Fireside

by Brian Parker

  “You’re right. I was on the radio with Hobbes, is the cage set up yet?”

  “Almost, or at least it will be by the time we get over there,” she replied. Starr rubbed at the bandage on her hand where she’d cut herself jumping from the horse. “Did they kill them yet?”

  “No, the idiots let them escape across a lake…in a boat. How the hell did they find a boat that wasn’t rotted through or in someone’s possession?”

  She stared blankly at him and he said, “It means a boat that nobody owned.”

  “Oh, maybe that’s how they got there in the first place and were running to where they’d left the boat.”

  Kendrick hadn’t thought of that possibility. If that were true, then maybe the shooters hadn’t been from San Angelo. If they came by boat, they could have been from anywhere on the Colorado River that wasn’t cut off by a dam. “Hmm… Maybe.”

  He decided to change the subject and asked, “What are you planning for tonight’s entertainment?”

  She grinned mischievously at him. “I want to cut off his eyelids so he suffers the entire dusty trip. And I’ll pull out his fingernails slowly with some needle-nosed pliers. You know the men enjoy getting an entire, intact nail as a reward. I’ve even heard that they trade them as currency!”

  Kendrick nodded his head, he’d heard that too. “Seems a little mild for you, my dear.”

  “I want him to last,” she deadpanned. “Maybe I’ll take a few other body parts that will hurt like hell, but won’t kill him.”

  Kendrick thought for a moment before answering, “Nipples?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ears?”

  “Maybe one.”

  “Testicles?”

  “Dammit, Kendrick! I didn’t want to ruin the surprise, but you’re too good,” she answered, practically bouncing in anticipation. “I’m gonna nail his nut sack to a piece of long wood that’ll rest across his thighs. I glued sandpaper to the back side, so as he walks the wood will pull against his balls while it rubs away the skin on his legs. Everything will be made even worse by the dust and salt in his sweat. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

  He pulled his enthusiastic little torturer into an embrace. “Yes, sweetie. The men will love it.”

  “Oh, maybe I’ll put a hot poker up his ass too. That’s always a crowd pleaser.”

  *****

  The boat finally ran aground on the far shore of the lake and the men stepped wearily from it as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. Aeric’s arms, back and shoulders ached from the effort of rowing the boat across the lake using only the stocks on their rifles as oars and his hand throbbed uncontrollably where the thorn was still embedded.

  He was better off than Joseph, though. The Shooter was leaking blood from his thigh and every time he’d shifted on the fishing boat’s seat, it tore away any scab that had tried to form. It was still dark out and difficult to see, but the man looked much paler in the moonlight than he had before they bedded down for the evening at the dam.

  “How you holding up, buddy?” he asked in concern.

  “We need some time to get a good pressure bandage applied to both the entry and exit wound,” he muttered. “And I need food. So hungry.”

  They’d cut miles and miles of shoreline off of their route by rowing straight across the lake. He wanted to take advantage of their lead and couldn’t. There was simply no way that Joseph would be able to make a run for it with his leg bleeding the way it was. Aeric glanced around the area where they’d landed. It looked like as good a place as any to try and make camp. There was a small square shape not too far inland that looked like it might have been a house of some kind.

  “Alright, let’s see about that house over there. Maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody will be living there.”

  He helped Joseph hobble along, which was harder than he thought it would be with both of them wearing backpacks and carrying two rifles. They’d walked fifty feet before he spoke again, “I changed my mind. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody will be living there. We need supplies that we don’t have.”

  As they neared the squat, one story building, he realized that it had been a store of some kind. Fifties-style gas pumps, considered old before the end of the world, rusted in the parking lot along with various pieces of trash and abandoned material. Everything seemed intact except for the front door, which had a large hole bashed through the glass.

  “Wait here and cover me,” Aeric ordered as he shifted Joseph’s weight off of his shoulders and leaned him up against the gas pumps.

  He slid the carbine off his shoulder and pressed the stock deep into his shoulder with the barrel pointing slightly down in front of him like the Shooters had taught him. They called it the low-ready position. He could easily lift the barrel up and fire an aimed shot, which was much more sensible in a potential encounter than carrying the rifle at his side or on his shoulder. The damned spike in his hand felt odd against the pistol grip. He couldn’t risk removing it until he had a place to perform the minor surgery that it would require. They needed that gas station.

  Aeric stepped forward cautiously towards the gas station. The hole in the glass meant that the store had been raided at some point. He had no way of knowing if that was last week or if it had happened twenty years ago. The morning had lightened up enough that he could make out vague, indistinct shapes behind the grime-encrusted windows and he didn’t see any movement.

  He picked out his path among the refuse in the parking lot and stared hard at the space in front of him, watching for tripwires or any type of movement. He didn’t want to set off some paramilitary nut-job’s grenade booby-trap and end up maimed—or worse. As he walked, his mind drifted to the possibilities of how someone could have set up a trap, to defend themselves or to catch something for food. Lord knows they’d heard plenty of stories about cannibals in the wastes as the resources dwindled during those lean years where virtually nothing would grow.

  If he’d been setting the trap, he would have rigged it to blow the gasoline pumps as well. That way, he’d have been guaranteed to get most of the raiding party in the explosion. The rain of body parts wouldn’t have been a pretty sight. It was every man for himself first, then family and friends. Nobody else mattered.

  Glass crunched under his boot, shattering the early morning stillness. Aeric paused and waited for some type of reaction from inside the gas station. He waited for several seconds before finally continuing on. It was nerve-wracking to be outside the walls of San Angelo again. He’d done it often enough on the Gathering Squad as a young man, but hadn’t been on any type of clearing operation since Veronica’s father died and he became the mayor in his place. And he’d never cleared anyplace by himself before. Even immediately after the war, he always had Tyler right by his side or providing backup from a few feet away.

  His mind wandered again to his earlier thought that nobody else mattered. He still remembered those innocent days of his youth when he thought that human beings cared for each other. He’d even engaged in a debate that freshman semester at UT that mankind ultimately wanted the get along and become a community. One of his arguments had been that if mankind was so evil, as they were portrayed in movies and literature, then the first societies would have never been formed. He used to think that mankind ultimately was good and wanted to be together in some type of society.

  He still felt that way, to an extent, but he’d been wrong in his argument about the good intentions of humanity. People wanted to be together when there was enough food to go around. When there wasn’t, they were violent, petty and mean. The ancients knew how to farm, how to hunt and how to preserve food from going bad, the people that survived here in Texas did not know how to do any of that at first—and people died by the thousands.

  Aeric reached the door without incident. There hadn’t been any traps in the parking lot; now he had to contend with the door itself. An easy trick would have been to tie fishing line to the door handle and the other end to a grenade pin, the
n when he pulled the door open, the pin would come out, the spoon would fly and boom, no more Aeric Traxx.

  Then the logical part of his mind took over. The average American, even the average Texan, didn’t have grenades lying around. It was unlikely that they had anything like that. They could have set up some type of ram to come down from the ceiling into the doorway like in that movie with the alien headhunter in South America.

  Something like that would be fairly easy to set up and far more likely to happen than a grenade. Even so, he pulled gently on the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He pulled hard on the door and swung down to the side, crouching beside the brick exterior. If there was some kind of booby-trap the brick should keep him safe, he reasoned.

  No explosion rocked the morning and there wasn’t a giant wooden log smashed through the now-closed front door. There hadn’t been a trap after all. He stood and proceeded cautiously through the store, checking behind the counter and along each of the pilfered shelving units. Surprisingly, some things still sat on the shelves, including what looked like some canned food. He left things where they were so he could continue clearing the building. The back storeroom was dark and empty, cleaned out of most of the supplies like the front had been. The store was vacant and most of the useful stuff had been taken long ago. It would serve them well as a place to get cleaned up if the locals thought it was empty.

  Aeric walked rapidly across the parking lot to where Joseph stood. The man’s eyes fluttered against the exhaustion that blood loss and their escape had caused him. “Come on, buddy. The inside is clear and pretty clean. We’ll see what we can do to get you patched up.”

  Joseph’s exhaustion was apparent as all of his bodyweight slumped onto Aeric’s shoulders and his feet dragged awkwardly as they walked from the pumps to the store’s front door. Once they were inside, Aeric pulled him deeper into the store between the shelving units and began searching for a first aid kit. There was probably one in the back near the receiving door, so he went there first. It didn’t take him long to find the rusted white box strapped to the wall.

  The inside of the first aid kit still held bandages, their paper wrappers brittle with age. As a bonus, inside was a little brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide that he could use to help disinfect their wounds. There was nothing that he could do about the peroxide’s expiration date. It was more than thirty years past when the manufacturer recommended it being replaced. Oh well. They’d discovered over time that the medicines and canned goods were still usable long after the date stamped on their packaging. He hoped the same could be said about the bottle of disinfectant.

  “Okay, Joe. I’m back,” he said hoarsely. There was a lot of work to get done before he could get any rest.

  Joseph muttered something that he couldn’t understand. He knelt beside him and grasped his belt, reminding him of the time, long ago, when Veronica forced his clothes off of him and threw him in the shower after he’d killed his first man. He’d been covered in blood then as well. It seemed to happen much too often in his life.

  “This is gonna hurt, Joe,” he said while he unbuckled the belt and pulled the Shooter’s pants down. The scabs once again ripped away and blood began to trickle out. Joseph didn’t cry or attempt to fight him, making his job easier. Surprisingly, the peroxide still bubbled up as he poured it over the wound. It looked like the bullet had passed clean-through without hitting the bone. They were lucky.

  He finished cleaning Joseph’s wounds then used wadded up pieces of cloth, torn from a collection of old touristy t-shirts from the back room, and tape from the first aid kit to put a pressure dressing on the back and front of his leg where the entry and exit points were. Once Aeric was finished, Joseph turned over to sleep, leaving him to his thoughts and the task of doctoring his own hand.

  He held his hand up to examine it closely in the morning light. The thorn had entered through his palm and exited the back side of his hand before breaking off from the cactus or vine that it had grown from. It had been in his hand for more than an hour—probably closer to two—and while it throbbed, the intense pain had subsided. Aeric guess that his endorphins had suppressed the pain while he and Joseph fled for their lives across the lake and that thrill was gone now, leaving him feeling miserable.

  “This is gonna suck,” he muttered as he grasped the thorn.

  “Mmm?” Joseph mumbled.

  “Nothing, just talking out loud to myself. Sorry. Go to sleep, Joe.”

  He made a mental note to be quieter and pulled the spike from his hand. The endorphins that had helped numb the pain apparently weren’t strong enough to deal with a large gaping hole in his hand. Pain exploded across his enflamed flesh and his entire hand felt like he’d stuck it into a fire.

  The wound, which was blocked by the thorn before, bled profusely. The older, darker blood that had been trapped mingled with new deep crimson to pour down on his lap. He cursed silently and leaned forward in an effort to keep from being covered in blood. There were creatures in the wastes that could smell blood from a long distance away and bring them running. The pain was intense, so decided to use the disinfectant while he was already in pain. He picked up the bottle with his uninjured hand and poured the liquid into the large hole in his palm.

  The white bubbles from the hydrogen peroxide turned rust brown immediately as the blood mingled with them and began to drip off onto the floor. Once the bubbles began to dissipate and turn red once again, he poured more of the peroxide on the wound. He did that a few times on his palm and the back of his hand until the bubbles stopped appearing. He remembered his mother telling him as a kid that once the bubbles went away, the injury was as clean as it could be at that moment so he put the bottle down and wrapped his hand in one of the old t-shirts.

  Once he’d exhausted his limited first aid capabilities, he grabbed one of the cans off the shelf and positioned himself so he could see the door while still being hidden from anyone observing from a distance. He pulled the can opener from his bag and then wiped the dust off the can.

  “Heh,” he grunted when he saw the contents of the can. It was the same gas station brand of ravioli that he and Tyler had survived on for the first week after they left Austin. He hadn’t touched the stuff since then. “Ain’t that a kick in the nuts.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Come on, Traxx! They’re getting closer. We’re not gonna make it.”

  Aeric gritted his teeth and pedaled harder. Sweat poured from his forehead and pooled along his lower back as he stood on the pedals, giving it everything he had. Up ahead, less than three miles away, the walls of San Angelo rose up out of the haze. While he couldn’t quite make out the Eastern Gate complex, he knew it was there—and they were in danger of being cut off from it.

  Aeric had been able to find a bicycle that had a pump for the nearly dry-rotted tires. A little more searching in the area around the gas station had yielded the mangled remains of two bodies, each with a single bullet hole in their head. The smaller of the two had a small hole in the back of the skull and a gaping vacant space on the front. That one had been shot in the back of the head. The second, larger skeleton, was the opposite and still clutched the rusted rifle that he’d used to take his own life. The two people had died beside a small grave that had a pile of rocks laid over the top to deter the scavengers that had eaten their bodies.

  Further investigation of the home confirmed his belief that it had been a family. Their home had been picked through by scavengers who’d left the old photos on the walls. The short bed in the child’s playroom sealed the scenario in Aeric’s mind. The child had died and the parents committed suicide—take that back, the father had shot the mother and then himself. It was a sad, often repeated event during those lean years after the war.

  He found an old Radio Flyer wagon in the carport and had been able to lash that to the bike’s frame. Bedding and old clothing from inside the family’s home went into the wagon for cushioning and he’d used that contraption to haul Joseph all the wa
y back to San Angelo. It had been a long, tiring, and uneventful trip until this morning.

  The two of them were on a smaller, less-used road traveling almost due west towards the city. The main road from Austin went northwest to southeast and then split off west and north around the outside of the city’s walls. Aeric didn’t notice the dust as he pedaled, focused on the road in front of him, but Joseph saw the massive dust cloud of the Vulture army traveling on the main route behind them.

  The road the Vultures were on was much better than the one they traveled. Before the war, Farm Road Seven Sixty-Five had barely qualified as more than a two-lane track; years of disuse and lack of maintenance had turned it downright treacherous for Aeric and Joseph as they flew down the road. They didn’t have any choice. The city’s defensive protocol was clear. If sentries saw raiders of any kind, they were to lock the gates down and prepare to repel them. If they didn’t beat the army, which traveled on a better road, then they’d be permanently locked out until the fighting ended and the Vultures went back to Austin.

  He pedaled as hard as he could for a few minutes in silence and then threw his head to the side to check their progress. They’d pulled out in front of the slower-moving army. They must not have noticed Aeric and Joseph yet, otherwise he was sure that they would have surged forward with some type of response force. They had horses that could have easily run them down, but for some reason, the Vultures continued at their steady pace, which allowed him to pull away.

  “I…think…we’re…gonna make it,” Aeric panted. He was exhausted; the headlong flight had taken everything out of him.

  “I hope you’re right, Traxx. There’s no way that they haven’t seen us yet. You can bet if we don’t make it through those gates, we’re done for.”

  The thought of the gates slamming shut, locking them outside with the Vulture army caused Aeric to dig deeper into himself and push harder. They were less than a half a mile from the gates. That meant only two or three minutes more of the maximum effort and then he’d be able to stop to get some water.