The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  *****

  He watched the two of them pedal away. Tyler grudgingly had to admit that his buddy had seemed much healthier and in a better mood with Kate around. It didn’t change his belief that in the long run, the girl would find a way to screw everyone over. For the time being, however, the physical contact was good for him.

  “Well, I guess we just settle down in here and wait,” he said as he muscled the burned metal frame of a refrigerator into place over the doorway.

  “How long are we going to wait?” Beth Gaines asked. “I don’t like being separated from my son again.”

  He shrugged, saying, “It shouldn’t be more than twenty or thirty minutes down to the apartments, then another five or ten minutes looking around there and right back, so what is that, an hour? Maybe two at the most.”

  “Tyler, do you think he’ll be safe?” Julie asked.

  He turned to the teen, who was holding Kayla, and smiled. “Mr. Aeric will be fine. He’s got a lot of experience in the city and even more from our time on the road. I wouldn’t worry about him. Let’s feed Kayla something to keep her quiet and settle in for the wait.”

  They spent the next few minutes preparing a small meal, something that would keep the toddler quiet in their hiding spot. He’d just opened a can of spaghetti rings when the pea gravel outside in the parking lot crunched under someone’s foot.

  Tyler stopped and held up his hand for everyone to be quiet. Had there been someone outside the door or was it the wind blowing the gravel around? Aeric and Kate had been gone less than ten minutes so it was possible that they turned around for something or even changed their mind about going down to the apartment.

  The sound of several people running across the gravel parking lot towards them filled the morning air. Tyler grabbed the shotgun, prepared to defend the girls when the front of the building exploded and brick went flying everywhere.

  A large chunk of masonry hit him squarely in the chest and he heard Mrs. Gaines cry out in pain. He couldn’t see what was happening because ash and dust that had been swept up combined with the murky light from outside to temporarily blind him. Pain flooded through his body, causing him to almost black out. Maybe he did, he couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t until a face appeared above him that he realized that he was lying flat on his back. The face belonged to a woman wearing both a combat helmet and a sneer.

  “We got them, sir!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Gross! This one is ripped open like one of Justin’s projects. She must have taken a grenade to the chest! Aw man, that’s her stomach!”

  “What were they carrying in those carts?” a man’s voice ordered.

  Tyler turned his head weakly and saw several people digging through their hard-earned supplies and the prone form of Aeric’s mother. Some type of clear, bloody fluid poured freely from her ears and the ash underneath her was slowly darkening. “It’s just food and worthless shit,” the woman said.

  “Wait. Weren’t there two bike carts?”

  “Uh….”

  “You idiots! They probably took off with anything of value in the second cart. It has to be the little one that ran off. Go get her!”

  Tyler smiled. Julie was okay and running. Did she have Kayla with her? He turned his head to the opposite side where he thought the second cart holding the little girl had been. Sure enough, the bicycle and cart were gone and there wasn’t any sign of the child. But his shotgun was laying less than an arm’s length away.

  The group of people seemed to have forgotten him, so he steeled his resolve and prepared to move. He figured that he could take out several of the fuckers before they killed him. Tyler tried to lift his shoulder off the ground to reach for the weapon and pain once again became the only thing that he was aware of. He screamed in agony as the jagged end of his baseball bat slid out of his back with a wet, sucking sound.

  “Oh no you don’t, big guy,” the leader of the group said. “You know, we followed you and your friend because you looked like the men that Justin told us to be on the lookout for when this all began. What did you take from him that he wants so badly?”

  “Captain Sanders!” a man shouted from the depths of the building that they stood in.

  He turned away and said, “What?”

  “The little bitch must have gone out the back door. It’s wide open, but there’s no sight of her.”

  “Where’s she going, Mr. Baseball Player?”

  Even through the pain in his back, Tyler recognized the wrongness of his question immediately. He hadn’t told this man that he played baseball. Did he think that because of Tyler’s bat or was it because this “Justin” person knew what he looked like?

  “I… We didn’t have a plan besides waiting here until our friends got back.”

  “You expect me to believe that you’ve survived more than two months of this shit without making back-up plans? Tell me, where’s she headed off to?”

  “I promise, I—” A rifle butt landed hard against his face, cracking his nose, which filled his sinus cavity with blood.

  “Don’t lie to me!” the captain screamed. “Where was she going?”

  “We…” he stopped and used his swollen tongue to push a tooth out of his mouth. “No pwan, we wewe gonna wait hewe fow them,” he mumbled through his broken mouth.

  A heavy boot landed on his ribs and he instinctively curled to that side, sending more spasms of pain through his body as the gash in his back stretched wide. He used his splayed fingers to try and protect his head as the blows rained down from all around.

  He blacked out and the darkness mercifully swallowed him.

  *****

  Pain. It never ended, never lessened. There was only the constant pain of burning flesh and the maddening feeling of fluids dripping slowly down his body as boils burst, scabs tore and his own bodily functions betrayed him.

  Aeric hung suspended by his wrists, chains wrapped around them and kettlebell weights tied to his ankles to add to the mass of his own body. He’d been beaten and tortured by the Vultures. The most brutal and long-lasting of their tactics had been a simple set of chain links from a swing set that had been heated in a fire. They laid it across his body, burning him repeatedly, no place was spared from the torture. The crowd of people that seemed to constantly be present in the torture room had started calling him “Tracks” because of the crisscrossing chain burns across his body.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there, a few days, maybe a week. Time ran together and really held no meaning for him anymore. When he could muster the energy to contort his body, he could see that some of the boils on his skin had burst and scabbed over, while others still contained their fluid. The pain was excruciating and it was humiliating to swing naked in front of so many people, but at least he wasn’t dead. He thought about the things that they did to Coach Harris, and Katie’s betrayal. Aeric wished that he would die.

  Almost immediately after they’d set out from the building in north Austin, they’d been attacked by a large group of what appeared to be a mix of soldiers and civilians who were armed to the teeth. Although he’d considered fighting, his desire to keep Kate safe had stopped him from acting foolishly in the face of such overwhelming odds. Now he wished that he would have.

  They were beaten and taken to the State Capitol building, which was now the headquarters of the Vulture gang. Somehow, they’d made the leap from computer hackers to a powerful group of thugs who controlled the city. Aeric still hadn’t worked that part out. It had something to do with the food and drug supplies in the city.

  The leader of the group was a man named Justin. He said that he knew Aeric and his big friend were in the city and that Tyler would be joining them soon if he survived the attack. So far, Aeric hadn’t seen Tyler or his mother, so he hoped that the gang leader was just lying to him. He did see poor Coach Harris a few times, though.

  The first time he saw him, he noticed the man had lost a lot of weight, his skin hung off of him in saggy flaps. He was stretched across som
e type of wooden machine that held all of his limbs apart and there were gears that could be turned to stretch him further. As Aeric and Kate had been paraded around the room full of people in handcuffs, Justin told them that they intended to torture Aeric the same way for being one of the social rejects that worshiped at the altar of consumerism. They planned to keep them alive a long time so the crowds would stay entertained.

  Katie hadn’t even lasted the tour of the facilities before she was offering her services to Justin. The steady source of food and exercise on their long trip from Missouri had done wonders for her figure and even with a black eye and bloody lip, she was still the beautiful prom queen who knew how to work a crowd. Justin had her stripped naked and examined her body. The gang leader saw something in her that he liked and spared her the same fate as him. Now, almost every time Aeric saw Justin, Katie was at his side. Tyler’s belief that she would slip out on the first chance she got had come true and he felt like a fool for believing her.

  He’d thought that she really did love him and that she’d only acted the way she did in Springfield because she was trying to survive. Hell, that’s all that she was doing now. She was taking advantage of the situation to survive. He hated her for it. At the same time, he couldn’t blame her. She took the smart way out to avoid getting tortured simply for being around Aeric when he was captured. Becoming Justin’s whore was the part that made him the angriest. She willingly slept with the man who ordered his daily torture.

  When the torturing had first begun, he’d felt sorry for himself and cried out in pain until he passed out. Then, somewhere over the course of the sessions, he stopped feeling the pain. It no longer mattered to him. His best friend was dead, he was the last of his family, the woman he thought he loved had betrayed him and the people that he’d sworn to protect were all dead.

  Aeric Gaines was gone. In his place was Traxx, the wretched hunk of flesh that would never give the Vultures the satisfaction of hearing him scream again.

  ELEVEN

  The trip westward sucked. Julie’s legs still burned badly near the end of each day as she pedaled the bicycle, pulling the cart and little Kayla. For such a small child, she was a heavy little thing. After almost two weeks on the road alone, there wasn’t too much farther to go and she was ready for the trip to be over, one way or another.

  When the grenades had blown the front of the building apart in Austin, she’d been in the middle of feeding Kayla. The door had been on the opposite side of the room and both Mrs. Gaines and Tyler were laying on the floor bleeding. Before the dust settled, she made the split-second decision to grab Kayla and the bike. She tore through the building and unlocked the back door. They were racing away around the corner before the men even figured out where she’d gone.

  She knew that they had to get out of the city before she could really think about things. Tyler and Mrs. Gaines were either dead or just as good as dead in the hands of the people who’d attacked the shop, and Aeric and Katie were probably going to get ambushed when they came back. There was nothing that she could do, though, so she made her way onto the highway and ran.

  It was about an hour later when Kayla’s cries of hunger brought Julie back to herself and she stopped. The baby needed to be changed and fed, so she practiced the fieldcraft that she’d learned from Aeric and Tyler, hiding the bike up in the trees off the road before doing anything. Once there, they ate and she took stock of the supplies that had been in the cart when she took off.

  They had a lot of food and some water, both of the water purification systems, one sleeping bag and Aeric’s large backpack. Everything else had been in the other cart because of Kayla. Inside Aeric’s bag, there were changes of clothes, a map of Texas, a folding knife, a whole bunch of cigarettes, multiple calibers of ammunition and a pistol. Also inside was a worn out scrap of paper with Veronica Delgado’s address in San Angelo.

  After she fed and changed Kayla, she mapped out how to get from Austin to San Angelo and then took off once again. If Aeric and Kate hadn’t gotten ambushed, then they’d eventually make their way to San Angelo like they all planned to do originally and she’d meet up with them there. If they had been ambushed, then she hoped the citizens of the city would take her and the baby in.

  That had been two weeks ago. Two weeks of struggling to keep the larger bike upright and pull everything along. She’d passed a sign saying San Angelo was two miles away and she could see the few skyscrapers standing darkly against the overcast sky. Her legs pumped slowly, driving the bike up a slight rise in the highway. When she reached the top, the road stretched on below them for what seemed like miles, leading to the city.

  Less than two football fields away sat a checkpoint. It was situated on the reverse slope of the hill where she couldn’t see it until she’d topped the hill and exposed herself and Kayla. The people manning the checkpoint saw her and began moving behind barricades. She had the distinct feeling that guns were pointed in her direction and she sighed. There was nothing she could do about the city’s defenders. If they were ever going to be safe, they had to make it past the checkpoint and find this Veronica Delgado woman.

  Gravity carried the bike slowly down the hill to where the men and women waited for her. They called out for her to stop when she was about twenty feet from the barbed wire stretched across the road.

  “We ain’t taking no more stragglers,” a male yelled out and then quickly yelped when he was slapped by one of the women.

  “I’m going to come out there to meet you,” the same woman said. “Are you alone? Do you have any weapons?”

  Julie held up her hands and replied, “I have a pistol and a few knives. Nothing else.”

  The woman glanced behind her along the road and asked, “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah. My group got separated and the people I was with were killed.”

  She approached Julie warily. “No grenades or bombs or anything?”

  “Huh? No, of course not, lady!”

  “What’s in the cart?”

  Julie had wondered how to answer that question on the entire trip from Austin. She’d finally settled on a response. “My baby sister and some food.”

  The woman’s body language changed and the wariness seemed to go away. “Oh my God! You have a baby with you?”

  “She’s two, but yeah.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Julie turned around and said, “Kayla, this is Miss….”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. My name’s Shellie.”

  Julie smiled and said, “That’s was my mom’s name too! I’m Julie.”

  The woman stuck out her hand and shook Julie’s. “Nice to meet you, Julie.”

  Shellie bent knelt down to see Kayla and exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, isn’t she precious? Mind if I take her out?”

  “No, go ahead.” Julie watched the older woman bend down to unlatch the harness around Kayla’s shoulders. When she stood upright with the baby on her hip, she was smiling and looked like she’d lost ten years. Julie realized that the woman probably wasn’t that much older than her sister Katie had been when she’d died.

  “Hi, Kayla. My name is Shellie, just like your grandma.” She bounced the girl for a moment and then looked up at Julie. “My daughter was only a couple of weeks old when…when everything happened.” Shellie wiped away a line of tears and continued, “She didn’t make it. The water we were using for her formula was contaminated.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Julie said.

  “Oh, please, call me Shellie. I’m probably only six or seven years older than you. We buried her out in the city cemetery…” She trailed off for a moment and then refocused back on Julie. “Sorry. Anyways, you guys are welcome here in San Angelo, although you’ll probably have to get some sort of job—the mayor has everyone over the age of fifteen working across the city. That way we can try to keep ahead of the radiation, keep the population fed and defend what we’ve got against raiders.”

  “Yeah, we ran into some of those raid
ers in Austin.”

  “You’ve been to Austin? How long ago?” Shellie asked. “We’ve been looking for info about the group there called the Vultures.”

  Julie nodded her head. “Tyler and Aeric talked about the Vultures a lot. They’re the ones who set off the nuclear missiles.”

  “Huh? I thought they were a street gang, how’d they get nukes?

  Julie shrugged and replied, “They hacked into the computers and launched them is what I was told.”

  “Okay, you need to come with me to see the mayor.”

  “Wait,” Julie said as she reached across and took Kayla. “We’re here to meet a friend of ours. I need to meet up with her and see if the rest of my group arrived yet. Do you know Veronica Delgado?”

  Shellie shook her head. “No, there’s a hundred thousand people in San Angelo, or there was before the fighting. It took a few weeks for the mayor to reestablish control and a lot of people died during the panic after the missiles hit Dallas and Houston.”

  “I have her address.”

  The older woman held up her hand and said, “Wait a minute. Hey, Charlie, what’s the mayor’s daughter’s name?”

  The other defenders had abandoned their spots behind the barricades and sat around a table playing cards. One of the men—Charlie, Julie assumed—looked up and said, “I don’t know. Victoria, Veronica, something like that.”

  “Thanks,” she called and turned back to Julie. “Maybe your friend is Mayor Delgado’s daughter. He went to Austin to get her right after the nukes hit, which is why it took so long for him to get things back under control.”

  Julie jumped up and down. “That must be her! When Aeric and Tyler left Austin a few months ago, she told them that her father was on his way to get her.”