The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  “I can clean it and get us a few more months out of it,” he answered.

  “Why not get a new one? Christy gets a new filter when hers goes bad.”

  He sighed. It was a debate that they’d had hundreds of times. “Veronica, we don’t have an unlimited supply of water filters. I’ll have to talk to Nicole about the rationing of non-replaceable items; Christy shouldn’t be getting a new one all the time.”

  “Aeric, you bust your ass for this town and nobody else except for our family seems to suffer from the programs that you’ve put into place to keep us going. Don’t you think that’s bullshit?”

  “I know, babe. The truth is, even without adhering strictly to the rationing program, by following even half of it, the community can sustain itself for a long time. Hopefully long enough for all the particulate matter to settle out of the water.”

  “Can’t Ted design a filtering system?” she asked.

  “He’s a mechanical engineer. He’s great with metal and steam powered things, not building water filters.” It was true. They’d been able to design all sorts of steam powered equipment, converting the old rusting hulks of tractor equipment into useable, self-powered backhoes and bulldozers. It had helped them clear the parts of the old city tremendously and aided in the rapid construction of the walls each time they’d collapsed the perimeter.

  “Well, there has to be something better than using blankets to filter out the filth. I just don’t know what it is.”

  Aeric ate his stew in silence for a moment while he thought about the requirement. Then, he said, “What if we use old screens?”

  “Huh?”

  “All those houses that we’ve torn down had window screens. What if we overlay a bunch of them together to help filter out the crap from the water over at the spigots? We could use that as an initial filter and then continue using the blankets and sheets to further filter it. Then, the water filters here at the house wouldn’t have to work as hard, so we could extend their life.”

  “That would help a little bit,” she admitted. “Right now, the blankets don’t last long before they’re gummed up and all that crap from the lake needs to be scraped away.”

  “Good, I’ll pass that on to the water folks. Maybe we can pick up some screens from the dumps when we go outside tomorrow.”

  “You’re going outside?”

  “Yeah. We didn’t find any breaches on the inside of the fence, so there must be some areas outside where the demonbrocs are able to climb up and over the wall.”

  Veronica grabbed his hand and squeezed tightly. “Be careful, Aeric. I’ve had terrible dreams lately.”

  “What kind of dreams?” he asked apprehensively.

  “About death and destruction…and fire.”

  “How long have you been having them?” It was an important question. Some of the younger people had begun to show signs of clairvoyance. Aeric was taken aback by his wife’s admission, though, because it was always in those who’d been born after the heavy radioactive fallout of the war, not in people who’d been an adult when the old world ended. There was one little girl named Maria who had shown up alone at the Western gate several months ago. They’d accepted her into the walls; there was no doubt that she had the Gift. It was scary.

  “About two weeks,” Veronica replied to his question.

  “Hmpf…that’s how long the demonbrocs have been getting inside the perimeter. Do you think that maybe you’re just worried about them—or is it something else?”

  “You mean like predicting the future?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Aeric replied in an attempt to ease his wife’s fears. “We’re facing extremely dangerous creatures that are getting inside our walls and have appeared all over the city. Maybe that’s causing you to have these nightmares. I’d hate to think of what else it could mean.”

  She thought about it for a moment before answering, pondering the implications behind her dreams. “You’re probably right about me having an overactive imagination,” she admitted. After a moment, Veronica continued, “I’m scared, Aeric. Scared of what it means if I do have a touch of the Gift and that these things have a chance of coming true. The things that I’ve been dreaming about are absolutely terrible. Life-altering things. Attacks by humans and creatures from the wastes. Total destruction of the city. Our people—the ones who survive at least—are spread to the corners of the earth.”

  Aeric thought about his wife’s statements, wondering what he could do. He didn’t know Maria, the girl with the Gift, well enough to know much about the aspects of her clairvoyance. Was Veronica experiencing the same thing or was it simply an overactive imagination after having lived through some terrible times? He’d heard that the little girl went into trances in the middle of conversations, which was supposedly how she ended up out on her own. The group that she’d been born into had freaked out and banished her with no supplies. It was a miracle that they hadn’t killed her outright.

  “I… Honestly, I don’t know what to say,” Aeric stammered “We’ve dedicated our lives to this place. We made it past those violent early years when we lived almost like hunter-gatherers from Neolithic times, killing each other for resources. Then the fallout cleared from the skies and the sickness helped to balance out the population in the city. I thought we were past the worst days now that we can grow crops again and produce enough food to sustain ourselves.”

  “We can produce enough food,” Veronica countered. “We have no idea what others can or can’t do. I mean, when was the last excursion beyond the city’s defensive perimeter?”

  Aeric thought back. It had to have been more than five years since the Gathering Squad went outside of the ten-mile San Angelo defense zone that they’d established around the city. The need to go beyond that had ceased once they’d developed arable land inside the city perimeter and procured enough goats through trading to have a viable breeding program. Veronica was right. They had no clue what was happening outside their little microcosm environment that they’d carved out for themselves in the west Texas wastes.

  He dragged his hand across his face and brought the spoon up to his mouth. The stew had gone cold, like the feeling of dread that had settled in his stomach. Finally, he answered his wife’s question, which felt more like an accusation than anything else. “It’s been years. The last big push we made outside of the area was to acquire the goats.”

  “God, it’s been that long? I thought maybe a year. Can you imagine what others have done if they had a smart engineer like Ted or an aggressive war leader like Tyler? Hell, what if they had a smart, caring and shrewdly calculating civil administrator like you? There could be other functioning societies like ours out there. Considering your experiences outside the walls, it’s not likely, but what if there are more like us? Or ones that have all those things, but are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way?”

  Again, she was right. He’d allowed himself to become so self-absorbed and secure behind the massive perimeter walls that Ted had designed that they didn’t know anything about the outside world anymore. It was a dangerous situation that they’d become complacent and he needed to change it. “I’ll speak to Lorelei tomorrow about preparing an exploratory excursion beyond the defense zone.”

  “Good—”

  Before she could say anything further, Aeric raced ahead and continued, “I need you to come with me tomorrow morning to speak to Maria. Maybe she’s seen something and hasn’t told anyone or they’ve ignored her because she’s a child.”

  His wife blanched. “Why do you need me to go with you?”

  “Because I need you to describe exactly what you’ve seen in your dreams. Maybe that will trigger her visions to start or something. I don’t know how it works.”

  “She scares me, Aeric.”

  “She’s a little girl, Veronica, how scary can she be?” His wife had interacted with Maria often at the soup kitchen, whereas he’d only seen her a few times during his incursions into the Barrio. In truth
, he wasn’t entirely sure that he could pick her out of a crowd of children.

  Veronica Traxx sighed and placed her hands on the table, splaying her fingers wide. She examined them intently, replying without looking up, “You’ll see. All of the kids with the Gift are a little off because of their visions, but she’s…different. Sometimes the things that come out of her mouth are downright frightening. I don’t want people to look at me like they do her. I don’t want people to call me a freak and hide their children like they do with her.”

  *****

  The city of San Angelo had fallen into disrepair, leaving the residents to fight a constant battle to keep their homes from collapsing. The parts of the city where few people lived were understandably worse off than other areas. The neighborhood that Veronica, Aeric and a young Shooter named Joseph found themselves entering the morning after Traxx decided to talk to the little girl with the Gift of future sight was known as the Barrio. The multiple contractions of the perimeter had inevitably left people homeless as the city shrunk inwards towards the larger concrete structures downtown. The homeless had successfully found homes in the first move after the big flu epidemic had killed off all those people, then when the walls were moved inward once more, less of them found homes, deciding to live in old commercial buildings. Finally, the third move had created the Barrio, a slum within the deteriorating city of San Angelo where the town’s less than desirable population chose to live.

  Veronica hadn’t ever been to the Barrio before. She was scared. She dealt with everyone in the city on a daily basis in the relative safety of the soup kitchen, not in their own neighborhoods. Parts of San Angelo—like the Barrio—were unofficially off-limits to non-residents except for the police force and the specialized troops like Captain Lorelei Griffith’s Shooters. Even Aeric confessed to her that he only went into the Barrio once every couple of months when he took the census to ensure that everyone had a job and worked towards the city’s common good.

  An old grocery store supposedly boasted a population of three hundred people, living in carefully portioned off pieces of real estate inside the building. Allegedly the large shelves helped to further subdivide the place. Murders and rapes were common in the Barrio. If it didn’t happen to you or your family, though, nobody would talk to the police. It was a depressing way of life, brought on partially by the conditions after the war, but mostly because those types of people chose to live together in such a small area.

  Veronica relied on her husband’s limited knowledge of the neighborhood to find Maria. It had been a few days since she’d last seen her at the soup kitchen. The girl was probably nine or ten years old and skinny as a rail. Most people these days were thin anyways, but she was excessively so, almost like her body was eating itself.

  The road they followed through the filth and wreckage was more of a path cleared of debris than an actual road. They traveled several blocks until it terminated at a large pile of rubble that might have been a house at one time. “This is the boundary for the Barrio,” Aeric stated.

  “Wait, I thought we were in the Barrio already,” Veronica said, holding up her hand and gesturing to the detritus around them.

  Aeric glanced at Joseph, who shook his head. “Not really. Joe spent the last few years of his childhood here before joining the Shooters. We were on the outskirts, the Barrio is a three-block square that’s been claimed by the residents. The main structure is the grocery store and then there are lots of little cinder block structures that used to be gas stations, fast food restaurants and hair salons. Now that’s where the people live.”

  Veronica stared at the young man who’d been with them from the start of their journey to find Maria. She hadn’t known anything about him other than the fact that Aeric vouched for him. “What’s it like growing up in there?” she asked.

  He cleared his throat before answering. “You don’t really know any different when you live there. We moved in about eight years ago when our old home fell outside the new city walls. It was either go to a place where you could have shelter from the elements inside the walls or take our chances out in the wastes. My dad chose to keep us inside. It’s not all that bad, just like living in the barracks, except it’s really dirty.”

  “Hmm,” she muttered. “That’s a good way of thinking about it. Why don’t the residents clean it up?”

  “The Barrio is different than any other part of the city. We have our own rules and ways of doing things. It suits most of the residents, so we’re good.”

  Veronica wondered what he meant. With the help of the city council, Aeric—and her father before him—set the laws for the city. She thought those were established and followed by everyone, not that some community made its own rules. Her husband always acted strangely when the topic of the Barrio was brought up and had been pretty vague so far today about the neighborhood. She’d chalked it up to one of those things that you had to see to believe and had gone with the flow, so far. Now, her patience was nearing its end. “Why couldn’t we have just told Maria to come meet with us somewhere else?”

  “It’s not that big of a place,” Joseph answered. “But if someone doesn’t want to be found, you’ll never find them inside the Barrio.”

  “Huh?”

  “What he means is that if Maria isn’t interested in talking to us, then she’d disappear,” Aeric answered. “If I’d led the life that she has, I wouldn’t go with strangers either. You’re our way of meeting with her. She knows you from the soup kitchen so hopefully she’ll decide to talk to us.”

  Veronica accepted the explanation. Besides the few years that she spent in Austin where she met Aeric, she’d lived her entire life in San Angelo. Admittedly, the world was entirely different than when she was a child, but she didn’t know that places like the Barrio could exist here. “Alright, fine. Let’s get this over with.”

  In a rare display of deference, Aeric looked to Joseph for approval. The Shooter nodded and said, “It’s morning, so most people are at their jobs. We’ll have to watch out for the kids, though. There are a few street gangs that run the place while the adults aren’t around. Most of the time, they’re harmless and just want to be recognized as equals to anyone who enters. To get their attention, though, we may have to kill one of them.”

  Veronica looked at him in shock. “What?”

  “If you kill one of ‘em, that usually shuts them up and they scurry off to their holes,” Joseph said with a shrug of his shoulders.

  She turned to her husband, “Aeric, what’s he talking about?”

  He held up his hands at waist level and patted downwards. “We’re not going to kill anyone.”

  After thirty years together, she knew her husband intimately and the daggers of warning that his stare sent towards Joseph meant that they’d talked about this beforehand. He knew about the killing of street children and kept it from her. It was unconscionable that he’d allow murders to happen inside the city walls without sending the police force in to put an end to it.

  “The Barrio is…different,” Aeric stated. “They are forced to do things that we don’t like, and quite frankly, sometimes don’t even understand.”

  “Then get some of Ted’s equipment and bulldoze the walls!” she exclaimed while pointing angrily at the barricade. “Increase the police presence, provide incentive to the residents to follow the established rules of our society, educate the children about what’s acceptable in a civilized city….”

  “We’ve tried,” Aeric replied. “They keep coming back. The best thing that we’ve found so far is to let them have their semi-autonomous neighborhood. They all contribute to the defense of the city and work in their jobs like everyone else. This is one of those things that we just have to let go. Trust me, Veronica.”

  She glanced back to Joseph, who nodded. “It works. It’s what we—what they—want,” he corrected himself. “There’s enough opportunity to leave if someone chooses to leave. Nobody is forcing them to stay.”

  It went against everythi
ng she’d allowed herself to believe about her city. She thought that out of all the death and destruction, they stood separate and apart from it all, the proverbial shining beacon of society in a post-nuclear war world. Her perceptions had been false. Of all people, her husband had helped to perpetrate the myth. What was real and what was an intricate lie to keep the masses in check, she wondered.

  FIVE

  They left the path that they’d followed and trailed behind Joseph. He led the way around the perimeter of the Barrio until they came to an opening in the pile of garbage. Two kids, Veronica thought they were no older than thirteen, guarded the entrance with spears made out of old copper plumbing and kitchen knives. If their weapons hadn’t looked so threatening, she’d have laughed at the absurdity of the children pretending to be soldiers.

  “What you want, Joe?” the larger of the two asked. He ducked his head and acknowledged Aeric’s presence. “Traxx.”

  “We’re here to see Maria,” the Shooter answered.

  “She not here. You give ammo, you maybe see her,” he said, holding out his grubby hand.

  Veronica wondered about the pattern of the boy’s speech. She hadn’t ever picked up on the children at the soup kitchen talking like the boy at the entrance to the Barrio. Then again, she’d never seen either of these two before. She wondered if they didn’t go to the daily communal meals that helped to cement the San Angelians together. At the very least, she should have seen them getting food to bring back here.

  “I don’t have any ammo to give you except for a bullet in the brain, Fish. Where is Maria?” Joe asked menacingly.

  The boy sniffed and then rubbed the snot that dripped from his nose with his palm. “Don’t gotta be fuckin’ asshole, Joe. We tryin’ to get more bullets for protection.”

  “We don’t have time for it. Which rat hole is she staying in today?”

  “No rats left. We ate them all,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  Veronica’s mouth opened to protest that even in the darkest of days, she’d never served rat in the kitchen. She snapped it shut quickly when Aeric’s hand gripped her wrist. He shook his head slightly, telling her to keep quiet.