The Age of Hysteria: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (The Age of Embers Book 2)

by Ryan Schow

  Amber: PLEASE DELETE.

  Unavailable White Guy: U OFFERED ME SEX EARLIER. U LONELY

  Amber: YES BUT NOT FOR U

  Unavailable White Guy: WHY R U UP?

  Amber: NIGHT OWL. U ALONE?

  Unavailable White Guy: ON A BREAK FROM JILL, SO YES. WHY?

  Amber: PLEASE DELETE. NOT MEANT FOR YOU. TOLD U I’M GOOD WITH THREE DAYS.

  Unavailable White Guy: THEY’RE ACTUALLY GOOD PICS.

  She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Turning off her phone, she did another line of coke, then started channel surfing. By four o’clock she drifted off to sleep. At two the next afternoon, she woke up in a pile of her own vomit. Her parents would be so proud.

  That’s when it hit her, what she’d done.

  She found her phone, checked her text history, saw with absolute horror that she had indeed sent Rock three pictures.

  Collectively, the three photos left not one single thing to the imagination.

  Her heart hurt and she felt some pressure in her head, the same as always when she did more than two lines. As she stumbled around the room talking to herself, her phone rang. The phone said it was her friend Marissa in L.A. Marissa just landed her first sitcom, and she didn’t even have to do the casting director, so she was dizzy with delight.

  “What’s up girl?” Amber said.

  “You sound like hell,” Marissa replied. “Are you still in cow town?”

  “Yeah. Party for one please. Trust me when I say, it’s not as much fun as it sounds.”

  “Uh oh,” Marissa said.

  “I kitty pic’d the guy working on my car on accident. Even worse, he was a total jerk to me both before and after the pics.”

  “Ew!”

  “Yeah, but at least he wasn’t sleazy about it.”

  “Is he hot?” Marissa asked. “Or is he nasty like most of those regular guys?”

  “Google Pimp’d Out Rides. He’s the owner. Roque Dimas. Rock.”

  “He sounds hot.”

  “He is.”

  After a minute, she said, “Oh my God! I’m looking at him on his website right now. You sent the fullzies to him?”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me…”

  “What did he say?”

  “It’s what he didn’t say,” she told her friend.

  “Which is?”

  “Come over, let’s turn your party of one into a party for two.”

  “Oh baby, it’s alright. Last year I had this guy I was shamelessly throwing myself at, but he wouldn’t even look my way. Later some girl said she saw him kissing some other guy from the party, a guy no one knew was capable of being dickmatized.”

  Just then the phone rang over. The caller ID read: Unavailable White Guy.

  “Marissa, love, I’ve gotta go. It’s him. He’s calling me on the other line.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  She switched over and said, “Hi, Rock.” Her voice sounded so uncomfortable, so sad and so apologetic. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t even close to her!

  Yet there she was, sounding weak.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry about that. I meant to send those photos to a friend, but I guess I was not in a sober frame of mind to be sexting.”

  “It happens to the best of us. Listen, I just wanted to say we got the vinyl this morning, measured it out and it’s a perfect fit. We should be ready for post-drying tonight.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s really good. Leo will be working late for it to be ready, but by tomorrow morning, you should be able to pick it up.”

  “How early?”

  “Since I’m sleeping here, pretty much when I get up around six.”

  “Wait, you’re sleeping at your shop?”

  “Yeah. I thought I told you Jill and I are on a break.”

  “As in broken up but intending to work it out, or broken up and most likely getting back together?”

  “The latter, hopefully.”

  “Listen, I’m here alone in the city and you’re sleeping in a garage, why don’t we—whoa, hang on.” She stood and hurried to the large window, looking outside. “Something just flew by my window pretty low.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like a small plane or something. Oh, wow. There are a lot of them out there now. Is this usual?”

  “I’ll take a look after I get off the phone with you.”

  “What I was saying was, maybe if you’re hungry around the time I’m hungry we could have dinner together.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “Two lonely souls with no hidden agenda sharing a filet minion? And maybe a drink?” Then she added, “Nothing formal. It’s not a date or anything.”

  “No offense, but I don’t want to be seen with a movie star. Fame isn’t what it used to be and honestly, it detracts from the point.”

  “Which is?” she asked, trying not to be miffed that he was acting like this yet again.

  “That I do great work for the sake of great work. I could care less about fame or popularity or fortune.”

  “How very noble of you.”

  “I think so.”

  “I can not look like me, if you like. I mean, if you’re worried about that.”

  “Can you be unrecognizable?” he joked.

  “That is perhaps the single most offensive thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she replied, hurt and saddened at the same time.

  “Okay then. Let me explain it another way. I love my girlfriend even though she’s beyond difficult. She loves me even though I have my own set of demons. We are two wrongs that together make a right and if I’m photographed with you, it will hit the papers because the paparazzi is desperate for any kind of a scandal. When that gets to Jill, she’ll never let that go. It will always be a weapon she’ll use against me.”

  “Let me say this again, Small Time, this time for the cheap seats—”

  “Don’t call me Small Time,” he interrupted. “I didn’t call you Hollywood. Or any other names.”

  “Actually you did, but whatever. The point is, I will not look like me,” she replied, accentuating every single word. He took his sweet time thinking about it. When he refused to reply, she said, “Okay, Mr. Strong and Silent, if you show up and I look like me, I’ll order in. But trust me, I hate room service!”

  “Because of the room or the food?”

  “The food, of course!”

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “Eight o’clock.”

  “Oh, and Rock?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you dare pick me up in that archaic fire truck,” she said.

  He laughed and then hung up. Even worse, he was still laughing when the phone line went dead. She text him the room number, then made him promise again not to bring that four wheeled atrocity.

  He text her back: IF U INSIST.

  Amber: I DO. C U AT 8

  Amber went into the bathroom, turned on the shower then dropped the robe. If he wanted different, she could do different. And with that, she stepped in the shower to get ready for her first real date with a real person in like forever.

  Chapter Three

  Two days before the attack…

  Jareth Gates left the war behind a long time ago, but the war wouldn’t leave him alone. Lately, however, he found ways to cope, ways to let go. For whatever reason, the things he was doing were working to keep some of his psychosis at bay, even though he sometimes felt a bit isolated.

  He woke up in bed next to his wife (not alone) while listening to the cat slowly lick the empty metal bowl as a way of saying she wanted food (not alone). He got out of bed, went to the bathroom and looked at his eyes to see if he still had a soul (so far still there).

  From the bathroom, he listened to his wife snoring like a ripsaw. It was a hideous sound that was louder than hades, and irritating most nights, but it was also a reminder that he still had someone, that he hadn’t been forsaken just yet.

&
nbsp; From the dresser drawer, he removed his M9 Beretta, an exact duplicate of his former Army service pistol. He laid it out on a clean cloth and began field stripping the weapon as quickly and as quietly as he could. Ten times to settle his mind. With each reassembly, he did a function check, and with each successful dry fire, he felt the tension beginning to wane. When he put the weapon away, he took the single 9mm round from the top of his dresser and carried it with him.

  Back in the bathroom, he looked at his bevy of pills, felt fine enough that he decided he didn’t need to take them. After that, he went through his normal routine of getting ready for work. When he kissed his wife good-bye, the uproarious snoring stopped and a hand swept at his face, not to touch him but to push him away.

  Prudence wasn’t a good sleeper—she never was—but he reasoned that the day he left for work without giving her a kiss was the day he pretty much gave up on his marriage.

  For Jareth, work was janitorial services at 450 N Street in Sacramento, California. The California State Board of Equalization. The building was twenty-five stories tall with over eight-hundred and sixty-eight thousand square feet. He was responsible for maintaining only a small fraction of the building, but he’d been cleaning there since he returned from Iraq and, for the most part, it was his pride and joy, the place where he had purpose.

  But he never left home and went straight to work.

  He had a routine.

  At Specialty’s Café and Bakery, he grabbed two Pete’s coffees and a muffin for both himself and his colleague, a man who was living paycheck to paycheck with barely enough money to cover the bills. His colleague worked as a security guard and was probably the kindest man Jareth knew.

  “You’re not eating for two, I can see by your build,” the barista said to him.

  Her name was Jen and she had a smile that went on for days. Girls like Jen never had a problem talking with guys like Jareth. The age gap between them was far too great for her to worry about pretense, or even attraction. She was twenty-one if a day; he was forty-two, but felt ten years older than that.

  “The extra coffee and muffin is for Will Crabtree,” Jareth said. “He works with me over at the BOE a block from here.”

  “Have you guys been friends for a long time?” Jen asked.

  Jareth smiled, not sure what to make of the question. “I don’t really know him. But one day he said my coffee and muffin looked good, so I’ve been buying for us both ever since.”

  “That’s been, like, three years, hasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Going on four, actually.”

  “And you’re not friends?” she said with a curious smile.

  “I know a few things about him, but only from what I hear from others. I like to think of this as my good deed for the day.”

  Jen smiled even wider, then she told Jareth how sweet he was.

  As he waited for his coffee, his hand slid unconsciously into his front pocket. That’s where he kept the 9mm round he’d taken from home. He moved it effortlessly through his fingers, turning it end over end, rubbing his thumb on the case, the pad of his finger over the smooth tip of the bullet. He hooked a nail on the edge of the rim, then pressed down on the primer divot. Finally he turned it one last time then tucked it in his hand where he relished the security of it, and the message it held.

  If ever there was a reason for Jareth to smile, it was in holding that old 9mm round, a round so worn the rim had rubbed down, as well as the fine ridge along the bullet-side of the casing.

  Another barista gave him his coffees and muffins and bid him a good day. Smiling because he knew it was going to be great, he strolled down the 5th Street block over to N Street saying hello to strangers and breathing in the fresh morning air. In moments like those, Jareth found himself—the pre-war version of himself, the version that never needed to try so hard to enjoy the finer points of the day.

  With a soft breeze running like silk over his cheeks and through his thinning hair, he reminded himself the world was beautiful, filled with clean air and birdsong, and that he had purpose. When he got inside the BOE building, he handed Will his coffee and muffin, smiled when the man thanked him, then headed upstairs where his boss stopped him and asked that he come to his office.

  “Should I clock in first?” Jareth asked.

  “This will only take a moment,” Hendrix Pugh said. He sat down, then said, “Have a seat, Jareth.”

  The man was fourteen years his junior, a college educated fop who never saw a day of combat in his life. Jareth smiled at him and he smiled back, but Pugh was not someone he’d ever associate with outside the office. He was a weak man, always talking about his hair, his seven dollar lattes, the types of razors he bought to get the cleanest, smoothest shave.

  Jareth let kindness permeate his eyes, but in his mind he knew that if push came to shove, he could snap the man’s neck and leave him dead at his desk with his clean shave and his fancy clothes and not miss a wink of sleep.

  “What can I do for you this morning, Mr. Pugh?” Jareth asked.

  “How many times have I said this, Jareth? Call me Hendrix. Pugh is what people say when someone farts, but Hendrix…now that’s a rock star’s name.”

  He said this warmly, well-practiced with a cheesy grin, and Jareth smiled the same as he always did. It was a fake smile, for his boss was no rock star. He was more of a self-righteous popinjay, someone to be tolerated rather than liked.

  “Alright, Hendrix,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Slide your chair over here. I want you to see this, maybe help me understand something.”

  Jareth slid his chair around Mr. Pugh’s desk so he could better see the computer screen. It looked like Pugh had some sort of video surveillance queued up. To Jareth, his boss smelled like a traffic jam of scents, each competing to outdo the other: cologne, hairspray, aftershave. Jareth moved out of the scent-cloud a foot, focused his eyes on the screen. Pugh moved his cursor to the play button on the screen and clicked it.

  When he saw his boss turn to study his reaction, Jareth’s stomach dropped and his temperature spiked. The sick, swirling feeling tightened the knot forming in his chest, almost like a hand squeezing his heart to death.

  Jareth knew what this was: yesterday’s interaction with MaryAnn Armstrong. A blustering fool of a woman who made several complaints about him in the past for not cleaning out the used tampon box in the ladies room.

  If he told her once he told her a hundred times: the blood triggered bad memories in him. But he would never go into detail. MaryAnn, this self-righteous donkey who wasn’t even his boss, said he needed to do it because that was his job, but Jareth held out as long as he could. In the back of his mind, he was sure one day they would fire him for shirking his responsibilities.

  Is that day today?

  Pugh turned the monitor’s volume up and they listened to the same conversation, an exchange that wouldn’t stop playing in Jareth’s mind since he went home yesterday.

  “I swear to God, Janitor Man,” MaryAnn was saying in that sharp, debasing tone, “I didn’t get my degree and this job so I could come in and see some woman’s period blood turning brown because you won’t clean the box. Are you married? No, don’t answer that. I can see by the ring on your finger some poor, miserable soul felt bad enough for you to say yes. Does she have a period? Are you married to a man? You know this is a natural thing, don’t you, Mr. Janitor Man? Do you hate women? Is that it? Do you hate us for our periods?”

  Her voice was murder on his nerves—sharp fingernails down the longest chalkboard in history.

  “I have an aversion to blood, Mr. Pugh,” Jareth told his boss. “Not women.”

  “Hendrix,” he said. “Not Pugh.”

  “You’ve seen my file, yes?” Jareth asked.

  “I have,” Pugh replied. “Watch this part, Jareth. This is the part I’m concerned about.”

  Jareth drew a deep breath, his nostrils flared, that deep, deep tunneling feeling inside of himself gettin
g worse by the minute. He knew what was coming.

  It wasn’t good.

  Pugh opened the next clip and it was of Jareth losing it. From the edge of the screen he saw himself walk the white plastic bag into MaryAnn’s cubicle. She was doing her work, not even aware he’d come up behind her.

  Nightmares from the tampon and maxi-pad collection hit him. A sort of period blood PTSD. All those boxes he’d been afraid to empty were now collected in a single bag. It took him four hours. In collecting them, there was a lot of shaking and sweating, and a ton of anger, but Jareth had done it. He’d bagged the contents of every last box.

  What Jareth wouldn’t tell Mr. Pugh was what it took for him to do that. He’d known the second he saw all that red-stained cotton, what he was really going to see were flashbacks of his friends the day they’d been shelled in a warehouse in Fallujah. They were on the southeast side of the city clearing the industrial site when the RPG came through the window and blew the side of the building out. He’d been behind several of his buddies when the RPG hit. They were talking, but he was kneeling down petting a dog staked to one of the support beams. Jareth loved animals so much it saved him from death. But his friends? Because they didn’t care about the animal, because they dismissed it, they got it the worst.

  As he’d been collecting the sanitary napkins and all those little red mice (as Prudence had taken to calling them), Jareth stumbled and whimpered and suffered several gaps in time. When he was aware of things, he suffered flashes of violence, the phantom smells of smoke and the high pitched sounds of screaming.

  That was yesterday. He’d been trying to put those memories out of his head.

  Now this…

  Staring at the computer screen, Jareth fought the memories once more. The horrors came anyway, causing him to sweat and grip his chair. Were those sounds of gunfire coming from outside, or inside his head?

  When that rocket propelled grenade hit the warehouse back in Fallujah, after they’d neutralized the man firing off the RPGs, Jareth realized the dog had lived and had run off. With no mutt to save, he carried his CO out of the burning, smoking ruins. The man was dead, his insides all but hanging out of a giant hole in his stomach. The meaty smell of his innards were awful, but the gory sight was so much worse. When he set his commanding officer down, Jareth accidentally glanced into the open wound. He thought he might have seen the man’s spine.