From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  “What he means to say,” Marshal said, tossing a quick glare in Luca’s direction, “is what were you thinking?”

  Luca glanced over at Marshal, and suddenly remembered his role.

  “Uh… Yeah!” he snarled. “What were you thinking? We got all of civilization - sorry, I got that word on the brain, now - the whole fuckin’ world’s a death trap, and you’re runnin’ around in a suit of garbage? You think this is a fucking game, little girl?”

  “Seriously, Luca,” Marshal said. “Let me handle this.”

  “Don’t you give me those fucking big eyes,” Luca growled, pointing at her with one big finger. “That shit doesn’t work on me! I fucking invented that! You with the… and the bottom lip… Now don’t you fucking cry! Do not! Cry! This is real fuckin’ serious, little girl! I said don’t look at me like that!”

  “I’m sorry,” Angie sniffed. “I… I just didn’t want to be alone.”

  Luca hesitated, looking desperate.

  “Aw, geez,” he said, wilting a little. “Did’ja hear that, Marshal? She was alone, for Christ sake! What do we gotta be dictators for anyway? She’s just a kid!”

  “Like a cheap suit,” Marshal said, shaking his head.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s how quickly you folded just now,” Marshal said. “Some tears. A quivering bottom lip. Honestly, Luca. See her little finger? How’s it feel to have your spine wrapped around it?”

  “So fucking sue me!” Luca said, his face turning red with embarrassment. “I’ve got a lifetime of identifying with rule-breakers!”

  His face grim, Marshal held Angie’s gaze.

  “Angie,” he said, “do you have any idea how I would feel…?” He waved his hands at Luca, who refused to be baited. “…How both Luca and I would feel, if you were to-”

  “I do know,” she said defiantly. “I do know, Marshal! Because I’ve lost my Mom and my Dad and my Grandma and everything I ever had! And now, you want me to sit around an empty apartment every day, while you and Uncle Luca go out and risk your lives!”

  Her tears flowed freely.

  “What if you never come back?” she demanded, her eyes blazing. “What if you leave me all by myself, and... and...”

  She turned away, crouched down in a clatter of dangling plastic and cardboard that made up her costume. Looking like nothing more than a small pile of trash, she began to sob.

  “She’s kicking your ass, Marshal,” Luca said.

  “You be quiet!” Marshal snapped.

  “I’m just saying,” Luca said. “Maybe it’s time to consider Plan B.”

  For a moment, Marshal didn’t answer.

  Then, he sighed out loud.

  “Fine,” he said, “but Heaven forgive me if I’m wrong.”

  He reached out to touch Angie’s elbow.

  “Okay,” he said, looking her in the eyes as she turned her head up to face him. “I suppose it’s possible that... maybe, we both have something to apologize for. I may as well start. I’m sorry. I just don’t want to lose you. Without you, Angie, I’d still be up in my apartment slowly going insane. Just the thought of you risking your life out on the streets make my spine freeze.”

  “But I’m good, Marshal,” she answered. “I deserve to be out here helping. I’m really good at sneaking, Marshal. Better than either of you.”

  “I… I know,” Marshal answered. “I’ll try to take that into account from now on. Maybe we could work out some kind of compromise that will make us both happy.”

  He paused, recounting some of her words.

  “But before we do, Angie. I just want to say that I know what its like, losing your Mom and Dad. When I lost my parents... I know it’s not the same, but it helped me to know that I was part of a new family. I’d like you to think of yourself as a part of my family. I’ve always wanted a little sister. It can help. Take Luca, for example. I know he looks like a foul-mouthed, stupid gorilla, but the truth is that he’s always been a pretty good brother to me.”

  “Yeah, it’s true!” Luca said, nodding. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute-”

  “If we’re going to spend our time worrying about each other,” Marshal continued, “then we might as well make it official and call ourselves a family. What do you think?”

  “That would make you my little sister too, by the way,” Luca added, glaring at Marshal. “Just thought you should know, since technically, I lost more family than the both of you put together.”

  “I’d like that,” Angie said, smiling.

  “As for cooping you up in the apartment,” Marshal said, “I promise you that’s over. You might be surprised to know that Uncle Luca already made some strong arguments for taking you with us anyway. But there will be rules, understand? And you will obey those rules, or so help me, I’ll lock you up like Rapunzel and throw away the damn key. Can you handle that?”

  “Yes,” Angie said, barely able to contain her happiness.

  “But just for the record,” Marshal said sternly, holding up an angry finger, “I’m still very, very mad.”

  Angie quickly hid her delight under a mask of looking very, very sorry.

  “Jesus,” Luca said, shaking his head in amazement. “She could break the balls of any cop on the force with that face! C’mere, kiddo. Now that we all agree that it’s Marshal’s fault, Uncle Luca wants to give you a hug to show you how proud of you he is.”

  Angie practically flew into his arms.

  “Jesus, Luca,” Marshal sighed. “She broke the rules. Do you even understand the meaning of the word discipline?”

  “Sure,” the mobster said, holding the little girl to his enormous chest like a grizzly bear clutching a sparrow. “It’s like rabies. To be fucking avoided at all costs. And when we start rescuing people, if they ask, I’ll tell them the same.”

  “Oh!” Suddenly, Angie pulled away, looking back and forth between Marshal and Luca with wide eyes.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” Luca asked. “Did I squeeze too hard?”

  “No,” Angie said, straightening up as if trying to decide how to word what she wanted to say next. “It’s just that… I followed you yesterday, too. I watched when you went to the Techie Direct, and then went to Uncle Luca’s car yard. I got bored, so I wandered away to explore for a bit.”

  “You went exploring,” Marshal repeated, sagging in his chair.

  “You got gigantic balls, kid,” Luca said. “Big enough to drag the ground. It’s fucking amazing. I wouldn’t have the stones to sneak around in a world of man-eatin’, super-zombies. Then again, I don’t disappear so good as you.”

  “I’m real sorry,” Angie said, flashing Marshal a quick dose of her ‘penitent face’. “I wanted to tell you yesterday, but I couldn’t because I knew I’d get in trouble. But since you know now, I have to tell you….”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I found a house,” she said. “Down on Peterson Street. And there are still people living in it.”

  Chapter Ten: Day 23: Hydroponics Hostelry

  “So we’re really gonna do this now?” Luca asked as he pushed the back end crossbeam that helped propel Crapmobile forward. “Shouldn’t we be focusing our energy on finishing the construction of Crapmobile, the next generation?”

  “That’ll take at least two more days to finish, Luca,” Marshal answered, as he steered them down the street. “A couple of days could be the difference between life and death. Remember the state you were in when we found you?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Luca grumbled. “Well, thanks for lettin’ us stop in at my house for clothes on the way. I feel like my old self, again. Whatever happens, at least this trip wasn’t a total loss.”

  He flexed his muscles under the swanky, lined suit, and flashed a fistful of gold rings.

  “No problem,” Marshal said. “Better than having you wandering the apartment in an undersized bathrobe. Look, I realize that we may not be able to reach everybody in time. But these people, whoever they ar
e, they’re so close that it makes no sense to wait. We could be there and back in a couple of hours.”

  He turned his head to glance at Angie, resplendent in her trash dress and pleased to be included this time.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us, Angie?”

  The girl pinched up her face.

  “Their house is really stinky,” she said. “It’s not stinky, like, with poo smells, or gasoline, or ammonia. More like… skunks. At first, the house looked empty, but then I saw a whole bunch of solar panels in the back yard and a few more on the roof. That’s why I took a closer look. I knew you’d want to know about stuff like that. So I snuck inside, very careful, in case there were any zombies, but instead, there were all these plants.”

  “Plants?” Luca asked.

  Angie nodded. “Plants everywhere, growing out of plastic tubs with all these tubes hanging all over the place, and neon lights hanging from wires right above them. And the people-”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Luca interrupted. “This is ringing a bell. Was this 229 Rushholme Avenue?”

  Angie stared at him. “I don’t know.”

  “What?” Marshal asked as the idea occurred. “Is this a grow-op?”

  “Sure sounds like it,” Luca answered. “I think I remember Frank sayin’ something about it. A guy named Randy or something kicked up a share of his profits to Frank, just for the right to grow in the neighborhood and be ignored. They used solar panels, ‘cause the cops have this trick where they find growers by checking their power usage from the grid. Anyway, Frank didn’t give a shit about weed, and was more than happy to take a little cut in exchange for looking the other way.”

  “Why?” Marshal asked. “Pot’s legal now. Why would anyone bother?”

  “Pot’s regulated,” Luca corrected him. “That medical shit is potent, but the best growers are still independent. So they grow their own, risk getting caught, but hope that they don’t, so that they can save up enough money to invest in it as a business. Don’t ask me how they afforded to get the solar panels. Pot growers are a weird group of people. Besides, by the sounds of it, they’re growing hydro, and the laws surrounding that shit are still kind of screwy.”

  Marshal considered. “Well, if they’re pot-growers, that goes a long way to explaining how they went undetected. The thick odor of that much weed would hide their smell better than any dog crap or chemical.”

  “Yeah,” Luca agreed. “And even with the doors and windows smashed in, the interior would look like a fucking jungle.”

  “I guess we’ll find out when we get there,” Marshal said. “How much further, Angie?”

  She crawled over the skid and pointed at one of the screens.

  “It’s that one,” she said. “And the people inside don’t look like they’re hiding. They were just lying on the couches smoking cigarettes when I found them, talking in quiet voices, mostly about what they were going to eat.”

  “That sounds like a house full of pot growers to me,” Luca said. “Fucking amazing they weren’t killed goin’ out in search of Doritos. Maybe you’re right, Marshal. Maybe we got here just in time.”

  Brian, Kumar, and Krissy sprawled in their living room, passing an enormous joint back and forth between them and contemplating the future. They spoke only occasionally, mindful of the apocalypse outside their window – or what had once been their window. The zombies had smashed them all – and when they did speak, they kept it to low tones.

  If put to a vote, Brian would have probably been their leader, though the notion of becoming the man in charge was politically objectionable to Brian. As far as he was concerned, Randy was the leader. It was Randy’s house. It was Randy’s hydroponics equipment. It was Randy’s money that had financed the entire operation. So what if Randy hadn’t been seen in weeks, and wasn’t likely to ever be seen again? It didn’t, in Brian’s opinion, change his essential ‘there-ish-ness’. Never had before. Why should it now?

  Randy, Brian thought in his cocoon-like, nimbus of smoke, would always be there, in a manner of speaking.

  Not that this would stop Brian from pulling rank, whenever the need arose. Randy had, after all, left him in charge. It was the principle of the thing.

  He was the portrait of perfect, stoner, slob-chic. Strikingly handsome at six-foot one and a well-muscled one hundred and ninety pounds, Brian had shoulder-length, curly, black hair, thoughtful, brown eyes, octagonal glasses and a goatee. He was light-skinned black and exuded a near perfect balance of aggressive intellectualism and sanguine humility. He wore a voluminous, black T-shirt with the Canadian Flag on the chest (one of those ones where the maple leaf had been replaced by marijuana leaf), brown Bermuda shorts, and black socks. The couch he was lying on was a tangle of blankets, abandoned sweaters, pillows, and other fabrics, effectively camouflaging him such that, if he didn’t move, he seemed almost invisible.

  Brian had started his first year at the University of Toronto pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Botany, and finished five years later with a Doctorate in Growing Pot. He was a welcome columnist in High Times magazine, which fame had first brought him to Randy’s attention. In particular, his special fascination with hydroponics (on which subject, he could have published peer-reviewed papers in most scientific journals) had led him on a master-craftsman’s quest to create the perfect weed, in much the same way that Dr. Frankenstein felt driven to create the perfect monster. And if, on occasion, Brian’s creations had escaped captivity to rampage through the minds of Toronto’s peasantry, he remained philosophically unconcerned, because he was an artist.

  Kumar had been Brian’s first-year dorm-mate, until they decided that they could enjoy more freedom by sharing an off-campus residence. Enrolled in U of T’s small but well-regarded computer science school, he’d been an indifferent student with middling grades. Of Indian descent, his parents were lapsed Hindu’s (save for a small shrine to Ganesh in the kitchen, because it couldn’t hurt to be sure) who owned their own appliance store.

  Unknown to most of the world, including many of his professors at the time, Kumar was, in fact, a supremely gifted programmer. ‘Getting good grades’ had simply slipped from his list of priorities somewhere in the middle of his first year, jostled down the top ten by the many delights of post-secondary education. This wasn’t to say that his love of programming was completely displaced. It still ranked at an astonishing number four, after women, staying up all night, and of course, anything to do with weed.

  His greatest achievement had been in the third year when he turned his three thousand dollar, state-of-the-art laptop into a high tech bong which could measure how much THC someone was inhaling on any given hit. It would then report the results with a little cartoon mouse that would come out on screen, cavort across it in corresponding and hilarious displays of incapacitation, and eventually cough out the actual numbers in a puff of smoky font.

  Like Brian, who was his best friend, Kumar fit a stereotype. He was tall and thin at six feet, though his propensity for slouching made him seem shorter. His best feature was his hair, which was glossy and floppy and jet-black, and always seemed to be in need of being pushed back from his face. His dark eyes sometimes got compliments from the fairer sex, but otherwise, an extremely flat forehead, bushy eyebrows and jutting chin gave him a moderately handsome profile. He hated his nose, almost as much as he resented his family, both of which seemed overly large to him, with a tendency to stand out.

  He currently sat upright in a big ‘Lazee-Boy’ chair, partly covered in blankets, with his hands and forearms flat on the armrests, gazing straight ahead in an intense sort of trance. Deeply influenced by Brian’s latest creation, he stared with half-lidded eyes at a spot on the wall, like he was trying to bore a hole in it with his mind. Ever since university, Brian and Kumar had been inseparable, with Kumar playing Sancho to Brian’s Don Quixote quest for the perfect weed. As a result, he was now uncertain if he could remember a time in his life when he wasn’t stoned.

  Ne
ither of them actually knew all that much about Krissy, other than that she was drop dead gorgeous, speculatively deep, could smoke a ton of weed, and that they were both in love with her. This might have caused a strain on their friendship had they not both been ‘friend-zoned’ upon first contact.

  Her long, perfect hair cloaked her face like a halo of shifting light. Strong features that were somehow handsome, sensuous, sexy, and innocent, all at once, could shift from warm invitation to stern disapproval with the intensity of the sun moving in and out from behind clouds. Her bright blue eyes (possibly because they were stoned most of the time) seemed to look straight through you, fearlessly read your every hidden insecurity, and somehow cherish it while you were still ashamed to feel so exposed. She had a deep rich laugh which seemed to emerge at erratic times (possibly because she was stoned most of the time), hinting at a level of perception beyond the literal, and a touchy-feely way with her hands that left hairs to stand on end. Supple curves, long legs, creamy breasts, and toned muscles, all of this seemed like a delicious afterthought, since most would-be suitors who got that far were already so in love that a physical relationship seemed almost sacrilegious.

  They had met her at a somebody’s party at somebody else’s house, where she seemed completely unaware of the flock of adoring men, caught up in the wake of her ethereal beauty. They took turns appealing to her generous attention, never overstepping lest they invoke the stern face, like the disapproving look of a mother to her child.

  The chemistry between her and Brian was immediate (though that was arguably true with almost every guy she met, and if it wasn’t, they would pretend that it was). Nevertheless, something special flared between the two of them, especially when he waxed on about his passion for weed. (“Passion for weed? I’m passionate about weed. It’s this magical plant, straight from the breast of Mother Nature, you know? Yes, I’d love to see your grow-op! It would be like visiting a temple to the Earth mother.”)

  Brian had never really thought of it that way, but for twenty minutes, under the glaring heat of her stare, he did.