World of Ashes

by J. K. Robinson

"They're letting people past, man, but don't give ‘em any shit.” The kid said as if he’d already said it a thousand times and was bored. “Are either of you hurt?" He wasn’t unfriendly, just not very sociable, probably still going through cell-phone withdrawal.

  "No." They lied. Keith was still beaten up pretty good, but they didn’t want to get stopped for some other medic to check him out. If Keith thought he’d make it, he probably would. That was a good way to lose what items they’d already collected, someone might decide those weapons would be of better use to them. "We were hiding in the countryside. We found this stuff. The owner blew his own head off.”

  "Whatever, man. They'll probably try and bribe you to stay and help fight. They figure the corpses from St. Louis will follow the highway here in a couple of days." The kid jumped into the bed of their truck without asking. He didn't make any threatening gestures, he just didn't want to walk the quarter mile to the checkpoint and miss all the action if his people decided to blow Ethan and Keith’s heads off.

  The truck was guided to a halt in a Sally Port surrounded by bomb proof barriers called Hesco Bastions. The bastions had saved countless lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that was only filled with the crap dirt that existed over there. Filled with solid Missouri river clay the barriers could stop a small tank. A woman approached the truck in woodland fatigues, though they could tell she’d been a cop once too. She still had her shiny leather utility belt. "Is this your truck?" She asked.

  "It is now." Ethan said, looking at the skill tabs sewn onto the lady’s uniform. Airborne, Air Assault, Combat Action Badge, 10th Mountain Division Combat Patch and a faded boony hat with salt stains where staff sergeant’s rank had been long ago.

  "I see. Does the legal owner know you have their truck?”

  Keith froze, he didn't know what to say to that. Luckily, Ethan did. “Ask him if you want. Whatever’s left is probably still stuck to the suspension. Let’s just say he had a wicked case of the munchies and wasn’t in the negotiating mood.”

  There was a brief moment where Ethan and the woman in charge of the traffic control point locked eyes. This was it, the game was up and they were going to be eaten alive in jail or shot. The woman burst out in an unexpected laugh that was horribly out of place in the dying world around them. Keith and the people at the checkpoint were mildly disturbed, but to Ethan it was a relief to meet someone who understood sarcastic nihilism. “So where are you coming from?”

  "Wildwood."

  She took a step back and looked at the tarp in the bed of the truck. "What's in the truck?"

  "Oh, you know, letters from home, a couple hookers I chloroformed, a box of duct tape, some Skittles in case we get hungry… oh, and the full second season of Scrubs in HD. It’s the best show no one’s going to be left alive to watch. We're heading for his place." Ethan said with a wide eyed smile, putting his arm around Keith’s shoulders.

  “I don’t know this psychopath.” Keith tried, but to no avail.

  "You two meet in the Army or something?" She said with a sly smile. Ethan shared the smile as Keith realized it was a gay joke.

  Keith shoved Ethan off of him and after a good laugh he pointed down the road. "So what's it gonna take to get you to let us on through, Ma’am?”

  The woman eyed the inventory in the truck. "Got any anti-tank weapons?" She asked, knowing full well they did. Ethan had found it under a bunk at the Gray Summit TCP and was planning to use it to blow up the first Army truck that tried to stop him from getting to his family.

  They had to let go of the AT4 Ethan was so proud of, but they were allowed passage through Twin Bridges after that. Maybe the woman would just enjoy splattering a few zombies with it, or maybe she and the equally buff looking woman in the tent would use it as a sex toy. It didn’t really matter either way, Ethan’s mind was wandering now that the adrenaline was wearing off.

  The road ahead promised two more towns and more roadblocks still. At this point the hope was those would be abandoned too. "She might have been cute twenty years ago." Keith finally broke the silence. They weren’t listening to the truck’s radio. Nothing was being broadcast, and the previous owner’s CD collection consisted entirely of Conway Twitty. The silence was annoying, but preferable to Country Western from the 1970’s. The next best thing was to sing to each other, and that wasn’t going to happen all gay jokes aside.

  "We can go back if you want her number." Ethan offered. "That butch chick with the rambo headband and tattoos in the tent behind her might take offense to that though, so tread carefully my friend.”

  "What if we run into a real roadblock and they want to know where we got the guns? I’ve heard about some deserters who’ve been shot. What’s to say they don’t just do that and save the paperwork?”

  "There's always traffic backed up at roadblocks. We'll see it coming and go around." Ethan looked over at Keith, changing the subject. "Do you think any of the infected can reason to do something like that? Strategize and work together?”

  "I don't know. When they're raging they don't care about much but hurting themselves or you, but they’ve been known to open complex door handles in pursuit of prey. We usually euthanized them, the order to start shooting the Infected came down a few months ago, I’m sure you know. I haven’t been privy to any clinical studies beyond the Rage Phase, I’m sad to say. For all I know they just break the doors open by sheer force, or they could remember absolutely everything until the moment of death.”

  "That's a really pretty word for shooting them in the head, ‘euthanize.’" Ethan was still not quite over Keller’s death, and the seemingly selfless action that had ended his life weighed against the illogical actions the infected were prone to. Keith was very likely not a believer in Karma, or at least Murphy’s Law, two philosophies Ethan found were almost inseparable.

  "You're not a believer anymore either, are ya? In the mission I mean." Keith said with a smile, taking Ethan by surprise with the first part. "I'll bet you got Drafted. A prior service Soldier who didn't want to come back. No wonder you weren't all that upset when your unit pulled out."

  "That is a surprisingly complete summary of my predicament." Ethan had to hand it to his new friend. “How did you get here?”

  "I was stationed at Fort Polk. What a blight on civilization that place is/was. There was a call for volunteers to help at Fort Lewis, Washington. I volunteered just to escape Polk and got diverted to Scott AFB en route, then trucked to Fort Leonard Wood. We all just kinda trickled to smaller assignments from there, I guess. My orders were so fluid at one point I just started bumming around with whatever unit I wanted until I landed myself at Antire Hill." A few burned out cars on the hill ahead forced them to slow. They were just outside of Ethan’s hometown of Sullivan and parked just below the horizon of the next hill so they could scout ahead. The highways were as empty as the rumored Ghost Cities of China, an image Ethan had never seen before.

  "I don't see any movement. Let's just get going."

  "I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for Marines in the bushes to jump out and take us to the stockade or shoot us. Call me paranoid.”

  "Dude, the Marines are retreating too." Keith put the binoculars down. "Nobody's going to ambush us."

  Keith was wrong. They were ambushed at the bottom of the hill by snipers in the woods, their high powered rounds plowing through the engine block like the massive vehicle was made of little more than a paper. The truck lurched to a stop and they bailed out before the attacker could reload. It killed Ethan to be so close yet so far away, but they had to lay in a ditch until dark after hearing the snipers shoot several more times nearby. Neither saw the shooters, but stayed frosty with rifles at the ready. In the twilight when whoever those idiots were had either moved on or been eaten, they unloaded as many weapons as they could and stashed the rest of it in a trailer at a construction site.

  MODOT had been repairing a section of bridge over a creek due to a recent mild tremor from the New Madrid Fault Line. The qua
ke had damaged many of the roads and bridges in the tri-state area, but had set Missouri up with a lot of FEMA equipment that had been instrumental in delaying the spread of the infection in the early days.

  Night came just as they reached the outskirts of Sullivan, only then had they been certain no one was following them. Keith broke into an ATV store and stole the keys to what amounted to an off-road golf cart. They stashed more guns in the storage shed to the dealership before heading out to explore the town and hopefully reach Ethan’s home. From there they’d rescue his family… then what? Tough it out in his parent’s loft like they were hiding from the Nazis? That was actually not a bad idea.

  What they found in the town was far from what either had expected. About half the citizens were still there, some in the process of looting the last bits of food and supplies from the Wal*Mart, and others looting the hardware stores. People were even taking the last bit of foodstuffs from the roadside restaurants, something Ethan hadn’t actually considered.

  A lifetime supply of Jumbo Mac’s did appeal to him in a macabre sort of way. The journal entry he could write would say, Day One Hundred and Seventy. Made fort out of MacChickens in living room. Used MacPoppers as people… Ate most of my citizens. Not a very good overlord and despot after all. Welcome to the demented mind of Ethan Cally, sometimes science fiction writer and a grand master in the art of sarcasm.

  Everyone in town was packing a gun, too. There were pickups in parking lots with extremely well armed children guarding them while their parents looted. It was semi-organized chaos really, but no one was shooting at each other. “An Armed Society is a Polite Society.” Ethan muttered. He and Keith walked up to a truck with children who seemed more interested in barter than looting. "Who's in charge around here?" Ethan asked, eyeing a hunting scope on the tailgate. None of the items had price tags in dollars, but there were small flash cards with items listed on them in purple and red marker that they would be willing to trade for.

  "Like we know." A little girl with an overdramatized southern accent said. She was kind of fat and filled her father's old Air Force uniform well, if she’d been six inches taller of course. "Everyone's takin' what they can, we got to keep an entire police cruiser from the Highway Patrol yesterday. Daddy says they have better engines than our cars, and that we should keep it because the cop inside was infected and he wasn’t gonna need it anymore." She hissed the last word for extra effect.

  Keith smiled, even with the world ending children could still be cute in the most macabre ways. "So there's no sheriff or police?"

  "My daddy is a cop, but he says all them other chicken shit motherfuckers left with the Army so they can eat shit and rot in hell." All three kids made the sign of the cross on their hearts.

  "Nice touch, Children of the Corn. Do you know where your daddy is?"

  "I'm right here." They both turned to face a rather plump man holding an M1 Garand menacingly enough. "Who're you?"

  "I'm Ethan, he's Keith." Ethan let his rifle hang on its sling. Keith similarly relaxed to try and ease the man's stress a little. "We're looking for family around here."

  "You stand an okay chance of finding them." The chubby cop relaxed his grip on his rifle. "Most people left along with the Army, though. Last soldiers we saw were gone by midnight last night." The officer eyed them suspiciously, "Those are some nice guns you got. Look kinda Government Issued if you ask me. Your haircut too." He pointed at Keith, “You friend there looks like a dirty hippy.”

  “Thank you.” Ethan smiled. “I like to think my inner self shines through when no one makes me shave at 0500.”

  "Where are you going with this?" Keith didn't like the direction the conversation was taking. The guy was still wearing a royal blue polo that read POLICE over his heart, and a work belt loaded for riot control.

  "You misunderstand me," The officer smiled. "I've been hoping there'd be some Soldiers or Marines out there who weren't stupid enough to get infected, that some of you guys would wind up here. Most of the officers from my department got caught up in the Army pullout. There's only three of us and a retired sheriff from Branson. We could use some help keeping the other towns away from us.”

  "Is there some kind of government here?" Ethan asked.

  "Not really. You can only be in charge of what you can patrol, and that would be just three cops right now to cover a lot of hostile area. If you two are who I think you are, we could use you."

  “Is there a meeting place?”

  "We’re meeting tonight at seven at the Police Station. You two gonna be there?"

  "We hope so." Ethan said before they turned to go back to their golf cart on steroids.

  "Hey, GI Ginger, I'll trade you this here drum magazine for that there bear mace you’re packin’." One of the kids on the truck offered to Keith. His father smiled proudly, watching his children sell like they were an auctioneer.

  Ethan looked down at Keith's belt. "Where the hell did you get bear mace?" Keith ignored Ethan and made the trade. They drove away after that, Keith happily loading the drum magazine with 5.56mm rounds. The trip wound through the older part of town on the East side of the tracks that paralleled Main Street. A dozen people on the roads were just wandering around in the middle of the dark, shock and disbelief disconnecting them from their new reality. One man even walked along the road with his cell phone out, looking for a signal that may never appear again. Wal*Mart had still been lit when they left, though the lights being on hadn’t stopped anyone from looting it of course. The streets were a lot scarier than Ethan remembered as a boy. He turned off the side-by-side’s lights as they swerved down a back road, suspicious someone might be following them. During Sullivan’s height, when the Railroads were everywhere, the housing had boomed to create several large subdivisions. Ethan drove through these randomly to throw off an imaginary tail before turning the corner at the firehouse across the tracks on Main Street and off into the wilderness of one of the back roads.

  In the countryside river bottoms between miles upon miles of identical trees and farms, the road stretch into oblivion. Keith was completely unprepared when Ethan swerved onto a gravel road with a single level house at the end. His soda toppled out onto the grass, along with several loose rounds. After an insufferable amount of time on the dark, nondescript patchwork of gray and black county roads, they were finally home. Ethan leapt from the vehicle before it had completely stopped and ran into the house before Keith could even gather that they were at his friend’s house.

  The windows were all intact and the garage door was closed. Ethan grabbed the door knob. To his horror the door was unlocked, and the house completely empty. He cleared it twice, the living room, furnished basement, and loft bedroom too. No one.

  "Hey, there's a note on the table." Keith pointed, unwilling to disturb the scene.

  Ethan rushed over and snatched all four pages of it. His whole family had left their own goodbye letter just in case he made it home. The world stopped while he read them, tears already rolling down his face as he read of dead friends and family, and finally of what the Army had done to get people to leave. Nicole’s warnings were vague, as if she were afraid of someone other than Ethan reading it. She wasn’t the code leaving type, but there seemed to be a mortal, compelling reason for them to obey the Army when they were told to leave.

  "FUCK!" Ethan threw a rather justified tantrum. "God fucking damnit!” A bowl of rotted fruit went sailing through the air. “Twelve hours! That’s all I needed was twelve fucking hours! If those fucking hillbillies hadn’t shot our fucking truck!..."

  “It would have made no difference.”

  “Fuck you!” The shouting continued until Ethan was exhausted and collapsed into an armchair a complete wreck. The air conditioner kicked on outside. Aside from the whirring of the vents the house was silent. "It's six thirty. We should go." Ethan finally admitted defeat.

  The Ford Crown Vic in the garage was still there, but barely started. One of Ethan’s Evanescence CDs started playing
. The music was too painful for him right now and he ripped the faceplate off the radio and threw it in the garage. Who knew what would happen at the Police Station when they arrived. Someone might be trying to take power, someone might even attack them. The station parking lot was almost completely empty. Only a couple of cruisers and a pristine Cadillac town car were parked neatly by the door, but not in the handicap spaces. Were there really any handicap people left? Wouldn’t their medical needs have made them easy prey for the infected? A sad truth few were willing to admit. Ethan parked in the handicapped space and went inside and found the portly cop he’d met earlier, another male officer with a crappy bowl cut he must have done himself, making him look like the skinny guy from Delta Farce, and a female cop who tucked her lower belly fat into her pants like it was somehow more natural looking that way.

  "So now what?" Ethan said once everyone had turned to him.

  "We were hoping you knew. You two are in the Army, right?"

  "That’s an ambiguous question." Ethan took a chair and sat in the semicircle with them. "We were left behind at abandoned outposts when they pulled out."

  "They left their own behind?" A man Ethan hadn't noticed was walking towards them. He had on jeans that might have fit fifty pounds ago, his gun hanging over a glittery rodeo belt. The pants had holes in the pockets with a bleach mark where a tobacco tin had been, and a red and black plaid shirt that had once had an embroidered Winston logo on the pocket. He carried an 1890 model Remington revolver in a leather holster strapped to his shoulder. He carried a frosty cold Coors in his left hand, a cigar of the finest quality in the other. The Stetson on his head had a big fat Eagle Globe and Anchor pinned to the center. "Typical Army pukes." He smiled, making it clear he didn’t mean the two men in the room.

  "There were Marines there too." Keith retorted.

  The old Marine harrumphed. "Look, Chief." He said to the officer who's kids they had met at Wal*Mart. "We got problems. If it ain't the lootin’ it's the dead. They're still popping up all over town. The guys at the VFW and the Boy Scouts are holding looters back from the truck stop, so at least that fuel ain't been stolen… yet." It seemed to the two newcomers this four person government was trying to hold onto at least some commodities for the looming winter, already assuming they’d be on their own. If any order was going to be maintained, they’d need to act quickly.