World of Ashes II

by J. K. Robinson

  Clawing at his seatbelt until he could find the latch to escape, Daniel fought to get away from the fowl stench of jet fuel and death, ripping his bloodied clothing off in the now pouring rain. In a scene from the Shawshank Redemption he laid in a puddle that didn’t glitter of rainbow oil and tried to wash the blood from his pours. He wasn’t worried about the virus, or any sickness, he just couldn’t stand to wear what had drained from Jose’s body, down Camilla’s and into her hair and then down onto him. Now shivering in the cold and caring about none of it, Daniel looked back at the plane, or what parts might have been identifiable. The nose, where the cockpit and latrines were located, had broken free and rolled to some bizarre angle, bodies hanging from it on all sides. The rest of the plane was collapsed in on itself, now more resembling a crushed tin can than a cargo jet the size of a Boeing 747. The wings and engines were a twisted mess that could have been confused with a tornado ravaged trailer part.

  Smoke poured from a building in the debris trail, it was only a matter of time before the rain stopped and the fire caught up to the rest of the wreck. A pile of duffle bags that had come loose from a cargo pallet was lying next to harvesting combine the plane had dragged with it some distance. Wearing only his skivvies in the now worsening storm, Daniel found a shard of metal and began tearing duffle bags open along their sides. The first one was a woman’s, a pile of neatly rolled pink panties and one alarmingly large dildo with a suction cup under the balls fell out on his lap. The idea of slapping a zombie with it made him laugh and want to share the joke with Jose. But Jose wasn’t here, and he never would be again. Daniel had to focus. Warm clothes, preferably ones that fit, though beggars couldn’t be choosers. The next two bags were filled with chemical gear that would do him no good, but finally as the first thunderclaps filled the sky Daniel found the luggage of some poor bastard who wasn’t going to need it anymore. He wrapped himself in the dead man’s wet weather poncho and carried the rest of the gear in the split open bag, running for his life before the rain and bloody mud swallowed him whole.

  Just on the other side of the trees Daniel tripped over a leaf strewn road he simply didn’t see coming and landed hard on his right shoulder. More of his blood seeped out into the slopping wet leaves, but he wasn’t too badly hurt. Cursing and shivering, fearing he would soon go into shock or hypothermia, Daniel recollected the bag and followed the road to his right for no apparent reason. He didn’t know where he was or what was out there, or even if this was the best direction to choose. Left might have been a better choice, but he’d never know.

  At the first bend in the road Daniel ran into what was left of one of the plane’s engines. A twisted clusterfuck of metal and gears, the turbo fans had a mutilated zombies wrapped up in them as well as having dragged a few hundred feet of a nearby power line along with it. The lines were stretched through the middle of the fans, and had this all been a cartoon the setup would have been perfect for Wile E. Coyote to injure himself in some hilarious manner. Daniel walked silently past the macabre scene and found a mailbox near an overgrown driveway. This was the best chance he had of finding a structure to hide in, and he desperately needed to recollect himself and find out what exactly he had to survive with.

  The driveway seemed like it was a mile long, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes before Daniel found the house in a clearing he’d have never seen from the road. With no weapons our hero had no way of defending against living or undead residents of the house, but nonetheless he plowed through the back door with all his weight and collapsed on the cat piss smelling blue carpet. A cheap wooden table next to him was knocked over by the duffle bag and an ash tray filled with ashes and cigarette butts landed on Daniel’s wet face.

  Coughing a plume of ash and cotton shit, Daniel rolled over and wiped his face on the already gross carpet. He came up with not only ash clinging to his cheeks, lips and eyelids, but now a full mask of animal hair that made him look like a crackhead wearing a Santa Claus mask of pubes, glue and mud. Deciding to stay silent in case someone was still home, Daniel found the cheap brown Army issue towels in the duffel and started cleaning himself off. Once satisfied that he resembled a human being again, he discovered the clothes he’d made off with were about two sizes too big, but at least he finally looked right in a modern U.S. Army uniform, a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia he hadn’t felt since a lifetime ago washed over him. The boots were too big too, but a couple extra socks in the toes and Daniel was able to make them work. Anything was better than nothing, but unfortunately the previous owner, an E5 whose last name was Buckle, had not been a believer in using elastic blousing straps to blouse his boots. He was a tucker, someone who believed it didn’t look sloppy and stupid to tightly tuck your trousers into your boots. Daniel had always felt a slim measure of pride in that he wasn’t too stupid to do it right, and in times of crisis having two elastic bands with hooks on them could be used for everything tourniquets to Field Expedient Happy Sacks*. Now he just looked slovenly, but at least he felt like a fucking Soldier again, and you can’t put a price on that.

  The closest thing Daniel found to a weapon in the duffle was a standard issue Gerber Multitool. Though invaluable in the world he lived in now, it was little more than a pair of pliers married to a Swiss Army Knife and would be useless against anything but a field mouse. A kitchen knife sufficed for now, and Daniel began moving silently through the rest of the doublewide to clear it of dangers. He noticed immediately that it didn’t look lived in at all. The dishes were all put away, the furniture had a light layer of dust and nothing but the refrigerator really smelled that bad, except maybe the carpet he’d first fallen on. That was pretty gross too. A set of keys were on a coffee table and Daniel looked through a curtain into the front yard. Sure enough there was a dark red, mid 1980’s Ford pickup. He’d take a look at the truck when the rain let up, for now the search focused on securing the house again and finding a better weapon. Whoever had lived there, and it seemed to be an older couple or maybe even just an elderly man, wasn’t much of a hunter. They weren’t however, stupid and a pair of shotguns and a Ruger .22 match pistol were in the master bedroom’s closet.

  Almost casually, Daniel seated himself at the kitchen table and began cleaning and loading the guns while he snacked on some potted meat product and crackers. He never thought he’d be so happy to find the meat byproduct-paste in a can, but right now he couldn’t imagine how anything could ever have tasted better. What with the crashing and the vomiting and the running he’d worked up quite an appetite, and not one he’d want to waste on finely cooked food he wouldn’t taste until he burped later. Right now he just needed a calorie binge, and what better than wheat crackers and the fatty parts of animals unfit for sale elsewhere?

  Feeling remarkably safe, probably falsely so, Daniel laid down on the couch and cuddled with the 12gage, the other two guns he dummy corded to himself with some shoe laces in case an intruder snuck up on him. He was asleep almost immediately and didn’t come to again until late at night. The rain hadn’t stopped, which didn’t bother him one bit. He took the time to make more of a meal, though it was difficult with no fresh ingredients to work with. Instant orange juice, some vodka, canned chili and more crackers, all made with nothing but the moonlight and the minimum of cursing.

  He slept again, but not for long because dawn was not far away now. When the first light broke through and he could see clear sky, Daniel quickly penned a thank you note and stuck it to the refrigerator. If these people were still alive they should know that by abandoning their home they’d inadvertently saved his life. And what’s the worst that could really happen? They don’t come back and the next refugee sees an example set by the previous, or the place burns down and nobody ever sees it. Whatever, his conscience was clear.

  In the movies the car the hero’s find outside the farm house where something horrible has happened is usually in one of two states: (1) It doesn’t work and that’s why the _______ kills and/or eats them before they
can fix it. It’s usually a muscle car in otherwise pristine condition, and for some reason never a hybrid with low batteries. (B) It works fine, but the ________ is either already inside it, or is about to chase/wreck them and kill and/or eat them. In this case Daniel found two things that weren’t necessarily related. First, the occupants of the house hadn’t just abandoned the place. They’d been robbed by looters and the whole mess of them on both sides had shot each other to death in some kind of fucked up shootout in the driveway. The last to die had been an old man, mostly given away by the trucker’s hat and Jesus Saves belt buckle sinking into his carcass. On top of his chest, just out of his sleeve pocket was a set of keys. Daniel had found keys inside, but it was more likely these were the right ones for the truck. He could spend all day shoving the wrong keys into the ignition, so he carefully reached out and snagged the Chevy keychain, even though the truck was a Ford.

  Wordlessly, Daniel poked around the bodies for whatever guns they’d left behind, but those were as rusted and useless as the corpses were decayed and dead. In this area the population must have been so thin nothing but the standard scavengers had touched the dead, zombies didn’t seem to have known there was a free buffet in this neck of the woods, and maybe never would. The Ford stuttered and struggled to start, but finally did with a very loud squealing belt and a couple exhaust backfires when the aging fuel began to run again. The pipes plumed black soot all over the bodies behind his truck, which wasn’t really of any consequence until Daniel had to force the stick out of neutral and into reverse because for some reason he couldn’t put it into drive the first time. The truck lurched backwards and probably crushed the poor man who’d owned it, but that apparently freed up the gears and Daniel was able to head steadily down the overgrown driveway toward the road he’d come from. The truck blew a tire almost immediately upon hitting the pavement and unfortunately there was no spare. Daniel wouldn’t be driving this truck back to Wyoming, that was for sure, but it would still work long enough to get somewhere. Anywhere but here.

  Continuing barely a mile to the left again, the trees broke for a power line cut. It was the same one the wreckage had been tangled in because the full scope of the disaster came into view through the valley. The plane was in three pieces, the tail loosely attached to the main cargo area, and of course the dislodged nosecone at an angle off to one side. What shocked Daniel more than anything wasn’t the broken plane and swath of destroyed buildings and trees behind it, but that he could clearly see survivors collecting supplies, burying bodies and setting up a defense perimeter against zombies. Elated and feeling a little bit stupid for not considering he might not have been the only survivor, Daniel drove down an overgrown gravel service road the power company used until he came across the first person in the group of maybe twenty.

  Daniel jumped out of the truck and asked the obvious, “How did you guys make it too?”

  The woman, an older lady but not yet in her middle age, looked at Daniel as if he had grown a dick out of his forehead. “What are you talking about? And who the fuck are you? How did you get here?” She raised a double barrel shotgun and instantly Daniel felt really, really stupid. Much more than before.

  Keeping his hands in view and nodding toward the destroyed plane, Daniel said the first thing that came to mind. “Is this how the Aliens at Roswell felt when their plane crashed?”

  “Jesus H Christ. You were on that?” The woman started to lower the gun, but just barely. “There’s four other survivors. Not from this plane, but we have them back at our place.”

  “What?” Daniel wanted to get back in the truck, but right then the engine quit anyway. Fuck. “What do you mean not from this plane? Were there other planes? What the fuck happened here?”

  “We thought you guys might shed some light on that.” The woman raised her hand and shouted for a man in her group to meet Daniel. “This boy was on that plane.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I wish.” Daniel suddenly felt weak and tried to sit down, but more collapsed than anything. “How am I the only one? There were easily two hundred people...”

  “You might not be. There’s tracks leading away from the plane to the South, but the rain washed most of it away. Where were you this whole time? Why didn’t you stay near the plane, Soldier?”

  Daniel looked up, the man’s head was obscured by the glare of the sun. “Who are you?”

  “No, who are you?”

  “Private First Class Daniel Sawyer, Wyoming Army National Guard. I was just hitching a ride home…”

  “My name is Lieutenant Gary Pitman, I’m the law around here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Well, if you came from Oz, then Karma would suggest here is Kansas. It’s also literally Kansas, so you’re maybe twelve miles East of Turtle Creek Lake and the city of Manhattan.” Officer Pitman pointed to what Daniel assumed was the direction of the lake he hadn’t seen. That would have been in the direction of left instead of right.

  “Who attacked us?”

  The woman and the cop tilted their heads to one side, helping Daniel to stand up while they considered their answers. “It was Texas, son. Don’t you know, you and them’s at war. Have been for months now. Every night you can see planes droppin’ from the sky on both sides, yesterday was worse than most days though. Seems the US was sending a big fleet ‘ah planes to convoy from wherever…”

  “Cuba.” Daniel put his hands on his head, pacing back and forth to try and make sense of all this. “We started out at Gitmo. I didn’t even know there were other planes with us. I remember the pilot took evasive, tried to dodge someone’s radar.” Daniel was confused. “I don’t understand, why would Texas shoot down a friendly plane!?”

  Officer Pitman stared Daniel down. “Where the fuck have you bee, son?”

  “Under a Goddamn rock!” Daniel threw a bit of a fit. “There are motherfucking zombies trying eat us and we’re shooting at each other? What kind of motherfucking fucked up bullshit is this!? Who the hell do they think they are!?”

  “Now calm down, son.” Pitman was being overly cautious now, “I’m guessing you don’t know, but the US ain’t what it used to be. It’s damned near every state for itself now, and Kansas don’t want nothin’ to do with what that high an’ mighty sonofabitch holed up in Cheyenne Mountain, or that demented reefer smokin’ hippy they got down in Texas. We just about got our zombie problem in check, we don’t need the rest of it rainin’ down on us too.”

  Daniel realized he was in the company of morons. “Look, I’ll try to keep it short and sweet, I was flying over the Atlantic when the virus hit DC, which was where I was supposed to land. I survived in Virginia for a bit, then got evacuated to Florida, then that fell apart and I got evacuated again to a Navy ship in the Gulf of Mexico, then Gitmo, and now…” Daniel turned and gestured at the field of destruction on the open Kansas plains. “Fucking Christ what is wrong with you people…”

  “Either way, son… We’re gonna have to ask you to come with us.” Officer Pitman pointed toward a patrol car on the other side of a windbreak of trees. “Like I said, we’re not in this fight. You’ll be returned to you side at the next POW swap in Topeka.”

  Daniel stayed silent the entire ride back to Manhattan, Kansas. They were nice enough not to handcuff him, and he got to ride in the front seat. Lt. Pitman had to make several stops to euthanize stray zombies, but those were relatively few compared to the number of miles traveled. Most of the zombies, Pitman explained, were from a FEMA camp outside Kansas City that fell early on. The survivors fled west and the zombies followed by the hundreds of thousands. The Kansas Militia, having replaced the mass numbers of the Kansas Nation Guard conscripted away from them by the Federal Government’s declaration of Martial Law, had stood its ground and kept several large areas of Kansas close to zombie free. It was at a price, though, a great deal of the American farmland was now basically a minefield of random pockets of infection. It was still too early in this multisided war to reclaim
what had once been generationally cultivated land. People by the millions were going to starve without this land.

  Like the rest of Kansas, the town of Manhattan wasn’t a tall one. The closest identifiable geographic feature was a dam that still wasn’t strikingly higher than any of the other features. A building that had once been a warehouse of some kind now functioned as the POW detainment area for both “sides” of the conflict. Daniel didn’t get to see the in-processing line for Texan prisoners, but he imagined it was as invasive and rude as the one he got once Officer Pitman was out of sight. A fat, grumpy old man who’d probably worked for the TSA made Daniel strip, shower while being watched, and gave him a medical workup not unlike what Wendy had done in West Virginia.

  After being probed for almost an hour Daniel was released into a double sided open floor with cots on either side. There was a double line of chain liked fencing with razor wire on top separating his group from the Texans. Daniel saw immediately it wasn’t like a prison, nobody on either side was in any condition to be hostile toward the other or their captures, though no one was being friendly across the lines either. Only three Texans were caged right now, but the Federals had dozens, most in casts or heavy bandages. Nurses were attending to some of them under the watchful eyes of the guards, but for most in this building the notion of fighting back was rather futile. They all just wanted to go home.

  “Hey, you were on that flight from Cuba with me, right?” One of the Federal Soldiers stood up and limped over to Daniel. It was the MP who’d been watching Kuzma/Petrov. “We looked for survivors before the rain, we thought everyone was dead.”