World of Ashes

by J. K. Robinson

  Ethan sat in the soft chair where he was supposed to wait for the shrink. Mary was outside with Samuel and there was nothing to do for the longest time before the head-shrink, a man in a stereotypical argyle sweater with the diamond shaped designs on it came in and sat across from Ethan. “Hello, I’m doctor Hector Ness. What can I do for you?”

  “My wife thinks I need to see a psychobabblist.” Ethan said flatly. This guy was only the billionth mental health professional Ethan had seen over the years. It was like dealing with the DMV to him. Pretend to smile, say what they want to hear, go home, pop open a bottle or light a dooby and pretend it never happened.

  “Do you?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Ethan felt it was likely he’d end up fucking with this guy on purpose. “I thought even shrinks saw other shrinks.”

  Dr. Ness smiled. “We try, but pickings are a pretty slim these days.”

  Ethan nodded, “Do you know what the attrition rate for your job field was?”

  “I’m the only qualified psychotherapist I’ve met since the government fell.” Dr. Ness replied. “So no, I don’t get to talk to other shrinks, just my wife. Do you speak to other sheriffs? Sit around a poker table and shoot the shit?”

  “There don’t seem to be any other sheriffs.” Ethan admitted.

  “I see. So tell me, Ethan, in your own words, what has been the major issue lately?”

  Ethan didn’t even know where to start. Who hadn’t heard of Keith’s death? How did this guy not know? “My best friend is dead. Do you even live on planet Earth?”

  “Keith Brewer. I knew him.”

  “He’s dead.” Ethan repeated, his tone softer now. His eyes started twitching a little as he grew perturbed. “What else is there to say?”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Like I miss everyone I’ve lost… only more. Keith was different. My wife and brother called it a ‘bromance.’ He deserved better… Why would they shoot the medic?” Ethan leaned back and shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. “…you’re not supposed to shoot the medics… It’s… evil…”

  “You’ve lived a blessed life behind these walls, Sheriff.” Dr. Ness said. “You don’t know what it’s like out there for people.”

  “Fuck you! That doesn’t justify murder!” Ethan countered, ready to stand up and put Dr. Ness through a window. “I was there! I was right fucking there!” Ethan looked down at his hands as they trembled, in his mind they were still dripping with Keith’s blood, his uniform stained and ruined. “They were trying to kill me. I know it.”

  “Can you tell me about it? You don’t have to.”

  “No.”

  Dr. Ness considered for a moment. “Would it help to know I’ve seen the same thing? I was a Marine once…”

  Ethan looked up from bloody hands. They were clean again. “You don’t look like a Marine to me, and I’ve known a lot of Marines. I’m married to one.”

  “Your records here show you were a Soldier a while back. You don’t look like one now. Your facial hair is too long… Though I digress, you are kind of fat like an Army Dog.”

  “Omission isn’t lying.” Ethan answered.

  “You’re right. I’m just used to talking with people who don’t know any better.” Dr. Ness folded one leg over the other. “We have the time, Sheriff. Why don’t we start from the beginning? I’m a combat veteran as well, Ethan. I was in Fallujah. I was a radio operator. I heard the screams over the radios, called in medevacs for men who would never make it as far as an aid station. You never forget those sorts of things. So please, I want you to feel comfortable speaking to me.”

  There was another long silence before Ethan could bring himself to speak. “I was ordered to clean her blood off the rocks with bottled water…” The story of Iraq unfolded over the next two hours. Doctor Ness had cleared his schedule for Ethan at Kenly’s request. The town needed him back to being the same Ethan Cally that had walked into town during the chaos and restored order with a gun and a badge.

  When it was all over Doctor Ness handed a prescription for an antidepressant and a powerful sleep aid to Ethan. He would have to be force fed both, but it was a step in the right direction. Someone finally had the right words for what was wrong with him, and he would just have to accept the diagnosis. Depression induced by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, combat fatigue from two years of fighting the undead and Insomnia to boot. If nothing else Ethan would have to try the meds for Mary and Samuel’s sake.

  Mary could hear outside the room, the walls weren’t that thick. It might have been wrong to eavesdrop, but little things in conversations had made her insatiably curious about a time Ethan refused to speak of. After maybe half the story she wished it were all still a mystery. A lot more made sense about her husband, if she had never worn a uniform she might not have really connected with all the things Ethan spoke of. The people you shared a uniform with weren’t supposed to become your enemy, and when you were a cop your fellow cops weren’t supposed to be the criminals.

  After the session Ethan composed himself and didn’t look any different than he did when he went in. He’d explained a great many things, including his guilt over losing Keith. He felt better, but it wouldn’t change the fact that when he got home his best friend’s wife would still be walking around the house with a blank stare, waiting for him to return as she always did. Keith’s second child, Keith JR, had come into this brave new world just before the elections. He was healthy and in no time would be causing trouble with his older sister and Samuel. Lee was becoming more of a father figure for the kids than Ethan was, but then that couldn’t be helped. Lee wasn’t falling apart from the inside out. He was the lucky one, seemingly immune to it all.

  Mary won the bid for Rowe’s position and now technically outranked Ethan. Not that it mattered, the position was more of an assistant civilian mayor than anything. Rowe and Reynolds hadn’t done their jobs according to the description, but then who was going to tell them otherwise? Reynolds was in the hospital still. He’d been shot three times, but was still alive and as ornery as ever. Good thing too, he had five kids. This unfortunately left a leadership void that at least one person with common sense, Mary, was able to fill, even if the other two positions went to complete morons. Reynolds’ position went to Jenny Kopland, one of the biggest proponents of settling outside the wire. She was also rumored to have had ties with just about anyone Kenly had pissed off over the last two years. Paperwork and obstacles were already undermining the Mayor’s authority at every turn and she only promised to get worse. Just before Halloween the Provost Martial’s Officer got a call from FOB Alamo. Ethan was at the desk eating lunch while Wigg, being punished for misbehaving yet again, was hanging rubber bats for decoration. Ethan and got to the phone first and shoed Wigg away to get back to work. “PMO, go ahead.”

  “Ethan, you need to get to the FOB. I have something to show you. Take it easy down the hill though, there might be ice.” Lee hung the phone up. Ethan looked into the main lobby and saw Mary arguing with her counterpart, Jenny Kopland, the third man elected, Douglas Baker, was sitting in the middle practically crying like he always did. She’d never notice him leaving for a while.

  They’d gotten an early winter snow storm, something to do with massively fucked up weather patterns worldwide now. Somehow Ethan managed to get halfway down the steep hill on Highway 185 before the cruiser’s rear tires broke loose and he went broadside the rest of the way down sideways. At the bottom the Police Charger hit a barrier filled with water that had turned to ice. The car skidded straight forward again, leaving Ethan facing two Soldiers standing at a guard shack, bewilderment and amusement on their faces.

  He rolled the window down, “Might you have any Grey Pupon?”

  The guards were cold and tired and probably didn’t think it was nearly as funny as Ethan did, at least until he put the patrol car in a ditch within sight of the checkpoint not ten seconds later. He could hear them laughing from afar. The car just slid right in, no warni
ng or control. Ethan had to walk back to the shack and wait for a truck with chains on its tires to make it to them. Lee was already on it, but refused to speak about what was happening until they were in a private office in the FOB. True, this office was just a hotel room that had been converted for Lee’s administrative uses, but it worked.

  “Did you finally make contact with Texas?” Ethan asked, warming his hands by a cast-iron Franklin stove Lee had recently cooked breakfast on. Sure there was a chow hall, but nobody cooks an omelet like yourself.

  “Not exactly. No actual communication, but we received an upload of satellite telemetry from the communications laptop.” Lee pointed to a printout of what had been on the computer. It was an infrared map of the tri-state area.

  “Are those Zims?” Ethan pointed immediately to a mass of white dots in Colorado and Kansas. Like a herd of bison from centuries past this migration stretched the plains.

  “Hardly.” Lee pointed to a concentration of Zims in the ruins of St. Louis. “That’s a Zim’s heat signature. Basically, it doesn’t have one because it’s just an infected corpse. Those, the white dots, are the living.”

  “Jesus. There’s got to be-“

  “Fifty million at last count.” Lee had covered his bases. “This map doesn’t cover Wyoming, but I would theorize these people are from the Federal Government’s colony in Cheyenne.”

  “So they’re recolonizing?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “What’s their estimated time of arrival?”

  “Weeks on the outside… maybe. This isn’t time-lapse, Ethan. We don’t know if it was taken this morning or if it’s a month old.” Lee sighed, “Either way, they’re going to be on our doorstep in no time… And we still don’t know what happened to Texas. We should have been able to make contact with the forward units building the power lines by now.” Lee shook his head. “We’ve neither seen nor heard from so much as a single refugee about them. Before you ask, we can’t put any birds in the air right now either. The airfield has detected active radar over us and we don’t know who’s sending it. The source also isn’t fixed, so there’s no triangulating it. Probably an orbiting aircraft. I can’t risk a chopper or small plane if the Air Force is still enforcing the no-fly zone.”

  “We have to find out what happened. We need to fly back down there.” Ethan couldn’t believe he was suggesting such a thing.

  “No.” Lee circled a concentrated masse of heat signatures. “This is a military unit. I can tell just by looking at the way their camp is set up. In this photo they are just West of Oklahoma City. In no time they could be here. We aren’t heavily armed enough to handle this if they turn hostile. These large signatures here are tanks and armored vehicles. They’re also pulling artillery behind them, and probably attack-choppers too.”

  “Fort Leonard Wood.” Ethan’s heart sank. Even though he’d lived in Missouri all his life, and had gone to Basic Combat Training at Ft. Leonard Wood, “Home of the MP Corps,” Ethan avoided the place like he avoided all other military facilities. “It’ll be a hotbed of hostile survivors and zombies alike, but there’s enough armor laying around out there to give us a fighting chance. If there’s holdouts we might be able to trade gold or supplies for vehicles, but we should be prepared to fight them for what we need.”

  “That’s going to be a tough sell, Lil Bro.” Lee hadn’t called Ethan ‘Lil Bro’ since middle school when they began to grow apart. There was something different about Lee today, and it wasn’t because he finally had a real threat to deal with. He was seeking Ethan’s approval, being nice for no reason. “But I came to the same conclusion this morning. As did my officers.”

  “Well, I’ll get Allen’s ass in gear. He’s still got another six months on his contract.”

  “Actually… I was hoping you could let Allen stand in as Sheriff for a little while and you accept a temporary commission of Captain until I get back.”

  Ethan didn’t skip a beat. “No.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Deadly. I’m not going to do that, Lee. Appoint someone else. Apparently these people want me to keep beating up drunks and telling off Liberals and shooting Zims in the face. They elected me, despite the fact I never actually ran, to be Sheriff. I’m going with you, and Allen will have to step up as Deputy Sheriff, but he can handle it. I know the area, before and after the Apocalypse. Besides, I want my fucking car back.”

  “You are unbelievable.” Lee smiled and shook his head. “You really won’t put a military uniform back on, will you?”

  “Not now, not ever.”

  “I guess I should respect that more. Alright. Get packed. We need to hurry.”

  Mary barely noticed Ethan leaving. She was being swamped by the responsibility of running an entire town as Jenny Kopland became more of a bothersome bureaucrat and Kenly’s cancer got worse. The dog would notice Ethan was gone at least. There was some sarcasm about gallivanting off on another crusade, but Mary’s supporters were fully behind bolstering defenses, especially after the report on the incident at the airfield with MS13 became public. Kopland’s team of college age Commies found the report in a locker that was accidentally left “unlocked.” They had tried to use it against Kenly, but there really wasn’t any fault to be had. The only thing Ethan wasn’t looking forward to was the trip down Interstate-44. The danger wouldn’t bother him half as much as the time it would take to get there. It was planned to take a week to drive what used to take two hours with a long bathroom break. Road blocks and hostiles were considered likely to cause massive delays, or stop them altogether.

  The convoy of ten up-armored trucks rolled toward the town of Bourbon at the crack of dawn on a frosty morning that saw the town evinced in a purple shade. Salvage teams had reported the town of Bourbon empty, the attack on the biker gang had gotten the point across that Sullivan now owned the territory lock stock and barrel. The Zims in the area were frozen solid and would be for several months. Most of the small town had been destroyed by the weather, campers or meth cooks who blessedly blew themselves up or got too stupid to lock their doors at night. A select few buildings made of stone still seemed untouched, most of them standing since the turn of the last century. Their windows were all broken out, but there was no sign of recent inhabitation. The easiest sign to spot, besides smoke from campfires and footprints in the snow were piles of recent trash. There were none.

  The five ton truck with the snowplow in front made short work of most of the cars in front of the convoy, the driver seemed to take an especial pride in demolishing Chevy Volts, Toyota electric cars and Smart Cars. He was the one who lent Ethan and Mary his ’71 Hemi Cuda for their honeymoon. A fun man to be around, he kept the trip entertaining. The first time they had to stop was just past the town of St. James. People were there, but seemed the survivalist types and ran from the convoy rather than approach it. Every vehicle was marked 1st Cavalry Co. Sullivan U.S.A. and had an American and Missouri flag stenciled on their hoods and sides. However, a flag didn’t mean much in this day and age, not with so many highwaymen with the means and will to impersonate officials. It wasn’t unlike the Pirates of Old, flying a friendly flag until it was too late for their prey to flee.

  The ruins of burned embattlements, structures crafted into makeshift castles and forts could be seen all over the countryside through the leafless trees. As the convoy neared Cuba, (No Castro), thick snow lay ahead and Lee ordered a bivouac for the night. There weren’t many troops on the mission, and those brought along were mechanics and heavy equipment operators, not infantrymen. Some civilians were paid to come along as well, those who had similar skills. The goal was armor, and they’d need those who could get it running again in a hurry.

  They ate MRE’s, ordered not to start any cooking fires, and sat silently within the ruined walls of an old truck stop that now more resembled an even cheaper version of the fort from the movie Mad Max. Lee and Ethan settled into the front of an LMTV, a flat nosed transport truck, and rested as best they
could. Ethan made himself comfortable in the center seat, wrapped in a red and black plaid comforter he’d had since they were children.

  “Ethan, can I ask you something?” Lee broke the silence as a feral dog howled in the distance. The moonlight made it bright enough to read and Ethan availed himself of the opportunity.

  Ethan closed his copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Your gun isn’t next to you is it?”

  “Is yours?” Ethan countered.

  “Very funny… I don’t want to beat around the bush, so I’ll just say it. I’m going to ask Paula to marry me.”

  The statement didn’t stun Ethan as much as it should have. His face turned red and Lee prepared himself to either be OC sprayed, stabbed, or even shot. After a moment Ethan opened the book again and continued reading. “I kinda figured. It’s not like you’ve been hanging around the house for my company, though for a minute I just thought you really liked Bogey.”

  Lee smiled and shook his head. “That’s really not the answer I expected from you.”

  “I’ll shoot you later. Right now I just really want my car back.”

  “You weren’t joking, huh? A near twenty year old GM junk heap, and that’s what you care about? You know there’s no chance in hell it’s even going to run, and that’s largely assuming the Army didn’t have it hauled off. They do that on lemon lots.”

  Ethan had to close the book again. “She’s not twenty years old… And she sure as hell isn’t a lemon.”

  Lee raised an eyebrow, “Ethan… I don’t know how to sugar coat this, because you’d probably eat that too, but it’s a Pontiac, not a Ferrari. I can find you one just like it in someone’s garage that will still work. Hell, you had one blown out from under you not even a year ago. Your car didn’t even work right before the Apocalypse! The electric system was wired by a Drunken German Gynecologist that got lost in a GM factory one night, the paint was had more shopping cart dents and contact scrapes from other people’s doors than its original color, someone keyed it on both sides and carved a swastika over the gas lid because you couldn’t keep your political opinions to yourself, the heads-up display hadn’t worked in over a year, the radio was stolen twice, the steering wheel controls for the radio haven’t worked since high school… Hell, it leaked every fluid but gas and got worse millage than a deuce and a half. I’m not trying to be mean here, well, not too mean, but what the fuck is your fascination with that car? Is it just because Grandpa gave it to you? I get that, but…”