The Barbarous Road_A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  The Ramada’s portico was gone. Caved in and halfway cleared for one, maybe one and a half car widths. Beyond it there were several big Suburbans, a Pontiac Trans Am from the Smokey and the Bandit days, and a older looking big rig with a sleeper cabin.

  As he pulled in, Marcus’s heart rate elevated.

  A guy came out to greet them. He was a thirty-something with a bandana and cholo look about him: checkered flannel (buttoned only at the very top) over the tucked in wife-beater; ironed slacks with a military flip and a pair of Nike’s. Except he was white. Not Mexican.

  Poser.

  The faux-cholo sauntered up to the tinted window, gave it a knuckle tap. Marcus rolled it down and stuck the Reaper2 blade into his throat the second faux-cholo registered the problem. In the background, from the row of motel rooms, loud music was pumping hard into the still afternoon air. As he was sitting there with the blade still stuck in this guy, he realized it was two different motel rooms making all the noise. One was gangster rap, the other heavy metal. Both rooms had the doors or windows open to some degree. Wasting no time, he jerked the blade clean out, letting the man collapse on the concrete.

  Marcus got out of the truck and quickly wrapped the bandana around faux-cholo’s neck to staunch the bleeding. Moving with purpose, he began stripping off the dead man’s clothes, hoping to get them clear of the rush of blood. Once he was done, Marcus dragged the body around a car and stuffed him where, for the next few minutes, he wouldn’t be found.

  He returned to the SUV, then eased it up to the big rig, a 50’s or 60’s style Mack truck with a sleeper and no trailer in sight. There were four gas cans next to the tank and a fresh weld done on the front. A steel cage and a triangular battering ram were fitted to the grill and the full-length bumper. It was like something out of Mad Max. He tugged on the contraption, found it solid. Looking down, he saw they’d welded it to the frame for strength. Good God. He checked the big rig’s door and it opened; the keys were tucked up on the visor.

  “Morons,” he muttered to himself.

  In the sleeper, he changed clothes, getting into the flannel, the jeans and the wife-beater. The shoes were too small, the pants too tight. And if he flexed just right, it would probably tear the arms clean off.

  Still, he needed the moment of distraction if he wanted to get the jump on these knuckleheads. And if he did, Marcus would have loot for days. Hopefully even the weapons cache he’d been dreaming about. When he stepped out of the cabin, some guy was already walking toward him. He was carrying a gun at his side.

  “What the hell?” he asked, seeing Marcus.

  “Just dropping off parts for the rest of the weld,” he said. “Didn’t want them being stolen since the place is pretty much wide open.”

  “We gotta handle on things, man, so why don’t you hustle your big ass outta here.”

  The Reaper2 caught homeboy across the face, creating a wide flap of skin. Marcus spun around and, with the full force of his weight and momentum, drove the blade into the nerve bundle just below the man’s sternum. He immediately twisted it then tore the blade loose, snatched the man’s gun and dragged the dying body over to where the other one was.

  Stacking the two of them meant there was going to be a body count. He hadn’t had a body count in years. Looking down, the man was gasping, dying, bleeding all over the place.

  He was also looking up into Marcus’s eyes, almost like he had a question. Like he wanted to say, why?

  “You brought this on yourself, scumbag.”

  He didn’t know if that was true or not, but the skinhead was part of a group robbing people and property, and he was carrying a gun as more than a loosely veiled threat.

  Marcus clanked his own head with the barrel of the gun a couple of times. Memories were surfacing. Things that happened in the heat of war. Already his mind was flashing through memories, interposing them with what was now happening. He shook his head to clear the memories. It wasn’t working.

  Early on in the second Iraq, right after Afghanistan, his crew hit a terrorist cell they’d managed to infiltrate. Thirty insurgents perished; five of Marcus’s men died along with them. They stacked the insurgents’ bodies in a huge pile. Just threw one body on top of the other, even when they weren’t all the way dead.

  They burned the bodies, standing there listening to the screaming. It went on for too long. Even now, sometimes in his sleep, he heard those screams, smelled the cooked flesh and the smoke, and tasted a bit of the blood on his tongue.

  For whatever reason, that was all he could think about.

  Looking down, faux-cholo number two was now gurgling in his throat. Marcus’s head cleared. He looked down at the body, made the decision. He drove the blade down in the man’s throat then pulled it out and told the man he’d go quicker, that this way he’d die a cleaner death.

  He didn’t wait for the man to pass. He used to when he could, just so he could see the soul off, but with unknown hostiles inside the Inn with untold amounts of firepower, he’d need to be on his toes.

  Moving toward the two story motel itself, he went to the room playing heavy metal music. The door was cracked open, the shades shut. When he entered the room, the sweltering heat hit him like a punch to the lungs. Just beyond the door, on the queen sized bed, some guy was railing his girl. Pants to his knees, Nike’s still on, wife beater soaked in back and pulled up, Marcus drove the knife into the man’s kidney, silenced the woman with a bedsheet in her mouth, then finished the job.

  He was suddenly having second thoughts.

  This was too bloody.

  This was sick.

  When the girl scrambled out from under the dead man, she covered herself, looked at him, and then said, “Thank you,” over the blaring music.

  Okay, unexpected...

  He turned the music down, but didn’t shut it off. He needed the cover of noise.

  “What?” he asked, knife still at his side, not sure what the young woman said or what to do with her.

  “We’re not their girls,” she said, her hands and legs shaking, her eyes already red and flooding with tears. “We’re just…girls.”

  Marcus locked the door and pulled her into the back bathroom where he said, “How many?”

  “Of them or us?” she asked, wiping her eyes, old mascara trailing down her cheeks.

  “Both.”

  “Two of us to every one of them,” she said through a hiccupping jag of tears. “I think there’s maybe twenty of them.”

  “How’d they get you?”

  “They just took me,” she said, sniffling and wiping her nose. “They took me from my father, and then they did…well…apparently they’ve been doing this for a couple of days now. Are you here to save us?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Corrine,” she said, gathering up her bra and panties. “How many are here with you?”

  He looked away while she dressed, doing what he could to preserve what modesty she had left. Besides, his head was an outrageous wreck right now. The flashbacks were persistent, which dragged down his spirits and left him feeling extra hostile and a bit jumpy.

  “It’s just me,” he said, looking up.

  He glanced in the mirror, saw what she saw and blanched. His face was bruised and that wet rolling feeling on his traps was blood from when he was hit with a bottle back in the Ralph’s supermarket. None of that was even accounting for all the blood spatter blown back on his face from when he shot the skinhead in the eye.

  “You’re not going to be enough,” she said, even though he looked hellish and mean.

  “That’s what my dad used to tell me,” he murmured.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Just stay here,” he said, opening the door again. “Stay here until I tell you it’s okay to come out.”

  “I have no one,” she said to Marcus.

  This stopped him. He looked at her one last time, and she looked at him with a lost, desperation in her eyes. This look arrested him.
Held him. Her eyes were pleading, chock full of fear.

  “You said they took you from your father?”

  “They killed him in front of me. These are not good people. They’re evil.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She left us.”

  He didn’t have time for this. “In these times, all the decent people are hiding and it’s the killers and the rapists and the opportunists wandering the streets. That’s why I don’t want you coming out until I say it’s okay.”

  “And if you don’t make it?”

  He never considered the notion that he wouldn’t make it. To Marcus, it was only a matter of how bad of shape would he be in when he finished with them.

  “If I don’t make it, then good luck to you.”

  “My family is gone,” she said again as he walked toward the door. Looking back, he turned up the music, went through the door and headed to the room blaring the gangster rap.

  Chapter Two

  I wake to butterfly kisses on my neck, the soft sensations pulling me from a dream I’d rather not revisit. The agitation in my head won’t stop in my sleep, and it’s making it hard for me to recover, but now this…someone’s lips on my neck.

  A smile creeps on my face. Opening my eyes, I roll over, see this incredibly beautiful woman lying in bed next to me.

  Bailey says, “Morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “I know you’re doing the whole single father thing, and I’m doing, you know…whatever, the whole damsel in distress thing—which has been real, by the way.”

  “I know,” I say, grinning.

  “But still, you saved me back there. A bunch of times.”

  “Are you trying to thank me?” I ask.

  “No, I’m just wanting you to know I liked you and thought you were hot before you went and got all heroic on me.”

  “And you’re telling me this, why?”

  “So that when I make some not-so-subtle advances on you, you know it’s not because I feel like I owe you anything, but because I genuinely like you.”

  For a second there, I almost forgot our circumstances. But then I don’t. Then I look at her, hair tussled, pillow imprint on her face—a face that’s cut and has some bruises, and no make-up, a face that’s naturally nearly as beautiful as it is made up—and I don’t care what’s going on outside this boat.

  “Basically Nick, I think you’re sexy AF.”

  “Thank you,” I say. Then: “I think I am, too.”

  Now she starts laughing, and something tight in my chest loosens. A sort of unwinding of what I now realize is an incredible ball of tension.

  “That’s very modest of you,” she says.

  “Naturally.”

  “But I’m hot, too, and when I get a little something to eat and a little more meat back on these bones, I’m going to be myself again. You’ll see.”

  “I’m barely awake, but you don’t have to sell me on you. I’m already sold. I saw you at the conference, Bailey James, so I know you’re attractive.”

  “How come you didn’t act like it mattered to you then?” she asks in a moment of seriousness.

  “Because back then it didn’t.”

  “You weren’t there to hook up, or hang out, or whatever?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “I actually respect that. In my books, the woman is always there needing saving from her bad decisions, and the guy is always there not needing love, but having a billion dollars and a gigantic—”

  I hold up my hand and say, “It’s still too early in the morning to be talking about other dudes’ wieners, if that’s what you’re about to say.”

  “I was going to say egos, but now that you mention it,” she says with that melodious laugh of hers. “The point is, those men are fiction, fantasy, and I’ve been laying here thinking about you, seeing you as a man without a boisterous ego, a man not needing to punish or control a woman, and I realize the guys I usually chase after are guys that aren’t real. Guys that end up being turds. You don’t seem like that.” She says this, grazing the back of her finger across my cheek, then she takes a lock of my hair and says, “I guess I’m just surprised by you, and a bit smitten, truth be told.”

  “My take on love is very different than yours,” I admit. “I got my heart crushed, Bailey. I mean stomped on. Thoroughly. I have an aversion to vulnerability, I suppose.”

  “None of us want to get hurt,” she replies, her eyes pouring over me. “But if you’re keeping your emotions close to the vest, if what you’re doing is burying yourself so deep in your own life, then trust me when I say you’ll never get a chance to feel the absolute highs of first love.”

  “My first love lives up the street with a douchebag and a Tesla.”

  Undeterred, her hand finds its way to my chest, then up under my shirt. I won’t lie, the warm flat of her hand on my belly, the sensation of it, it’s beyond enticing. Like she’s waking up something I put to sleep a long time ago. I ease her hand away, tell her there’s too much going on, that I’m not ready.

  “Ready for what, Nick? Marriage? More babies?”

  I can’t help laughing, but this is nervous laughter. It’s the kind of laughter that says, I’ve already got too much on my plate, I can’t handle this.

  Or can I?

  “It looks like what you’re hiding from is intimacy, and after what you said about your ex-wife, I see how you wouldn’t want to jump right into anything.”

  “It’s not that—”

  “Sure it is, Nick,” she says, kissing my neck again. “Don’t be a liar to yourself.”

  “I just don’t want to...let myself feel again. I don’t want to have to come down from that high when you go home, or die or whatever else happens to come along in this severely screwed up world. And if it does work out between us, I can’t introduce you to Indigo, not until we’ve been dating a long time, a year maybe or two—”

  “Listening to you rationalize sex is seriously exhausting,” she says, rolling away from me.

  Damn. She’s right. What am I doing?

  “I’m sorry. Your points are valid.”

  She turns over, meets my eye. “These aren’t points, this is a conversation.”

  “How are you so beautiful?” I hear myself ask.

  Smiling, she scoots toward me. Suddenly her hand is on me again, testing these waters, making that move. Gliding slowly up to my chest, her face nuzzling against mine, she nestles into me. I wrap an arm around her. Her lips touch my neck, soft, moist. Tilting my chin down, I’m thinking she’s right, that I’ve definitely been overthinking this.

  When our mouths meet, when I let myself fall into her, into the feelings and emotions of her—of this moment—I find these uncharted waters feeling all too familiar. In some ways, it’s me revisiting Margot, in other ways it’s me letting her go. I pull back. Look at her.

  But she’s not Margot, I tell myself. God, I’m so screwed up.

  “What?” she says.

  “It’s me,” I say. “Not you.”

  “Of course it’s you, dummy,” she says.

  She starts kissing me again and I tell myself she’s Bailey James, not the former Margot Platt. Not a woman armed to the teeth to give me a broken heart. Even though she could be. She leans back, pulls her shirt off and she’s not wearing anything underneath. I see her body again, but this time it’s not the same as pulling her out of a box.

  This time, it’s something more.

  In the dim light of the cabin, she is just about as gorgeous as I’ve ever seen. It’s actually painful looking at her, she’s that hot.

  “Wow.”

  “Your turn, Nick,” she says, her voice low and silky, bristling with need.

  From there, I have to say, she finds a way for me to let go of the past, if only long enough to chase away some of the hesitation I’ve been carrying around like a security blanket these last couple of years. And for that, maybe I felt something I haven’t felt in years. Perhaps a sense of self-wo
rth. The idea that maybe I can let go. Find love again.

  I know it’s cliché to say I found God in the flesh of a woman, but isn’t that what this kind of thing is about? Aren’t we meant to feel the euphoria of what could very well be first love? If we are all made in God’s image, then I would imagine Him wanting more for me than a life of self-deprecation and anxiety. Maybe I need something more than this depression, or isolation, or fear of affection.

  Maybe I deserve…this.

  When we’re done, we lay there, spent, our breath coming fast, our eyes on each other. I start to smile, then laugh and she’s like, “You needed that.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  We lay in bed for the next hour, undressed, unshowered, halfway unaware of the insanity brewing outside. That’s when she gets really serious and says, “I’m afraid, Nick.”

  “I am, too,” I say.

  “Do you think Marcus is alive?”

  “I don’t know. That guy’s a block of steel though, and just pissy enough to either bulldoze an entire city barehanded or get himself killed.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “You think he’s all there?” she asks. Tapping her temple, she says, “Upstairs, I mean.”

  “Are any of us at this point?”

  A sad smile creeps on her face and it reminds me of Margot, how when she knew something was really bad, or out of our control, this same forlorn look would escape her. It is this look that somehow reaches the deeper parts of me.

  I shelve thoughts of Margot.

  Instead, I just listen, and I study the landscape of her face. Her skin is so young and unblemished (except for a smattering of superficial wounds), her eyes so full of life in spite of our dire circumstances. My eyes moving down her face, there are faint horizontal lines in her neck, soft lines that make me want to kiss her again.

  A flash of our past slips into my mind, uninvited: her throat, my throat. Darkness shrouds the moment as I’m haunted by memories of Clinton’s belt, wrapping around my neck, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

  I touch my neck where The Warden got me. He’d drowned me in a sea of darkness and then he threw me in a cage with those animals. The memory of it weakens me.