The Age of Embers {Book 3): The Age of Reprisal

by Schow, Ryan

  It was like tracking Satan. You were mesmerized, terrified, fascinated but too much of a chicken to introduce yourself, to creep up on him, to start a fight you were prepared to end.

  No one was going to end Maria.

  Back at Stanford, from the command center, he’d watched her undergoing body modifications, genetic alterations. He watched as they’d cut open the back of Antoinette’s head and brought in the AI’s own neural network to not only interface with the body but to overtake it.

  This wasn’t Satan. He was following around a parasite.

  The more he thought about Maria, the more he thought about the woman he met in the hallway. Antoinette. Who was Antoinette before this? And if this was Antoinette’s body, who was she now that Maria had overtaken her? Was the real Antoinette gone? Dead? Was her soul just smashed down inside her mind like some supernatural prisoner? Was this physical body now the hot-as-hell-Alcatraz that imprisoned Antoinette’s soul?

  All these questions refused to vacate his mind.

  As the miles passed, he realized he would not get any suitable answers. Having taken in the miles, he also realized if he stopped walking, just found a place to put down roots, his life would have little or no meaning at all.

  What were his big goals going to be? Eat? Find a way to manage his own waste? Maybe meet a nice girl and settle down in a house not burnt to the ground, or infested with the kind of decay that came with neglect?

  When Maria finally stopped walking, it was because she’d seen a guy working under his muscle car and for some reason this fascinated her enough to stop.

  The barrage of questions, curiosities and summations in Carver’s head stopped.

  Most of the bright orange muscle car was backed into an opened garage. The owner was on a mechanic’s slide board underneath it. Parts were laying about, the wheels taken off the front axle and set beside the jacked up car. Carver’s eyes went to an old pair of rusted brake drums, then to the small cardboard boxes holding what looked like new ones.

  Had the classic orange muscle car survived the EMP? It looked old enough. Did the owner think he could get it working again? Was Maria planning on stealing it? Where would she go?

  Hell, he didn’t even know where she was going now!

  Carver covertly hustled up through the neighborhood, scanning the homes, the bushes, the cars—anywhere he could hide, anywhere he could stakeout the scene. He needed to keep an eye on her, but mostly he was terrified she was going to take the car and get away.

  Then what?

  Somehow concoct a Plan B?

  He crept up to the house across the way, eyes on Maria as she stood in front of the orange car, and by proxy, the man on the slide board. He was still deep under the car. Even from across the street, he knew something was wrong. You didn’t need 20/20 vision to see the problem brewing.

  The man’s voice from beneath the jacked-up front end of the vehicle was carrying. Carver couldn’t understand exactly what he was saying, only that the pitch and tenor of his voice was rising to meet his agitation.

  Maria had her foot on his board, or on his nuts, and she wasn’t letting him out.

  The Detroit beast stood on a pair of skinny jack stands. The old school ones, not the wide-base, stable jack stands of today. The entire thing looked volatile. Stable, but only under perfect circumstances.

  Maria was not a perfect circumstance.

  She was a gathering storm.

  Unable to push himself out from under the car, the mechanic’s protestations got wild. Why was she doing this? What was she trying to prove?

  Then, reaching down under the bumper, this genetically modified AI/human hybrid hoisted the front of the car up off the jacks just enough to pull it forward and topple the stands.

  Carver drew a startled breath, time slowing to a crawl as Maria dropped the car on top of the man. The engine slammed down on his torso, squashing him so hard the slide board broke and his legs jerked up in response.

  For a very long moment, he couldn’t stop staring. Did she just kill him?

  You know she did.

  He almost couldn’t breathe. Should he be surprised by any of this? She killed Dean and Clark. She damn near slaughtered Tiberius, too. These were his men. His friends! Hell, she’d waged an assault on America using drones, and then she did the impossible. She hijacked another person’s body and set out into the world as an imposter, a harbinger of death, a brand new Satan and the last surviving piece of machine learning technology.

  Like nothing had happened, the Maria hybrid walked around the front of the house, worked herself into a fit of contrived emotion, then knocked on the door. By the time the woman of the house answered, Maria was sobbing.

  Carver used the distraction to bolt across the street unseen. Horrified, yet morbidly curious, he planted himself around the other side of the neighbor’s house. From that vantage point, he had a view of the front driveway. He couldn’t so much as breathe lest he be discovered. Still, he needed to see, perhaps intervene if something worse happened.

  What will you even do against a woman who lifts cars then drops them on men?

  He didn’t know.

  The woman of the house was a plain looking specimen in her mid-thirties. From the distance, he assumed Maria told this woman her husband was stuck under the car and needed help. From what he could hear now, being ten feet removed from the scene of the crime, Maria sounded frantic.

  Visions of his friends dying plagued his mind. He didn’t want them there, occupying his thoughts, for not only was the loss heartbreaking, he was reminded of his cowardice. How he just froze while it all happened under his watch. How he just sat there like a little shivering rat, his courage having forsaken him. He’d never stiffened to a hard stop like that. The shame of it stabbed him deeply. Now he had watched it happen again, this time to a man, a stranger, an innocent.

  Would he do something if Maria tried to kill the woman? And what the hell did Maria even want with these two?

  The second the man’s wife saw her husband’s legs flopped over, half jutting out from the car that was all but sitting on the ground with her husband beneath, she fell into hysterics. Carver did not know why Maria would torture the woman like this, but if she was the most intelligent woman on earth, she must have her reasons.

  The grieving wife was knelt down before the body, frantic-crying, calling her husband’s name, but only for a moment. Like a nightmare unfolding, Maria advanced on the woman, grabbing a handful of her hair with one hand and her chin with the other. She stepped to the side, viciously, her face twisted, and then she gave the woman’s head a ferocious crank. From where he was hiding, Carver felt the loud pop deep in his chest.

  Startled, he nearly gasped and gave himself away.

  The woman sunk down dead, her brief struggle at an end. If Carver felt an ungodly amount of shame before, it was ten times worse now! He had to do something. He had to act now, purposefully and decisively! Not out of fear. Not out of retaliation. He needed to put a stop to this because he could no longer bare witness to this much death while skulking in the shadows.

  Get a hold of yourself, Carver.

  This hybrid woman was a menace. The destroyer of worlds. Death incarnate.

  Get a hold of yourself!

  Maria strolled up to the house. Where was she going? His hands were making and unmaking themselves into fists, his breathing shallow, his mind strategizing her death, his victory, life afterward. What he needed was a window of opportunity. A way to get the jump on her. This in itself would be—

  Oh, God.

  Carver heard the voice of a young child. She was walking toward her dead parents with Maria. Shot through with a surge of vertigo, horrified thinking of what Maria might do to her, he realized he’d have to give himself away to attack her.

  If it meant saving the child, he would give his life.

  But would the child even survive the loss of her parents? He didn’t know if even he could survive this post-apocalyptic nightmare, and he
was a full grown adult, capable of far more than a mere child.

  The moment the girl saw her parent’s bodies, Carver closed his eyes.

  He couldn’t see this.

  There were worse things waiting for him in his head, though. The memories of his friends being massacred were front and center, rolling through his mind like some horror film, the carnage looping through him reel after reel after reel. Maria had torn through his friends like they were nothing. Now they were dead. Slaughtered. Survived only by the most shameless coward ever to walk the earth.

  Carver motherfreaking Gamble.

  The child’s voice snapped him into awareness. The pint-sized brunette. The five or six or seven year old girl was seeing her father’s legs sprouting out from the car. She was seeing her mother lying in a heap, her body folded over sideways.

  “Mommy?” the girl said, dropping and shaking her mother’s shoulder. She had big watery eyes, a small mouth, a dimpled chin.

  “She died of a broken heart,” Maria said, cold, standing over the top of the girl. “The loss of her husband, your daddy, was just too much for her to bear.”

  The cold tenor of Maria’s voice pumped ice into his veins.

  “Mommy?” the girl said again, louder this time, tears in her eyes and in her voice. She shook her mother’s shoulder harder, but the woman was no more.

  Maria cracked her knuckles simply by flexing them. Carver thought he saw the start of a sneer on her face, but then her expression fell flat, almost like her face didn’t know how to handle conflicting emotions.

  Then, in a creepy turn of events, Maria took her fingers to her lips and traced a smile. Her mouth followed suit.

  She’d propped this sad smile on her face, then she looked down at the girl and said, “Let’s go cry inside while we get your shoes and coat.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere with you!” the girl looked up and yelled, her eyes finally bubbling over.

  Maria knelt down, grabbed a fistful of unwashed brown hair—tight to the scalp where Carver knew it would hurt—then said, “Your mommy didn’t die of a broken heart, she died of a broken neck. See that bulge in the skin right there?” Maria pointed to a push of broken bone pressing up against the skin from the inside. “That’s your proof she’s gone. Now if you really want to be with your mommy and your daddy, then you’ll have to be the same way they are. Dead. Do you want to die?”

  Bawling now, clawing at Maria’s hand, she wailed, belting out the word: “No!”

  “I can give you the same broken neck as your mommy,” Maria offered with an abundance of cruelty in her voice. She finally shoved the girl’s head aside as she let go of her hair. “It won’t hurt at all, but then you’ll be with them. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she said, wiping her eyes, a little quieter now.

  “If you don’t go get your shoes and coat, I’m going to drag you in there by your hair and get you dressed myself.”

  The child just sat there, sobbing, not answering. Maria made good on her promise. She grabbed her and dragged her down the sidewalk, kicking and screaming. The girl nearly kicked herself loose, startling Maria.

  The hybrid finally let go.

  And Carver? Yeah, he just sat there. He knew he was capable of defending himself, but not against Maria.

  Now towering over the girl, Maria’s expression was malevolent, the kind of pitiless look brought on by frustration, outrage, the strain of burden.

  “Time’s up,” Maria said. “Am I going to kill you or are you going to get dressed?”

  “Dressed!” the girl shouted, sniffling, holding her head where it hurt.

  “Good. Now get your ass up and go get dressed!”

  The girl did as instructed. She went inside, then returned moments later. Her cheeks were bright red, her eyes still wet, her expression a state of permanent terror.

  Maria smiled a big fake smile and said, “You and me are going to go on an adventure to the big city, do you want that?”

  Carver listened for an answer, but the girl said nothing.

  “You want me to level with you, you silly, silly nuisance? Fine. I suppose after what happened to your parents, I owe you at least that.”

  The child’s untamed hair had fallen over one eye, her face shivering, her shoulders slumped forward. She said nothing. Carver couldn’t even begin to fathom what it was Maria was about to say.

  The hybrid took a deep breath, then said, “I need you. People trust someone with kids. They tend to leave them alone. Kids get you into places you can’t get on your own, and they instill trust. You will be my child, and if you agree, I will protect you from everything sick and cruel this world has to offer.”

  So she wanted to fit in? Infiltrate society, perhaps? But which society was she going after if she’d already brought the country to its knees? Society had crashed down all around them. There was nothing to rule but a wasteland. She’d broken the United States.

  She annihilated us.

  “You killed my parents,” the little girl said, brushing her hair out of her face.

  “The died of unnatural circumstances.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Do you have food?” Maria asked. The child said neither yes nor no. “Well, do you?”

  The child reluctantly nodded, then followed Maria into the house.

  Carver swallowed hard, took in his surroundings before emerging from his hiding place. As he crossed the driveway, he looked down, bore witness to these two corpses, added them to the list of dead he’d have to carry with him. He might have been able to save the woman’s life. And though he could not have stopped Maria from killing Clark and Dean, he might have been able to stop her from maiming Tiberius.

  He should have at least tried.

  There was a pond of blood seeping out from the dead man, the cloudy sky above reflected in its surface. The woman’s head was turned at an unusual angle, her eyes open, lifeless, the expanse of her husband’s blood pooling against her cheek.

  The lurching feeling in his stomach didn’t startle him. He expected this. His emotions were in turmoil, the push and pull of so many feelings wreaking havoc on his mental state. Now it seemed to be taking a toll on his physical state as well. Holding his stomach, trying to keep it down, he pushed on.

  Staying low along the house, making sure he wasn’t seen out a window, he crept around back looking for ways to see in, or vulnerabilities he could later use to his advantage. He saw some of the dark rooms inside the house, but he didn’t see either Maria or the girl until he was around back looking in through the slider. The girl was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Maria seemed to be eating them faster than the girl could make them.

  Try not to eat your hand while you’re at it, he thought to himself.

  Whatever fear he had about Maria killing the child slowly began to dissipate. If she hadn’t killed the child by now, if she was truthful when she said she needed her for cover, then maybe she wouldn’t kill her after all.

  Perhaps the child was safe.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Carver followed Maria and the child for days. When they squatted for the night, Carver rummaged through vacant houses, gathering what he could, collecting things of value, be it food, a light blanket, a backpack, extra socks and underwear, toilet paper dots, water. He never found any guns, but he did find a blade he could flip open with his thumb, and he found a bunch of protein bars he could stuff in his pockets and take with him.

  His cottonmouth was out of control, so when he found a place with enough decent water to drink, he’d all but drown himself in it, pissing every hour all night long just to make sure his system was clean and his body was hydrated. As hard as he tried to eat and drink, to keep up his strength, he was losing weight, getting skinny, weak.

  Then one night, while he was out foraging, he turned to leave the house he’d broken into and saw the girl standing in the front doorway.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He froze.<
br />
  “Eating,” he finally said. He showed her a can of pinto beans and a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips. “Would you like some?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why are you out so late?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be back with your mother?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “That woman you’re with, she’s your mother, right?” Carver asked.

  “She killed my mommy,” the girls said. “Can I stay with you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  He was about to tell her, but then he wondered if Maria ever found out about him and pressed the child for information, would she know he was the Carver? The one from Stanford?

  “I don’t have a name,” he said. “What about you?”

  She shook her head.

  He opened up the foil colored bag of chocolate chips, offered her the opening. She paused for a moment, looked at Carver, then reached in, grabbed a handful and popped them in her mouth before running off.

  He was hungry for more than pinto beans and chocolate. After stashing his goods next to his binoculars and a blanket he stole a few days back, he surveyed the street they were on. There were three more houses he could hit before turning in for the night.

  He was exhausted, but truthfully, he didn’t have the luxury of being tired. His survival depended on him not being lazy.

  When he pried open the back door to the next house, he was only halfway through a good stash of food when something hit him in the head hard enough to dizzy him. He stumbled sideways, staggering left and right before grabbing the back of a kitchen chair to keep from falling over. His vision blurry, a wicked smarting in his head, his eyes wobbled then dropped at the sight of a baseball rolling across the kitchen floor.

  The second he realized someone had thrown that at him, he was tackled and driven to the ground. The beatings started and went on until he blacked out.

  When he woke up, it was to his head bouncing down the stairs. Someone was dragging him out of the house and down their porch stairs. The fourth time his head bounced off the concrete steps, it was lights out again.