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

by Schow, Ryan

“It’s like a nightmare,” Brooklyn tells me. She’s in the front seat, looking out the window at the fields. In the back seat, Adeline is asleep against the side of the car and Bianca is nestled into her, asleep as well.

  “Yes it is,” I say in quiet agreement. By now, we’re passing through North Platte and making decent time.

  “Those are some scary looking clouds,” she says looking up through the windshield and the bars crossing it. I’ve had my eye on them for the last half hour.

  “We should be okay,” I say.

  “We’re headed right for them,” she tells me. Then looking over, she asks, “Have you ever been in a tornado before?”

  I shake my head.

  “Can we maybe try and keep it that way?” she asks.

  “We’re in Tornado alley,” I tell her, a bit of concern creeping in, “and this has been an active season.”

  “Why would you tell me that?” she says, aghast. “Are you trying to scare me?”

  I shrug my shoulders, then say, “I guess with everything you’ve survived, with everything you’ve seen, you’re old enough and smart enough for me to talk to you like an adult.”

  “I’m still your daughter, still just a girl.”

  I turn and look at her. “You’re one of the toughest girls I know.” Eyes back on the road, both hands on the wheel, I say, “It’s out of respect for you that I tell you the truth, warts and all. But if you want me to sugar coat it, tell you everything is going to be fine, then what you’re asking me to do is lie to you, and that’s not something I’ve ever done before.”

  Up ahead, in the swirling center of the sky, a small funnel begins to form, giving my heart the kind of jolt that has me grabbing for the two-way. Brooklyn sees what I want and hands it to me.

  I key the switch and say, “You guys seeing this?”

  All three of them come back with a “10-4.”

  “Have you checked your six?” Ice asks, the question itself pumping even more adrenaline into my bloodstream.

  I check the freshly installed side view mirror, see the funnels dropping behind us, and then around us.

  “Daddy?” Brooklyn says, her voice sounding younger than I remember.

  There’s a twister forming overhead and that’s when I know we’re absolutely, positively screwed. Even worse, it’s happening so fast I’m not sure what to do.

  “What’s happening?” Adeline says. Then she sees what we’re looking at. “Oh, my God.”

  “Exactly,” I mumble as the winds start kicking up.

  Brooklyn and I are ducking down and peering up through the windshield. The sky is so black and low it’s daunting, but the deep churning all along the skies is what has me almost crapping my pants. More funnels are forming ahead.

  That’s when a twister appears beside us, touching down not two hundred yards away. It starts kicking up all kinds of rocks and debris, the winds whipping the sides of our car and the other vehicles in our caravan.

  I key the two-way and say, “Anyone got any advice?”

  It’s silent for a moment, then Draven comes over the line. “Go faster.”

  That’s it? I think as I’m operating purely out of distress. Just go faster?

  When no one else has anything to add, I bury the gas pedal and watch the needle creep up. By now we’re in the heart of it and twisters are dropping everywhere. Bianca is crying and holding on to Adeline, and I swear to God, my grip is going to leave impressions in the steering wheel before all this is done.

  If we even survive.

  One drops in front of us and we can’t slow down. It pulls back up, the funnel breaking apart, then trying to reform itself. We barrel through the cloud of crap it’s still kicking up, the winds so violent I feel the car shuddering and getting pummeled with all kinds of debris as it nearly loses its footing.

  At this speed, losing control would be catastrophic. I try the wipers and hope to God they work. They do. Even though the arm is grazing the slight edge of one of the metal bars, the wipers don’t slow and the glass is wiped clean.

  “The kids!” Xavier barks, the walkie-talkie crackling to life.

  “Oh God,” Adeline says from the back seat.

  I press the key. “Pass me up, Xavier,” I say into the mic. “Take the lead. Draven, you fall in behind X and I’ll slide behind the bus.”

  “10-4,” comes through three times.

  Xavier takes the lead, Draven tight on his six as they pass us by. The rain is really hammering us now and the roads are slick. We can’t dilly-dally in this nightmare much longer. When they pass us by, I slide out into the lane over, slow down even more to let Ice pass us, then fall in behind the bus where I see Ross and Constanza hunkered down on the flatbed trailer soaked and scared and hanging onto the short metal rails.

  “We need to get those two into a car,” Adeline says.

  “No,” Brooklyn and I say at the same time.

  “Are you crazy?” I ask.

  “We can’t just leave them out there!” she says.

  The tornados are swarming now, five, six, seven funnels forming, dropping down, the twisters nearby and whipping up wind and throwing all kinds of garbage everywhere.

  Brooklyn’s face is practically pressed into the windshield, her eyes angled straight up.

  “Dad…” she says.

  The way she says it, I can’t tell if it’s a question or a warning. But then I see the funnel dropping right over us, and several more on the both sides of us. We’re suddenly caught in the middle of them.

  “Dammit,” I growl against the deafening clamor of us doing eighty-five through this nightmarish scene. “Everyone hang on to something!”

  “It’s right over us, Dad!” Brooklyn is screaming. It’s like all hell is dropping down on us, followed by a thousand screaming banshees.

  “Look out the back window, Adeline!” I shout. “What do you see?!”

  She looks back and shouts back: “No tornadoes.”

  I stomp on the brakes just as the funnel drops between us and the trailer of kids and supplies.

  Adeline and the girls all scream at once, everyone slamming forward. I’m gripping the wheel, slipping and sliding to a stop, the back end getting a bit loose against this swirling, nightmarish wall of wind and water.

  Through the debris smacking our car, I see the trailer start to lift and shudder. I pray to God it’s heavy enough, but the wheels are skipping back and forth, bumping around, coming off the ground and slamming back down, the uproar tugging not only at the trailer but at the back end of the bus.

  If it lifts and topples them, people could die. The kids could die.

  The tornado then widens and shrinks very quickly, throwing all the dirt and rubble it couldn’t whip high enough in the air right at the ‘Cuda.

  You know how time seems to slow down in the midst of something truly terrifying? How when something profoundly wrong is happening, and you’re processing everything in a logical way, some other side of your brain is stuffing a bomb in your chest, dumping ten gallons of adrenaline in your bloodstream and raking all your nerves at once? That’s how I feel as I see the dying kids hanging on to the edge of the trailer for dear life.

  My heart stops.

  I can’t even breathe.

  The winds are forming again, the sky converging on the land. Their little bodies are suddenly drawn up now, legs in the air, whipping around, their hands gripping the side of the trailer.

  Adeline is screaming and Bianca starts wailing, but Brooklyn and I are mortified, caught in that appalling void of disbelief, of hope and defeat, praying for the best, but knowing the worst is—

  The tornado shifts, ripping the kids loose, flinging them so high and far into the air, both Brooklyn’s and my head whip around sideways to track them.

  The car comes to a stop as I watch them fly hundreds of yards away, into another tornado that catches them and launches them off somewhere else, deeper into the fields.

  I drop the purple beast in gear, step on the gas and c
atch up to the others. Ahead, I see a familiar car overturned in a ditch. It’s Xavier, Nyanath and Nasr. I pull to a stop as the storms rage overhead. Ahead the bus’s red lights glow against the wet windshield and the darkness of the day, and for that moment all I hear is the hard patter of rain and the thundering rush of blood beating in my neck.

  Turning off the car, I turn and look at Adeline and Bianca. The nine year old child is sobbing against my wife, and Adeline’s crying just as fervently. Beside me, Brooklyn’s silence is unnerving. I look at her and her eyes are wide, her skin bone white. She holds my eyes, unblinking. We’re two people who just saw the worst thing happen and we can’t believe it. The two-way crackles to life, making us jump.

  Xavier…

  “Xavier, come in,” Draven is saying.

  I pick up the walkie-talkie, my finger about to press the transmit key, but my mouth unable to form the words. Brooklyn takes it from me. I let her.

  Snap out of it!

  “I’ll check on Xavier and Nyanath, you tell them what just happened,” I manage to tell my daughter. She looks at me, mortified, still gripped by a sort of paralysis.

  “Do it!” I bark.

  She shakes it off, then nods and says, “Okay, yeah.”

  Looking back at Adeline I say, “Are you alright?”

  She nods, then says, “Go check on Xavier.”

  “The kids are gone,” Brooklyn says into the walkie-talkie, her anguished voice high in her throat and now trembling. “Twisters took them.”

  She drops the two-way on the seat, puts her hand to her mouth and turns away from me, her shoulders shaking.

  I rub her back and say, “It’s okay.”

  “No it’s not,” she says, her voice in tatters.

  Getting out of the car, I shield my eyes from the rain, glancing up for a moment at the storm overhead. It’s surging forward, moving away from us. We’re not in the clear yet. The clouds overhead are low and dark, and they’re dumping rain like crazy, but none of them have that slowly gathering look of a forming funnel and that gets me moving toward the overturned Voyager.

  Xavier is crawling out of the car when I get to him. He isn’t bleeding, but he’s moving slowly. Same with Nyanath and Nasr. Xavier helps Nyanath up, then Nasr. Nyanath grabs hold of Xavier and holds on to him for dear life. She’s sniffle-sobbing, but Nasr, he’s walking into the middle of the street and looking up.

  “Son of a bitch,” he says in the cutest little voice. His head is bleeding, but the wound isn’t deep or long.

  “You alright?” I ask. He nods, sticks out his upper lip. “Good.”

  The cool rain on my boiling face douses some of the flames inside me, but the shock of what I’ve just witnessed is sitting in me like a giant hunk of lead. I can’t tell, but I think my face is just as wet with the rain as it is with my tears.

  “X, brother, you alright?” I ask over the downpour.

  He gives a stiff nod, then says, “Yeah, we’re good, brother.”

  No matter the creeping insanity festering inside me, the feelings I had earlier about having to kill the kids feels embarrassing and dirty. Forget the sound logic of that moment…my emotions are in an uproar right now.

  Brooklyn gets out of the car, into the pounding rain and starts walking toward the trailer where the kids were only moments ago.

  “Come back here, Brooklyn,” I shout. “It’s not safe.”

  She doesn’t stop.

  Turning, I look behind us and the clouds have a less menacing look. There’s no guarantee this storm is going to stop anytime soon, but there might be enough of a break for me to find the kids and give them a proper burial.

  Ice gets out of the bus, checks the trailer, startles, then heads my way. Brooklyn grabs him in a hug, which he stops for, but then he pulls away and walks her back in my direction. My feet somehow get moving, and I meet Ice in the middle of the highway.

  “Get back in the car,” I tell my daughter. She wipes her eyes and looks at me.

  “They’re gone, Dad.”

  “I know.”

  “Did the twister really take them?” Ice asks, his head tucked down, his hand shielding his eyes from the downpour.

  Nodding my head, I let the storm drench me, the water getting in my eyes, my clothes, my undershirt. “Yeah,” I say, standing there like a zombie.

  “You see where?”

  I point out into the fields and say, “The first one threw them that way, right into another one of the twisters, which threw them somewhere else.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  “Find them and bury them,” I tell him. “We can’t just leave them out there.”

  “We’ll lose a night and day doing that,” he reasons. “And we may not even find them.”

  “I’M FINDING THEM!” I explode, the agonizing roar coming from somewhere so deep inside of me, it sounds like someone else is screaming out of my mouth.

  “Okay, damn. We’ll wait the storm out and then go.”

  I walk past him, get on the bus, walk past the mortified kids and grab the camp shovel. Without a word, I walk back out, prepared to head out after them.

  “You want to go now?” Ice asks, meeting me at the school bus door.

  “If I’m not back by morning, it doesn’t mean I’m dead.”

  Without concern for myself, or any kind of sanity, I trudge out into the fields in search of the two dead kids. If you ask me if this is smart or not, I’d say it was terribly stupid. But if you ask me about my own well being, I’d say I don’t care about my fate right now. I’m just so damn pissed off about all this I need an outlet.

  Since I can’t punch anything, or scream at anyone else, all I have is walking and finding and grave digging, and so I aim to do all three.

  That’s when I hear a little voice yelling and I turn around. Little Phillip is running into the fields after me, the rain soaking him, not that he notices or cares. Chase is then out of the bus and yelling for his brother, but Phillip isn’t listening.

  When he gets to me, I say, “You’re going to catch a cold out here!”

  “Are you going to find my brother?” he asks, looking up at me, squinting and blinking away the rain, his inquisitive face needing that answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” he says, firm.

  I look up at Ice who’s with Chase. I give him a wave of acknowledgement and he starts talking to Phillip’s brother.

  “How does Chase feel about Ross being gone?” I ask as we start walking.

  “He told me Ross was going to die anyway.”

  “Because he was sick?” I ask. The boy nods his head. “And does that make you sad?”

  “Yes,” he says, his voice cracking.

  I look down at the boy, keeping up with me in spite of his inability to match my stride. The way the rain is flattening his hair against his head, how it’s soaking wet, I wonder about his parents, if they’re looking down from heaven upon their child, and me.

  Seeing his narrow shoulders, his little body in effort, the frailty of this child becomes so apparent it weighs on my heart in ways I never expected. This is not the life a child should ever have to live. None of us should have to live this way!

  But we are, and he is.

  I put a hand on top of the boy’s head and say, “Ross was lucky to have a brother like you.”

  He looks up at me, a small smile on his face, but an overwhelming sadness in his expression.

  “I heard you saved Morgan from one of the coyotes,” I say, both of us sloshing through a damp run of farmland.

  He nods his head, not looking up at me.

  “You did good,” I tell him. “It’s what saved her life. And maybe your own.” When he doesn’t respond, I say, “What made you do that?”

  “I was scared,” he responds. Looking up at me through the rain, he says, “Do you get scared?”

  “All the time,” I say. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t,” he says
, keeping up beside me. “I promise.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After wandering the fields for hours looking for the kids, we approach a farmhouse only to be met by a farmer with a shotgun. He racks a load and says, “Stop right there!”

  We stop. Put our hands up. Make no quick moves.

  I knew we were coming up on a farm and, honestly, I think maybe I need help finding the kids. Maybe a pair of binoculars and a perch.

  The rain had stopped by then, but the boy and I are soaked to the skin and cold. Phillip’s teeth are chattering and his cheeks are blue. This whole thing is stupid, but noble. Right then I can’t decide if I’d made the right decision.

  “Just keep on walking, friends,” the farmer said. He was an older man, maybe mid-sixties, white hair, a man you could see was once plain in every single way.

  “Stop or keep walking?” I say. “I can’t do both so with all due respect, what will it be, sir?”

  “Why you here?” he asks.

  “The twisters took two of my kids,” I tell him. He looks at me over the barrel of the shotgun, then lowers the weapon.

  “That true, son?” he asks Phillip.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When’s the last time you ate?” he asks the boy.

  “Yesterday,” Phillip says. “We ate a coyote. It’s friends took Alma.”

  “Who’s Alma?” he asks.

  “One of the children we rescued,” I tell him. “We were attacked by coyotes and they…they got her, dragged her off.”

  “You cold?” the farmer asks, weapon now at his side. I nod my head. “Lift up your shirt and turn around.”

  I do what he asks.

  “Wife’s making a little extra stew. And the kid’s gonna catch his death out here. First I gotta ask. You good people?”

  “I am,” I say. Then looking at the kid, I say, “Phillip is, too.”

  Phillip nods.

  “Well head over to the house. I’ll follow you, if that’s okay. Maybe after lunch we can help find your kids.”

  We spend the late afternoon in the farmhouse with Bobby Lee and his wife, Peaches. Part of me would rather be out searching for the kids, but the other part of me is plum out of gas. So being off my feet, out of the rain and eating a proper meal…I sort of lose myself to the moment.