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

by Schow, Ryan

  “I’m too old for you,” she said.

  He laughed, then shook his head and laughed again.

  “Not really,” he countered with a smile.

  Together, they crept into what looked like a three star hotel that had been burned halfway up the front. They weren’t sure who they would see, if anyone, but Draven said, “Be ready for anything.”

  Inside, Draven did some digging around behind the front desk and managed to locate a master key, which he presented to Morgan with a smile. They began going room to room, filling a plastic garbage bag with mouthwash, hand soap and little drinking glasses they’d found and had wrapped in thin hand towels.

  “You go to the next room,” Draven said, handing her the master key card. “I’m going to use the restroom like a proper gentleman, but I’m afraid the toilet won’t flush so I don’t want witnesses.”

  “That’ll be the next guy’s problem,” she said, eliciting a laugh.

  While she went on, he relaxed on the hoop and did his thing like a civilized man. No squatting, crapping, burying it with a shovel. He wasn’t a cat or a dog today, throwing dirt over his deposit. He could actually lower his pants without fearing he’d let loose and hit some of the fabric. When he was done, he wiped himself with a terrycloth robe, then got up, pulled up his pants and said, “Ladies and Gentleman, Elvis has left the building.”

  Next door, he called out to Morgan.

  “Back here,” she said.

  He walked back to the bathroom and found a bathtub filled with water. He also found Morgan sitting inside it, a pile of her clothes at the foot of the tub.

  “Did I really take that long?” he asked, swallowing hard, his throat impossibly dry in that very moment.

  “The water’s cold, but it was fairly clean before I got in. How could I not? Besides, my leg needed to be cleaned then looked at. Will you look at it?”

  As she was saying this, he was looking at this completely naked woman in the bathtub big enough for two. Yet somehow, he felt the fatigue grabbing hold of him. So much, in fact, that he felt too tired for pretense. He didn’t even know how to fake embarrassment.

  “Are you at least wearing your panties?” he asked, trying not to look at her breasts but failing miserably.

  “If you look away now,” Morgan said, “you’re going to make me feel self-conscious when this is the best I’ve looked in years.”

  “Who knew the Apocalypse Diet was the key to all your self-esteem issues?” he said, swallowing awkwardly, his Adam’s apple thrust out, his lips curling up funny.

  “It isn’t, but I do feel pretty good about myself. Or maybe I’m just happy to be clean. Well, cleanish.”

  He finally relaxed, let his eyes dip to her shoulders, her arms, her breasts and her stomach. She’d rinsed her skin, her hair, her face. The mere sight of her was arousing, both mentally and physically. Finally turning away, he saw mouthwash on the countertop and went for it. Beside the small bottle was an unwrapped bar of hotel soap.

  “I left some of the rinse for you,” she said, nodding her head at the travel-sized bottle of bluish-green liquid.

  He took a mouthful, swished it around, spit it out.

  Already he felt better.

  Cleaner.

  “Grab the bar of soap and get in. The water is cold and a little brown, but it would’ve been anyway had you gotten in here before me.”

  “Um, Morgan...”

  “I’ve seen a dick before, Draven,” she said. “Admittedly it’s been awhile, but I’ve seen one.”

  “Yeah but…”

  She moved around, got a grip on the sides of the Roman soaking tub, then stood up, favoring her bitten leg. The water drained off her, left her dripping and perfectly naked. Needless to say, there would be no more wondering about underwear as she was wearing none.

  Looking at her, he was taken aback by how beautiful she was.

  She looked down at his pants, then pointing, she said, “If your mouth can’t give me a compliment, then I guess I’ll take that for one instead.”

  He undressed, then went and got in the tub with her, their limbs sliding up against each other, their bodies inextricably close. She washed him off as he was asking about her leg. It was the best he’d felt in weeks. Maybe more.

  “It hurts,” she said, “but it’s feeling better.”

  “What about your dreams?” he asked her. “Are you having bad dreams?”

  “It’s to the point where I’m scared to go to sleep,” she said, being quiet in spite of how alone they were.

  “I’m having them, too.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about Ross,” she admitted, her voice losing the airy quality about it to the more weightier sounds of grief. “And Constanza and Kamal.”

  “Who checked you for boils?” Draven asked, trying to change the subject so as not to darken the mood.

  “Adeline,” she said. “But she only checked my back. Not my legs or butt.”

  “Stand up, turn around, let me make sure we’re not becoming our own Petri dish,” Draven said.

  She gripped the sides of the tub again, her body moving closer, her eyes locked dead on his as she stood before him and slowly turned around. He put his hand on her butt cheeks, then moved them to her hips. He turned her around and looked up her body at her, letting his gaze reach her eyes, eyes that were longing for something, something she seemed to think he could give her.

  “I noticed the bed hasn’t been turned down,” he said, polite and unassuming, “and it’s not slept in.”

  “You noticed that, too?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  The moment they first kissed felt surreal, not because they were attracted to each other and thinking about having kids and buying a house together or discussing things like 401Ks or where they wanted to vacation first. They both just needed something good in this God-awful existence, something meaningful to balance the equation. The opposite of death is life and making love to a beautiful woman was life.

  She seemed to feel the same. Almost like an actress in a play who lost herself to her role and found it was better than her real life.

  The ride up to the climax was short but steep, the intensity building and building until they reached that peak and gave themselves fully over to the rush of pure, unbridled ecstasy. For awhile they laid there, looking at the ceiling, but then she broke the silence with a tone that surprised him. She was sad once more.

  “My children died a horrible death,” she said.

  He looked over at her and she was looking at him, her face haunted, her eyes now with less sparkle, and dark circles beneath them. He saw the lines in her skin and knew it wasn’t age that did that, but anguish, loss, constant fear. He couldn’t imagine all the trauma her heart had suffered, but in that moment, he wondered how much of it he was seeing in her eyes, in her expression, in the very air between them.

  “I fear we’ll die the same way,” he replied.

  He could have said a thousand other things, but he didn’t want her to give in to the pain when she’d been so good at holding it at bay for so long. Then again, he was trying to hold his own grief at bay.

  “Maybe we can die our own way,” she said, sitting up and not bothering with the comforter. “At least then we dictate the terms of our surrender.”

  When she got up to go to the bathroom, he watched her walk, his eyes on her bare shoulders, the curve of her back, her lovely ass.

  For some reason he felt sick enjoying the sight of her when she was so sad. Somehow it seemed…dirty. He looked away, tried to fall back into that post-coital bliss. He’d finally let go for the first time since Eudora’s passing and it felt good. Like he was able to be himself but also lose himself. This was one of the many things he loved about women, how they were able to make you better than you’d ever be on your own, even if the emotion sometimes felt fleeting.

  She shut the bathroom door most of the way, and for a second he thought he heard sniffling, then crying. This wasn’t the first time
this happened to him. He came to think of it as post-coital weeping. When he talked to his friend, Carver Gamble, about it—because he didn’t understand it at first—his friend from Silicon Valley said that was the sound of buyer’s remorse.

  Draven had laughed and f-bombed his friend, but then he took another shot on the chin when Carver said, “Truthfully though, that’s the sound of a girl crying as she thinks up ways to explain to her boyfriend that she’d taken the rebound D and now she wanted to fix what was wrong in the relationship. ‘I swear it meant nothing. It just sort of happened…’ That’s what all that bawling is really about.”

  It got really quiet between them that day, but then Carver burst out laughing and Draven followed suit.

  He eventually learned this wasn’t the case, that sometimes good lovemaking brought out some pretty intense emotions in a woman. Draven hadn’t expected to ever sleep with her. Morgan was older, but alluring in spite of everything, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected either.

  Still, his thoughts tended to lean more towards Brooklyn than Morgan. But when Morgan stood up in the tub and looked at him, expecting his company, wanting him to take off his clothes and join her, he wasn’t moved by her nudity or her invitation. What truly got him taking off his shirt and stripping out of his pants and briefs was that look on her face.

  For that ephemeral moment, the desolation in her eyes—the utter defeat—was gone. She wasn’t a widow, mother to dead children, a failed guardian. She was just a woman needing a man the way you sometimes need that extra deep breath after an impossibly long day.

  He went to her and climbed into the tub because he wanted to hold off Morgan’s sadness for as long as he could. And when he made love to her, which later turned into sex as things intensified, this moment became probably the best sex of his life. Right then he knew the relationship had changed with her. She wasn’t taking to him with that kind of vigor because she was running from her sadness…she was riding him because she wanted him and now he wanted her just as badly. That was the moment they’d been able to let go, to be those actors in that perfect scene with no one to call cut, to stop filming, to pull the curtains.

  It felt like an eternity, but in truth, it was probably five minutes that felt like an eternity.

  And now she was in the bathroom crying good tears, tears that would soon empty out, tears that shadowed that satisfaction of connection, even if said connection was only with a friend and maybe only that one time.

  At least that’s what he thought. He thought that right up until the moment the sound of gunfire shattered the silence, causing him to scramble out of bed and hide. Whoever shot at them was still outside.

  “Stay where you’re at, Morgan,” he hissed. “Stay there and keep your head down!”

  Naked, spent but alert, he peeked up over the comforter and saw the door remained shut. He checked for bullet holes, but found none.

  That’s when he heard the body sliding off the toilet and hitting the floor. The snap of vertigo ripped through him, wobbling him but not putting him down. He steadied himself, then turned around, his gaze falling to the bathroom door and the darkness stretched out beyond it.

  He stood on weak knees and went for the bathroom, little whimpering noises leaving his mouth unguarded. He tried to push open the door, but Morgan’s body was in the way. The word “no” escaped his mouth in an anguished plea, coming over and over again as he shouldered his way into the bathroom.

  When he was finally able to squeeze through and get inside, Morgan was laid out on the bathroom linoleum. Crying now, sobbing, he tried to lift her head, but he felt the wet warmth and her sopping wet hair the second he cradled her. Lowering her back down, wiping his hands on the floor, he bumped the gun, sniffed the barrel, smelled that familiar scent.

  At that point, everything flashed red and what happened next he could only piece together in fragments. First he was on his feet, screaming, bawling, punching the bathroom door (it broke), then he was tearing up comforters, throwing the bedside lamp through the window (broken glass, fluttering drapes), and then it was a smashed mirror, an upturned mattress, drawers ripped from the nightstand and hurled against he wall. After that it was him on his knees puking up creamed corn and rabbit with snot drizzling out of his nostrils and tears leaking from his eyes.

  Head rearing up, thinking of Eudora, he screamed, “YOU STARTED THIS!” and though he didn’t mean to sound so venomous, an impossible sorrow overtook any sense of rationality and he was no longer himself.

  All he felt was this bottomless pit of hurt. So much hurt, in fact, all he could do was roll over on his side and cry, wailing with no witnesses, the anguish bullying its way out of him, stealing away the very last of his reserves, resigning him to what amounted to an emotional coma and physical exhaustion.

  When he finally got back up, put on his clothes and left, Draven saw Fire first. He pulled him aside and told him everything. In that moment, Draven found an unlikely kinship with the man because the emotion hit Fire hard. Hard enough to know the ex-DEA agent had as big of a heart as he did, and that it still worked.

  “Let me tell the group something else,” he whispered to Draven, wiping his eyes. “They don’t need the truth right now.”

  That’s when he told everyone that Morgan was shot by a marauder and that Draven had killed him.

  “I need to bury her,” Draven said after finding the shovel. “But I need to do it by myself.”

  “We don’t do this kind of thing by ourselves, Draven,” Adeline said.

  “I appreciate that,” he told her.

  “We’re making camp for the night, brother,” Fire said, pulling him into a hug. “Just be careful. And be kind to yourself. This is not your fault. This could never be your fault.”

  “I will,” he said, and then he grabbed the shovel and he went back to the hotel by himself working through the night to give her a proper burial.

  Everyone showed up to help. He couldn’t turn them away.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  DAY 26 – 30…

  As a group, no one says it, but we feel beaten down, demoralized. Eudora stunned us all. Then losing Alma to the coyotes and Kamal to his sickness was a steep blow. Something all of us wrestled with. But having the tornados rip Constanza and Ross away from us? That in itself felt…incomprehensible. We were done though. We lost the sick and the weak. No one else had to die. And then we lost Morgan the same way we lost Eudora, the wheel of death landing on the same sad tile: suicide. The others think she was killed. But Draven and I knowing how she really died, this is the straw that keeps breaking our collective backs.

  Still, we can’t stop what we’re doing. We can’t just lay down and die.

  We’re about halfway to California now and used to this sometimes slow, often cumbersome journey. The trip was going to be tough, we knew as much—and we knew there would be casualties—but we were thinking maybe one or two wouldn’t make it. Not five and counting. And we certainly didn’t expect any of our people to die the way they did.

  Outside, I breathe the fresh air, smell the earth (which smells best in the cool of mornings) and gaze upon the landscape dreaming of the day we can finally settle down and try to put our lives back together.

  “Doesn’t feel so hot anymore, does it?” Adeline says.

  She wraps her arms around me, lays her head on my shoulder. I think about how far we’ve come, where we were just weeks ago—me losing my mind, committing murder, nearly beating her boyfriend to death—but now it’s almost like trauma has tightened the bonds between us.

  When I lay down next to her at night and think about Caelyn Boyle, that monkey’s nut, I wish I would have beaten him to death. I didn’t realize what this world would have become back then. Had I known that, I would have put him in the ground.

  He’s probably dead already.

  Good riddance.

  Holding Adeline tighter I say, “What’s that, doll?”

  Smiling, looking up at me, she says, “I said it doesn
’t seem as hot.”

  The day is bright, the sky a clear, beautiful blue.

  “You’re right,” I tell her. “If the nuclear bombs that set off the EMP blew a hole in the atmosphere, maybe it wasn’t permanent. Maybe it healed itself and is now back to normal.”

  “Perhaps,” she says. “Or maybe Chicago is still baking and we’re just out of the affected zone.”

  I nod my head, then say, “I want to kiss the top of your head, but you stink.”

  “You stink, too,” she says, holding me tighter.

  “Where’s our daughter?”

  “She and Eliana took the kids to find a bathroom, or a suitable plant by which to water or bury in mud.”

  Laughing, on the sly, I say, “Before we hit the road, do you want to find a watering hole we can fill? Because I might have to go...”

  “You’re not suggesting,” she says, not finishing the sentence.

  Frowning, I say, “With all due respect, and you know I love you, but there will be no fornication until you and I scrub ourselves clean. I’m not into sex with homeless people, enchanting as it sounds.”

  “I have a home,” she says, leaning her head into my chest.

  “I’m glad you finally realize it.”

  “Helps when you’re around,” she says. “When you’re gone, I just miss you too much.”

  Standing here in this moment, the most tender moment my wife and I have shared since we started this journey, I look out across the land, at the hard asphalt surface of the highway fifty yards away, and I think about the road ahead.

  Dread and agitation at the thought of driving another day courses through me, tunneling around in my guts, dragging at my mood and dramatically shortening my temper.

  I’m praying for clear roads today.

  Saying a prayer to the Almighty, I promise Him we won’t kill anyone, that we’ll start to care if someone we don’t know is dead and that we won’t resort to violence, so long as deviants don’t cross our path.

  But what if we are the deviants? I wonder.

  In my head, I say, “Lord, please give us those long stretches of road. I know they’re baked and desolate, and the endlessness of them gets me pissed off to the point of being mean, but those are better than seeing dead bodies and trying to push through and around other cars, so if we could just have that, I’ll be forever indebted to you.”