The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  Joseph seemed to consider his words for a moment and then stated, “When the time comes, I’ll take the shot.”

  Traxx smiled, “Nah, Joe. I appreciate it, but I’ve got to do it.”

  “I’m a much better shot than you. I’ve trained extensively with that rifle.”

  Aeric patted the 30.06 that Joseph had leaned against the side of an old air conditioning unit when they began talking. “I don’t know…you’ve never seen me shoot. Besides, you wouldn’t know who Kendrick is—hell, it’s been fifteen years, I might have a hard time figuring it out.”

  “Then point him out to me.”

  “See, here’s the part where we start talking about a plan. I don’t intend for this to be a suicide mission. If we both went to one spot and fired, they’d probably home in on us pretty quickly. If both of us are shooting—and moving—from different locations, then they won’t be able to mass on us, we’ll keep ‘em guessing where the shots are coming from.”

  Joseph nodded slowly in understanding. “So we’re splitting up, in a hostile city? Wasn’t the whole point of me coming with you to watch your back?”

  “It was. This strategy gives us a greater chance of survivability, though. We’ll disguise ourselves to infiltrate the city and get a feel for the place, then split up to go to our shooting positions. In two days, we’ll meet back here.”

  “Two days from now or two days after we spilt up?”

  “Good point,” Aeric acknowledged. “Two days after we split up. That’ll give us probably one day of shooting and one day of evading.”

  “What if we don’t see any targets? Do we still come back here?”

  “This would have been so much easier with a radio,” the older man muttered as he rubbed the scars across the bridge of his nose. “Okay, we’ll meet here in the evening of the second day after one of us shoots our weapon. It could be a week before we see anyone, though.”

  “Got it. That makes more sense.”

  They spent the remainder of the day hiding their bikes in the skeletal forest surrounding the campus and finding a defensible place to sleep. They settled on an outbuilding near the back side of the school grounds, which would allow them an easier escape than the roof of the high school if it came to that. Aeric took first watch while Joseph slept. He figured that he had a lot of thinking to do before he could go to sleep anyways.

  After all, he’d signed up to murder his son.

  *****

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t see you,” Aeric protested as the guard turned menacingly to see who’d bumped into him.

  “Do you know who I am?” the man, dressed in army-style camouflage pants and a grimy t-shirt with a green square sewn on the left side, asked.

  “Yes, sir. You’re one of them Vultures.”

  “What the hell happened to you?” The gang member pointed at Aeric’s face, “Looks like you got caught making love to a stove!” He laughed while his buddies congratulated him on what they thought was a witty comment.

  All of them wore the green square of cloth and it reminded Aeric of something that he’d seen before, but couldn’t quite remember where. As his mind clutched at the significance of the fabric, he had to abandon that line of thought and deal with the immediate situation in front of him. There’d be time to ponder the Vulture’s fashion choice later. “I was on the outskirts of San Antonio when it got bombed. Got trapped in a burning apartment,” he lied. “That’s why I can’t see so well, sir.”

  “Well get the fuck out of here, old man. I don’t have any food to give you.” He raised both his hands and “shooed” Traxx away like he was trying to scare away birds from a table. “Go on, before I change my mind.”

  Aeric dragged his leg behind him like he’d been doing for the last two blocks as he hurried away along the palace’s fence line. His hip hurt like hell from limping as a part of his disguise, but it was necessary. He’d been able to verify that the old state capitol was still the Vulture’s headquarters and now he had a place to focus his attention. Now all he needed to do was to link back up with Joseph and find a building that would allow him to fire down into the palace grounds when he saw Kendrick.

  He turned down a street that he remembered from his college days. Back then, it had been named San Jacinto Street or Boulevard, he couldn’t quite recall. Now, a sign hung from an old lamp post that said it was Murder Lane. “Cute,” he muttered, dragging his leg until a building blocked the palace guards from view. Then he walked normally back towards where he’d left Joseph in an alley with most of their weapons.

  Since coming into the city, he’d been surprised at how clean everything seemed to be compared to San Angelo. If he pretended that the war hadn’t happened, he could almost think that it was the Austin of old. There weren’t the large piles of trash that had littered the city the last time he was here and, thankfully, the bodies had been hauled away as well. He wondered if they’d gone through their own round of illnesses, like had happened at San Angelo, that forced them to change their ways.

  They’d taken the cleanliness to the extreme, which was a strange combination when you mixed it with the totalitarian rule of the Vultures. From the renamed streets to the furtive glances of residents as they passed by, it was clear that the people were repressed by the gang.

  The Vulture’s oppressive rule worked in Aeric and Joseph’s favor. Even though they were easily recognized as outsiders and carried their weapons openly, no alarms had been raised against them. If anything, the people seemed surprised by the two men, traveling through the city, not marked as Vultures, without a cart or wheelbarrow of some kind. The residents were curious about the two of them, but they continued their work and didn’t ask any questions of them.

  The children seemed to be the exception. Here, like in San Angelo, if a child was too young to work, they had the run of the streets. There were three of them in the alley with Joseph when Aeric returned.

  “Okay, you guys need to get out of here,” Joseph told the kids.

  “You gon’ try to steal our food?” one of them asked.

  The first child was quickly followed up by another, “You get caught stealin’ an they chop off you hands. Both of ‘em.”

  “Yeah, den dey beat ya to deaf for not workin’ on ya farm.”

  “We’re not going to steal anything,” Aeric muttered. “We got tired of living alone in the wasteland so we’re moving into the city.”

  “Sho, sho. How you get over da fence if you wasn’t sneakin’?”

  Aeric grinned, hoping that his disfigurement didn’t scare the children. “We want to set up our own place, without the Vulture’s help, so we climbed over.”

  The third child finally spoke, “You just don’t wanna get called up for the army. You must be a wimp if you don’t wanna fight.”

  He kept the grin plastered across his face as he said, “We’ve been fighting in the wasteland our whole lives. Maybe we will join the army. What are they putting an army together for?”

  “The boss man, he says it’s time to pay back for all the seeds and animals,” the third boy continued. “There’s some bad guys outside that want to come take our crops and murder everyone, so we gonna go stop them.”

  Aeric nodded his head solemnly, “Yeah, there are lots of bad guys outside the walls. When is the army going to go get those dirty murderers?”

  The boy shrugged, “Don’t know. My dad and both brothers are going to keep me and momma safe. I’d go if they let me.”

  “Believe me, kid, you’ll end up seeing war sooner than you expect. You shouldn’t wish for those sorts of things. Hey, do you guys know of an empty house where we could stay?”

  “What ‘bout one of dem on five-one ess tee? They’s a buncha empty ones over there.”

  “Five-one ess tee? Oh, do you mean Fifty-First Street?” Aeric asked.

  “Sure, whatever. You can stay there.”

  “We’ll go see about it then.” Aeric pretended to have a thought pop into his head, “Oh, hey! W
hat about one of these big tall buildings? Are there any rooms in there where we could stay?”

  The talkative boy of the bunch shook his head emphatically. “The boss man don’t let nobody live in those no more. Didn’t like people not havin’ a farm. Now they’re empty. Don’t try to live there, you’ll get arrested—or worse.”

  The grin reappeared on Aeric’s scarred face; that was exactly what he wanted to hear. “Thank you for the advice. I guess we’ll be going up to Fifty-First Street to see what’s available up there.”

  He motioned for Joseph to follow him as he turned towards the north and headed in the general direction that they’d been told housing was available. They continued their ruse for three blocks, making a few turns here and there to ensure that they weren’t being followed, before ducking down an alley and jogging back towards the shadows near one of the high-rises that overlooked the grounds of the Vultures’ headquarters.

  They hid until nightfall and then split up to go into the separate buildings like they’d planned when they were at the high school. Aeric watched Joseph walk casually into the night and then he used the wall to push himself up.

  “Ugh,” he grunted. “Geez, I’m getting too old to do this.”

  He thought about running towards the boarded-up entryway that they’d passed on the way into the alley and decided against it. It would be better to find the emergency exit door to see if he could get in that way. It was a long shot that he’d find an open way into the building except through the front.

  His hands trailed across the dry, dust-covered brick as he groped blindly for the opening. The few remaining high-rise buildings conspired to block out the moonlight from above, casting the entire alley into a deep, black shadow. He could barely see anything in the closeness of the alley.

  His fingers finally ran into a set of hinges. Aeric turned and faced the door so he could keep one hand on the hinge and search for the handle with the other. He cursed as his fingers rubbed against a jagged piece of metal sticking out where the handle should have been. He felt blood dripping from the ends of his fingers, but it was too dark to see how badly he’d been cut.

  More cautiously this time, he probed the area where the handle should have been. He felt the circular opening where the knob had been knocked off at some point in the past. The shard of metal that had stabbed him protruded from the door along the lower side of the opening, probably where the knob had ripped it away as it fell.

  Aeric slid his fingers into the top of the hole and tugged gently on the door. It didn’t budge. He cursed silently once more; there was no getting into the building from the alley. They’d purposefully made it so someone couldn’t sneak in that way. While he hadn’t expected it to be so easy, he’d allowed himself to become hopeful. Gotta stop doing that, he told himself. There was no reason to be hopeful about anything in Austin; he was probably going to die there.

  He crept down the alley, still trailing his hand along the wall, more to keep in contact with it and go in one direction than in hopes of finding another door. Ahead, the gray of the sidewalk pavement nearly glowed in the dark compared to the alleyway.

  When he neared the opening back to the main streets, he paused to listen. Nothing seemed out of place, so he peered cautiously around the corner of the building, first one way and then the other. Nothing moved along “Murder Lane” so he walked around the corner as casually as he could manage. There was no sense in drawing suspicion to himself by acting like he was trying to hide his movements.

  About halfway down the building, he came to the doors that led inside. They had a chain through the handles to keep people out, but the glass had long ago been smashed in, granting access to the lobby. Aeric checked his surroundings once again before he drew the large fighting knife from the sheath on his belt as he stepped through the door into the building.

  Darkness once again enveloped him like a shroud. He held the knife before him, letting the blade lead the way into the void. If he was attacked in the lobby, there would be almost nothing that he could do. He couldn’t see a thing. A moment of panic hit him; what if there was a demonbroc in the building? What if there was an entire nest of them? Not that it mattered. Even one of those fuckers was enough to kill an armed man in broad daylight. His chance of surviving something like that in the pitch black that surrounded him was exactly zero.

  He stumbled on something in the darkness and fell to the floor with a yelp. So much for being quiet, he thought. Thankfully, he’d kept his hold on the knife and had the presence of mind to throw his hands wide when he fell so he didn’t stab himself. Traxx felt around his ankles and discovered an old blanket wrapped around them. He’d gotten tripped up by a stupid blanket; he was definitely not going to be nominated for a hero of the year award, he told himself bitterly.

  Despite his fear of the darkness, the thought of some kind of superhero award made him grin. He was an old man who’d done a lot of ass-kicking in his life—even if he’d survived mostly by luck and by having good people around him. The only formalized training that he’d gone through was the hand-to-hand fighting classes and some marksmanship instruction with the Shooters. Most of his success had come from trial and error, figuring out what worked in their new world and what motivated people to perform the duties that he asked of them.

  And he’d asked himself to end this war before it started, so sitting around remembering the good old days wasn’t going to get the job done. He pushed himself up off of the floor and staggered blindly through the darkness. There was no way of telling where the stairs were. Some buildings had them tucked off in corners where they were out of the way for all the ritzy guests who used to stay there, while others were designed with simple functionality above anything else.

  The building that he’d chosen to be his sniper perch didn’t have any windows on the ground floor. He’d have to check every door that he came to in the darkness. It was convenient for his safety, but the gloom was a horrible choice for trying to get around. Without any type of ambient lighting, his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the pitch black and he was just as blind now as when he initially entered the lobby. He wished that he had a flashlight or a torch….

  Aeric slapped himself on the forehead in his mind. Of course! He had several lighters in his pack. He’d used them to start their cooking fires at night. There had always been an abundance of the damn things around. Even thirty-five years after the end of the world, they were everywhere. He shrugged out of his backpack and unzipped the top flap. The sound of something hard scraping against the floor in the darkness made him pause and stare blindly towards where he thought it had come from.

  He waited several seconds. When he didn’t hear anything else, he dismissed it as his mind playing tricks on him and jammed his hand into the pocket where his lighters were. He pulled one out and zipped the bag closed before slinging it up onto his shoulders once again.

  Light blossomed from the precious little tube of plastic, bathing the area around him in a soft orange glow. He stood, more or less, in the middle of a large hotel lobby. The furniture had long since been hauled away, whether for use as it was intended or for firewood, he’d never know. What he thought was a blanket was the fabric from a couch or chair, though, so he leaned towards the firewood explanation. Not much else remained in the small circle of light around him.

  Far across the open space, he saw three sets of eyes glittering brightly back towards him. The glow from the lighter’s flame reflected green in the darkness. He breathed a sigh of relief; green usually meant a dog or cat, both things that he could handle. If the eyes were red, he would have been worried. Rodents’ eyes reflected red in firelight and while the demonbroc wasn’t a rodent, their eyes shone red as well.

  Whatever the creatures were, they stared at him without making a move to run away or attack, so he decided to continue his search for the stairs. The lighter quickly got hot on his thumb and he had to release the button, plunging the lobby into darkness once more. He used the memory of the open space tha
t the light had showed him to navigate towards one of the walls as the lighter cooled. Once he got there, he turned towards the interior of the building and began walking along the wall until he came to a doorway.

  He struck the lighter and the dark blue and white pictogram of a male shone back at him. Aeric definitively did not want to go in there. Since the building was off-limits, the bathroom was likely used by street people or workers in an emergency. No one would have cleaned it in decades. Yeah, not a pretty picture.

  Aeric continued along the wall, stopping at each doorway he came across. Ladies’ restroom, supply, concierge, vending, finally he came to the doorway labeled stairs. He opened the door cautiously and examined the stairwell. Once he determined that it was safe, he began to climb.

  TWELVE

  “Ahh, what a lovely morning for a war,” Starr purred as she strapped a pistol belt around her slim waist.

  Kendrick smirked at her choice of wording. “Yes, it is. We’re going to wipe those clowns off the face of the earth and then the Vultures will rule all of the remaining parts of Texas.”

  She picked up one of her knives and then stopped. “How long did you say it was gonna take?”

  He sighed; the girl couldn’t remember details about anything to save her life. “It’s about 160 miles, so we’ll be there in a week.”

  “A week? That’s so far away!” She flopped dramatically onto the couch at the end of their bed. “Can’t we make them walk faster?”

  “Not if we want the army in any condition to fight when they get there,” Kendrick answered. “The tanks can’t go that fast either, their engines are cobbled together from the other vehicles and the fuel has so much stabilizer in it that it’s damn-near worthless. I think twenty, twenty-five miles a day is about right.”

  Starr held her knife out for him to see, waving it lazily in front of him. There were dried streaks of blood on the blade and he felt himself stiffen against the restraining fabric of his pants. “I need some entertainment then,” she stated. “We need to bring some of the inmates along. Maybe we could have a tournament or something each night, like a gladiator ring or a marksmanship competition where we start at the feet and work our way up to the head.”