The Last War Series Box Set [Books 1-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  Anyone coming into my house is going to accuse me of being a hoarder, and at this point, I’d say hell yes, I’m a hoarder! In this day and age you have to be if you want to survive.

  The thing I’m worried about more than my own survival is the survival of those whom I love. I haven’t heard a thing from either of my parents, or even Terrible Tad. He knows where we live. How to reach me. The problem is, if I don’t hear from any of them soon, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fall back into that deep, sorrowful place where the world is collapsing all around me and I’m out here, all alone.

  A few times I’ve thought about going across the street to see the girl I talked to. Twice I’ve even gone knocking but she won’t answer the door. Maybe it’s because the relentless bombing and the constant, acrid smell of smoke hanging in the air. Or is it because the drones have been flying down her street, blowing up three and four houses at a time?

  Perhaps this is why the gang bangers-turned-looters haven’t come through here in a minute. This area’s hot. They’ve been around, though. I’ve seen them. I confiscated a brand new rifle with two boxes of .22 rounds and a big ass Bushnell scope and this has me thinking of them. It has me wondering if I can shoot them with it. Part of me wants to tell my shy, blonde neighbor what I’m doing, what I have—if anything, to put her at ease—but Rider would tell me I’m a moron for telling anyone what I’m up to.

  Because of him, my mindset is quickly shifting. Because of Rider, because of Tad and my father and my mother, because of me feeling terribly alone and seeing thugs on the block and a city being leveled day after day, I’ve made my long slide down the evolutionary scale.

  I am regressing, working my way toward savage.

  There’s been nothing specific to make me feel like I’m no longer myself; it’s what I’ve allowed myself to become that lets me know how far I’ve fallen. It’s the absolution of guilt. I am a thief. I am a murderer. I am a watcher, a hoarder, an island of one.

  At night I pray for guidance, for forgiveness, but I also tell God that I am only reacting to the times, that I am obeying my father by surviving at all costs, and that I will do what I can to help people if there are people in need of help.

  So far, He’s sent me no one. All I’ve done is help myself. Perhaps I am slated to serve sometime in the future. Perhaps I will be a useful servant. Then again, I could be the Devil and I might not know it. All my good intentions might just be a ruse, even to me, a way of justifying my more disreputable behaviors.

  In the mean time, when I’m not preparing myself for war, or famine, or the end of the world, I grab a book or watch a DVD, or I sleep. Basically I do whatever I can to keep this harsh reality from sinking in too deep. As long as I have my mind, I’ve got everything I need. If that goes, I know I’m toast. So to keep my mind, I remain preoccupied. Or distracted at the very least.

  When the water went off, I was asleep. I didn’t hear anything. It just wasn’t there anymore. I panicked. All my pretend bravado, all my pseudo-preparedness, all my self-determination to outlast my enemies, to survive, it just sort of crumbled, like something dead and disintegrating, like something that was once alive but has now been reduced to a dry powder with no future but to flitter away on winter’s first wind.

  Am I being dramatic? I am. I don’t care. This is no place for calmer minds to prevail. There is no climate for calm minds to even exist. All day long the safe men, the sane men, the cautious men, die on the streets. In their cars. In their homes.

  Now the freaking water’s out…

  Naturally, I spend two days being depressed. After that I get up and go to my mom’s house. I have to talk to Tad, see if he knows anything. See if he’s done anything. When I get to their street, I see the block and my heart sinks. Half the houses have been bombed. More than a few of them have fallen to fire or from collapse. Some are better than others. Then there are those still standing untouched by anything other than heavy smoke and a soft, smoldering heat.

  Tad’s and my mom’s home is standing in near ruin. I can’t help the tears and I can’t stop them. What’s left of Tad’s car is in the same place I left it. I only recognize it because of how the trunk looks smashed in. It’s a charred frame sitting on bare rims sitting in a quilt of its own toxic ash.

  I get out of the Cutlass, make my way inside the home. Half the roof has caved in. I want to cry out my mother’s name, but it’s so deathly still inside I can’t bring myself to disturb the silence.

  Looking around, wiping my eyes constantly, I see things I recognize, but it’s when I get into the kitchen that I see the most recognizable thing: Tad.

  A large part of the ceiling has caved in on him. He’s an upper torso. A statistic. I turn away, stifling the cry. It smells like fire and soot in here, and even though the ashy smell sits heavy in my nose, there is a deeper, more distinct smell at work here. It’s something truly foul. Death. Backtracking to the stairs, I carefully make my way to the second floor in search of my mother. She’s no where to be found. Part of me is relieved. The other part of me feels nothing of the sort.

  She’s already dead, I tell myself. She’s been dead since the beginning.

  Sitting on the floor upstairs, the collapsed roof open to the sky, the sounds of things being bombed in the distance, I do what I’ve been doing and that’s open myself up to the flood.

  I never really mourned for my parents. It kills me to know they may still be out there, but it stings even worse knowing chances are good they’re not really here anymore. They’re not really alive. A flash of my father dead in some building in San Diego tears through my mind, forcing me to close my eyes. I see my mother, dead in her car, blown up by one of those drones and my eyes squeeze out more tears.

  It seems the more I surrender to the pain, the more I feel parts of me walling themselves off, shutting down. The warmth in me, the love I used to carry behind my breast, the little girl who wanted friends and a boyfriend and for God’s sake some kind of a future, it’s all slipping away. All becoming something that was and will never be.

  Sitting in this house of death, in this city that’s systematically being destroyed, razed to the bone, I contemplate my own mortality, my own reasons for living. I don’t want to live. Not like this. Not with all this loss, all this fear, all this solitude.

  The scream that boils up from inside me, the scream that feels explosive the way a nuclear bomb feels explosive, starts with infinite sorrow and a mighty inhalation of breath, and when the flood of emotion roars forth I can’t stop it, and I can’t help it. I scream my throat ragged. I scream until I’m left breathless and hunched over with no fight left in me and barely a will to survive. Then I lie down in the ash. I just lay here with my eyes running and my heart this thunderous force in my chest. Then, as the tears dry and my pulse returns to normal, I feel that last bit of humanity inside me hardening to stone.

  By the time I dredge up the will to pick my body up off this floor, I realize something’s changed. No. I realize everything’s changed. The light inside me is now gone. Behind my eyes there is nothing, no one, two lightless holes. The way Rider said I should make myself feel nothing, well that’s exactly what I feel.

  Dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  My house is a tomb. I get home and know I should grab my bow and arrows and head outside, but I don’t want to. Instead, I grab an empty five gallon gas can I “procured” about a week back and a small plastic siphoning hose, then I head out looking for cars.

  The thing about people abandoning their cars is there’s always plenty of gas around. If the power goes out like the city’s water pump went out, I’m going to need that gas to power a generator. I need to keep the fridge running. If I can’t find a generator right now, I’ll at least have the gas for when I do find one.

  One half of the equation…solved.

  Things are going to get worse, though. I can feel it. That being the case, I’m moving “finding a generator” to the top of my needs list. The only problem is th
e noise. Generators aren’t always quiet. Ugh. I’ll have to deal with the logistics of that later.

  I open the garage door and back the Cutlass out into the alley. There is something about the sound of that feisty Detroit motor that has me feeling alive. This has become the kind of car you run over people with. The kind of car a real hard ass drives. This is a take-no-crap-from-anyone kind of car and I love every last inch of it.

  Rumbling down the alley with my gun in my lap, I could care less who hears me right now. Come and get me…

  Inside of two blocks I find half a dozen abandoned sedans. They all have gas. I fill the Cutlass first, then I top off the five gallon container one last time and put it in the front seat foot well.

  The drive back home is short, and thank God because nothing is worse than the taste of gasoline in your mouth. Back home with a bottle of water, I brush my teeth, gargle some mouthwash to get the noxious taste out of my mouth, then head upstairs and lay down for a nap.

  When I wake up, it’s to the sounds of screaming. Flying out of bed, feeling out of sorts, not sure what’s happening or even where I am, I rush to my bedroom window overlooking my backyard and Dirt Alley. Tearing the curtains aside, an orange sky greets me, one that’s quickly growing dark but isn’t so dark that I miss the nightmare scene unfolding below.

  My senses are quick to return.

  Across the alley, barging out of the back of the girl’s house—the girl I warned to be careful several days back—are the five deviants. One of these monstrous turds, he’s dragging the blonde out of her house by her hair. To her credit, the girl is kicking and screaming, clawing at her abductor’s hands and cursing violently.

  All five of these creeps find this amusing, judging by the riot of laughter. Two of the guys crossing the backyard are even whooping and hollering like a bunch of drug-addled morons. They then count to three like a pair of drunk frat boys and charge the fence, driving into it shoulder-first. The entire thing topples and both guys go down laughing. They climb slowly to their feet and start jumping up and down on the wood, stomping the fallen fence until it’s all but flattened.

  The guy with the blonde, he’s still dragging her by the hair. He’s still weathering her attacks. He’s still kicking at her when she gets in a good shot not because he’s mad but because sooner or later he’s going to beat the fight out of her.

  My pulse doubles, then triples. Something in me kicks into high gear and screams that I do something.

  “You motherfu—”

  At the fence, the guy with the girl drags her over splintered wood and exposed nails. She’s wailing now, screaming for help while I’m up here, squirming in the dark. In my head, I’m formulating a plan, but the truth is, I’m trying to figure out how to start this fight and not end up in the same position as she’s in right now.

  I know what I said about calmer minds prevailing, and how there was no room for calm minds here, but I take that back.

  Reeling myself in, I try to focus.

  To think…

  Now that they’ve got her out in the middle of Dirt Alley, four of them are wrestling her limbs while the other is undoing his belt buckle.

  Her screaming becomes pleading and her pleading becomes uncontrollable sobbing.

  “No, no, no…”

  I race downstairs, slip on my shoes, then grab my bow and arrows, blow through the back door and climb the ladder leading to my garage roof. Night is falling fast, as is the temperature, but my heart is kicking up a ferocious storm, pumping adrenaline into my blood, keeping me warm, making me hot with rage.

  Every one of those pukes has his eyes on the blonde. They have her pinned down by force, pinned to the ground with lust and sick intentions. One of the guys on her wrist, he’s tearing off her shirt. Another guy at her ankle has a knife and he’s cutting through the soft cotton shorts she’s wearing. When the shirt comes off, her breasts are bared. At the same time, the dirt bag who cut her shorts also cuts her underwear and all that gets pulled away, too, exposing a strip of dark pubic hair.

  “Mother of God,” I hear myself mutter.

  The lead in this pack of rapists gets down on hands and knees, planting his legs between her legs. He reaches back, drags down his pants and underwear, then nudges the insides of her thighs further apart with the outsides of his knees.

  By then I’ve grabbed an arrow, seated it and have it pulled back to the anchor point. The second I loose the arrow, another is out of the quiver, seated and drawn back. The first arrow hits its mark, sinking deep into the flesh, much farther than I imagined. I was aiming for the rapist’s tailpipe. No kidding. It went in about halfway.

  “Bullseye, bitch,” I growl.

  The next two arrows are flying by the time the rapist gathers enough breath to scream. He’s fallen face-first onto the blonde. Both arrows find their marks. We’re talking head shots. The two targets go down, dead. The fourth guy is looking around then finding me.

  He’s got a gun and he’s pulling it out.

  I loose an arrow that catches him just right. His head snaps back, then rocks forward; my arrow is protruding from his left eye. He topples over in slow motion.

  The fifth guy is now running. No, he’s sprinting.

  My fifth arrow finds his back, which slows him down and wobbles him a bit, but doesn’t stop him. By now he’s too far away.

  I lob another arrow anyway. It falls short by a foot.

  Leaping off the roof, I hurry to the girl. The man with his pants down and an arrow driven halfway into his ass is howling in pain on top of her. I kick him over, but his body stops the fall halfway, and he lets out another deafening screech. Apparently the protruding arrow is serving as a kickstand. The rapist’s eyes find me. Lock in on me. They’re pumped full of fear, righteous agony and pleading.

  My eyes take in the ravaged blonde. She’s not in her head right now; she’s already disappeared by the vacant look in her eyes and the frenetic panting still going on.

  I grab an arrow, seat in, draw back and shoot it right into the eye of her attacker, the man that’s still laying halfway on her. His head jerks back, then lolls forward and to the side. He suddenly goes very still, all the fight in him gone. All the life in him…gone.

  “You okay?” I ask the girl.

  She just looks at me, unable to form words. The look in her eyes tells me no one’s home, not that I blame her. First she gets assaulted, dragged out of her house, stripped naked before five men planning on defiling her, and then she sees four of those men die all around her, one on top of her. So yeah, I don’t really blame her for being traumatized.

  Dragging the guy off her, I say, “I’ll be back to check on you. Get back inside.”

  Without waiting for a response, I sprint after the one getting away, ripping my arrow out of the fourth man’s eyeball on the way. Hauling ass down Dirt Alley, I glance down and see the fourth man’s bloody eyeball skewered on the arrow. Sickened, I drop the arrow and pick up speed.

  If the witness is going anywhere, it’s to his home base. If I find home base, I find their loot and killing him and his friends will be a formality at best.

  At the end of Dirt Alley, on Judah, I look left and then right and then decide on right. I find him rounding the corner onto 22nd a block and a half away. With the dying embers of day working to my advantage, I hang back, but not as far back as I would have had there been an abundance of light.

  I track him on 22nd, hiding behind cars and slipping into alcove driveways. I follow him the entire block up to 22nd and Irving where he disappears into the Walgreen’s.

  So Walgreen’s is home base.

  Inching up on it, I try but fail to see inside the windows. Where my eyes are rendered useless, my ears take center stage. There’s a commotion of voices coming from inside. Loud voices, authoritative voices. I hear enough to realize they’re gathering up a posse.

  Oh, crap.

  Moving like my life depends on it, because it does, I run down Irving, take the corner on to 23rd and bo
ok it home. The four dead men are where I left them and the blonde’s house is fully dark. Presumably, she’s gone in to clean herself up. Good girl.

  Rushing inside my home, I grab the loaded rifle and start stuffing my pockets with shells. When I can’t get anymore in there, I scurry out back, heading toward the end of the alley furthest from where I expect trouble. There I set up a blind.

  It’s dark outside now.

  If they’re coming, hopefully they’re bringing light. Just as I’m thinking this, seven guys round the corner and start up Dirt Alley with flashlights, guns and the purposeful stride of men on a vengeance-fueled testosterone rush.

  Sighting the pack of scumbags through the high-powered Bushnell scope is easy. They crowd the dead bodies, take a moment, and then they’re all eyes in search of me.

  The guy I was tracking—the one who took an arrow in the back—he points to the garage by my house. It appears he’s talking to the one in charge, this heavily muscled beast of a man with slicked back hair. He has a gun in his hand and just one tattoo—an upside down cross over his Adam’s apple.

  I put the first round right through the tattoo.

  Then I open fire.

  I’m conscious of my ten round magazine, and this being a .22, it’s got its advantages. Bullets like these from a rifle like this won’t blow through a person as much as it’ll make a mess of things inside the body first. I’m talking about head shots. The way a bullet enters the skull with enough steam to get in but not enough punch to get out means whatever’s inside is going to be brain soup in no time flat.