The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  They reached the San Angelo Community Medical Center in less than ten minutes. Early on, it had been decided to consolidate the multiple clinics across the city to the one, centralized location. The much smaller population didn’t need more than one facility and the medical center, while older than some of the others, it fit the bill perfectly. It had everything that a society living without electricity would need.

  Aeric mumbled, “Thank you,” to his friend and rushed inside. Stacey, one of the clinic’s nurses, was in the hallway when he went inside. Gone were the days of a dedicated greeter sitting behind a desk performing administrative duties.

  Stacey knew Aeric well from all the injuries to the Gathering Squad and the occasional death of one of his people. “I’m so sorry, Traxx. We tried everything we could do.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Exam room three. Follow me.”

  She led him down the hallway to a small room. Inside, a standard hospital bed sat, forever positioned where it had been when the EMP struck. A body rested under a sheet. Aeric knew it was Kate.

  “I’ll go get Doc Huerta,” Stacey said as an excuse to give him a moment of privacy.

  He pulled the sheet aside. Kate’s blonde hair fell over the edge of the bed. Her face was swollen in the effort of childbirth and her lips were blue with the loss of blood. He brushed the hair away and touched her cheek. Her skin wasn’t cold like they used to show in the movies. Instead, it was the same temperature as the room her body had sat in for an untold number of hours.

  Aeric reached down and touched her stomach. It gave and jiggled slightly, no longer holding Justin’s baby that she’d carried since he raped her repeatedly. He wondered if the baby had survived the ordeal. Lorelei said that it was healthy, but her information was hours old. Kate had also been alive when she left for the Western Gate. There was no telling what had happened since then.

  The doctor cleared his throat behind Aeric and he turned to see the older man standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Traxx. There was nothing that I could do for her. We couldn’t stop bleeding after she gave birth to the baby.”

  “Is it… I mean, is the baby alright?” Aeric asked.

  “Yes. The boy weighs four pounds thirteen ounces. He’s small, but it looks like he’s a fighter. He would have been put into the ICU before all this,” the doctor gestured in a circle towards the ceiling. “Now the only thing we can do is to keep him warm, keep him fed with formula and make sure that he doesn’t get dehydrated. That’s about all we can do medically.”

  Aeric nodded dumbly. He hadn’t expected to become a single father and was at a loss. The only baby he’d ever held had been Tyler’s stepdaughter Kayla. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do all by himself.

  Sensing Aeric’s apprehension, the doctor continued, “There is one thing that we could try, from the homeopathic standpoint. Now, keep in mind, it’s not medical science, but there’s plenty of observational evidence to back up the treatment.”

  “What is it, doc?” he asked. Aeric would try just about anything that the doctor told him. Katie had been the one with all the experience and who’d read the books, he’d always just planned on picking it up as it went, supporting her when she needed it.

  Doc Huerta shrugged and said, “The best thing for the baby is to have skin-to-skin contact with a woman.”

  “Huh?”

  “It helps a baby feel comforted, nurtured. That’s extremely important for a newborn’s development. Contact with the father is encouraged, but babies respond better to a woman for some reason. Kate was able to do it last night until she died. One of the nurses agreed to hold the baby for a little while this morning. Do you know anyone who’d be willing to help you for at least a few weeks, preferably a couple of months, until the baby has grown beyond the danger point?”

  “I… Uh…” Aeric stammered. His world had changed once again. He’d adapted his life to the new reality of post-nuclear war America, but the rules had changed once again. His pregnant girlfriend had been dead for a few hours and the doctor was suggesting that he find another woman before she was even in the ground?

  “I know it’s difficult, Traxx. Your initial response is to mourn your loss. Your tears need to get cried out now, in this room, and then you’ve got to move on. That little boy needs his father to be there for him. You’ve got to learn how to compartmentalize your emotions and do what’s best for the baby.”

  Aeric had learned to become a master at compartmentalizing his feelings while the Vultures held him in captivity. Every day they’d visit some new horror upon him, a favorite being the heated swing set chains that gave him the scars of his namesake. They resembled crisscrossing railroad tracks over almost every inch of his body. After a few weeks of the repetitive torture, he was able to suppress his body’s desire to scream out in pain, vowing to deny his captors’ the pleasure they sought. Yes, he certainly knew how to compartmentalize his feelings.

  He thought about the doctor’s words. There was only one person who came to mind when he thought about a woman who could help him with the baby. Veronica Delgado had been there for him from the beginning, even before he knew Kate was still alive. She’d certainly made it clear to him often enough that she would welcome a physical relationship with him, but did that offer extend to caring for an infant?

  “I know someone, Doc. I’m not sure how she’ll feel about a baby, though.”

  The doctor smiled, “Then convince her. Your son needs this.”

  Aeric nodded slowly. Would she agree to be a stand-in mother for the boy, just for a few weeks?

  FOUR

  “Oh, so that’s who our great grandmother is,” Tanya exclaimed.

  Aiden took a drink of the ersatz tea that the family brewed from various plants in the region, including mint, which helped to hide the bitterness. “Yes, child. Aeric Traxx went to Veronica with his request to help him raise Kendrick—the baby. She accepted and they fell in love, eventually getting married and starting a family of their own. Five years after Aeric’s trip to find Ted Winston, my father was born.”

  “Did he live?”

  “My father? Of course!”

  Tanya nudged his shoulder gently. “No, silly! Did Ken… Sorry, I forgot his name already. Did the baby live?”

  The old man’s brows furrowed deeply as he scowled. “Yes. Kendrick survived. He wasn’t an imposing figure, like Aeric, but he was very strong like his real father had been and he was as smart as any prewar scientist. In fact, he apprenticed to Ted when he was only a teenager, learning the skills needed to become an engineer himself. The community accepted him, but he never quite fit in. He ran away when he was a teenager without telling anyone where he was going. Aeric searched the wastes for days without luck. They never found his body and assumed that he’d become the victim of some creature in the wasteland that drug him off to its lair.

  “He returned to San Angelo almost twenty years later,” Aiden continued solemnly. “Using his knowledge of the town’s defenses, he sabotaged the walls and led an attack that destroyed our city.”

  “Was that when Aeric moved here?”

  Aiden’s eyes glazed over as he stared off into the room behind the girl. “No, Aeric didn’t survive the battle for the city. It was… You know what? Let me tell you the entire story, it will make more sense for you that way. I was ten when San Angelo’s wall fell and the Vultures burned it to the ground.”

  “You lived there?” she asked.

  “Yes. It was a beautiful city. Most of the buildings were just the way they were before the war, not the ruins that the other places had become. Then, one day, the Vultures arrived and changed everything.”

  *****

  “Ah, my back is at it again,” Aeric protested as he stood up from the table pressing both hands into his lower back.

  “You’ve spent your entire life working hard for our family. I’m surprised that you haven’t already fallen apart,” Veronica chided while she walked up behind him and slid her hand
under his shirt. Her fingers curled playfully in the tangle of salt-and-pepper gray hair on his stomach. “You’ve got to take it easy, you’re not a young man anymore,”

  Aeric reached behind him and held her close while he turned gingerly to face her. “I’m still young,” he mumbled. “Go to the bedroom and I’ll show you!”

  She giggled like a teenager and snuggled into his embrace. Then the front door opened and their oldest son, Mason, came in.

  “Oh geez, are you two at it again? You have grandchildren for heaven’s sake.”

  “Good morning, son,” Aeric muttered forlornly as his wife separated from him, going over to embrace the man that their oldest child had become.

  “Morning, Dad. I thought we had an appointment to go inspect the walls this morning.”

  “We do. Just because we’re hugging each other doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Do you need me to come back in thirty minutes?”

  “Yes,” Aeric said.

  “No,” his wife overruled. “You two go out and make sure no more of those nasty animals get inside the perimeter.”

  The animals that she referred to were known as demonbrocs to the San Angelians. The first known sighting of one of them had been by Tyler Nordgren on the mission when they found the engineer, Ted Winston. He’d seen a large badger-like animal chasing a pack of dogs. The creatures had continued to mutate and evolve in the thirty-five years since then.

  Now, they more closely resembled some sick, twisted artist’s version of a hellspawn than what a badger looked like before the war. The radiation had been the catalyst for the mutations and then evolution took over to help the creatures become some of the meanest sonsabitches in the wastes. Lately, there’d been several incursions through the walls by the animals, and they’d killed a score of the city’s residents. No one knew how—or why—they were coming inside the walls. However, before they could go out into the wastes to investigate further, they needed to ensure that the walls were secure from any more incursions.

  “Fine,” Aeric said with a final peck on his wife’s cheek. Then he asked Mason, “How’s the ash today?”

  “It’s good. Sun’s already made an appearance.”

  The environment had slowly been making a comeback in the last twenty years. They were able to grow crops to sustain the five thousand remaining people in San Angelo. A rash of diseases had halved the population about a year after Kendrick was born. Then, malnutrition and a few other epidemics had further reduced the population over the years until the sun finally began to peek through the clouds of ash, allowing them to plant crops for food. There weren’t many people left anymore.

  “Good, the lighting will help us see if there are any holes or if the damn things are climbing the walls somehow.”

  “I know, Dad,” Mason replied. “You’ve taught me everything about wall maintenance.” He leaned in to kiss his mother as well and then headed back towards the front of the house.

  At thirty, Mason still acted like a teenager when he was around his father. Aeric snorted as he thought, Too bad the apocalypse couldn’t have taken away the snarky attitudes of young people. Mason had his own children for Christ’s sake; he should have been beyond the stage of not listening to his old man. Aeric had seen a lot of shit in his life and he needed to pass that information along to his family.

  Thinking of his grandkids made him smile. “How are Alex and Aiden doing this morning?” he asked as he put on a light jacket and strapped his old respirator to his belt. The masks were no longer used every day, but most people still kept them at hand in case a sand storm blew in. A storm could stir up the radioactive dust particles and nobody wanted to breathe in any more of that if they could help it.

  “They’re doing well. I think Aiden’s grown half a foot since you saw him the other day. Seriously, Dad, that kid is growing like a weed.”

  The older man slapped his hand on his son’s back, “Good! That means he’s getting enough nutrition. I hope we can all say that.”

  Mason turned and looked at Aeric, “How is Uncle Tyler doing? I haven’t heard anything in about a week.”

  “I was over there last night. He doesn’t have long, the damn cancer has consumed him. Nicole said that he hasn’t eaten anything in a few days.”

  “How’s she holding up?”

  “She’s devastated. That damn woman loves him—hell, maybe more than I do.” Aeric had never truly understood Tyler and Nicole’s relationship. Neither of them married and they’d lived together since Kendrick was born and Veronica moved into Aeric’s home. Tyler still professed to be gay, and as far as he knew, they’d never been more than friends who’d developed a strong bond. Whatever it was, it worked for them and they’d always seemed truly happy in one another’s company.

  Aeric didn’t know what Nicole was going to do now, though. She was fifty years old and had a lot of good years left if she stayed healthy, maybe she’d be able to find someone and possibly even start a family—which was something that the community sorely needed now that they were able to grow crops again. He just hoped that she didn’t lose herself to despair like so many others had before her.

  “I hope she’s able to cope with it,” Mason remarked. “Lord knows we don’t need any more suicides.”

  “Yeah…” Aeric trailed off, surprised at Mason’s insight. “Alright, Son, you ready to get out to the perimeter?”

  “Sure. Let’s get to it,” he sighed as they walked out the front door to their waiting bicycles.

  They rode slowly as the aging machines squeaked and rattled down the pitted asphalt roads. The city’s infrastructure was completely failing at this point. They spent most of their available manpower guarding the walls, reinforcing the walls according to Ted Winston’s designs or tending to the vegetables and livestock, leaving little time for maintenance. The roads had massive potholes that were filled with gravel from the early years of freezing and thawing. Aeric was thankful that they were in what used to be Texas instead of somewhere farther north where the ash cloud-induced climate change had surely hit hard.

  Besides the roads, the buildings were falling apart as well. The dust storms and acid rain early on had wreaked havoc on the non-brick houses that didn’t have siding, making those uninhabitable. The homes that remained were in need of repair beyond the paint that was available from the old hardware store. The ones that needed major structural repair were abandoned and marked for demolition, either to be used as additional material for the walls or chopped up and used in the cooking fires.

  The trip to the southern edge of the city’s wall took ten minutes at their leisurely pace. Over the years, the perimeter had decreased steadily; utilizing Ted’s engineering expertise to build stable and defendable walls that had withstood countless attacks from scavengers and raiders in the wastes. Aeric’s own stepson, Kendrick, had helped to build the current set before he was lost to the evils outside the walls. The boy’s death had been hard on the Traxx family, threatening to tear them apart as Aeric repeatedly exposed himself to the dangers of the wasteland beyond the walls looking for him. It never sat well with him that he didn’t find a trace of what happened to Kendrick. There should have been something.

  “Alright, which way, west or east?”

  Aeric focused on Mason and replied, “West. We’ll leave our bikes here so we can look closely. All of the other inspections have been done by mounted patrols, so if there’s something that they missed, we should see it. If we don’t find anything, we’ll be done by dinner.”

  His son dismounted and pulled the old chain lock from the basket behind his seat. He knelt and ran it through the tires and frame of both bicycles. Aeric was impressed, he’d half-expected him to complain about the walk. Maybe the last demonbroc kill only a few blocks from his home had changed his attitude about the duty.

  They walked the perimeter of San Angelo—now only about seven miles around—in a few hours. Aeric remembered when the massive city walls stretched for miles and miles, encircling most of
the old city. The huge decline in population meant that they could collapse their perimeter. They could still make it many times smaller if they wanted to move some of the infrastructure and force more people to move towards the old university buildings. It would mean that they’d need to rebuild the walls again, though; the population’s appetite wasn’t there to move them once more.

  The walls were intact. They didn’t find any holes or evidence of meddling on the inside. “Tomorrow, we’ll have to check outside to see if there’s a way they’re getting in from that side,” Aeric stated while Mason unlocked the bikes.

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. There’s got to be a way that they’re getting in. It must be over the top since we didn’t find any holes.”

  “Maybe there’s been some kind of damage to the walls and there are some jagged edges that they’re able to use as handholds to climb up,” Aeric suggested hopefully. They had to stop the damn things.

  Their uneventful day ended with Mason promising to bring the boys over to Aeric and Veronica’s house later that night. Aeric walked in to a house full of wonderful aromas. His wife sat in the kitchen reading a book. A large pot rested over a low fire.

  “Mmm,” Aeric said as he gave her a kiss. “That smells wonderful, what is it?”

  “We got our meat ration today, so I made stew with vegetables from our garden along with some oats from the community fields.”

  “Sounds good. Is it ready?”

  “Yes. I’ll fix you a bowl after you wash your hands.”

  Aeric chuckled at his wife’s statement. He’d been outside of their house, touching the fence, testing the wall that kept them safe, of course he’d wash his hands because of the radiation dust. But, raising three boys had instilled in her a lifelong need to ensure that everyone stayed clean—even Aeric.

  When he returned, she had a steaming bowl of the stew sitting on the table and a glass of water. Aeric noticed a few things floating inside the glass. She saw his stare and said, “The filter is just about shot. We need a new one.”