From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  Wow! That was awesome!

  It was like in those movies where some kind of African tribesmen seemed able to vanish in plain sight. “There could be hundreds of them out there,” the safari expert would say, glaring suspiciously at the empty plain, “right in front of our eyes, and we wouldn’t even know it.” And then they would appear, as if out of thin air.

  Randy had studied the pile of garbage, puzzled. Where had she learned to do that? Was there a ‘Lost tribe of Toronto’ who had mastered the art of disappearing in the urban waste? Or was she, like, a specialist of some kind? Either way, it was weird, but cool.

  Slowly, a slender arm extended from the garbage, and lifted up a dark, plastic flap near the top of the pile, and Randy saw the girl’s shadowy, glittering eyes gazing directly up at him. He saw that she was old. Maybe eleven or twelve? And she was pretty for a girl who was covered in garbage, with a beautiful face and… and well, that was all that Randy could see, but he could tell that the rest of her would be pretty in that way that older girls could be, and… and if Randy hadn’t already known that girls in general were annoying creatures, he might have thought her very beautiful.

  The girl who looked like a trash pile had hesitated for a few more seconds, then stood up and soundlessly headed back the way she came. Again, Randy felt the temptation to call after her, and again, Ms. Wyatt’s rules took hold of his tongue.

  He didn’t blame Ms. Wyatt for not believing him. If he hadn’t seen it himself, then he wouldn’t have believed him either. Later, after a scant meal of stale cookies and crackers, he began to wonder if he hadn’t imagined it. With his stomach aching from hunger, he’d slipped into an uncomfortable slumber with visions of pretty girls crawling through an endless junkyard as inspiration for dreams.

  The next morning, Ms. Wyatt had been too tired to go out looking for food. Instead, she gave them their assignments and, with a grimace, went back to sleep. Randy asked her if she was okay, because she looked so unhappy. Sarah, who was once again in charge, ordered him to get to work, and there would have been an argument, but Ms. Wyatt assured him that she was okay.

  Armed with his laser pointer and a cookie that Ms. Wyatt had given him, Randy assumed his post. There hadn’t been a zombie sighting in six days, at least, not in the gymnasium. Ms. Wyatt said they no longer wandered the school halls. Randy wondered if that was true, or if she was just trying to make them all less scared.

  The gymnasium was the same as it had been yesterday. The once shiny basketball court was filthy with dirt and water stains. The smashed out, upper windows had let in some of the recent rain, lending a scent of mildew to the room. Banners drooped from the walls, and a gaping hole in one wall had left a pile of rubble strewn across the floor. A part of the stage had been crushed to splinters from when Mr. Fawcett, the music teacher, had been pursued by one of the undead. That had been before Ms. Wyatt had built the shelter, and they’d been hiding out in ducts above the equipment room.

  Unlike most schools, the John Simcoe school gymnasium was situated in the middle of the structure, with the three story buildings rising up on three sides, and a connecting one-story, hallway on the fourth. It had been a little after three in the afternoon when the wave of undead swept through a school still filled with students. With so much prey, the zombies had attacked with a savagery that left most of the school smashed to ruin, all save the comparatively empty gymnasium.

  “It’s almost all destroyed,” Ms. Wyatt had told them one day after returning from a hunt for food. She’d spoken in a calm but distant voice, gazing at the walls of their shelter with empty eyes. “Most of the hallways are still whole, but they’re like tunnels. Everything else has collapsed, except the cafeteria and kitchens.”

  “Why not them, Ms. Wyatt?” Denise asked, poised to write in her journal.

  “I don’t know,” she’d answered. “Both the cafeteria and the gymnasium were built out of cinderblocks and steel twenty years ago. The rest of the school was built in the nineteen forties. Whatever it was, we’re buried on three sides with only the roof of the gymnasium exposed, and we’re half-buried on the forth side.”

  Nothing happened all morning, and Randy tried to make the time pass by imagining himself as a superhero, capable of destroying a zombie with one punch. The cookie, he divided up into quarters, in an effort to make it last longer by eating only one quarter per hour. Unfortunately, his stomach had other ideas, groaning at him until he finally gave in and ate it all at once. He didn’t feel any less hungry, but at least he’d stopped arguing with himself.

  It was late in the afternoon when it started. He could tell what time it was because the small crack in the ceiling was letting the sunlight hit his little nest.

  Outside, in the distance, the groaning of excited zombies suddenly exploded with a sound and fury that shook the entire gymnasium. Dozens of zombies joined in, howling with eagerness, and in that instant, Randy was terrified. He’d been playing with the laser pointer again, which he often did when he got bored. For a moment, he felt the dread that it was this behavior that had started it all.

  “Randy,” came the whisper from his right. He turned and saw Ms. Wyatt gesturing to him. “Get in here! Now!”

  Numbly, he hurried to comply.

  Sarah’s cheeks were wet with tears, and Denise trembled visibly, her head tucked in between her knees. Randy, for his part, buried his face in Ms. Wyatt’s side, certain that they were all going to die.

  To their relief and surprise, however, the howls started to fade, until they had disappeared altogether. A heavy silence returned to the gymnasium, and Ms. Wyatt’s grave expression took on a look of alarmed curiosity. A strange sound, a kind of faint buzzing, permeated the dampening curtain of the shelter’s walls. It was like nothing they’d heard before in the long silences that had dominated since the zombies had taken over the world.

  With care, Ms. Wyatt reached out and lifted a flap of cloth that covered their main viewing port. On two occasions in the past, the window had saved their lives. Twice before, it had allowed them to spot an interloping zombie below without giving themselves away. Today, in the faint daylight cast by the zombie-made holes in the ceiling, it revealed a sight to amaze and inspire wonder.

  Hovering in the center of the auditorium and slowly panning the scenery, they saw a toy drone. Randy immediately recognized it as a XJ9000 Omnicrone hover-drone. He’d begged his parents to buy it for him as a Christmas present, but the thousand dollar price tag had scared them off. Nevertheless, he knew it was reputed to have an amazing battery life, an on-board camera, and excellent control.

  He gawped at it, stunned, opening his mouth to comment, when Ms. Wyatt’s firm grip on his arm reminded him of Rule #1. Randy’s mouth snapped shut, but he noticed that even Ms. Wyatt was having trouble digesting the sight.

  Her face grew hard, however, when she heard the approach of shuffling footsteps.

  And… voices?

  “… place is fuckin’ empty,” the first voice was saying. Though still faint, the speaker had a deep, angry baritone quality, and Randy was instantly afraid of it. “We got maybe... I dunno. An hour? Jesus. Look at this place!”

  “We should bank on a half an hour,” came a second, more pleasant-sounding voice. “I’ll tell Kumar to fly the drone back out and patrol the surrounding area. That should give us plenty of warning if things start heading south. Hmm.”

  “Yeah. Holy crap, right?” The first voice was getting louder. “Place is fuckin’ amazing! Wouldn’t take much to make it safe, either. We could instigate a little rubble-fall to close off the hallways and maybe camouflage the roof to look like… dirt, I guess. And this whole fucking space disappears. And over there, that’s a natural born launch gate. With the rubble from the surrounding buildings spilling onto that hallway, it’s like a dead-end ravine, only the ravine ends in that double-door over there. We could rig up a camouflage cover like a garage door, open up those double doors, and drive Crapmobile right up inside this motherfucker! We coul
d build all our Crapmobiles in here, and the fuckin’ zombies wouldn’t know shit!”

  There was a pause while the other seemed to consider.

  “It would take a lot of work,” the second voice said at last. “We’d have to install the solar panels it would take to power this place, and… and we’d need to really test it to be sure. Unlike our other hiding spots, the undead have clearly been here. They might remember it exists. Still. If it passes muster, then yeah, this place could be a godsend. And we could construct a more internal hiding spot up in the rafters, disguised to look like another part of the roof, and - Oh! There they are.”

  “What?” the first voice asked, as if irritated by the distraction.

  “The people we were looking for.”

  Randy’s blood froze. The scary first voice knew they were here! His grip on Ms. Wyatt’s arm tightened, and his eyes sought out Ms. Wyatt’s face. She looked worried, hopeful, and calculating, all at once.

  “Angie said that she spotted one up in the rafters,” the first voice growled. “Only, if they’re up there, then why the fuck aren’t they talking?”

  “You’ve probably terrified them into silence,” the second voice said. “Or just him. Angie wasn’t sure if there was more than one.”

  “Terrified them into…? Jesus Christ. Can I fuckin’ help it if I’m big?” the first voice griped. “C’mon! Just do your thing. We don’t got all the time in the world.”

  The second voice sighed loudly.

  “Hello?” it called out. “If you can hear me, please… don’t be afraid. My name is Marshal, and the foul-mouthed rhinoceros next to me-”

  “Hey! Fuck you!”

  “… is called Luca. We don’t have time for me to explain everything, so you’ll just have to believe me. We’ve managed to lure all the local zombies away from this location, but it won’t last long. We can get you out of here and take you to a much safer location. We have food, electricity, and clean running water. Most importantly, we have safe refuge from the zombies. One of our people, a young girl called Angie, discovered that you were here and sent us to come and offer you help. We have the ability to transport you through the streets safely. I give you my word that you won’t be harmed, and that you won’t be prisoners, or at least, not any more or less than any of us are.”

  Randy couldn’t believe his ears. Lure the zombies away? From his sharp angle, he could see the two speakers now, though only just barely as Ms. Wyatt crowded the viewing aperture.

  The one called Luca, the one with the scary voice, looked just as scary as he sounded. He was huge! Towering over his companion, he looked fat, broad-shouldered, and had a neck that seemed to kind of ‘double-bulge’ at the back. And he looked dangerous, like he could eat zombies for breakfast, though Randy had seen enough zombies in action to know better. He wore a dark brown coat that looked like leather over top of a black, collared shirt, black slacks, and shiny, brown shoes.

  The second man, Marshal, was a lot less frightening. Slender and a little shorter than the first man, his head was a loose mop of light brown hair and a pleasant, clean-shaven, friendly face. Dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans under a calf-length, unbuttoned gray trench coat, he held a brightly-lit tablet up in front of him as he crossed the floor. Hard-soled leather boots crunched the rubble beneath him as he walked, his attention divided between whatever the tablet was telling him and the hiding spot where Ms. Wyatt and the children huddled. Friendly though he looked, Randy couldn’t help but notice the prominently displayed handgun, holstered in a leather belt that crossed the man’s chest.

  A gun. Randy eyed it with a chill of excitement and fear that ran up and down his spine.

  “I have a gun, too,” Ms. Wyatt called back, though Randy knew she didn’t, “and it’s trained on your heart right now. Don’t test me, or I’ll kill you where you stand. In the meantime, you can give me one good reason why I should trust you.”

  Ms. Wyatt took the laser pointer from Randy and aimed it square at Marshal’s chest. In response, Marshal glanced over at the big scary one, who visibly rolled his eyes and shrugged.

  “All right,” Marshal answered. He raised his hands above his head. After a few seconds and a glare from Marshal, Luca raised his hands as well.

  “We don’t have time for this shit,” Luca growled.

  “Just let me handle this,” Marshal said, keeping his hands up and attention focused on the camouflaged hideout in the rafters above him. “You just work on trying to look a little less ugly.”

  He called up to hideout.

  “The answer to your question is that you have no reason to trust us, but what choice have you got? Whether we’ve got good or bad intentions, at least we’re not zombies, right? And whatever else you might think, your days here are numbered. Am I wrong, Ms…?”

  He left it hanging, waiting for a response.

  “It’s Ms. ‘Blows-your-head-off’, if you don’t get to the point!” Ms Wyatt shouted down at him. Randy, Sarah, and Denise stared at her in surprise.

  The big scary man chuckled.

  “My point, Ms. Blows-Your-Head-Off,” Marshal said, “is that we’re stronger together than alone. Now, if you really want us too, we could leave you alone in here. I’m not saying we would, but let’s just play it out. You stay here and what? Starve to death? Wait for a better deal? And if by some miracle, one came along, how would you know you could trust them any more than us?”

  He paused, allowing this to sink in.

  “Now,” he continued, “while you dwell on that, consider our offer. The deal is this: You can come with us. All of you. We can offer cooked food, hot showers, friendship, and safe beds. We’ve found ways to survive by exploiting resources and staying hidden. We’ll teach you what we’ve learned. In exchange, while you’re with us, you obey our rules, and you pitch in and help. This is non-negotiable. I am in charge. Luca is my second-in-command and, when necessary, my chief enforcer.

  “Now, before you start getting nervous, you should know that we’re building a community, not a slave state. Other than the obligation to help out, no one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. There is no government or law enforcement anymore, so when I say that Luca and I are ‘in charge’, I’m saying that we’re taking it on ourselves to maintain law and order. We’ve saved seventeen people already and are hoping to grow. While you’re with us, your problems are our problems, your needs are our needs, and if anyone tries to abuse you, you let one of us know.”

  “You let me know,” Luca added, cracking his knuckles, “and I make sure they don’t go abusing nobody anymore, you know what I mean?”

  “Now,” Marshal said, his hands still in the air as he shrugged, “if you feel like you can’t live by my rules, then there’s nothing I can say. Either way, you’ll have to make a decision.”

  It was at this moment that Randy noticed something that had been tugging at him the whole time, but he’d been unable to pinpoint: these two men were clean! Clean clothes, clean-shaven, they both looked healthy and well fed. Even the big one’s shoes looked like they’d been polished.

  He looked up at Ms. Wyatt with mounting excitement, and saw that Denise and Sarah were hopeful too. Ms. Wyatt looked stricken, but Randy could see that she was bending.

  “All right,” she said. “This all sounds good. But before we come down, I want to know more about these rules of yours.”

  Marshall smiled.

  “They’re pretty straightforward,” he answered, lowering his hands, “and mostly have to do with safety. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, we don’t have that much time. Come down now, and I’ll tell you as we go.”

  Ms. Wyatt bit her lip, and pushed a dirty lock of brown hair out of her eyes. Randy looked up at her, holding his breath.

  “Come on children,” she said at last, exhaling a deep breath. “Stay behind me and be prepared to run if I tell you.”

  “Can we trust them, Ms. Wyatt?” Sarah asked in a frightened whisper.

  Ms.
Wyatt looked down at the two men below, who appeared to be arguing. Suddenly, the big one, Luca, waved Marshal off and turned to shout up at them with a hint of irritation.

  “And you can turn off yer damn laser-pointer,” Luca called out. “We know it ain’t no gun. Last time I checked, you didn’t find too many laser-sited, assault rifles in a public school. It was a nice touch, but do I look like an idiot?”

  Marshal seemed to sag, covering his eyes with one hand and squeezing the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.

  “You know,” Ms. Wyatt said, looking thoughtful. “I actually think we can. Come on, now, and stay quiet until we get wherever we’re going.”

  Chapter Thirteen: Day 29: Skyscraper Haven

  Crapmobile rumbled down the street in relative quiet.

  “I want to thank you guys again,” Marshal said. “I would have given you both as much time as you needed to convalesce, instead of only one day, but there’s a lot to do and we’re so short on healthy bodies-”

  “I feel fine,” Torstein Mueller interrupted in a neutral voice.

  The awkward silence resumed.

  The tall, wiry construction worker sat in the front passenger-side seat beside him, gazing at the screens with studied disinterest, his face a mask. He had shoulder-length, black curly hair tied back in a pony-tail, thick, German features, heavy eyelids and smooth, well-tanned skin. At first glance, he looked thin and frail, but was in fact a powerful physical presence, with long, rangy limbs, twisted cords of sinewy muscle, and calloused, shovel-sized hands.

  To Marshal’s surprise, it was becoming more and more apparent that Torstein regarded him with a thinly-veiled hostility. And he couldn’t understand why.

  By contrast, Cesar Hernandez sat in the back seat, just in front of Crapmobile’s cargo area, leaning forward with an eager expression. His round face had a day or two of growth on it, giving him a shaggy, wolf-like demeanor. He wore a button-studded, black denim jacket, black jeans, and black, leather cowboy boots. Several times, he’d opened his mouth like he wanted to talk. Instead, his dark eyes flickered back and forth between the two men in with uncertainty.