The Age of Embers (Book 5): The Age of Defiance

by Schow, Ryan

  “Everyone knows you’re weak,” she said, not looking back. “You’re the most high-tech nation in the world. Everything is done for you, yet you still complain about all the petty things in life. You complain if your food isn’t cooked just right, if your delivery pizza is five minutes late, if your clothes aren’t pressed, and if some idiot takes a knee during the National Anthem on a field, on a court, or while standing on a winner’s box. You protest, and you blog your every thought like somehow this empowers you, but you can’t fight, you can’t hunt or farm, and most of you don’t have a single clue what it would be like to survive long term without power. You ask me if I know you’re weak? Statistically, you have no chance of survival without the multitude of services and accoutrements you were used to on a daily basis.”

  The sun beat down on his forehead and forearms. It was already hot. But hearing the ender of worlds lay out humanity’s vulnerabilities in but a few sentences made that brilliant warmth feel like a wash of fire.

  “Innovation meant we could leave the old world behind,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “It slipped away slowly and no one reveled in it. No one lamented its passing. It was simply gone. Thank you so much for bringing it back, Satan.”

  “You’re speaking out your ass,” she quipped, sarcastic.

  “You successfully erased a hundred and fifty years of progress, so don’t expect me to say ‘thank you’ anytime soon or want to sleep with you because you’re jacked into a hottie.”

  “Progress was your weakness, Carver. You know it, I know it. And decadence was your downfall. Yours was a society so evolved it had no grasp of the past,” she said, glancing back at him for a moment. “Well now the past is your present and your future, and not even guys like you will survive.”

  He didn’t like the look in her eye when she said this. It was the look of inevitability. The look of a predator knowing it’s killed its prey and is now just waiting for them to die.

  “Do you feel better about yourself after having created all this death?” he asked, not realizing he’d been speaking a little louder than intended.

  She stopped and said, “You’d better check the content of this conversation if you’re going to turn that mouth of yours into a bullhorn.”

  He reeled, slowing. “No one can hear us,” he said. “Look how far up they are.”

  They started walking again in total and complete silence. He smacked another bug, this one on his forearm. He flicked the corpse at her, but she wasn’t looking at him anymore.

  They were at the back of the group, trudging forward a step at a time, their feet dragging along the asphalt. Well, he was dragging his feet. Maria wasn’t. She was walking with grace, in spite of the discomfort she must feel. And One? She was off in Sally-Land, probably dreaming about dolls and Bundt cakes, maybe all the friends she once used to play with that were now dead and left to rot like her parents.

  “You’d better be sure no one can hear us,” Maria finally grumbled. They had been the last of the group to leave, and though they were told to keep some distance between them, the group was more spread out than Carver felt they should be. He picked up the pace. Maria and One kept up with him. They’d been given specific instructions not to get too close. He hadn’t forgotten that.

  The burly, bearded, very authoritative Marcus had said, “If there are road raiders, and if they’re armed, it would be easy to mow down a pack of us if we were walking side by side, or bunched together as a group.”

  Rider was in charge of determining the distances between them when they first started walking. From a little ways back, he looked like some sort of a hardened warrior: handsome, lots of ink on his body, a sense of both confidence and purpose about him. He had eyes like a hawk, a strong jaw, big biceps and a solid frame. When he got close and gave Carver, Maria and One their instructions, the man bore a steely look in his eye, like he’d smile and be nice and even exchange pleasantries with you, but if push came to shove he’d beat you to death with a shovel and not think twice. That was the kind of guy Rider was, and for some reason it put him at ease.

  Maria told Rider that Carver and One would be walking with her and that she’d secure the group’s six. He gave a stern nod, like he knew he could count on her. Whatever she did in their fight at Lone Mountain must have made an impression because guys like Rider don’t always trust pretty girls for anything. Certainly not someone who looked like Maria. The only thing Carver could think of was that Rider had seen her move. If he knew what she could do, then he’d know she was quick and lethal and able to hold her own. That would certainly inspire trust.

  With Maria, it was all about trust and illusion.

  Carver tried not to forget that, lest he one day be on the receiving end of a Maria-beat down. After Rider left them, Carver asked what happened when they went into Lone Mountain, how all the guys got the crap beat out of them while she remained unscathed. Maria merely waved off the question.

  Now there they were, in a group, part of something bigger than just the three of them. Maria had a delicate look to her, one she knew people would mistake. Her bones were not merely bones, though. She was not dainty. Or weak. Studying her in that moment, he couldn’t stop wondering what it was that made her so strong.

  Back at the Stanford lab, where Maria’s body had been laid out on the operating table, there were inked dots lining the skin all along the framework of her nude body. They’d injected her with some colored serum, the needle hitting every single dot, each injection point. There were dozens of them. What was in that serum?

  “I have to take a lady squat,” Maria blurted out.

  “And I have to pee,” One said, looking up at Carver.

  He glanced ahead at the barren asphalt road. They were twenty feet from everyone else. He wiped his brow, shaded his eyes from the sun and said, “Fine, just hurry.”

  “We weren’t asking for your permission,” Maria said. Taking Sally’s hand, she said, “C’mon, One.”

  One went over into a bush, pulled down her pants and peed. He looked away. She was done quickly. Maria, not so much.

  “If I smell that…” he said, turning away, holding his nose.

  “You’re not downwind,” she replied.

  “I feel like I am,” he complained. Then, impatient, he said, “Are you almost done?”

  “No,” she said with the hint of strain in her voice.

  He looked at One and she was looking up at him. She shrugged her shoulders and he was like, “Freaking hybrids these days.”

  She looked away, but Carver was back on the question—the one turning around in his mind. He finally got the courage to ask.

  “What is that coating on your bones?” he asked. “That’s what that was, right? Some kind of…I don’t know, high-tech liquid armor or something?”

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” Maria said.

  “You’re deflecting,” he replied.

  She didn’t say anything, so he turned around, thinking she was done. She wasn’t. Her pants and underwear were shoved down around her ankles and she was in the middle of a rolling brownout. Looking up, her face strained, she started to growl at him. For a second, he feared retaliation, but then he realized there was nothing she could do. When you’re crunching a grumpy, you don’t stop mid-session. Obviously. That didn’t stop her from looking like she was going to try.

  “Stand up now and you get poop in your underwear,” he warned her, “which means you chafe, and that’s not good for your butt cheeks or your thighs. You could get a nasty infection, and then you could go septic, which would kill you. You’d be the big bad Terminator who crapped herself to death. For realsies.”

  He said “for realsies” just to rattle her. He smiled, seeing that it worked.

  She rocked out the rest of the Lincoln logs, then pulled some toilet paper out of her pocket and wiped front to back while leveling him with the most ferocious stare. She then tossed the paper aside, stood and pulled up her pants and underwear. Walking toward him, h
er face neutral, he watched as some of the red heat drained from her cheeks.

  Uh-oh…

  He narrowed his eyes, wondered for a moment if she felt conscious about him watching her. How could she? She might know the meaning of the word embarrassment, but she certainly couldn’t feel it, could she? She was a biological animal with a computer for a mind, he reasoned. A slight smile broke over her face, the look contagious. He smiled in return right about the time she hit him with a slap that knocked him out.

  He started to come around. Something dry and sharp was pressing into his face. Something bumpy and hot. He cracked open an eye and saw dirt, weeds and a familiar pair of shoes in front of him. It took a moment for his mind to process everything, but when the gears finally caught, he knew he was looking at Maria’s feet. When he managed to spur life into his body, he struggled into a seated position and rubbed his jaw. Slowly moving it around, the teeth didn’t line up right. This had happened before. In karate.

  “You don’t get to watch me do that,” she finally said.

  “I wasn’t getting aroused by it if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said. “I honestly thought you were done.”

  “You saw my privates,” she said.

  He looked over at One, who seemed ambivalent to the entire exchange. Then he said, “I’ve seen them before. I watched you get made, you freak.”

  He looked up at her, dirt and tiny rocks still smashed into his cheek. He shaded his eyes from the sun, blinked three times fast to clear the dust.

  Still smiling, not warm or natural—more like a Stepford Wife smile—she said, “That’s right, you did.”

  She bent down and offered him a hand. He slapped it away and stood on his own.

  “You take a hit like a girl,” she said, looking at the place where he’d struck her. “I was hoping you’d be…stronger.”

  “You’re in for a lifetime of frustration if you think anyone in the human race will amount to anything before you.”

  “Is that a compliment?” she asked. “Because it sounded like a compliment.”

  “If I said your butt was nice, that would be a compliment. If I said you were pretty, or that I loved how I felt around you, or that you made life worth living, that would be a compliment.”

  “So you’re saying it’s not a compliment?”

  “You aren’t human, Maria, so none of what you do is impressive to me. You’re impressive, don’t get me wrong, but only because you cheated.”

  “You’re not human?” One asked.

  “Of course I am, sweetie,” she said, smiling. “Carver’s just got his tampon in sideways this morning.”

  “What’s a tampon?” she asked.

  “A cotton plug for your vagina,” Maria answered.

  Shaking his head in disgust, Carver said, “You’re smarter than all of us because you have a computer in your head. You’re faster than us because you had something injected into your body to…give you an advantage over humans, or whatever.”

  “Don’t say ‘or whatever,’” Maria snapped. “It makes you sound stupid, like someone trying to be trendy and ironic, not someone intelligent.”

  He brushed himself off, wobbling from the pain in his face.

  “All I ever wanted was to work hard, get laid occasionally, save up for retirement and get old with a wife and a dog,” Carver said. “Then you came and wiped your dirty feet all over my nice, clean dreams. Because you are a cheater. And a sadist.”

  “Why would you plug your vagina?” One asked.

  “Ask me that question in another six years,” Maria said, waving her off. Continuing, she said, “I am many things, Carver. If I knew what it felt like to be offended, I’m sure I would be feeling that way now.”

  “But you’re not human. You only think you could be human because this body allows you to feel,” he said, grabbing her face, giving it a squeeze.

  She shoved his hand off, not hard enough to break bones, but hard enough to let him know never to touch her again. He tried to hide the pain, but there was no such thing as a gentle touch with this monster. And yet to look at her through the naked eye, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

  It was falsification on an entirely different level, the physical embodiment of gaslighting.

  You see pretty on the surface, but deep down it’s all ugly.

  “You are abhorrent and foul, a blight on society,” he hissed, tired of this charade. “You hijacked this woman’s body, used her as a Trojan Horse to trick your way into humanity—”

  “I’m the next evolution of mankind,” she barked back, taking an aggressive step toward him. He knew what she could do, so he took the same sized step backward. “You should have some respect when you’re standing before me.”

  “I don’t respect cheaters,” he said, rubbing his jaw again. One stepped back from the two of them, an act by the child that wasn’t lost on either him or the beautiful monster.

  “Look at you,” she sneered, her eyes roving up and down his body with contempt. “You’re not even a man. You’re a soft-spined pansy that existed in a box of a room, sitting at a desk, watching a monitor all day. I bet if I checked your pants I’d find only one testicle, or maybe two really small ones.”

  “Let’s go, Sally,” Carver said to One. She looked concerned now, her little face perplexed, like she was seeing something different in Maria that she hadn’t seen before.

  “When was the last time you had sex?” she asked, walking after him, catching up only to stand in front of him and block his path. He looked past her, saw the crowd was far more than the prescribed twenty feet ahead of them now.

  “Does it even work anymore?” she asked, snapping her fingers in his face. “I mean, I finally saw some life in you when you saw this hairy mess I have going on down here.”

  “Humans aren’t shiny objects,” he said, not taking the bait. “We smudge, we stain, we tarnish. You’ll see.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “We’re getting too far behind, Maria,” he said, nodding toward the group.

  “Fine,” she said.

  They walked a little faster than usual, caught up to within twenty feet of the others, then walked until the sun went down. When they finally called it a night, Maria said, “You’re sleeping with me until I can trust you.”

  “Trust me to what?” he said, exhausted.

  “Until I can trust you to keep my secrets,” she said, low, conspiratorially.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  Earlier that day, if she’d punched him as opposed to slapping him, he’d already be dead. Reason would stand that she didn’t want him dead. But was he safe? He didn’t know. Either way, he decided he didn’t care. When he slept that night, when he closed his eyes to her and the night sky, he resigned himself to whatever fate was in store for him. Quietly, however, he hoped he would not wake in the morning. The way he felt, how his feet and legs were killing him, death was preferable to another day of walking. When he did wake that next morning, he found Maria had scooted up against him, and that she was resting her heavy body against his.

  Like everyone else, they got up with little fanfare, ate a small ration of food, then walked for the next eight hours off and on, keeping pace with the kids Maria had saved but seemed to not really have concern for now.

  Indigo eventually made her way back to them, her bow slung over her shoulder, her quiver of arrows full. “You three are awfully quiet back here,” she said, her eyes roving over the three of them.

  “Words are overrated for these times,” Maria replied without pretense.

  Indigo looked from Maria to him. The cold look he received chilled him to the core. “I decided I don’t like you,” she said.

  “I don’t even like myself most days,” he grumbled.

  “He’s too pretty, right?” Maria said.

  “No,” she replied. “I like pretty men, obviously. It’s just…you look like…I don’t know…”

  “I have the
worst case of hemorrhoids I’ve ever had, and this wretched slag hit me over a misunderstanding.” He pointed to the big bruise on the side of his face.

  She turned and looked at Maria.

  “You hit him?”

  “It was more of a cautionary slap,” she said. “I caught him watching me while I was peeing.”

  “Is that true?” Indigo asked, pinning Carver down with a contemptuous stare.

  “I thought she was done,” he said, sheepish. “It turned out she was doing number two and having a real go of it.”

  “A proper lady doesn’t go number two,” Maria said.

  “Not in the company of strangers,” Indigo replied. Then, looking at him, she said, “Are you a pervert?”

  He scoffed at the comment, then said, “Of course not. I just don’t think violence is the way to solve a problem.”

  “Violence is the way to solve all problems these days,” Indigo said, unblinking.

  This stilled him.

  “For real?” he asked.

  “There he goes again with that skinny jeans, caramel latte talk,” Maria retorted. “There’s no room for metrosexuals in this world, Carver. There will only be hardened warriors, capable men and women, and the anomalies. And I can tell you with absolute authority, no one will be saying things like, ‘for real’ or ‘whatever’ in the future. People like that will get their asses kicked by real men and women who converse like adults.”

  “The anomalies?” Indigo asked, perking up.

  “Yes,” Maria replied. “Those men and woman who defy logic. Those beasts whose actions cannot stand up to reason but have solid purpose. These are the anomalies. The people who will bear the scrutiny of others not out of judgment, but out of misunderstanding, and possibly even fear.”

  “Like you?” Indigo challenged.

  Smiling an empty smile, Maria said, “I’m just a normal girl in an abnormal world. I fit, even though I don’t. But you…”

  “Me, what?” Indigo said.

  “You could be the exception to the rule,” the lovely brown-skinned beauty replied. Indigo didn’t give anything away in her expression. Maria then said, “That’s a compliment, young lady. Carver and I were discussing the virtues of a well-timed compliment yesterday.”