From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  Still, it was a pile of garbage.

  “It looks… like garbage?” she offered, sensing that Marshal was waiting for her opinion. “Very nice, Marshal. Can we go back and eat some breakfast now? I have to use the washroom.”

  The crestfallen expression that flashed across his face provided her with a sudden rush of guilt, but his look disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.

  “You’re just saying that because you haven’t had the chance to sit inside it yet,” Marshal said with a surge of confidence, moving towards the rear of the garbage pile. “Come on. You’ve got to try this thing out.”

  Try it out? Angie, despite her self-inspired week as a person covered in dog-poo, drew away from the apparition in front of her. Was that motor oil dribbling down one side, or some kind of cooking grease? And the smell of it was even worse than dog poo.

  “Ammonia,” Marshal explained, noticing her wrinkled nose expression. “along with some other chemicals I hauled up from the Dollar Den. I got all these ideas from you, Angie, plus a little observation from our trip to the drug store. Don’t worry. It smells totally different on the inside.”

  Reaching down to the floor, Marshal grabbed a handle on the very rear of the monstrosity and lifted it upwards. He then pulled out a long pole from the inside, using it to prop up the back hatch so that the door would remain open.

  Angie gasped in surprise.

  The garbage skid was hollow.

  “I call it Crapmobile,” Marshal told her proudly.

  The inside of Crapmobile was well organized and clean. Several blankets had been sacrificed to give it soft, comfortable-looking walls and ceiling. At the front of the compartment was a small, 28” flat screen computer monitor that appeared to be running a live feed from the external cameras, with six boxes showing multiple angles. Below it, just above a crude-looking steering wheel, there was a computer, keyboard, and mouse. Meanwhile, on the right and left hand side of the front of the cab, tablets had been affixed to the walls, showing what Angie assumed were the camera view to the direct left and right of the vehicle.

  But it was the structure of the interior that was the most engaging. A single, empty 5x5 wooden skid was fixed between two ten-foot long 2x10 boards, roughly a foot above the ground. Metal poles had been fixed onto the undersides of the boards in the front and back, and served as axles for the thick, 10-inch, rubber wheels that supported the frame. The 2x10’s extended three feet ahead of the skid in front, and trailed two feet in back, giving it a vague ‘H’-shape. Crossbeams on the end then stabilized the base, and upon this foundation, the rest of the interior cab had been built. Like a geometrical, wooden cage, it rose upwards, holding up the cloth-covered canopy.

  “It’s human propelled,” Marshal said, stepping inside the beast and climbing over top of the skid, which proved to be surprisingly stable. “I don’t have any motors strong enough to push a skid this heavy. Hollow or not, thanks to all the wood and metal, it weighs about four hundred, maybe even five hundred pounds. Still. Those wheels are rated to hold upwards of three hundred pounds each, so we can carry total haulage of twelve hundred pounds.”

  He took up position in front of the skid and put two hands on a sturdy-looking board that spanned the cab a little above waist-level in front of him.

  “You push here,” he demonstrated, then pointed to a similar span in the back, “and a second person pushes on that one, and away you go. Steering is… uh, still rather primitive. Building a car isn’t exactly in my skill-set, so I kind of had to wing it, but it should still allow us to navigate the streets outside and-”

  “You want to go outside in this thing?” Angie interrupted in alarm. “Us? Down with the zombies? In this?”

  Marshal looked at her with an embarrassed expression.

  “Well… yeah.” His gaze met the floor. “Sort of. I want to go out in this thing. You, on the other hand, will stay safe and sound up in the apartment. When the Swarm is over…”

  Angie stomach did a backflip, and her heart fluttered.

  He wanted to go alone? That was even worse! For a moment, Angie was speechless, torn between competing emotions. On the one hand, the idea of taking Crapmobile outside when she’d already seen the Swarm destroy similar vehicles was enough to make her hair stand on end. On the other, the thought of Marshal leaving, of… of going away and leaving her all by herself…

  “No!” she said.

  “I understand you’re nervous,” Marshal said, holding up his hands in an effort to calm her. “But, don’t you see? The Swarm has already examined moving skids of garbage and dismissed them as unimportant. Why wouldn’t they? There’s garbage and rubble everywhere! But like I said before, what the Swarm decides, the individual zombie remembers. You saw it! The Swarm ignored our last garbage skid! It follows, therefore, that we should be able to use Crapmobile to move about as we please. Or, at least, I will.”

  “No!” Angie repeated, angrier this time.

  “We don’t have a choice,” he insisted. “One day, we’re going to run out of food, or parts, or something else that we need. We’re going to need some way of replenishing-”

  “I won’t stay behind,” Angie snapped.

  Marshal hesitated, surprised by her change of temper.

  “You want to come?”

  “Please don’t make me stay behind, Marshal,” she begged. “I promise to do as I’m told, I really do. Just don’t leave me alone again.”

  Marshal rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know, Angie. This is going to be pretty risky, you know? I’d like to hope we can outsmart the Swarm, but the truth is, there are so many ways that this could blow up in my face.”

  Angie shook her head. “If you died out there, and I could have helped-”

  “How could you help?”

  “I can help lots of ways,” she said, looking annoyed. “And… and I don’t want to be alone anymore. I’m not afraid. I survived out there without Crapmobile. I could do it again. But I don’t want to be alone ever again.”

  She watched his eyes hopefully. Something she had said struck him, and she watched as some hidden part of him mulled it over. Finally, he let out a heavy sigh.

  “We’ll think about it,” he said, not looking happy. “Either way, we’ll wait until after the Swarm clears up. I’ve got two places that I want to go first, and they’re far enough away that I could be gone a whole day. Let’s just wait and see what happens, okay?”

  “I’m not staying,” Angie said stubbornly. “If you try to leave me behind, I’ll put on a garbage dress and follow you.”

  He glared at her, and Angie lost some of her nerve.

  Some. But not all.

  The next day, Crapmobile rumbled down the back alley without any trouble and emerged onto Dornack Street, looking for all the world like a slow-drifting garbage pile.

  Inside, Marshal scanned the exterior camera views, steering by their perspective alone. The brightly lit screens showed the lumbering figure of Frank up ahead, doing his rounds. His back was turned towards Crapmobile, walking the other direction. Marshal had timed the departure this way in order to avoid him. Swarm or no Swarm, Frank was unpredictable enough that Marshal wanted to avoid confrontation.

  As for other zombies, not one so much as glanced at the mobile garbage pile.

  “Success,” Marshal said, pushing the wooden bar and guiding them back up to College Street. He kept his voice down. Muffled by three layers of blankets, two layers of plastic, and of course a thick layer of garbage, Crapmobile was practically soundproof, but better safe than sorry.

  “This was a really smart idea, Marshal,” Angie said, calling up from the rear of the vehicle. Her eyes were locked on the screens as she walked along behind the skid, pushing the second wooden span, lending her own energy to Crapmobile’s propulsion. “The zombies aren’t even looking at us. We can go anywhere.”

  She caught a glimpse of Marshal’s face, its smile and the hint of a blush.

  “Thanks, Angie,” he said. “
But if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have come up with these ideas.”

  “Where are we going first?” Angie asked, excited.

  “Techie Direct,” Marshal answered. “It’s an electronics warehouse store, kind of a Home Depot for electro-geeks. There’s tons of stuff I need from the place, but I’d settle for their stash of tablets, laptops, speakers, and wiring. Honestly, if I haven’t made a half-dozen trips there by the end of the week, then it’s because Crapmobile’s been discovered.”

  “Can we get other stuff while we’re there?” She gasped as an idea occurred to her. “Can I get my own super-computer?”

  “I think we’ll have room on the credit card,” Marshal said. “But, I’d like to focus on getting the things that will help make us safer. That’s our main priority.”

  “Okay,” Angie said, sounding disappointed. “Are we going anywhere else?”

  “Yes. A downtown auto-wrecker yard that used to belong to my step-brother, Luca. We passed the street when we made our run on Rothman’s, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Auto wreckers?” Angie frowned. “A place where smashed up cars get taken and crushed into cubes? Why would we want to go there?”

  “Car batteries,” Marshal answered. “I happen to know that he’s got a whole bunch of them sitting on one of his shelves. We might also see about getting better tires for Crapmobile while we’re there. These ones are shitty.”

  “Where are we going after that?”

  “We should be loaded down by then,” Marshal said. “After that, we’ll head home. Why? Was there somewhere else you wanted to go?”

  Angie considered this. “Book store? I like to read.”

  Marshal nodded. “We’ll try.”

  A little after ten in the morning, the autumn streets were a windswept forgotten zone, whispering with the passage of leaves, twigs, and bits of paper. The recent rains had washed the city, but it would take generations before it would ever feel clean again. Flights of pigeons, packs of squirrels and other animals who now felt courageous enough to wander by day, failed to compensate for the pall of lifelessness that seemed to hang over the empty shops and streets.

  Progress was slow and frustrating. Many times, the wheels would jam up while climbing over bumpy obstructions. Twice during their journey, they came to a jarring halt when a wheel hit a stone or piece of rubble. At such impacts, the entirety of Crapmobile would shudder violently. It wasn’t long before Marshal came to relish the open stretches of uncluttered pavement.

  It took a couple of hours to arrive at Techie Direct. The box store was located three blocks to the north, along a major inner city artery called Bloor street. A huge building, it was loaded with electronic accessories and gadgetry of all kinds. Flat-screens to tablets, desktops to routers, analog to digital, wiring and storage devices, Techie-Direct had it all and more.

  Before the outbreak, it had been as familiar to Marshal as the hardware store was to a contractor, or the lumberyard to a carpenter. He knew the floors like the back of his hand and most of the staff by their first names. Now, as he looked at it on the dashboard flat screen, it was a hollow shell of its former glory. Vacant doorways and gaping windows gave it a haunted appearance. Tattered banners, hanging from the space above the front doors like jungle vines, proclaimed a twenty percent savings on all memory storage devices.

  There were three undead wandering the streets out front of the store. None of them seemed particularly interested in their surroundings, Crapmobile, or the passage of time.

  “Okay,” Marshal whispered. “Here’s where we start to take risks. I don’t think we’ll be able to fit Crapmobile in through the doors, so we’ll park as close as we can. The big problem is that we don’t know if there are any undead inside the store, so we’re going to have to try and draw any that might be inside out and to another location.”

  “Teddy bear?” Angie asked.

  Marshal shook his head. “Not this time. Too dangerous if the zombies can’t figure out how to destroy it. So. I customized this little toy back in my workshop.”

  He reached into his backpack, which had been sitting on the skid, and removed a big wheeled, remote-control car.

  “It’s not very advanced, but it should do the trick,” he said, holding up the sporty, blue car. “We release it into the store from the doorway. It’s got my last remaining bluetooth speaker strapped to the top of it. I’ll drive inside and back again, while you…”

  He passed her a microphone, whose chord stretched all the way back to Crapmobile’s computer.

  “… you call out to the zombies. If there are any inside, they’ll hear you and come running. Then we’ll lead them off down the street, hopefully picking up the others while we go. While you keep them busy, I’ll put on the blanket, slip inside, and find the things I need. I know the place pretty well, so if we’re lucky, I won’t be gone longer than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”

  “You’re leaving me behind?”

  Marshal took her hands carefully and looked her in the eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “You convinced me to let you come along, and you were right. I really do need you here, watching over the zombies, talking to them if it looks like they’re losing interest in the hunt. There won’t be any light inside the building, so I’m going to need to use my flashlight. But if there’s anything that will guarantee that the undead find me-”

  “It’ll be if they spot you using your flashlight in the dark,” Angie finished.

  Marshal gave her hands a light squeeze. “Will you do this for me?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I just…”

  “I know.” He smiled back at her. “Thank you.”

  The back hatch did not have to be opened the whole way in order to release the remote controlled car. A slight crack, a push through the outside layer of trash, and the car was on its way. Since they had backed Crapmobile up against the entrance, entering the store was easy, even with all the debris and broken glass.

  “Here we go,” Marshal said, using one of the rear-facing cameras to steer the car into the darkness. He hoped that the lights on the toy would be enough to track its progress in the near blackness.

  The car took off, speeding in through the entrance of Techie Direct and into the dark. As it traveled, the onboard lights became a twinkling, shrinking beacon against the blackness.

  “Yoo hoo!” Angie’s voice called out to the dark abyss of the depths of Techie Direct. “Zombies? Are you in here? Got some nice, fat humans over here for you to eat!”

  Marshal chuckled, even as he concentrated on controlling the car. He could detect movement somewhere inside, responding to Angie’s summons, but the exact location was still indistinct. At about forty feet, the car slowed to a halt. He waited several seconds, allowing Angie’s voice to reach any remaining undead, and then started backing out again.

  “Tasty, tasty humans!” Angie said. “Getcher fresh, tasty humans!”

  “Good,” Marshal said.

  When the car emerged back into the daylight, no less than three undead exploded after it, following the sound of Angie’s voice.

  “Hold off for a second,” Marshal whispered. A crowd of six undead had now gathered around Crapmobile, in full Hunting mode. “Let me drive a little further away from our actual hiding spot.”

  Crapmobile lurched as a zombie took a poke at it, causing Angie to let out a frightened squeak.

  “All right... now,” Marshal said as the toy car sped off down the sidewalk.

  “Yoo hoo! I’m over here now!” Angie called out. “One, big, fat, delicious human, just waiting for the right zombie to come and eat me!”

  Immediately, the crowd was speeding off down the street in pursuit.

  “Have to watch out for that in the future,” Marshal said, breathing easier.

  Despite the fact that they quickly overtook the toy car, all six zombies seemed unaware of its involvement as the source of their prey. They clambered around it in frantic pursuit, only fai
ling to stomp it flat by sheer luck.

  “Almost there,” Marshal said, guiding the car down the sidewalk.

  When it reached its maximum range, he drove it over the curb and into the gutter. All around it, zombies searched and searched and searched.

  “Okay,” Marshal said. “Just keep an eye on them. If they look like they’re losing interest, start talking, but otherwise, just lie low.”

  Angie tossed him a mock salute.

  Folded up under Marshal’s backpack were the same two blankets they’d used during the trip to Rothman’s, and he pulled out one of them now. In addition to the eyeholes, they had been re-sewn to look more like a classical ghost shroud, with tubes for the arms, and a slight noose around the neck to keep the eyeholes from traveling. In addition, paper, bits of cardboard, plastic plates and cups had been sewn or stapled to the exterior so that the wearer could simply crouch down and pretend to be just another pile of garbage. It was crude but convincing.

  “Here,” Marshal said, handing Angie a bottle of fluid. “Sprinkle a little of this on me.”

  She sniffed at it. “Ugh. More of that ammonia stuff?”

  “You got it. Not smelling like human still seems like the best defense, and this stuff will make your eyes water. Try not to spill any in the cab.”

  Angie sprinkled him, and then went back to tormenting undead. Two more had stumbled along, and so six zombies had become eight. Careful not to use too much provocation, she called them names and reminded them how delicious humans were.

  Over the course of an hour, Marshal made several trips, returning fully laden each time. Thousands of dollars of merchandise now filled the skid, including five powerful laptops, two boxes with a dozen security cameras in each, a motherlode of tablets, Bluetooth speakers, wiring and connectors, solar panels, and two 30” flat screen monitors.

  The biggest score, however, hadn’t even been on his shopping list. Five, state of the art flying drones, each equipped with on-board cameras and long-range network connections, joined the haul. Among the best that money could buy, each drone would have cost a small fortune before the outbreak. They were powerful, with almost a half hour flight time, and as Marshal explained to Angie, there was no end to the uses he could imagine putting them to.