Fireside

by Brian Parker

  The big man nodded his head, his shaggy blond hair becoming more disheveled as he did so. “We should attack them,” he stated simply.

  That was the last thing Aeric thought he’d hear from the mouth of his lifelong friend. “What do you mean? San Angelo’s strength is in our walls. We’ve trained to defend from above, not to conduct offensive, open warfare in front of the gates.”

  “Exactly. It’s the last thing Kendrick would expect. He trained with us and knows our tactics. He helped to build those walls, so he knows how formidable they are. There’s nothing that—”

  Aeric held up his hand and then slid his open palm down across his face. “How could I have been so stupid? Kendrick helped to build the walls. He knows their weaknesses; that’s what he’s counting on.”

  “You think those flares this morning were some sort of signal?” Tyler asked.

  “You can count on it…” He trailed off as one of the hoodrats from the Barrio walked across his line of sight. He recognized him as one of the boys who’d been outside the grocery store where Maria lived before she moved into the Traxx house. He wore raggedy clothing like most of the other residents of the Barrio, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there were rips in the fabric. He was also covered in mud and what looked like smears of black ash from a fire.

  Tyler followed his gaze toward the gang member. “What is it?”

  The boy was one of hundreds that Aeric saw on a daily basis; what stood out and caused him to stop was the green square of fabric above his left breast. “We’ve been infiltrated!” he shouted. “The Vultures are inside the walls.”

  The gang member in question took off at a dead sprint towards the Barrio. “Prepare for an attack!” Aeric yelled towards the defenders above them on the wall.

  One of them began ringing a bell loudly in warning. Men and women streamed out of houses near the walls where they’d been resting and went up the ladders to the top of the wall. The defenders crouched down behind the ramparts, staring out into the wastes for the pending attack. They were ready to repel the Vultures, as they’d done time and again against raiders and bands of scavengers.

  Aeric clutched Aiden to his side and spun in circles in the open assembly area behind the walls. He knew what he saw. The Vultures in Austin wore the green square to indicate that they were part of the gang and one of the gangs in the Barrio had worn the same symbol. The fuckers had been here all along.

  The surprise attack was revealed across the northern end of the city as thick black smoke began pouring into the sky, followed by more in the west. They’d started fires inside the city. They planned to burn it and force the residents out in the open to be slaughtered. Aeric would never allow that to happen on his watch.

  Then the explosives hidden in the walls detonated and the world descended into chaos.

  Defenders that didn’t die instantly in the explosion were thrown thirty feet into the air, only to fall back to the earth, twisted and broken. Scores died from secondary effects of the blast. Some who’d been standing near the explosion had their insides liquefied from the overpressure. Others suffocated on their own blood as their lungs were punctured in a hundred places by shattered bone fragments. Still more of them had limbs which bent at grotesque angles. Even if they survived, they’d never walk again. The force defending the walls of San Angelo was decimated and a large, gaping hole more than forty feet across stood open to the attackers.

  Even though Aeric’s body had shielded Aiden from the worst of the damage, the boy bled from multiple cuts and stood looking at the mayhem in a daze. “Go, Aiden! Run to your grandmother. Tell her the city has fallen and to evacuate the family through the Northern Gate!” Aeric ordered with a hard shove from behind, sending the boy off towards the old campus where the secondary line of defense had been established.

  “We’ll meet you in Tennyson,” he called after the retreating boy, telling him to move the family to the ruins of a small town about fifteen miles beyond the gate. Tennyson had been set up as a known evacuation point for the city’s residents if the walls were ever breached. As a former resident, Kendrick would know about the escape route to the north. So far, there hadn’t been any reports of Vulture activity on that side of the perimeter and Aeric wondered if Rustwood had forgotten about the rally point.

  “We need to prepare to fight,” Tyler bellowed. “Here they come!”

  Aeric turned from his grandchild’s fleeing form towards the smoldering hole in the wall. Dimly, as if from a distance, through the ringing in his ears, he heard hundreds of small pops as the remaining defenders near the Eastern Gate began firing at the advancing Vulture army.

  A quick glance through the walls told him that they were still out of range. “Save your ammo!” he yelled hoarsely. His throat felt like it was on fire, probably from the dust and choking black smoke in the air. The fires from the north and western side of the city had spread at an alarming rate, covering everything. Not far from where he stood, bright orange and green flames poured from an open manhole cover, sending the greasy blackness skyward to once again blot out the sun. Fires burned unchecked across the city as homes and supply depots burned.

  The fires had their intended effect on the defenders as residents raced away from their positions along the remaining portion of the wall back towards their homes where family members had been left. While not everyone fled to save their families, the damage had already been done.

  Aeric stared in shock at the large empty spaces along the parapets. Less than a third of the force that he’d seen at their positions before the blast remained. “The city is lost,” he muttered.

  Two large hands gripped his shoulders on either side and shook him violently enough to make him think there’d been another explosion. When the shaking stopped, Tyler stared hard at him. “You’re this city’s leader, now act like a leader and organize this defense,” he ordered.

  Tyler’s words shook him from the dark place that he’d entered. His friend was right; they could fight and delay the attackers long enough for people to come from the other sectors to defend the city. He picked up the old cheerleader’s megaphone and yelled instructions through it. “Even out those gaps! We still have a chance to stop them. They’ve used up their surprise, now it’s time to show them that we won’t just roll over! Use aimed shots to take out anybody who’s in the open. Don’t waste your time shooting at the armored vehicles; we have specially trained soldiers for that.”

  The last part was at least partially true. Lorelei had taken forty of her Shooters off to begin developing weapons capable of stopping the hodge-podge collection of armored cars, and the two old world tanks that the Vultures brought with them. She was a realist and knew that they had little chance of killing the vehicle itself. However, if they could knock the tracks off of the tanks and blow out the tires on the armored trucks, they wouldn’t be able to move. Then the defenders had a chance to wipe out the crew in more traditional ways.

  Aeric’s words of encouragement heartened the defenders. They spread out like he’d ordered and the amount of outgoing fire lessoned dramatically as men and women took their time to aim at individual targets, instead of spraying bullets in the general direction of the enemy, hoping that one would find its way into the flesh of something.

  He rushed behind the rusting hulk of an old pickup truck and unslung the 30.06 rifle from his back. It was the same weapon that he’d used as a paddle to escape across the lake. His body protested as he knelt, but he willed his mind to be quiet, to accept the pain since there was nothing that he could do about it. He pulled the bolt back and chambered a round, then settled the butt against his shoulder while he rested his cheek on the stock.

  Aeric began the methodical work of shooting unsuspecting men and women as they charged towards the city across the killing field. The armored vehicles hung back and he wondered what the hell was going on. “Why aren’t they shooting back or attacking with the trucks? They know we don’t have anything capable of penetrating their armor.” />
  Tyler held out his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Give me your binoculars.”

  Aeric lifted them off of his neck and passed them to his friend. After a few moments of adjusting the focus and then sweeping back and forth, he muttered, “They’re decoys; unarmed men and women, probably prisoners. They’re making us use up our ammo.”

  “And to demoralize us,” Aeric said before calling for a cease fire through the megaphone.

  Within minutes, the ragged cries and pleas for mercy drifted towards the defenders and a handful of the original prisoners who’d charged across the open came stumbling through the hole in the wall. They all wore long-sleeved shirts, with their arms pulled out of the sleeves and tied behind their backs. Black wooden sticks had been tied at the ends of their shirtsleeves to give them the appearance of soldiers charging with weapons as they ran.

  Aeric pulled one of them behind the truck and forced him to his knees. “Who are you?”

  “Javier, my lord. Please, don’t kill us. We were just tending our crops with our families. None of us want any part of this.”

  “You’re from Austin?”

  Javier smiled, “That’s what it used to be called, yes. Now they just call it The Nest. The Vulture Nest.”

  Chills ran down his spine as Aeric recalled the conversation that he had with Veronica regarding Maria’s latest vision. She’d said that once the birds left the nest, nothing could stop them. Bullshit. His survival after being hunted all the way to the lake and then his escape had proven that her visions were just one possibility in an ever-changing future. He’d make sure that this one about the nest didn’t come true either. He would stop them.

  Shouts along the wall warned defenders to look out. The Vulture army was moving forward slowly. Once again, Kendrick’s tactics proved to be effective as they gained well over three hundred yards before anyone began to fire at the real enemy. The defenders didn’t want to risk shooting any more innocents and had allowed valuable stand-off range to be lost.

  “Shoot!” Tyler yelled and then grabbed the megaphone from Aeric. “Shoot! This is the real attack!”

  His words seemed to galvanize the defenders as first a few fired down at the advancing army, then several more joined in until finally the entire line was firing at the exposed enemy. That’s when Kendrick ordered the two tanks to open fire.

  They didn’t target the individual soldiers on the line; they fired through the hole in the wall deeper into the city. Behind him, thousands of feet away, the shells exploded against buildings, killing and maiming people by the dozens. Then, the tanks stopped firing their high-explosive rounds through the holes and crewmen popped out of the hatches to fire the mounted machine guns. They raked the parapet. The smaller caliber 7.62 millimeter bullets of the loader and the coaxial gun sent shards of white-hot metal in every direction as they disintegrated against the brick defenses, while the larger .50 caliber that the tank commander fired punched holes through the masonry. It was a bloodbath.

  Aeric took the opportunity to snipe one of the commanders. The bullet threw his head backwards and then he fell forward causing the barrel of the fifty-cal to aim skyward. The gun continued to fire as the weight of his body pressed against his hands, pouring rounds from the end of the barrel until the tube became so hot that it warped and rounds began to bounce from side to side down the tube. The end of the barrel exploded as one of the outgoing rounds impacted against another round that hadn’t exited the tube yet.

  The second tank commander noticed that his partner was dead and dropped inside the tank, immediately ceasing his own gunfire while the tank continued onward. Aeric smiled and called for a general withdrawal into the city. “Fall back! Fall back and fight them for every block. This is our home! We know where we can hide and shoot these bastards. We know where to go where they can’t reach us. Your family’s lives depend on the next couple of hours. Go, and make history!”

  He and Tyler took a few more shots at the advancing Vultures before he heeded his own words and melted into the smoke-filled streets.

  *****

  Random sounds of gunfire echoed behind them and off to the east as they ran towards the Barrio. Aeric knew the gangs had started the fires that raged across the city and somehow, they’d rigged the wall to blow. The signs had been so obvious that they were up to no good. But he hadn’t thought that anyone in San Angelo would have done something so foolish as to allow the Vultures inside the walls.

  Hell, the gangs from the Barrio had been bold enough to wear the symbol of the Vultures openly and he’d been so focused on Maria’s prophecy that he didn’t catch it. He told himself that it was understandable since the green square hadn’t been the Vulture’s symbol when he’d been their captive and that no one had heard from them in the recent past. Ultimately, though, when it came down to it, he still blamed himself for the attack.

  Kendrick had led the Vultures here because of his hatred for Aeric and his role in Justin’s death. If it hadn’t been for Aeric Traxx, the people of San Angelo wouldn’t be facing certain death. They would have continued on with their lives, scraping out a meager survival on the edge of the wastes.

  In the back of his mind, another voice countered his assessment. If it hadn’t been for him, San Angelo might not have survived the first year. He’d been the one to send Lorelei and her platoon here. They’d been key in the city’s defense and were responsible for training everyone in marksmanship and patrol techniques. He and Tyler had led the Gathering Squad into Garden City where they found Ted Winston. Ted had engineered the walls that protected the city for three decades and converted the engines of the trucks and heavy equipment from gasoline to steam. The Gathering Squad had been responsible for finding the seeds that grew the crops and bringing the goats from the wasteland into the city for milk, butter and meat. No, Aeric Traxx may be why the Vultures were here now, but he wasn’t the reason for the city’s demise.

  “It’s right up here,” he huffed, pointing towards a hole in the makeshift wall that the residents had constructed around the Barrio.

  Tyler glanced at him pointedly and said, “It’s my body that’s failing, not my mind.”

  “Sorry,” Aeric replied. He’d forgotten that Tyler was one of the people who helped establish the grocery store as a temporary housing area when they’d moved the walls for the third time; the residents had refused to relocate any more after that.

  “Hold up,” Tyler whispered as he grabbed the meat of Aeric’s upper arm.

  Aeric slowed to a walk, and then quietly stalked forward, mimicking Tyler’s movements until they were at the gate, hidden from view of the other side. The big man reached out and grabbed the end of a rifle, yanking a startled boy off his feet into the street. He clamped a hand over the youth’s mouth and then wrestled to subdue him. Aeric could see that even the little bit of fight that the boy put up was wearing down the big man.

  He pulled out his knife and waved it in front of the boy’s eyes, causing him to go limp and stop fighting. “Thanks,” Tyler panted. “I just don’t have the energy anymore.”

  Aeric ducked his chin in acknowledgement. The cancer was eating away at Tyler. “Listen here, kid,” he added a menacing tone to his voice. “I’m going to give you one chance to tell me how many Vultures there are in the Barrio.”

  “I… I don’t know,” the boy stammered.

  “Not good enough,” Aeric hissed and plunged the knife deep into the teen’s shoulder. Tyler reacted too slowly in replacing his hand and the boy’s strangled cries of pain echoed briefly across the gloom.

  “I’m going to ask you again. Look at me.” Aeric poked him hard in the ribs with the tip of the knife, “Look at me, dammit! You see these scars on my face? I know how to torture someone for days without killing them. Is that what you want?”

  The boy shook his head violently from side to side. “You have an opportunity here. If you tell me what I need to know, I’ll kill you quickly, painlessly. If you don’t, you’ll be strung along, wishing for
a death that won’t come. Do you understand?”

  Hot tears fell against Tyler’s hand as the Vulture realized the consequences of his choice to join the gang. Aeric couldn’t risk leaving the kid alive when he went into the Barrio—or allow him to grow up to be a man who hated Traxx and his family like the other Vultures.

  “We have a deal?” Aeric asked.

  Tyler uncovered his mouth and he sputtered, “Please! Please, let me go! I leave. I never come back. I—”

  Aeric shut him up with a punch to his stomach. “Not the deal, kid. You made your bed, now you’ve gotta lie in it. The choice is yours how you go out though. Quick or slow?”

  The youth thought about it for a moment and then nodded his head slowly, accepting his fate. “Ten soldiers and Mr. Huerta. He leader here.”

  Aeric cursed under his breath, “Huerta. I should have known that he was mixed up with this too. Ten including you or are you number eleven?” He couldn’t risk allowing any of them to survive and escape to shoot him in the back.

  “I the ten one,” he replied in the strange dialect that had developed in the Barrio.

  “Okay, the fires, how many did you guys light?”

  “All ‘dem. Sewers filled with years of shit, burns hot. City will burn. No help now.”

  “God damn it!” he muttered, enunciating each syllable. “Where are the other Vultures?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Aeric stabbed downward into his thigh, eliciting a screech that Tyler quickly cut off. “Sorry, wasn’t expecting that,” he said sheepishly.

  “Where are the Vultures from the Barrio?” Aeric asked, clarifying his question.

  The boy sobbed in pain and replied, “Inside. All back from starting fires.”

  “Where is Huerta?”

  “At demonbroc nest. Gonna let them go.”

  Aeric thought for a minute about what to ask next. “Explain to me how to get to the nest.”

  The boy gave him directions to the secret entrance into an unused labyrinth of tunnels, blocked off from the rest of the sewer system. The entryway was in the old supermarket through the back of the store. “Anything else you want to say?” he asked in contempt of the Vulture who’d helped to engineer the collapse of his city and condemned the residents who survived to more hardship.