The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]
Page 9
While he was in the shower, she’d laid out a towel for him on the counter and cleaned the blood away from the toilet and floor where he’d been sitting. Nothing could be done about the smear on the drywall where his back had rested against it, though.
While he was toweling off, another soft knock announced her return. He wrapped the towel around his waist and said, “Come in.”
The door opened slightly and Veronica’s head poked through the opening. “He wasn’t there, so Tyler picked out a few sets of clothes for you. They look like they’ll fit you pretty well.”
“You think your friend was the man down in the parking lot?”
She stepped into the bathroom and put a small armload of clothes on the counter. “I don’t know,” she answered and leaned back against the sink. “Just because he wasn’t home doesn’t mean that he’s dead. I thought I recognized his face down there; it was difficult to see with the lighting and the people all around him….”
Veronica trailed off and Aeric felt like he should hug her or something, but he barely knew the woman and didn’t want her to be offended. “Did you know him well?”
She looked up at him and frowned. “Not really. We went on one awkward date last year and both of us decided that we were way too different to make anything work. Besides saying hello in the hallway or elevator, we didn’t really talk much. It’s just sad, y’know?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
She nodded and then patted the clothes. “Well, here you go,” she said. “I hope something fits.”
Veronica started to go and he stepped quickly across the bath mat. “Hey,” he said as he grabbed her wrist lightly.
She turned back to him. “What?”
“Thank you… Thanks for making me get up. I was in a weird place after what happened.”
“I know,” she answered and placed her own hand on his upper arm. “We all need a little help sometimes.”
Aeric watched the candle light flicker in her eyes and wondered if he was supposed to kiss her or something. The last girl that he’d made out with ended up as hamburger underneath a giant police SWAT vehicle and besides Kate, his long-term high school girlfriend who’d tried her best to ruin him at Central High, he didn’t have much experience with girls.
She stared back at him, her face dangerously close to his with her hand on his arm. Then the moment passed and Veronica stepped back. “Okay, get dressed so I can come in here and shower. I think Tyler wants to shower, too.”
And then, just like that, she was gone and Aeric cursed his stupidity. The girl had wanted to kiss him and he’d been too stupid to act on it. He had a lot of growing up to do if he was going to survive in this new world.
FIVE
Aeric woke to find himself lying in the front seat of an abandoned sedan while Tyler snored softly beside him. His lower back ached from the way the seat rose up at a strange angle when it was fully reclined. What was the point of the damn seat reclining if it was going to twist you into the shape of a pretzel?
He sat up and pulled the lever to bring the seatback up while he rubbed at the stubble on his chin. They’d made it as far north as Mexia down side roads until their stolen vehicle had run out of gas and they’d been forced to walk until nightfall. They came across the car that they’d slept in before full darkness had set in. The previous owner of the car was nowhere to be found, but the empty fuel gauge told them all that they needed to know, so they broke out one of the back windows and unlocked the car for a secure place to sleep overnight.
He’d tried unsuccessfully to convince Veronica to leave Austin and come with him to his parent’s house in Springfield. She was holding out for her own parents to come and find her in the city, and didn’t want to be gone when they arrived. Aeric promised her that he would be back in only a few days after he checked on his parents and they’d given her one of their pistols with enough ammunition to defend herself if things went bad.
It was all he could do. They weren’t together and she didn’t owe him anything, so they’d bid a sad farewell to her the morning after he and Tyler had killed the men in the parking lot. She’d surprised him by giving him her parent’s address in San Angelo, and kissing him deeply on the lips, before closing the door to her apartment and locking it. They waited until they heard the chair push back in place against the door and trudged out of the apartment complex headed north.
Their first stop was at a car dealership in town. They discovered the body of a well-dressed man at the key box. It looked like he’d been ordered to open the safe and then he was killed once he did. There weren’t any other employees present so they’d selected a couple sets of keys at random and used the keyless remote to find which ones they had. Then it was a simple matter of determining which one had the most fuel and driving out of the city.
Just as Veronica had reported, the interstate was blocked off to traffic. Military vehicles diverted them away from the exit, going so far as to fire into the air to ensure that they complied. The crashed vehicle with bullet holes through the windshield that they passed was convincing enough for them, so they diverted back into the city and traveled under the highway to the east, and then north along one of the many back roads out of the city.
Tyler seemed content to be with Aeric and follow him through the dangerous mission that he’d assigned to himself. When Aeric asked him what his plans were, his answers were always non-committal and he’d change the topic. Aeric wondered if the big man wanted to go to Nebraska after they went to Missouri or if he’d written off his family altogether. Either way, he was grateful for the company while it lasted.
His partner snorted and then choked on drool that had been in his mouth. “Ah, fuck,” Tyler muttered when he finally stopped coughing.
“Morning, dear,” Aeric quipped. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like shit, man. My back is killing me!”
“Mine too. We should probably try to find some sleeping bags and sleep out in the open from now on.”
“Yeah, I can’t spend another night like that. What’s the plan for today, boss?”
Aeric grimaced. He hated when Tyler called him that. “Where are we?”
Tyler pulled the map out of his pocket and handed it to him. “We’re somewhere in here,” he said as he jabbed a finger along Texas State Highway 14. The area that he indicated was north of the town of Wortham which they’d passed through yesterday morning, and south of Interstate 45.
The residents of Wortham had been less than receptive to the two out-of-towners who walked through and they’d been turned away at every door that they tried. It was a shame that the town, once probably a nice community with friendly people, had been turned into such a dreary place. Signs had been placed at both of the town’s gas stations, telling travelers that they weren’t welcome and that they were out of fuel. Small town America had deteriorated just as quickly as the cities and it made them wonder what had happened to cause it all the way out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.
“We probably walked, what? Six or seven miles after we left town yesterday?” Aeric asked.
“Something like that. We must be getting close to the interstate. I wonder if the Army is set up there, too.”
“Only way to find out is to go,” Aeric responded as he opened the door and unfolded himself from the sedan. He walked across the road and pissed into the ditch before returning to his friend.
He absently rubbed his stomach as it rumbled. “What have we got for breakfast?”
Tyler held up a can of spaghetti rings and meatballs before tossing it to him. “Enjoy, sweetheart!”
“Aw, you get me the nicest things!”
He pulled the plastic spoon that he’d been using for three days from his backpack and peeled back the lid of the pop-top can. The cold meatballs tasted terrible, but after taking an hour to build a fire and heat the canned goods on their first night out from Austin, they’d discovered that the wax lining of the cheap gas station cans would melt and cover the food. Since then,
they’d eaten their meals cold, although it was high on Aeric’s priority list to pick up a cooking pot when they found the sleeping bags.
They finished their meal in silence, and then checked through the car for anything useful, before putting their backpacks on and continuing north along the highway. They’d had to get inventive with the bags that they’d taken from the thugs in the smoke shop. Veronica didn’t have any zip ties—which would have made it much easier—so they had used tape to secure the shoulder straps of two extra bags onto each of their backpacks. The result was that they each carried three backpacks worth of canned food, bottled water, beef jerky, cigarettes and a few changes of her neighbor’s clothing. The contraptions were, surprisingly, not too bulky, but they hadn’t had to do more than simply walk with them, so far. Neither of them were confident that they’d hold up well if they had to run with them.
Aeric and Tyler were still within sight of the car that they’d camped in during the night when the world changed irrevocably. A brilliant white light appeared high in the sky above them and Tyler glanced up at it.
“Ahh, my eyes!” he screamed and fell to the ground with the palms of his hands digging into his eye sockets.
Aeric, who’d been looking behind them at the car when the high-altitude explosion occurred, didn’t see what had happened to Tyler. He turned around in time to see the tail end of the massive fireball in the sky that had faded from the brightness of a thousand suns into an orange, smoke-filled mass spreading outward in every direction.
“What the hell?” he shouted as the reverberations of the explosion reached him. The noise became a gale-force wind that scared him badly enough that he had to dive to the ground beside Tyler’s writhing form.
“Ty! Are you okay?” he screamed above the noise.
He saw Tyler’s lips move, but couldn’t hear anything. Then the sound and wind stopped. “My eyes are fucked up!” his friend answered.
“Did you see what happened?”
“There was a bright light in the sky and then an explosion,” Tyler replied. “Shit, I can’t see anything except for a big, white blur in the middle of my vision and dark splotches around the edges.”
“I think we need to get back to the car!” Aeric shouted.
“You might be—”
Tyler was cut off by the sound of another explosion, this one to the south, followed rapidly by a third further north and then another to the southeast. They huddled close to the ground against the wind, but it didn’t return as strongly as it had with the first explosion. Aeric helped his friend to his feet and they stumbled back to the car as the sound of thunder rumbled across the morning sky.
As they headed back towards the car, a huge column of smoke could be seen far to the south. “Shit,” he muttered and doubled his efforts to get Tyler back to the car.
When they got there, he opened the back door and threw the two backpacks into the seat. Something seemed different about the car; he couldn’t put his finger on what it was, so he slammed the door and opened Tyler’s door for him. Again, something seemed odd as he eased his friend down inside.
“There you go, buddy,” he said and then closed the door gently before running around to the driver’s side of the car. Off to the northwest, another massive cloud of smoke and ash drifted skyward where the original burst had been. Dallas.
He turned almost due north along their original line of march where more smoke billowed angrily towards the heavens. Oklahoma City. To the south and then southeast even more smoke poured from the earth. San Antonio and Houston.
Aeric opened the door and sat down heavily into the seat. “What’s happening?” Tyler asked.
“I think we were just bombed,” he answered. “Shit! That’s what it is!”
“What?”
Aeric ignored him and opened the car door. Then he shut it and opened it again. “What the hell are you doing?” Tyler asked in confusion.
“The dome lights in the car don’t work anymore,” he replied distractedly and then turned around into the back seat to dig the flashlight from his pack.
“What the hell does that mean?” Tyler asked in confusion.
Aeric pressed the button on the side of the flashlight several times and then banged it against the steering wheel. “Goddammit!”
“What is it?” the big man demanded.
“Everything electronic is down, man.”
Tyler grunted, “EMP.”
“What’s that?”
“I saw a show on the History channel about it. It’s an electromagnetic pulse. Nuclear weapons give them off and the military is developing weapons that can just give off EMPs without bombing. It kills everything with circuitry and almost everything electronic that’s been built in the last seventy or eighty years would be toast.”
“Was that what those explosions were?”
Tyler shrugged and looked blindly around the car, “Maybe?”
“Does that mean our guns won’t work?”
“No, those are mechanical. Well, hell I don’t know.”
“Hold on,” Aeric said and stepped out of the car. He pulled the 30-30 from the back seat and cocked the hammer. He fired the rifle into a large cedar tree beside the road.
“Okay, our weapons work fine. What does that mean for our trip?” Aeric asked.
“It means that we’re walking, riding a bike, or finding a horse to get around from now on,” Tyler replied bitterly.
“That sucks.”
The conversation trailed off for a moment before Tyler asked, “How far do you think it went?”
It took him a moment to respond. “Sorry, I forgot that you didn’t see them. There were explosions all around us at different distances. If I was to guess, I’d say it was Dallas, San Antonio, Houston… Maybe Oklahoma City.”
His friend shook his head. “I can’t believe that someone would shoot a nuclear missile—four missiles—at us.”
“The crazies were out in force down in Austin, maybe—” he stopped in fear of what his mouth would say.
“What?”
“Do you think Austin got hit?” Aeric asked.
Tyler tapped the side of his head and replied, “I can’t see. Did it look like it?”
He turned in the seat once again and looked southward through the back window at the darkening sky. “I don’t know. I assumed it was San Antonio; could have been Austin, though. I mean, San Antonio is the bigger city, but Austin’s the state capitol. Who knows what was targeted.”
Tyler nodded his head in agreement. “Maybe it was San Antonio.”
Aeric wondered if they should go back to Austin to find Veronica, but doubted if it would do any good. If they returned to the city and found it destroyed, then they’d have nothing to show for traveling as far as they had. If they got down there and it was intact, why would Veronica change her mind and decide to go with them? It was better to stick to the original plan and find out if his parents were okay, then return to Austin, or even San Angelo where she was going.
“Maybe,” Aeric agreed.
“I assume we’re not walking today.”
“It’s probably best if we keep out of the open today. If there is some type of automatic response to the bombs, then there may be a counterstrike. I wish we had a house or something that we could hole up in instead of this car.”
“Anything’s better than nothing though, right?”
“Yeah. Get some rest, man. Maybe your eyes will be better after a couple of hours with them closed.”
He fingered the folded up paper with Veronica’s address on it that was stuffed in his pocket. When Tyler reclined the seat, he pulled it out and began memorizing the words on the paper.
*****
“Okay, big guy, how are your eyes this morning?” Aeric asked his friend the next morning. The dark sky had lightened up enough to see the surrounding area through the car’s side windows. A thick layer of ash covered the windshield and the sloped back window that made it impossible to see out of either of them.
Aeric tapped his friend and pointed at the dark clouds looming overhead that continued to drop ash across the hood of the car. “I don’t know if doctors will be able to do much for you. Looks like it may be a while before we’ll be using microscopic lasers again.”
Tyler chuckled, “Yeah. Guess I forgot about that part. I was worried about not being able to see that ninety-eight mile per hour fastball coming at my head anymore. There’s probably some higher-priority things going on, huh?”
Aeric yawned and stretched his hands above his head. “I still can’t believe that you were able to sleep through all of that last night. Seemed like there were explosions coming from everywhere at once. There were times when it was bright enough that if you didn’t know that it was supposed to be nighttime, then you’d have thought it was morning.”
Tyler grunted and opened the door. “Gotta pee.”
Ash drifted in the open door and landed on the seat. The simple piece of ash made Aeric wonder what the future held. He wondered where it had come from. Was it from a burning forest or from the city? Had it been a part of someone’s home, their work or from a supermarket that they frequented? Or, more sinister, was that piece of ash the last remnant of a person’s body as it burned in the superheated columns of fire that had taken everything?
How much of the United States was effected by the explosions? How much of the world had just been thrown back to the Dark Ages? From the size of the fireballs that he’d seen and the giant columns of smoke lifting skyward, he had to assume that they were nuclear missiles and not some type of asteroid strikes, or EMP bomb. Outside of the big airburst that had temporarily blinded Tyler and released the electromagnetic pulse that killed their electronics, every other detonation could have been a conventional weapon of some kind or another. Yeah, right.