From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  “This is why we need the fuckin’ engine,” Luca said, gasping for breath.

  “This engine is part of the reason we’re having so much trouble,” Marshal said.

  “You wait,” Luca said, preparing to resume pushing. “You’ll thank me, and I’ll remind you what a whiney bitch you were. Just thinking about it is already cheering me up.”

  It was after nightfall when they finally made it back to the apartment. One of the wheels fell off when they tried pushing Crapmobile over the slight curb that separated Dornack Street from the back alley, forcing them to spend an hour under the cover of darkness, trying to find a way to wedge it back on again. Finally, by drilling a new hole in the wheel with the portable drill they’d used to install the ISU’s, they were able to get enough of a lift off the ground that Crapmobile, wobbling like drunken hippo during an oil spill, was able to crawl the last few meters to the skid lift.

  “Fucking piece of shit,” Luca growled, rumbling like a volcano. This time, Marshal didn’t even have the strength to argue.

  They arrived upstairs to find Angie surprisingly cheerful and happy. She was ecstatic when Marshal showed her the new computer, which he promised to set up in her bedroom the next morning. Luca, meanwhile, was grimly silent as he ferried parts, tools, and supplies into the back storage area.

  Food improved their mood tremendously however, as Marshal pulled out all the stops, cooking them each a steak dinner, with sides of corn and french fries. A bottle of red wine finished off the cure, and they all sat down to eat while watching Die Hard.

  With a rosy feeling of accomplishment, Marshal went off to his bedroom, and fell asleep sitting up at his worktable, halfway through assembling his second ISU.

  When morning came, an industrious-looking Luca, and a sleepy-eyed Angie greeted Marshal at breakfast.

  “We gotta go out again,” Luca said, as soon as he appeared.

  “How?” Marshal asked, pouring himself some coffee. “Crapmobile’s wrecked. You said it was a piece of shit, and there it lies, steaming on the floor.”

  Luca waved this off.

  “I already fixed the wheel,” he said. “A spot weld here, a couple of bolts there, and that’s all it took. It’s still a piece of shit, but like you said, it’s all we got at the moment.”

  “What’s so important?”

  “I gotta get some more parts from the yard,” Luca said through a mouthful of noodles. He waved a hand. “More heavy stuff. If we’re gonna build a Crapmobile that lasts, it’s gonna need a steel frame, wire mesh canopy, and a proper wheel base. I got all the parts I need to build the essentials, but if we want to be able to drive in style-”

  “Style isn’t that important,” Marshal pointed out, ladling himself a bowl of the noodles, “to a man traveling under a mound of garbage.”

  “Not that kind of style,” Luca said, pulling out a big roll of paper. “I’m talking about seating for four people, leg room, not to mention all the maximum weight allowance and storage space we can cram into this puppy. That’s gonna require support beams, shock absorbers, alignment, and a whole bunch of extra parts. There ain’t gonna be any wood in this version.”

  Marshal looked at Luca’s diagram, pointing. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “Hooks,” Luca answered, “outside the frame, but under the canopy. Gives you storage for all the tools we bring with us so they’re not rolling around on the floor. It’s like all that bumpy shit you see on the outside of tanks, only if this was a tank, it would have the garbage-camouflaged cover hanging over top of everything else.

  Marshal pointed again. “And this?”

  “Extra set of wheels,” Luca said. “Like on a transport truck. When the weight hits a certain level – like it did yesterday – this extra set gets pushed down and picks up the extra slack.”

  “Wow,” Marshal said, lifting his eyebrows. “You’ve been putting a lot of thought into this. What about that?”

  “Pneumatic struts,” Luca said, “for the back hatch, so that it’ll stay open without us having to prop it up with a stick every time. One of the things I gotta pick up.”

  “Impressive,” Marshal said, getting excited. “And what’s that?”

  Luca squinted. “Doodle. I think it’s a machine gun. I doodle when I’m thinking. Listen, if we get these parts, assembling it happens pretty quickly. It’s just like puttin’ together a jigsaw puzzle, welding it in place, and then building the business end of Crapmobile over top. It’ll take a day, maybe two. The hardest part is the engine, the wiring, and all that computer shit you’ve been doing.”

  Marshal shook his head, still studying the sketch. “I can handle that. Might take me a few hours to familiarize myself with the Tesla, but unless there’s some problem I’m not seeing, I can have it working in the same time it takes you to put it together. I save a lot of time by not having to make it look pretty. What’s this part here?”

  Luca looked where he was pointing, and grinned. “Sliding trapdoor in the floor. Figured that since we’d be getting a little ground clearance, we could save time picking things up by simply driving over top of them, opening the hatch and grabbing them.”

  Marshal nodded. “I like it. And over here…”

  Angie, who’d been watching patiently the entire time, smiled and discreetly slipped away, leaving the two of them to continue poring over their plans.

  Two hours later, Crapmobile was back on the road.

  Angie was content to stay behind in the apartment. She smiled happily as they packed themselves in, and even waved at the cameras as the skid lift sank them out of sight. Puzzled at her shift in attitude, Marshal and Luca exchanged a look, but neither of them had any special insight to offer.

  This time, they paused to install a pair of cameras in the Dollar Den, which Marshal was able to link to the apartment’s existing power and camera systems, forgoing the need for accessories. They installed the ISU that Marshal had built the night before a little way down the street.

  “Did you find it weird that Angie didn’t argue about being left behind?” Marshal asked when they were about halfway to the yard.

  Luca shrugged. “I dunno, Marshal. I had four sisters but none of them behaved like Angie. They had a problem with you, they’d take your fucking head off. Remember Anna? Marone.”

  “I never had a problem with Anna.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t,” Luca muttered, scowling. “A brainy, big-hearted, goody two-shoes like you never had to take on the full brunt of the Sabbatini sisters. Other than try to set you up with their girlfriends once in a while, they left you alone. Anyway. My point is that I don’t have a good frame of reference for twelve-year old girls like Angie.”

  “But...?” Marshal prodded, sensing there was more.

  “Yeah. But.” Luca sighed. “I’ve seen hundreds of guys trying to pull a fast one, and that girl is up to something sneaky. Does she know about the spare remote?”

  “To the skid lift?” Marshal shook his head. “Never came up. As far as I know, it’s still in the flowerpot that’s glued to the table under the picture of Frank-Elvis. Not the most obvious hiding place. Besides. I said she was brave, not stupid. She wouldn’t try to go outside all by herself.”

  Again, Luca shrugged, as if to repeat his sentiment on the ineffability of twelve-year old girls. “It does seem pretty fucking unlikely,” he agreed charitably.

  Marshal didn’t answer.

  “So,” Luca said, changing the subject. “You got any ideas on what to do if we can rescue any other people? We got room, I guess, but we got our limits. I don’t know if I could handle living with too many other people. You, I can live with. And let’s face it, Angie had me the second she called me Uncle Luca. Don’t know about anybody else though.”

  “I don’t see a way around it,” Marshal said. “Consider it this way: What is the most valuable resource we can lay our hands on?”

  “Power?” Luca said. “No wait! Clean water. Power’s a luxury, right? But we can’t survive
without water. We can use it to grow food, and we-”

  “Nope,” Marshal said. “Our most precious resource is people.”

  Luca rolled his eyes. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  “I’m dead serious. Look. We’ve both seen any number of ‘end-of-the-world’ movies, and the survivors in those films, they always seem to go around, shooting each other, raping each other, as if they didn’t have anything better to do with their time. But how stupid is that? They’ll kill each other over a candy bar, or an insult... for what? So they can go it alone? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “But that ain’t what’s happening,” Luca said, shaking his head. “When civilization falls apart, humans let out their inner animal. Face facts, Marshal. We’re fucking savages. All you gotta do is remember the looting that happens every time there’s a power failure.”

  But Marshal waved this off.

  “That only happens because we take civilization for granted. Every one of those looters knows the power is going to come back on, and then it’s back to business as usual. But to actually lose civilization-”

  “That doesn’t change nothing,” Luca insisted. “What they’re saying in those movies is that all that ‘civilized behavior’, it’s just a game of pretend we play when things are hunky-dory. Underneath it all, we’re fucking animals, and that’s the truth we gotta deal with whenever everything goes to shit. It’s in our nature. Put the two last men on the planet in a fucking box, give them that candy bar, and ten minutes later, you’ll have one guy, a wrapper, and a bloodstain. That’s what we are.”

  “And I say that’s bullshit,” Marshal said. “No! Just listen to me for a second! The problem is that humanity has spent too much time sitting at the top of the food chain for us to remember how we got there. For over two thousand years, the only other creature that humans had to compete with - in a Darwinian sense – was each other. We’ve forgotten that we built civilization, not as an afterthought, but because it was better than the alternative. Civilization made us strong.”

  “Tell that to the Romans,” Luca said. “Fuckin’ light of western civilization, but it got torn apart by barbarians like a flock of sheep getting torn apart by wolves.”

  “Nonsense,” Marshal said. “Rome was the undisputed power of the western world for almost half a millennia, during which time they spent a hell of a lot more time shit-kicking the barbarians than the reverse. Civilization gave them strength of numbers, better technology, a sense of cultural identity, and a protected environment to try out new ideas. It was only after about five hundred years, when the Romans started taking their civilization for granted and turning decadent, that the barbarians were able to threaten them. Fourteen hundred if you consider how long Rome existed as a state.”

  “So what? Are you a political scientist now?”

  “Just making a point. Civilization wasn’t an accident; it’s a preference. We don’t want to be animals, and the fact is that being a barbarian sucks. We invented civilization because the idea of living in a world with raiders and rapists is objectionable to most people. As such, the Dusters of the world are almost always the first bodies under the foundations of the next Great Society, and after that, they’re vermin. Monsters and criminals, inhabiting our jails. And even on those rare occasions that they do wind up in charge, it’s only a matter of time before they’re murdered by someone with greater vision.”

  “Someone like you?”

  There was a slight shift in Crapmobile’s forward momentum, and Luca realized that he was the only one pushing. Marshal had stopped moving.

  “Shit, Marshal,” he said, remembering how much Marshal had regretted his role in the deaths of Ted and Duster. “Look… I’m sorry. I should have my fucking head examined. You know I don’t-”

  “Killing Duster,” Marshal said, “wasn’t about building the Great Society. That was more like… two animals fighting each other in the dark, and it’s what you get when people lose hope. It’s dark, and it’s primal, and it’s ugly, and that’s exactly my point. Most people don’t want to live in a world like that.”

  He turned to look back at his best friend.

  “So yes,” he said. “It would be someone like me who puts Duster down. And if not me, then it would be someone like you. Would you have been willing to live under Duster? Or become him?”

  “Fuck no. I told you, I probably would have killed him too.”

  “Right. And if not you, then it would be someone else. We all have it in us. Maybe even Angie, after she grew up. She’s brave enough, that’s for sure. The truth is that we expect more from our world than the Dusters are capable of giving us, and we’re ready to kill to make it right. You said it yourself: we’re killers. It isn’t special. It isn’t hard. The ugly, ugly truth, the part we hate, is that murder is so easy.”

  Luca fell silent for a few moments, and then threw up his hands.

  “Fine,” he said. “Whatever. You’ve always been a better thinker than me, Marshal, which is why you’re in charge. I think I admitted that much already when I was drunk. What’s that got to do with me having to share my shower with a complete stranger?”

  “Nothing,” Marshal said, “except…suppose we found a medical doctor, cowering in a convenience store, sometime in the days ahead. Would you kill him for that last candy bar?”

  “That’s a stupid question. Of course not.”

  “Exactly. Finding a doctor would be about the best thing that could ever happen to us. Can you set a broken arm? Can you diagnose an illness? Or poison? Or recognize the proper antibiotic to give if someone is about to die from pneumonia? Do you have any idea what it takes to train a doctor? Maybe, if we find one, he or she will be able to train their successor, but otherwise, the ‘Doctor-Making-Factory’ is closed forever, and tuberculosis is as likely to wipe out the human race as any zombie plague. Or influenza. Or syphilis.

  “For all we know, the last honest-to-god doctor in the whole world died weeks ago, taking all his years of training and knowledge into the grave with him. Finding one would be worth more than an entire warehouse full of non-perishable food and water. And if we were so lucky as to find one, would you allow him or her to wander off? Or kill himself out of depression? Or are you going to do whatever it takes to make him a part of our tribe? Wait. Don’t answer right away. Wait for a time when you’re puking up every meal we give you, and nobody has a fucking clue what to do. That’s what I mean when I say that people are our most precious resource.”

  “Yeah, okay. But a doctor-”

  “What about an engineer? I’m an electrical engineer, and just look at how useful I’m proving to be. I can build and maintain solar arrays, install an electric motor, wire new hideouts for power and electricity, and about a hundred other valuable projects. But what do I know about plumbing? Or nutrition? Or animal husbandry? Actually, you and I are pretty lucky. We’ve got backgrounds in construction, auto mechanics, cooking, and weapons, but what happens when the food runs out? Catch any chickens lately? Grown any crops? If only we had an agricultural engineer, or at the very least, a farmer. And if we do learn how to farm, or build, or manipulate the undead, then there’s going to be a whole lot of grunt work to do. Think Angie will be the one to help? Even the most unskilled laborer is valuable to us. How about butchers? Or chemists? If we’re going to get insulin, so that Angie doesn’t die in a couple of years-”

  “All right! I get your fucking point already.” Luca glowered.

  “That’s the bottom line, then,” Marshal said. “The more people we get, the stronger our tribe becomes, the better our chances for survival. If that means we have to share our home for a few days, then that’s what we’ll have to do. I can’t think of a better way to build a new friendship between two complete strangers than a hot shower, a soft bed, and a well-cooked meal.”

  Luca hesitated, remembering his own shower after two weeks of hiding. “So we offer them a place to stay,” he said, “but for how long? And how many can we take?” />
  Marshal turned back to face the front of Crapmobile.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Marshal said. “This is all still a work in progress. Ideally, as we get better at mastering the wasteland, we start taking advantage of all the hideouts we’ve been finding. The trapdoor basement at the Pharmacy. Your hidden room. Or someplace spacious that we can easily hide from the undead. Then, we find a way to get those places electricity and water, make them livable, and turn them into luxury homes. It shouldn’t be too hard, now that the whole world is our shopping mall.”

  Luca seemed to consider this as he watched the monitors. Then, he did a double-take. He blinked, squinted, and let out a heavy sigh.

  “I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” he said. “But first, I think we gotta deal with something a little closer to home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Luca pointed at one of the screens.

  “See that tiny pile of garbage over there? The one next to the smashed-up mailbox?”

  Marshal squinted. “Yeah? What about it?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just that, about thirty seconds ago, it got up and walked over from the street planter a little ways down the street.”

  “What? Oh. For the love of …”

  “We’d better deal with it,” Luca said, getting ready to push again. “Sooner rather than later, I think.”

  “You bet your ass we will,” Marshal said, steering towards their target.

  Crapmobile pulled up close to the small, inert, pile of garbage. After a quick inspection to see if any undead were watching, the back hatch lifted up a crack, and a pair of hands reached out and yanked the garbage pile inside.

  “Hand it over,” Marshal said, holding out one hand.

  With a sheepish expression, Angie passed over the spare remote to the skid lift.

  “How did you find it?” Luca asked, genuinely curious and more than a little impressed. “Did you just decide that there had to be one? That’s some pretty good detective work.”