, right? I mean, if this were random and they were just passing through?”

  “I’m pretty sure they were local,” I tell him, his initial assessment matching mine.

  “They looked like disgusting hill people,” Ice says. “Not civilized farmers, or even your run of the mill rednecks. So we’re looking for a house or a homestead that’s run down, something that wouldn’t have been faring well before the attack, and the subsequent EMP.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking,” I tell him. “Let’s pick up the pace.”

  Night comes too quickly. We’re too far out to return home, and we’re too exhausted to do anything but find a place to drop our heads for the night. I’d told everyone that we weren’t coming back empty handed, and that if we didn’t come back that night, it was because we were still looking.

  Well…we’re still looking.

  We shack up in someone’s barn on a bed of old hay in a stall that doesn’t smell like manure, but has the heavy smell of soil instead. Ice sleeps beside me. We’re both out cold in minutes and we both sleep until the break of day.

  I don’t dream, but I remember stirring several times to the excited sounds of coyotes. I recall some yipping and a lot of barking, but what sits deepest in my mind is the howling. I wonder what they found, what they caught, if they ravaged their kill and finally sated their appetites.

  A low, painful groan rumbles in my stomach. I look down, feeling thinner than ever. Is it possible I lost another five pounds? I look at Ice and he’s looking thinner, too. Neither of us say anything, but we both know that to keep our energy, we need sustenance.

  Around high noon, in the distance, we see the brown roof of a barn and the farm surrounding it. The closer we get, the more dilapidated it begins to look.

  “Starting to look promising,” I say, eyes on the gathering of buildings.

  “Sure fits the bill,” Ice says, hopeful.

  When we get to the edge of the property, it’s quiet. As still as the dead. For awhile we keep an eye on the place, tucked under the cover of brush, working on our patience, exercising our restraint.

  I personally want to charge in there, pound the snot out of these toilet bugs, get our stuff, then get on the road and get the hell out of this state. Then again, that’s how ops go south and good people die—you game plan on emotion. Besides, we don’t even know if these are our guys.

  After an hour of nothing but a slight breeze for movement, we creep onto the property, case the farmhouse in a circular fashion. Then, tightening our radius, we breach the most accessible building: the barn.

  This weathered old shack is tall inside—maybe two stories with rafters and a ladder. It has eight stalls in it and dirt floors but no hay. It smells dry, a bit dusty and certainly unused. There are worn out slats that look old and warped with both time and the elements, and the wood has pulled so far away from its seat in some places, long slivers of sunlight cut into the darkness giving the inside a slightly ominous glow.

  “This is like the barn in Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Ice says.

  “There was a barn in that movie?”

  “If not, there should’ve been, and it should have looked like this,” he replies, looking around to take it all in.

  I scan the open space for giant meat hooks, the kind those psychos in serial killer movies hang their victims on just before torturing them. If I hadn’t have known better, I’d say Ice is unnerved.

  Then again, so am I.

  For the next hour, we work through the various buildings. It becomes clear to us we have a farm that hasn’t seen use in a few years. Finally we move into the main residence. Ice checks the back door. It’s unlocked. He looks at me with eyes that say, “Venus Fly Trap for humans?” so I shrug my shoulders.

  That’s when it hits me...

  The smell of death is something you never get used to. It’s so awful it defies description. All I can say is that it feels like that hideous odor penetrates not only your skin and organs, but works its way into the very marrow of your bones, settling in like some sort of putrefaction that will one day overtake you. Just breathing the smell means you’ve got someone’s death inside you.

  We have death inside us all now.

  Ice spots the old woman on the couch first. She’s only a few days dead. At least, she looks like an old woman because, when later we find her head, it matches the apparent age of the body it had been separated from.

  “Whoever did this,” Ice says, his words clipped, his tone stiff, “they didn’t have to be so extreme.”

  “Do you think it was our guys who did this?” I ask.

  Ice nods.

  He flashes me a look.

  “People rarely cut off other people’s heads unless they’re trying to make a point, or they’re flat out psychotic.”

  I’m certain he’s speaking from experience.

  “What’s the point you think they were trying to make?” I ask. “Because this doesn’t seem rational.”

  He looks at me and says, “That’s the problem, brother. I don’t think they were trying to make a point.”

  Meaning we could be working with psychos here.

  Her body is in a housedress, a white cotton button-up that’s got hundreds of little blue and red paisley designs on it, so many the dress looks polka-dotted where it’s not washed in dried brown gore. The garment is pulled slightly open, the shriveled skin mottled with death.

  What an unsightly mess!

  Holding my nose, I lean in and get a closer look at the big stain on the front of that dress. Not the one around her neck, but lower, by her hip. It’s blackened, but looks like blood.

  I poke the fabric.

  It’s stiff.

  From a kitchen drawer, I find a pair of long metal of tongs. I use them to pull back her dress. She’s wearing flesh-colored underwear that’s bright against the darkness of her dead body. Above the underwear’s elastic waistband, I locate the source of the dried wound.

  Turning away, I try to push the image out of my head. Lett
ing the garment fall back into place, I use the tongs to cover her properly.

  “Looks like they tried to dig out the fleshier parts of her,” I say from what feels like a faraway place.

  “Does it look like torture?” Ice asks. He’s in the kitchen going through the cabinets, as desperate as me for food and water.

  “It’s all torture when you cut someone’s head off,” I say. “But that’s beside the point. It looks surgical. I mean, not Harvard level surgical, but pre-determined. I think they were thinking they could maybe…eat her.”

  I hear the commotion in the kitchen stop. Ice pops his head around the corner and says, “Come again?”

  “It looks like they were trying to cut out the meatiest part of her, only there wasn’t much meat there, so I think they just gave up and left her here.”

  “Those douchebags who took our stuff, did they strike you as cannibals?” he asks.

  Wordless, I raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders.

  Then something occurs to me.

  “If push came to shove,” I ask, “and you thought you could get to the other side of something if you just survived long enough, would you eat a human? I mean, could you make yourself do it?”

  He stares at me like he doesn’t want to have this conversation.

  “If you’d have asked the Donner party,” Ice says, referring to the infamous group of pioneers traveling the Oregon trail who were stuck for months in the wintery nightmare that was the Sierra Nevada mountains, “what do you think they would have said? I mean, if you’d have asked them before they started eating each other to live.”

  “Probably not.”

  No one really ever sets out to eat a human—well, maybe some of those more eccentric freaks in D.C. and Hollywierd—but no one sane does this.

  This unexpected memory has me really pondering the roots of the Donner-Reed party. I learned the story as a kid and it always stuck with me. Not like a bad memory, or an experience that haunts you, but more like a curiosity. Something you can’t imagine possible.

  The group of nearly a hundred travelers ventured onto a different route in the middle of the winter of 1846 and were stuck in the elements for four long months leading into 1847. The Hastings Cutoff. That’s what they took. They bypassed the more established trails hoping to beat the winter and instead they found themselves traveling some impossibly rough terrain. They crossed Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, and eventually their desolate journey had them bumping and slogging along the Humboldt River in what is now modern-day Nevada.