Fireside

by Brian Parker

  He watched as the countryside sped by. The area wasn’t particularly green before the war. The problem was compounded by the months of poor sunlight under the clouds of ash and the resulting chemical rains, turning the surrounding landscape into a bleak mockery of what it had been. They passed by a few abandoned homesteads that the Gathering Squad had already picked clean. Most of the population this far out had either died long ago or joined with the residents of San Angelo, choosing to move into the city.

  The ruined land—the wastes as the city folk referred to it—passed by the door of the truck in a blur. Almost everything was a mix of muted, neutral colors since the vegetation had died, revealing patches of earth covered in a grayish residue. He assumed that the stuff was the result of the ash that had fallen to the ground and then the rains had turned it into a plant-killing slurry. Once the sun came out, it dried up and left behind the rest.

  Every so often Aeric could see patches of green. Each time, he was hopeful that it was a living tree or even budding grasslands; unfortunately, it always ended up being the outline of a cactus. The cacti in this area had been particularly hardy, most of it staying green until two or three months ago. Most of them had finally succumbed to the devastation that had ruined the rest of the vegetation. He had faith that the vegetation would eventually return after enough clean rainstorms washed away the ash and sulfur.

  What if it doesn’t come back? he asked himself. San Angelo was holding on for now, but the fact that they were traveling more than seventy-five miles to raid a facility that might have food was indicative of the long term problem that the city faced. It was a simple fact that he returned to often. There were too many people living there.

  It was a problem that didn’t have an easy fix or workaround. Every one of the residents of the city deserved the opportunity to live. How would anyone ever make that sort of choice, anyways? They prided themselves on the fact that they were humane in their treatment of everyone, once they were inside the walls. He was glad that he wasn’t the mayor; he wouldn’t be the one forced to make the call when they were eventually forced to cull the population.

  *****

  The time—and miles—passed quickly. When they made it to the mile marker indicating that they were five miles from Sterling City, Aeric had his forces go to one hundred percent watch. His Gatherers and the Shooters all readied their weapons, pointing them out from the interior of the truck towards the wastes.

  They entered the town minutes later. The road went right down the main drag of Sterling City, which, thankfully, wasn’t that large. The road was wide and open, the few buildings set far enough off the street to allow them a clear view of the surrounding area. It looked abandoned. No roadblocks could be seen in front of them along the route and there didn’t appear to be any junked cars sitting dead where they’d been when the EMP struck. Everyone relaxed slightly and breathed a collective sigh of relief. They’d been worried about the townspeople trying to stop the trucks, which didn’t seem to be the case.

  Then they took their first casualty.

  They passed a red brick building with a sign on the side proclaiming that the squat, two story structure had been a hotel when the world exploded in gunfire. People had been waiting in the alley between the hotel and a rock-faced building. The rounds peppered the trucks, hitting several of the men and women in the back.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Aeric screamed at the driver, who pressed the pedal all the way to the floor.

  He looked in the side view mirror to make sure that Tyler, who was in the second truck, followed their lead as they sped through the engagement area. The noise of rifles and pistols firing in rapid succession made it impossible to determine if the San Angelians were returning fire or if they’d hunkered down to take whatever the ambush threw at them.

  They were out of the kill zone in seconds. From his vantage point in the mirror, Aeric saw the barrels of several weapons appear around the corner of the stone building to fire blindly in their direction. That told him that the people in the alley were unwilling to follow them out into the street. He saw a few muzzle flashes from the back of Tyler’s truck, so he knew his men were shooting back at the assholes who’d tried to ambush them.

  They cleared the town with no further incidents. Aeric called a halt several miles outside of town to see if everyone was okay. Two of the Shooters in his truck had minor injuries. One of them was shot through the shoulder, the other had a broken wrist from when he dove to the floor of the truck. The second truck didn’t fare as well. The townspeople had been able to fire into the cargo area as they drove away.

  The most serious injury was to one of his Gatherers. The man had been sitting in the rearmost seat of Tyler’s truck. He’d been shot through the side twice and once in the neck. By the time they stopped, Russ was dead. Several others had been hit as well. Thankfully, none of the other injuries were life-threatening.

  Aeric was furious. They all knew that the town was likely going to be a dangerous place. It became real when they’d been shot at, not some imagined scenario during a rehearsal back at the Provisions Warehouse. Although about half of their missions to the various food storage points had resulted in a shootout of some kind, it had been months since anyone flat-out tried to ambush the group. He wanted revenge.

  “Nicole, I want you to stay here with the injured and patch them up,” Aeric ordered. “Darren and Sam, you stay here to guard the trucks and help Nicole. The rest of you, drop your gear, except ammo and water. We’re gonna wipe that town off the map.”

  Tyler stepped over and whispered, “Are you sure? Our mission is to get the supplies from Garden City, not end up in a firefight in some piss-ant little town along the way.”

  Aeric thought about it for a moment, then answered, “Yeah, I’m sure, buddy. We can’t leave these fuckers behind. They killed Russ with some lucky shots as we sped through town going forty-five. What’s gonna happen when we’re all riding our bikes through here on the way back? It’s so quiet now that the sound of our trucks carries for miles. We caught them by surprise this time. You know we’ve got to put an end to them before they figure out another strategy for when we come back through.”

  Tyler nodded his head slowly. “You’re right. You usually are in these situations. You make the hard, but necessary call. Alright, let’s go.”

  The group rode their bicycles back down the highway until they were about a mile from town and then hid them off the side of the road. Since they didn’t really know the layout of the town, except for what they’d seen when they drove through, Aeric sent half his remaining force, just nine men, to the south of the main strip with Tyler and the other half stayed with him on the north side, where the ambush had originated.

  They moved into town rapidly, passing a sign announcing that the pre-apocalypse population had been eight hundred and fifty-three souls. Aeric wondered how many of those people were left alive. Probably not many since they’d been shot at by around twenty or so from the alley.

  He led his group around the first building and stumbled into a man sitting in a lawn chair under the shade of an awning. He started to bring his rifle up and stayed his hand. He smiled and slowly raised his hand away from the weapon. One of Aeric’s Gatherers slammed a spear through the watcher’s throat. He didn’t stand up and fire the gun like Aeric thought he would. Instead, he crumpled backwards into the chair and slid off, hitting the porch with a dull thud.

  Everyone fanned out quickly, expecting an attack. When it didn’t come, Aeric looked back to the man they’d killed. He wore multiple layers of clothing against the chill. Likely he was some kind of sentry on this end of town. He had some dirty brown water in a jug and a book sitting beside his post. The most interesting thing about his position was a rope that ran off towards the direction of the alley where they’d been ambushed.

  Aeric pointed at it and asked, “What do you make of that?”

  Charles, the man who’d speared the sentry, said, “I bet it leads to a bell or an alert system
of some kind where the attackers are gathered.”

  Traxx nodded and grunted an affirmative. It made sense. They could post a sentry on either end of town, equip them with a means to communicate and warn the others of danger, then hide in the building. They likely didn’t have enough people to build solid fortifications and any effort would have been a waste, so this was their answer to keeping the place as secure as they could.

  “Hmm, wonder what that means?” Charles asked as he poked the body with the spear.

  “Huh?” Aeric sidestepped towards Charles so he could see what the man was pointing at. He wore a tattered Texas flag bandana around his left biceps.

  Aeric’s mind was thrust six months into the past when he, Tyler and Katie had fled from Austin. They’d all been physically and emotionally battered, nearly starving and barely hanging on, when they came across the remnants of a massive firefight. Bodies littered the highway, about half of them wearing a Texas flag bandana on their arm. They’d gladly taken the weapons and bicycles from the dead, easing their journey to San Angelo.

  Had the survivors who’d fought way out east of San Angelo somehow made it all the way to Sterling City? It was entirely possible that they’d bypassed San Angelo because of the large pseudo-military force that the town boasted and made their way here? If that were the case, what had happened to the original townspeople? They were questions that wouldn’t be answered by staring at the corpse of a dead man, so Aeric had his team follow the rope towards the ambush site, watching carefully for any more sentries.

  They made their way past several buildings until they came to a large, open parking lot where he called a halt. The stone building sat right in front of them and on the other side was the alley. Realistically, he knew that the people wouldn’t still be there, it had been almost an hour since the ambush so they’d probably returned to their homes.

  Everyone looked to him for guidance, what did he want to do now that they’d made it back into the town? He wished that he had a way to communicate with Tyler on the other side of the road. He thought about it for a moment. They had no way of knowing where the alley led on the back side. The anger that had fueled him immediately after discovering that Russ was dead had subsided now that he’d walked back into town. He thought about why they’d came back and what it would mean if they didn’t clean out this nest of villains.

  The idea that they’d have to face them again spurred Aeric into action. “Alright, let’s go around to the back side of that building,” he whispered. “We’ll go two at a time for safety and when we get to the back, we’ll see what’s over there. Try not to use your guns if you run into anyone—unless you have to. Questions?”

  There were none, so he sent the first two across the gravel parking lot. He cringed as the sound of their boots crunching on the rock echoed across the small space. Everyone scanned the area for activity in response to their noise. Nothing else happened until one of the men he’d sent across started gesturing wildly for him to come over to where he was.

  He jogged across by himself, feeling foolish for crouching at a run. It was something that he’d seen in countless movies. Guys always crouched when they ran in the movies, it makes sense, right? he asked himself. When he arrived, he saw that it was Charles who’d waved him over.

  “What’d you see?”

  Charles held his fingers to his lips and replied, “Listen.”

  Aeric did as he was asked, straining to hear what Charles wanted him to hear. Then he heard it. The faint sound of music came from inside the building. It sounded like a couple of guitars and a set of drums. They were having a goddamned concert after murdering one of his people.

  He peeked around the side of the building into the alley. It was empty. All of the rats must have gone back to their nest. His eyes fell on several vacant cars and he had an idea. “Block the back door with as much shit as you can,” he told the Shooter that had been with Charles. “Quietly.”

  He waived a few men over from the remaining group and gave them a mission to go find Tyler’s team and pass a message to them. Then he and Charles jogged back to where the old cars sat and saw that they’d conveniently already left all the supplies that he’d need sitting in the front seat of one of the vehicles.

  *****

  The residents of the town had been siphoning fuel from the vehicles around town, probably to start their fires each night, so he’d filled several jugs with the remaining gasoline and rifled through the trash to find five glass bottles. He kept one of the jugs for himself and sent a man up on the roof of the low building to pour the remaining ones across the rooftop.

  The sounds continued to drift from inside the building. They were rocking to some old school punk rock. Whoever was playing the guitar hit every chord, but the drummer wasn’t very good. Regardless, it sounded great to Aeric, who’d rarely heard any type of music since the war and reminded him of the people of Eureka Springs that he met on his journey back to Missouri. Not many of the band members from San Angelo State had survived the first few weeks when Mayor Delgado was on the road going after his daughter in Austin.

  The ambushers must have relied solely on their outlooks on the edges of town because no one was guarding the building. Aeric took advantage of their overconfidence and emptied the container he’d kept all over the building’s wooden front porch.

  Once his man was off the roof, he lit the Molotov cocktails that he’d created in the glass bottles and hurled them high up onto the roof. The old tar paper on the roof caught quickly and he lit the gas he’d poured on the porch. Shouts of alarm spread from inside and Tyler’s men, whom he’d placed across the street, shot several people as they burst through the front door. They fell dead onto the flames blocking the doorway.

  Aeric threw the remaining Molotov through the open front door, spreading flames quickly across the inside as the old, dried wood caught fire. The heat from the roof combined with the blaze inside to create a raging inferno. Then the building blew up. Chunks of burning wood and superheated shards of glass flew in every direction. Whatever they’d stored inside with them had exploded once the ceiling collapsed.

  Tyler’s squad fired a few rounds towards the east as the sentry from that side of town came running up to see about the commotion. Aeric assumed that the threat was taken care of since they didn’t continue after their initial volley and hoped that no one else would come out of the woodwork to shoot at them as they left town.

  Aeric watched as the flames engulfed the building. He braved the heat to peer through the partially collapsed rock wall into the old store. Nothing moved inside, they were all dead. He wanted to feel remorse for what he’d done. He was only twenty years old, I should feel terrible for their deaths, he told himself, but he didn’t feel anything except relief that his people were safe. The townsfolk had done this to themselves by choosing to attack his convoy. There would be no mourning from him. He’d grown exponentially during his experiences over the past year. Age wasn’t a factor in the new world; you were either the hunter or the hunted. After his time with the Vultures, he would never allow himself to be hunted again.

  He stepped back and continued to observe the fire while his team scanned the area for any threats. Finally, after ten minutes, Traxx was satisfied that no one would sneak up on them and whistled to bring everyone over to the parking lot next to the burning building. Once his team had gathered around, he took a breath to steady himself and said, “Okay, that isn’t what we were expecting. I didn’t want to kill everybody. I figured that we’d extract a little revenge for what they did to Russ and they’d never try to ambush innocent people again.”

  “You didn’t know that they had explosives stored in there,” Tyler answered for the group.

  “I know,” he mumbled, still wondering to himself why he didn’t really care that every one of his enemies had died.

  “What if there were women or kids in there, just enjoying a concert?” one of the Shooters asked.

  “Stop,” Tyler ordered. “We can�
�t second-guess what happened. Traxx made the decision to attack and this is what happened. End of story. Beating ourselves up over what we could have done differently won’t change a damn thing. They’re all dead, end of story.”

  Aeric took heart from his friend’s words. The big man could always be counted on to reinforce his decisions, regardless of how horrible their outcome was. He nodded his head, “You’re right, buddy. Let’s leave town and go back to the trucks before all this smoke attracts attention from out in the wastes.”

  They turned westward and began walking towards the edge of town where they’d stashed their bikes. When they reached the building where Charles killed the sentry, Aeric was shocked to see a blanket resting on top of the man with the edges tucked in like a shroud.

  He immediately dispersed his team to check the surrounding buildings. They didn’t find anything so they continued warily back to their bikes. Everyone had the feeling that they were being watched as they made their way out of town towards their bikes. No one said anything as they pedaled hard to put distance between themselves and the strange little town in the middle of the Texas wasteland.

  THREE

  Tyler watched his friend help the wounded back into the truck as they loaded up to continue on to Garden City. Traxx made the decision to keep Russ’s body in the back of his truck instead of leaving it out in the middle of nowhere. It was the right thing to do and while the dead body in the cargo area may have made some of the Gatherers uneasy, they all knew that his family back in San Angelo would appreciate being able to bury him in the city’s cemetery.

  They were back on the road in under an hour. The rest of the trip to their destination was uneventful, except for a small pack of dogs that ran across the road in front of them. Tyler watched in amazement as some type of small furry animal chased the entire group. It took him a minute to work out that it was a badger chasing the dogs. He wondered what that was about. Badgers were known to be vicious, but weren’t wild dogs supposed to be worse? Packs of the damn things had attacked their checkpoints before, how the hell was a single badger scaring the entire group?