The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  “Wait here and cover me,” Aeric ordered as he shifted Joseph’s weight off of his shoulders and leaned him up against the gas pumps.

  He slid the carbine off his shoulder and pressed the stock deep into his shoulder with the barrel pointing slightly down in front of him like the Shooters had taught him. They called it the low-ready position. He could easily lift the barrel up and fire an aimed shot, which was much more sensible in a potential encounter than carrying the rifle at his side or on his shoulder. The damned spike in his hand felt odd against the pistol grip. He couldn’t risk removing it until he had a place to perform the minor surgery that it would require. They needed that gas station.

  Aeric stepped forward cautiously towards the gas station. The hole in the glass meant that the store had been raided at some point. He had no way of knowing if that was last week or if it had happened twenty years ago. The morning had lightened up enough that he could make out vague, indistinct shapes behind the grime-encrusted windows and he didn’t see any movement.

  He picked out his path among the refuse in the parking lot and stared hard at the space in front of him, watching for tripwires or any type of movement. He didn’t want to set off some paramilitary nut-job’s grenade booby-trap and end up maimed—or worse. As he walked, his mind drifted to the possibilities of how someone could have set up a trap, to defend themselves or to catch something for food. Lord knows they’d heard plenty of stories about cannibals in the wastes as the resources dwindled during those lean years where virtually nothing would grow.

  If he’d been setting the trap, he would have rigged it to blow the gasoline pumps as well. That way, he’d have been guaranteed to get most of the raiding party in the explosion. The rain of body parts wouldn’t have been a pretty sight. It was every man for himself first, then family and friends. Nobody else mattered.

  Glass crunched under his boot, shattering the early morning stillness. Aeric paused and waited for some type of reaction from inside the gas station. He waited for several seconds before finally continuing on. It was nerve-wracking to be outside the walls of San Angelo again. He’d done it often enough on the Gathering Squad as a young man, but hadn’t been on any type of clearing operation since Veronica’s father died and he became the mayor in his place. And he’d never cleared anyplace by himself before. Even immediately after the war, he always had Tyler right by his side or providing backup from a few feet away.

  His mind wandered again to his earlier thought that nobody else mattered. He still remembered those innocent days of his youth when he thought that human beings cared for each other. He’d even engaged in a debate that freshman semester at UT that mankind ultimately wanted the get along and become a community. One of his arguments had been that if mankind was so evil, as they were portrayed in movies and literature, then the first societies would have never been formed. He used to think that mankind ultimately was good and wanted to be together in some type of society.

  He still felt that way, to an extent, but he’d been wrong in his argument about the good intentions of humanity. People wanted to be together when there was enough food to go around. When there wasn’t, they were violent, petty and mean. The ancients knew how to farm, how to hunt and how to preserve food from going bad, the people that survived here in Texas did not know how to do any of that at first—and people died by the thousands.

  Aeric reached the door without incident. There hadn’t been any traps in the parking lot; now he had to contend with the door itself. An easy trick would have been to tie fishing line to the door handle and the other end to a grenade pin, then when he pulled the door open, the pin would come out, the spoon would fly and boom, no more Aeric Traxx.

  Then the logical part of his mind took over. The average American, even the average Texan, didn’t have grenades lying around. It was unlikely that they had anything like that. They could have set up some type of ram to come down from the ceiling into the doorway like in that movie with the alien headhunter in South America.

  Something like that would be fairly easy to set up and far more likely to happen than a grenade. Even so, he pulled gently on the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He pulled hard on the door and swung down to the side, crouching beside the brick exterior. If there was some kind of booby-trap the brick should keep him safe, he reasoned.

  No explosion rocked the morning and there wasn’t a giant wooden log smashed through the now-closed front door. There hadn’t been a trap after all. He stood and proceeded cautiously through the store, checking behind the counter and along each of the pilfered shelving units. Surprisingly, some things still sat on the shelves, including what looked like some canned food. He left things where they were so he could continue clearing the building. The back storeroom was dark and empty, cleaned out of most of the supplies like the front had been. The store was vacant and most of the useful stuff had been taken long ago. It would serve them well as a place to get cleaned up if the locals thought it was empty.

  Aeric walked rapidly across the parking lot to where Joseph stood. The man’s eyes fluttered against the exhaustion that blood loss and their escape had caused him. “Come on, buddy. The inside is clear and pretty clean. We’ll see what we can do to get you patched up.”

  Joseph’s exhaustion was apparent as all of his bodyweight slumped onto Aeric’s shoulders and his feet dragged awkwardly as they walked from the pumps to the store’s front door. Once they were inside, Aeric pulled him deeper into the store between the shelving units and began searching for a first aid kit. There was probably one in the back near the receiving door, so he went there first. It didn’t take him long to find the rusted white box strapped to the wall.

  The inside of the first aid kit still held bandages, their paper wrappers brittle with age. As a bonus, inside was a little brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide that he could use to help disinfect their wounds. There was nothing that he could do about the peroxide’s expiration date. It was more than thirty years past when the manufacturer recommended it being replaced. Oh well. They’d discovered over time that the medicines and canned goods were still usable long after the date stamped on their packaging. He hoped the same could be said about the bottle of disinfectant.

  “Okay, Joe. I’m back,” he said hoarsely. There was a lot of work to get done before he could get any rest.

  Joseph muttered something that he couldn’t understand. He knelt beside him and grasped his belt, reminding him of the time, long ago, when Veronica forced his clothes off of him and threw him in the shower after he’d killed his first man. He’d been covered in blood then as well. It seemed to happen much too often in his life.

  “This is gonna hurt, Joe,” he said while he unbuckled the belt and pulled the Shooter’s pants down. The scabs once again ripped away and blood began to trickle out. Joseph didn’t cry or attempt to fight him, making his job easier. Surprisingly, the peroxide still bubbled up as he poured it over the wound. It looked like the bullet had passed clean-through without hitting the bone. They were lucky.

  He finished cleaning Joseph’s wounds then used wadded up pieces of cloth, torn from a collection of old touristy t-shirts from the back room, and tape from the first aid kit to put a pressure dressing on the back and front of his leg where the entry and exit points were. Once Aeric was finished, Joseph turned over to sleep, leaving him to his thoughts and the task of doctoring his own hand.

  He held his hand up to examine it closely in the morning light. The thorn had entered through his palm and exited the back side of his hand before breaking off from the cactus or vine that it had grown from. It had been in his hand for more than an hour—probably closer to two—and while it throbbed, the intense pain had subsided. Aeric guess that his endorphins had suppressed the pain while he and Joseph fled for their lives across the lake and that thrill was gone now, leaving him feeling miserable.

  “This is gonna suck,” he muttered as he grasped the thorn.

  “Mmm?” Joseph mumbled.

  “Nothing, ju
st talking out loud to myself. Sorry. Go to sleep, Joe.”

  He made a mental note to be quieter and pulled the spike from his hand. The endorphins that had helped numb the pain apparently weren’t strong enough to deal with a large gaping hole in his hand. Pain exploded across his enflamed flesh and his entire hand felt like he’d stuck it into a fire.

  The wound, which was blocked by the thorn before, bled profusely. The older, darker blood that had been trapped mingled with new deep crimson to pour down on his lap. He cursed silently and leaned forward in an effort to keep from being covered in blood. There were creatures in the wastes that could smell blood from a long distance away and bring them running. The pain was intense, so decided to use the disinfectant while he was already in pain. He picked up the bottle with his uninjured hand and poured the liquid into the large hole in his palm.

  The white bubbles from the hydrogen peroxide turned rust brown immediately as the blood mingled with them and began to drip off onto the floor. Once the bubbles began to dissipate and turn red once again, he poured more of the peroxide on the wound. He did that a few times on his palm and the back of his hand until the bubbles stopped appearing. He remembered his mother telling him as a kid that once the bubbles went away, the injury was as clean as it could be at that moment so he put the bottle down and wrapped his hand in one of the old t-shirts.

  Once he’d exhausted his limited first aid capabilities, he grabbed one of the cans off the shelf and positioned himself so he could see the door while still being hidden from anyone observing from a distance. He pulled the can opener from his bag and then wiped the dust off the can.

  “Heh,” he grunted when he saw the contents of the can. It was the same gas station brand of ravioli that he and Tyler had survived on for the first week after they left Austin. He hadn’t touched the stuff since then. “Ain’t that a kick in the nuts.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Come on, Traxx! They’re getting closer. We’re not gonna make it.”

  Aeric gritted his teeth and pedaled harder. Sweat poured from his forehead and pooled along his lower back as he stood on the pedals, giving it everything he had. Up ahead, less than three miles away, the walls of San Angelo rose up out of the haze. While he couldn’t quite make out the Eastern Gate complex, he knew it was there—and they were in danger of being cut off from it.

  Aeric had been able to find a bicycle that had a pump for the nearly dry-rotted tires. A little more searching in the area around the gas station had yielded the mangled remains of two bodies, each with a single bullet hole in their head. The smaller of the two had a small hole in the back of the skull and a gaping vacant space on the front. That one had been shot in the back of the head. The second, larger skeleton, was the opposite and still clutched the rusted rifle that he’d used to take his own life. The two people had died beside a small grave that had a pile of rocks laid over the top to deter the scavengers that had eaten their bodies.

  Further investigation of the home confirmed his belief that it had been a family. Their home had been picked through by scavengers who’d left the old photos on the walls. The short bed in the child’s playroom sealed the scenario in Aeric’s mind. The child had died and the parents committed suicide—take that back, the father had shot the mother and then himself. It was a sad, often repeated event during those lean years after the war.

  He found an old Radio Flyer wagon in the carport and had been able to lash that to the bike’s frame. Bedding and old clothing from inside the family’s home went into the wagon for cushioning and he’d used that contraption to haul Joseph all the way back to San Angelo. It had been a long, tiring, and uneventful trip until this morning.

  The two of them were on a smaller, less-used road traveling almost due west towards the city. The main road from Austin went northwest to southeast and then split off west and north around the outside of the city’s walls. Aeric didn’t notice the dust as he pedaled, focused on the road in front of him, but Joseph saw the massive dust cloud of the Vulture army traveling on the main route behind them.

  The road the Vultures were on was much better than the one they traveled. Before the war, Farm Road Seven Sixty-Five had barely qualified as more than a two-lane track; years of disuse and lack of maintenance had turned it downright treacherous for Aeric and Joseph as they flew down the road. They didn’t have any choice. The city’s defensive protocol was clear. If sentries saw raiders of any kind, they were to lock the gates down and prepare to repel them. If they didn’t beat the army, which traveled on a better road, then they’d be permanently locked out until the fighting ended and the Vultures went back to Austin.

  He pedaled as hard as he could for a few minutes in silence and then threw his head to the side to check their progress. They’d pulled out in front of the slower-moving army. They must not have noticed Aeric and Joseph yet, otherwise he was sure that they would have surged forward with some type of response force. They had horses that could have easily run them down, but for some reason, the Vultures continued at their steady pace, which allowed him to pull away.

  “I…think…we’re…gonna make it,” Aeric panted. He was exhausted; the headlong flight had taken everything out of him.

  “I hope you’re right, Traxx. There’s no way that they haven’t seen us yet. You can bet if we don’t make it through those gates, we’re done for.”

  The thought of the gates slamming shut, locking them outside with the Vulture army caused Aeric to dig deeper into himself and push harder. They were less than a half a mile from the gates. That meant only two or three minutes more of the maximum effort and then he’d be able to stop to get some water.

  Two minutes. He could do anything for two minutes. He willed his legs to pump harder. Veronica was inside the walls. His sons, Mason, Anthony and John, their children, his grandchildren, Tyler and Nicole, Kayla and Lorelei; everyone that he knew and cared about lived in San Angelo. They had to make it back inside so he could be with them and defend his home alongside the Shooters and the other defenders like he’d done hundreds of times over the years. He’d failed to stop the attack; he couldn’t fail to be there with them for it as well.

  The gates loomed before him. They were closing. He heard Joseph shouting behind him and he glanced back, the Shooter was waving a small neon pink piece of fabric over his head. It was an old VS-17 panel that ground troops used to signal pilots back in the old world. Since they were virtually indestructible and folded up to the size of a deck of playing cards, the Shooters had adopted them as way of signaling each other from long distances to avoid accidentally shooting one another.

  Joseph’s signal worked. The gates stopped closing and Aeric heard the shouts of encouragement from the defenders. The cinderblock, brick and metal walls came and went as they raced through the gate. His chest hurt and his lungs heaved as he tried to catch his breath. The bike skidded to a halt a few feet beyond the walls and he heard the clang of the gates as they closed.

  His chest seized, spread pain across his left side. He vaguely heard the metal crossbeams inserted into place behind the gates. It sounded like he was underwater. Aeric was dimly aware of people thumping him on the back in congratulations before he collapsed.

  *****

  “Oh! He’s waking up,” Veronica said.

  Aeric blinked against the bright light and looked around blearily. He recognized the dresser and the useless ceiling fan above. He was in his bedroom and sunlight streamed in through the windows on the west side of the house. He didn’t remember going to his house. The last thing he remembered was making it through the gate and then pain. So much pain in his chest; it was more than from exhaustion or the exertion of their narrow escape, something had happened.

  Veronica leaned across him and held onto him. Her gentle shuddering told him that she was crying. He let her get it out and after a moment, she pushed herself up. She had red-rimmed eyes and her face was puffy from crying. He wondered how long she’d been at it. “How do you feel?” she asked.

&n
bsp; “Ugh,” he replied. “I feel like crap. What happened?”

  “You beat the Vulture army inside the walls and then collapsed,” Mason stated from the other side of the bed.

  He turned to see his oldest child grinning at him. Beside him, little Aiden reached out and grabbed Aeric’s shirt, using the fabric to pull himself up. “I’m glad that you’re okay, Grandad!” the little boy whimpered as he hugged Aeric.

  Aeric hugged him back, feeling like he’d been run over by a truck and then backed over again for good measure. “Thanks, little buddy. I’m alright, just tired.”

  He lolled his head over to the side and Veronica’s lovely face came into view. “Hey, baby,” Aeric muttered.

  She fell forward onto the bed beside him and hugged him around his grandson. “I was so worried about you, Aeric,” she sobbed.

  He hugged her back awkwardly and said, “It’ll take more than a bike ride to do me in.”

  Veronica pulled back and touched him lightly on his chest, “Aeric, you were writhing on the ground and clutching your chest. Then you stopped. We think you had a heart attack. If it hadn’t been for Joseph’s quick reaction in giving you CPR, then you probably would have died.”

  “A heart attack?” he asked. That must be why he felt like crap. He’d chalked it up to his bad back and the overwhelming exertion from trying to race the Vultures while hauling Joseph in a wagon behind the bike. “What about the Vultures?”

  “They’re sitting outside the walls,” Mason answered. “They’re outside of rifle range and they haven’t tried to attack; it’s like they’re sitting there waiting for something.”

  Aeric tried to sit up. His son placed a restraining hand across his chest. “Sorry, Dad. You’ve gotta get some rest.”

  “Bullshit, Mason. I have to oversee the defense of the city.”

  “Captain Griffith has it under control. You’re not in any shape to go anywhere. Mr. Winston and his engineers have done an outstanding job on those walls. The Vultures are gonna sit out there until they starve to death or go home because they aren’t getting through those walls.”