The Age of Embers (Book 4): The Age of Exodus

by Schow, Ryan

  “Constanza isn’t eating, and twice now she’s thrown up,” Adeline says. She’s got heavy eyes and an unmistakable air of trepidation. I can see this by firelight and it has me concerned. “And I’m pretty sure she has a fever.”

  Constanza is thirteen years old, quiet and withdrawn. Her eyes show constant pain. I didn’t know this was from sickness. She wasn’t coughing, sneezing, or crying. She wasn’t throwing up or having a hard time sleeping. The migrant child simply had a hard run of things. At least, that’s what I thought.

  “What are her symptoms?” I ask.

  “She has all the signs of a flu,” Adeline says. “Do we have anymore ibuprofen? Because if we don’t, we need to find some antibiotics as quickly as possible.”

  The last time I took a good look at the thirteen year old was when we were loading everyone on the bus. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, pants, shoes. She didn’t look happy, but she wasn’t sad either. How did we miss this? Who else might be sick?

  “Did you say we have antibiotics?” Morgan asks, having just stepped off the bus.

  “No, I didn’t,” Adeline answers. “I said we need to get some.”

  “I’m really worried about her,” Morgan replies. “But also, we don’t need her getting the others sick.”

  “That’s what I was talking to Fire about,” Adeline says.

  “Should we quarantine her?” I ask.

  “Where?” Morgan says.

  “We could make room on the back of the trailer if we shift a few things around,” I say. “And whatever we take off the trailer, we can stow in the back of the bus.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Morgan says. “In the meantime, she’s running hot and I can tell she uncomfortable, even if she won’t say so.”

  Morgan seems like the kind of woman who needs a task. She’s been despondent ever since we met her, rightfully so, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to pull through it anytime soon and this is concerning. But having these kids to care for? Maybe this will help. Now maybe her maternal intuition will overtake her enough to give her heart a break.

  That night, Adeline and I sleep out under the stars.

  It’s not comfortable.

  Because I am who I am with Adeline, I give her most of my yoga mat. I want her to sleep. Thankfully she manages to drift off. Her steady breathing gives me something to listen to, something comforting to nurture me in these hard, horrible times. It’s not much, but everything counts, right?

  Our vehicles are half circled around us for protection. We’ve all made camp in the middle of the street and everyone has fallen asleep but me. I’m just laying here on the asphalt, drifting in and out, listening past my wife and the crackling fire to the far off howls of coyotes and the chittering of other, smaller things. The fire is keeping the wildlife at bay, which is why I feel comfortable just staring at the rig as it burns.

  The flames are mesmerizing.

  When we set the truck on fire, we decided it was best to blow the fuel tank since none of our vehicles ran on diesel.

  I tore the dead trucker’s shirtsleeve off, trying hard not to vomit from the rotting smell of death. Draven soaked it in gasoline and stuffed it in the fuel tank. No one volunteered to light the shirt. Finally we drew for the shortest stick. Xavier had the winning pull, but he wasn’t all that upset about putting his life on the line.

  He’d lost everything but us anyway. And we weren’t even that close before all this.

  What I mean to say is, if he caught fire and burned to death setting the truck ablaze, he’d probably feel relieved to be leaving this world behind.

  So he lit the soaked sleeve and ran.

  The explosion was not as spectacular as we’d imagined it would be. Then again, we didn’t know how much fuel was in the tank either. As for the ten gallons we poured all over the truck, it caught fire quickly and eventually died down to what it was: a slow, steady burn. From where we are now, the fire continues to ward off the evening chill.

  Too quickly, however, the sun breaks over the horizon and daylight washes over us. I wake with a groan, nothing feeling that great, especially my back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DAY 5…

  Constanza stumbles off the back of the trailer, falls to her hands and knees and vomits. Morgan holds her hair back, the girl’s sickness having worsened overnight. When she’s done, the poor thing is crying, sweating, writhing slowly but painfully in her body. She lowers herself to her stomach, slowly turns over on her side.

  The crying stops, but her eyes are rimmed red, her gaze becomes distant, and her hands ball into tight little fists that loosen back up and start to shake with tremors. She keeps swallowing, almost like she has something in her throat.

  Each time looks more painful than the last.

  Eliana speaks to her in Spanish. She asks about her throat, how it feels, if it hurts. The child says her armpits hurt, that her neck hurts. Eliana unbuttons her shirt two buttons, pulls it aside. There is bruising and a few small, black lesions on her skin.

  I turn away.

  Dread unfurls in my gut, the implications of this beyond upsetting. We’ve only just started this journey. I force myself to look back, to at least see what we’re dealing with here.

  “What is that?” I finally ask Eliana.

  She pulls the girl’s shirt up, enough to see her armpits. Her skin has lots of little bumps on it, but her armpits…they’re bruised and clearly swollen. In some places it almost looks like there are small marbles under the skin. At this point, even I know we need to poke them to see if they are boils or cysts.

  “Have you had anything like this before?” Eliana asks the girl. She nods her head. “What did you do for it?”

  “Medicine,” she says.

  “Did you bring any with you when you came here?” she asks.

  She shakes her head, then whispers, “I did not come here willingly. Do we have any headache medicine?”

  “We’ll look for some right away,” I tell her. “Does your head hurt?”

  She nods, one of her eyelids dipping against the pain. Leaving the two of them, I walk over to the truck and trailer. The trailer is burnt down to the frame, the tires melted to the pavement. Xavier and Ice are already looking things over, talking amongst themselves. For whatever reason, Xavier has the axe we procured back in Chicago.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “We need to see if we can release the trailer from the rig,” Xavier says. “Ice is going to jack down the landing gear so we don’t wreck our backs trying to uncouple this thing.”

  “You sound like you’ve done this before,” I tell Xavier.

  “He hasn’t, but I have,” Ice says. “We stole a cocaine shipment this way back in Mexico. Well, not by burning the rig. We hijacked its load. We basically put the drivers in the back of the trailer, uncoupled it from their rig and coupled it to ours. When we emptied the coke into a warehouse, we left the trailer out in the dessert, locked.”

  “What about the guys inside?” Xavier asks.

  “I left them in the heat to cook to death,” he says. I just look at him. The weight of the air between us is so heavy you can practically weigh it on a scale.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” Ice finally says, pulling the jack handle out of the side of the landing gear and cranking it down.

  “How many of them were there?” Xavier asks, shading his eyes from the early morning sun.

  “Two plus a gunman. We killed the gunman, but the others were alive when we left them.”

  “Very saintly of you,” Xavier says.

  “In case my brother hasn’t told you,” Ice says over his shoulder, “after my wife and kids were slaughtered in the street like animals, after my brother Rock shot me and left me for dead, I went to Juarez and found my way into the cartels working as a hitman. I did not represent one cartel or another, but I killed men and vicious women from all cartels. I killed as many of them as I could. They did not know my face, only a name and my reputation. I
cut through their ranks with brutality and efficiency, and it felt good. Fulfilling. So if you expect me to feel bad about who I am and what I did, I don’t. Judge me all you want, but you haven’t walked in my shoes.”

  “So you were a paid assassin?” he asks. “For real?”

  “Yes, Xavier. For real. The only thing that made it fulfilling was knowing these monsters were the scourge of society and would never live to hurt another person again.”

  “And that helped you sleep at night?” Xavier asks, but not like he’s going to hold it against him.

  “They were the crap under the heel of society and whatever death I gave them, however brutal and unforgiveable, the world has been better without them.”

  As Ice is saying this, he’s cranking the landing gear down. When it touches ground, he reverses direction and wheels it back up half an inch, leaving a bit of air between the gear and the ground.

  “We’ll float the gear just enough to spare our backs,” he says, a thin sheen of sweat mapping his brow.

  He crawls over the blackened steel frame, steps down into the piles of ash.

  “We need to hit the release handle to unlock the locking jaw,” Ice instructs, “or we won’t have any chance of breaking the kingpin. Can you hand me that axe, X?”

  He does.

  “What do you hope to do with that?” I ask.

  “I already told you. I’m going to try to break the kingpin. We need the trailer to uncouple sideways, through force. There’s no room to slide it backwards, like we’d normally do. If it works, we’re getting through. If not, I’m going to be pissed.”

  “It’s lodged in here pretty tight,” I say, studying the front and rear bumpers. “Do you really think it’ll bow inwards?”

  “If I can break the kingpin and we give the trailer enough of a push, we can hopefully shove our way through the middle, nudging the front of the trailer out of the way.”

  “What car are you planning on using to do this pushing?” I ask with narrowed eyes and a good idea of what he’s about to say.

  “Yours.”

  “I knew you were thinking that,” I tell him, shaking my head.

  “The bus is more important than the Barney-mobile, and the front end is already wrecked. Besides, those other cars are family cars. Your car is a beast.”

  Holding up my hand, I say, “Just break the damn kingpin already.” With that, using the butt end of the axe, Ice goes to work.

  Morgan strolls over and, in between the sounds of metal smashing metal, she says, “Adeline wanted me to tell you that most everyone seems okay this morning. Nothing like what’s going on with Constanza. Although I have some concerns about Ross. He says he doesn’t feel well, that he’s a little hot and his skin under his elbow hurts a bit.”

  Ross is the middle child of the three neighbor boys, the eleven year old. This is bad news. Not just because we might have another sick kid, but if he dies in Morgan’s care, that’s another dead child she won’t be able to deal with.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask her.

  Looking like she’s bursting to say something, she opens her mouth and it comes out in a rush. “I think we should quarantine Constanza permanently. And get her some antibiotics as soon as possible. I mean, I know you’re planning on finding what you can, but we need stuff sooner rather than later.”

  “How are those lesions?” I ask.

  “They’ve turned into big black boils,” she says. “I pressed against them with a smooth rock, just to see. They’re soft, squishy.”

  “What about poking them with something sharper?” I ask in between the constant clanking of Ice waging war on the truck’s gear.

  “Eliana asked if she got boils on her skin like that before and she said she did. That they put masks and gloves on and poked them.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Use a lighter, heat the tip of Eliana’s blade and pierce the biggest sore. Let’s see what comes out. Use any clean cloths we have for masks, then wipe the blade and sterilize it with heat. We don’t know if what she has is contagious.”

  “Do you have any idea what this could be?” she asks.

  “Where’s Adeline?” I ask.

  “Taking the girls out to pee,” Morgan replies. “Like I said. She told me to come talk to you.”

  “Well now that you have, what are you thinking?”

  “We have medicine for just about anything someone can contract here in America,” Morgan tells me, “but she’s from a third world country with no real standardized healthcare. So who can really say what she has?”

  When everyone started pouring into the country through the border, diseases started to appear. Some we knew about that seemed to be of a different strain, others we hadn’t seen in eighty years. The uninformed called it a conspiracy theory until it wasn’t.

  “Do you remember the outbreak of disease at the height of the border crisis?” I ask.

  She nods, then asks, “Were any of them like this?”

  “Not that I can remember,” I say. “But I never really got the details of the diseases either. I knew we were dealing with measles, drug-resistant tuberculosis, some cases of wet leprosy, and even the bubonic plague.”

  “Really?” she asks, breathless. “The bubonic plague as in the Black Death?”

  “The same,” I admit.

  “That killed like fifty-million people in the thirteen-hundreds and wiped out something like sixty percent of Europe.”

  “It did.”

  “How though?”

  “Fleas off diseased rats is how it starts,” I tell her.

  “Skid Row,” she replies, referring to the long stretches of garbage strewn, disease-laden streets in the infamous L.A. district.

  “Yep.”

  Just then the clank, clank, clank became a very sharp CHINK! followed by the sound of a piece of metal landing in ash.

  “Got it,” Ice says, standing up, stretching his lower back and wincing.

  “Feeling your age?” I ask.

  “Every year of it,” he replies, appraising the break. “If you push it from the right angle, the trailer should slide off the hitch.”

  I throw Xavier the keys to the ‘Cuda, then tell him I’m going to check on Constanza. Eliana is already heating the tip of her blade when I get there.

  Great minds think alike…

  When it’s hot and clean, she pokes the tip of the blister, causing the skin to part and blood to seep out.

  “What the hell is that?” Adeline asks from over my shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Eliana replies.

  Ross is now over in the bushes on the other side of the road throwing up. Morgan heads off to help the child.

  “Don’t get too close,” I call out to her. Morgan looks up at me, but doesn’t say anything, or really even heed my warnings.

  Xavier fires up the ‘Cuda, the big engine tearing a hole in the general morning silence. He gives it some gas, then eases into position. I would normally be in the mix with them, seeing where I could help, but what’s going on here is far more concerning.

  “We need to quarantine them both,” I tell Eliana and my wife. “Adeline, you want to make room for Ross on the trailer? We don’t know if this is contagious and it’s best not to have too many people near her. Especially if she’s our patient zero.”

  Eliana looks at me, and in English, she says, “I know what this is.”

  “What is it?”

  “Variation of the bubonic plague,” she says.

  Adeline looks horrified. She glances over at me and I nod, solemn.

  Smoothing the girl’s hair down, Eliana says, “Some kids get it in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Medication can alleviate it, but it is never truly gone.”

  “What kind of medication?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she admits. “But if we don’t do something…”

  Nodding, the weight of this terrifying new wrinkle gargantuan, I try to say very little for fear the child will understand some of what we’re sayin
g and know just how bad of a situation she’s in.

  Looking at her, into her big brown eyes, at this young girl who might never see womanhood, all I see is my own child, Brooklyn, and how something like this could happen to her. Suddenly I don’t want my kids anywhere near Constanza.

  The thought jumps into my head that maybe we should kill her now. I don’t want to think like this—I’m startled the thought even entered my mind—but when it comes to protecting your kids, there are no real boundaries as to what a parent will do.

  “I need to talk to you Adeline,” I say, standing up.

  Eliana says something, but I’m not even listening because now I hear the ‘Cuda’s engine revving hard. The back wheels start to spin, smoke gathering up off the burning rubber, and then Xavier eases up as things begin to move. Moments later, the deafening squeal of twisting, breaking metal has all of us covering our ears.

  It’s working…

  The ‘Cuda is driving the front of the trailer forward, which is shoving the back corner of the trailer’s bumper against the guard rail. The metal seems to hold its own for a second, the back end of the Cuda starting to slip back and forth, but then the tractor trailer’s bumper gives in, crumpling against the frame. A smile breaks over my face.

  “He’s getting through,” Orlando says. He’s standing next to Brooklyn, Carolina and little Phillip.

  Seconds later, the trailer turns even more and Xavier is able to push through to the other side. The harsh scraping sounds of my car making this hole worries me. I’m especially worried about the Jimmy rigged glass that is the passenger side window.

  Ice is whooping and hollering, and Xavier gets out of the car to appraise the damage. It’s mostly cosmetic. I approach the car from the passenger side, then sigh with relief as I see parts of the window scraped and the bottom corner broken off, but not shattered.

  Looking at Adeline, I whisper, “Whatever happens, our kids do NOT get near Ross or Constanza, okay?”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” she says.

  “It’s bad, Adeline.”

  “I know.”