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

by Schow, Ryan

  The thing about having to slow your roll is that it gets irritating. Lately we’ve been looking for roadside motels we can occupy. We could probably loot our way through the town, stay here a few more days, try to breathe again, but half the group now wants to push through and I don’t blame them.

  I’m usually the “push through” kind of guy, but this trip has been disheartening in so many ways. It makes me look at the road ahead and hate it. All of this also makes me groan thinking I didn’t listen to Adeline and stay back in Chicago. But that wasn’t an option.

  It’s just a new reality.

  Speaking of changes, none of us wants to turn into the foragers we are fast becoming, but our hearts have grown callous, the line between right and wrong has been crossed so many times it’s now blurred, and I feel us getting more bold by the day, possibly even a touch reckless.

  I’m pretty sure this has to do with Eliana and Draven’s training.

  Everyone is getting more and more comfortable with the idea of hand-to-hand combat, which has bolstered our confidence as a group. But is this overconfidence? Perhaps. For the adults anyway. Lately all we’ve been working on is killing techniques.

  So yeah, there’s that…

  We’ve officially broken up into three groups now: scavengers, trainers and weapons specialists. Phillip and Nasr are the weapons specialists and crafting sharp weapons has become their niche. So far we’ve collected all kinds of gardening tools the boys have since converted to weapons. I personally like the lawnmower blade Phillip has been refining for me with some of the scraps we’ve found in garages we’ve looted along the way.

  On one end, he cut out wooden handles from two pieces of pine then fit them to the end of the blade and glued them in place temporarily. He then sanded down the edges, giving me slight finger grooves. When he handed it to me, I took the weapon, turned it over, swung it to feel the weight and heft of it.

  “Is that okay?” Phillip asks.

  The kid’s a genius.

  “Yeah, it feels good so far.”

  Without a word, he takes it from me and goes back to work. I watch him for a few minutes, then let him go back to work perfecting the weapon.

  After he pulls the temporary pine grip off, he roughs up the underside of the wood then takes steel wool to the metal. When the surfaces are coarse enough, he uses a waterproof wood glue to hold the permanent grip in place. After the glue has time to set, he sands down the wooden edges then wraps the handle with cotton twine we’d found in a tool box three days ago.

  When he’s done, he hands it to me and again I test it, marveling inside but unwilling to show it just yet. Not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because the kid is in a groove I dare not disturb.

  “This will work,” I say. He looks up at me, almost like he’s waiting for the praise, but instead of praise I say, “It needs to be sharp enough on one end to split a skull, but flat enough on the other to shatter bones.”

  He nods, then relays the message to Nasr who likes sharp things enough to sharpen them to a razor’s edge. As we travel cross country, bumping along in the bus with time on our hands, Nasr works on the sharpened edge. He works on it for hours with a set of metal files we found, not taking time to stretch, speak or pee. He just goes after it because this is not a seven year old boy, this is a weapons specialist and his job is critical to our survival.

  When the blade is finally done, he gives it to Phillip who inspects it with a judicious eye. He runs his thumb over every sharpened centimeter of the blade. He then spins it and inspects the flat side with a shrewd gaze. The surface is level where it needs to be, the edges softened just enough to not break skin. This is the side that will break bones.

  Nodding his head in approval, he looks up at Nasr and says, “This is good work.”

  “I know,” Nasr says.

  Then they hand it to me, both boys studying my expression.

  So far, I give them nothing.

  Looking it over, gripping it and turning it, swinging it the way I’d swing it in combat, it feels good. No, it feels perfect.

  “How is the balance?” Phillip asks. This from a nine year old.

  “This is a fine weapon you boys have turned out,” I say, still moving the weapon back and forth from hand to hand.

  “It was a good design,” Nasr says. In truth, the design was my idea, but the boys ran with it, eventually doing it justice.

  “Think you can split a skull with it?” Chase asks as Phillip looks on with a measure of personal satisfaction.

  Chase is holding his bat. It looks like he’s hammered about twenty more nails into it, the nail heads cut off at an angle and sharpened to a lethal point.

  “I think so, if push comes to shove.” Then, looking at the bat, I say, “Be careful where you swing that thing.”

  “Yes sir,” Chase says.

  “Did you work on that, Nasr?” I ask, seeing how sharp the nails are.

  “Yes sir,” he says, echoing Chase.

  “Between your blade and my porcupine stick, we can do some real damage,” Chase says.

  It takes me aback that he isn’t appalled by what he did to the ginger monster of a woman back in Chicago. Whether she deserved such a rancorous death or not (and I’m certain she did), Chase clobbered her in the back with the porcupine stick. Then Draven used it to bash her head in. Knowing this, I’m not sure I could even pick it up, let alone talk about killing with it again. But somehow, to my great consternation, this is the boy’s pride and joy.

  “I made some other things, too,” Nasr says. He goes back on the bus, then comes out with an unbalanced load of what look like shovel handles. He’s got a big smile on his face. Like he’s proud.

  He hands me the first and says, “This was from a garden hoe.”

  The long wood handle is coarsely sanded at the top, but polished and smooth all the way down to the end where the wood is whittled away and sharpened to a point.

  “That’s so we can fight from the bus windows if we want,” Nasr explains, “or for me and Phillip to keep bigger men away from us.”

  The next handle looks the same, although this time the wood up top has been grooved down and has the same cotton twine laid into it for a handle.

  “I’m playing with the grip,” Phillip says, nodding his head and looking at his work. “It feels better, but it’s not right yet. Nasr can still grab it out of my hands.”

  “Well keep at it,” I tell him. “You’ll figure it out.”

  The third weapon is a skinnier weapon and it comes from a lawn rake. It’s shorter, but the point is just as sharp.

  “This is for Bianca,” Nasr says. “I’m going to make one for Carolina and Veronica, too.”

  “What about Brooklyn?” I ask.

  “She says she’s going to find a gun she can shoot people with,” Phillip says, “then we can come stab them with our spears to make sure they’re dead.”

  “She said this?” I ask.

  Both boys nod, like of course she’d say this.

  Chase is looking on, but swinging the bat almost unconsciously. I’m watching him every so often and he’s coming dangerously close to hitting himself with the spikes.

  “If you cut yourself in this new world,” I tell Chase, “it could mean you die.”

  “I won’t die,” he says, still spinning the bat.

  “There are no hospitals, no doctors, and you saw how hard we fought to find ointments and antibiotics, so stop swinging that bat like it’s not completely dangerous.”

  He stops swinging it, then levels me with a stare.

  “Did your father ever beat you for getting out of line?” I ask, not liking the look on his face, but respecting that he’s tough enough to hold his ground.

  “No.”

  “Well I’m not him,” I say, low and stern. “You pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”

  “Yes sir, I am.”

  “Good, then wipe that smug look off your face and use some common sense.”

  Loweri
ng his head, he says, “Okay.”

  Drawing a deep breath, I remind myself that he’s just a kid, that he lost his parents, and most recently his brother. Looking around at all the faces watching me, I tell myself to calm down, to back off and just chill…

  “I appreciate you, Chase,” I tell him. He looks up at me, almost like he wants to know what for. “I just do. Even if sometimes I sound like a jerk. I just want all of us to live and half the time I’m scared we won’t.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dimas,” he says, relieved to have been let off the hook.

  We pull the bus out into a field for lunch and a pee break. When we’re all done, I notice that, maybe twenty yards away, Eliana is teaching the girls various self-defense moves as well as tactical offense.

  I grab a folding chair, plop it down beside the bus and just watch.

  She’s showing the girls moves and counter moves, throws, chokeholds, combination shots with both hands and feet, knees and elbows, all while working on their footing and their stances. I hear her talking about balance, distancing, how to cut angles on attacks and how to use the same angles to off-balance an opponent in more direct attacks.

  No one is in a hurry to load back up, myself included.

  Eliana works with them for about two hours. Several times I drift off. Between her voice in the distance, the coolness of the hour and a soft breeze that continues to roll over me here and there, I could almost fall in love with this day.

  Sitting around the campfire, the girls and women exhausted from training, Eliana talks about murder. Well, she talks about the human anatomy as it relates to murder. Like how you needed to really press a knife into the neck before making that fatal slice because the Carotid artery is maybe an inch deep. Or how breaking a neck is not as easy as the movies make it look and it’s better to just place the head on an elevated surface and stomp down on the back of the neck.

  We’re talking about death and killing over a meal that is scant and unfulfilling, yet somehow this passes as acceptable dinner conversation. The truth is, Eliana has a way about her that is both intense and calming. Intense because she knows what she’s talking about, calming because in a fight, this is the kind of knowledge we need to win.

  Sometimes I wonder if I could kick her ass in a fight, or if she’d get over on me. It pisses me off that I don’t know.

  Adeline takes my hand, but my eyes don’t leave Eliana. The truth is, if she were clean and looking like her original self, I think I’d actually be jealous of my brother, because in this life, survival skills and the ability to handle yourself in combat is as sexy to me as a beautiful face, a nice rack and the kind of butt that brings young guys to tears.

  Adeline pumps my hand, which breaks my trance. I glance over at her. “You should train with us,” she says. “It’s actually a lot of fun.”

  “So are we making camp here or what?” I ask.

  The nods to stay are overwhelming.

  The next day, instead of heading out, we opt to stay as a group and train with Eliana. We train the entire day, then sleep the whole night through. If anyone would have asked me, it was no walk in the park. Eliana is a slave driver. When I weigh a full day’s drive against a full day of training with Eliana, now more than ever, I’m anxious to get on the road. So at first light, we pack up and head out.

  The going is slow and taxing. Cars seem to be everywhere, the highways clogged with the remnants of cars that were hit early and hard. At one point, Draven starts to kick the side panel of a car that’s blocking our path and he doesn’t stop until we’re all staring at him. I get it. Picking up a nearby rock, one the size of a fist, I throw it at the back window, shattering it. Another rock sails in and smashes another window. I look back and see it was Brooklyn who threw it.

  “That felt good,” she says with a grin.

  Pretty soon everyone takes after the cars with a vengeance, getting all their frustration out on the dead metal. When we’ve exhausted ourselves beating up cars, we all just kind of sit back and catch our breaths.

  “I feel better,” Carolina says, pushing strands of dirty black hair out of her face.

  “Me, too,” Nasr adds.

  Nyanath doesn’t say anything, but the look on her face tells me there’s no way for her to fully let out the pain of loss. Xavier sees this too and is holding her hand. She leans into him and I wonder if there will be a point where they’ll choose each other not out of need but out of choice.

  Standing up, I say, “Alright, lets get these metal pigs off the road,” and then we’re back to work, back in the cars and ticking off another day’s worth of miles.

  We’re not an hour into the next day when Veronica finally snaps. She starts crying, seemingly for no reason, but when Orlando asks what’s wrong, she just screams a response.

  “I can’t take another day on this damn bus! Pull the bus over, Fiyero!” she screams. So yeah, I’ve got the bus today.

  Ice, Eliana, Carolina and Bianca are in the ‘Cuda.

  “Tell the others,” I tell Adeline, who grabs the two-way and explains the situation.

  I pull the bus to the side of the road and Veronica, who is in tears and sobbing, stands, moves to the front of the bus and walks down to the door. I open it the minute we come to a stop. She’s out in a flash, walking into the fields where she falls to her knees and screams at the top of her lungs. She does this for a good five minutes as we watch with curiosity, sadness and concern.

  “We need to not drive for about a week,” Eliana says. “Our bodies need fresh air, a chance to relax, some semblance of normalcy.”

  I want to object, but she has a point.

  Draven says, “Why don’t the girls take some time to recuperate. Maybe I can work on some tactical moves with the guys, so we don’t stop driving for nothing.”

  “I want to train with you guys,” Bianca says.

  “Anyone can train if they want to,” Draven says with a smile.

  We find a place to pull over, meander down a bumpy, tire-tracked dirt path with a hump of grass in the middle. The path takes us through a grove of trees and into a wide clearing. There’s nothing but meadow to see for miles around, which suits us just fine. The walkie-talkie crackles to life.

  “This is good,” Xavier says.

  He hasn’t been talkative lately, but seeing that everyone is going through difficulties similar to his own seems to be bringing him out of his social coma a bit.

  I’m glad to see this happening.

  After setting up camp, Veronica and Orlando wander off, away from the group, but in our eye sight. The two of them come together in a hug. That’s how I know they’re going to be okay. Even when she cracked, Orlando was there for her. She didn’t know it, but we all were.

  We still are.

  “Let’s go,” Draven says to me. “We can teach each other something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I teach you something, you teach me something,” he says. “That’s how we learn.”

  “Don’t you want to wait for the others?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I say, getting up.

  It’s not long before the others join us, including Orlando. Within a half an hour, the women are joining in, too. Ready for more lessons from another seasoned fighter.

  Eliana takes Draven’s lead, working to help others after she learned the technique he’s working to demonstrate. As I watch Adeline grow as a fighter, and Brooklyn take after her mother, I begin to feel proud of my family, of how strong we’re becoming. Then again, you only get this kind of strength when the stakes are astronomical. If we get caught off guard, we die. Those are the stakes, plain and simple.

  But at least we’re learning…

  Speaking of getting caught off guard, Draven is teaching Xavier and Orlando basic attacks that, when done right, can be lethal. When a guy rushes you, there’s always the kick to the balls, or the faked kick to the balls that slows the attack enough to raise or drop an elbow on your opponent’s face. These
are techniques Draven has been working for hours now.

  “I’m kinda getting bored of these same four moves,” Orlando admits out loud.

  Inside, I can’t help but cringe.

  Acting like what he said was no big deal, Draven says, “If you have fifty tools, but you can’t use one with any proficiency, how do you expect to ever build something?”

  “Well I have four tools and even though I’m pretty good with them, sometimes when you’re carrying a screwdriver, you need a circular saw.”

  Seeing where this is going, Draven rushes him in that moment, takes him down and starts beating on him. At first, I want to go and pull him off my son and kick the life out of him, but I stop myself. Adeline moves to jump in as well, but I grab her arm, hold her back.

  “Let go of me,” she says, trying to shake off my grip.

  “Let them be,” I tell her, still holding on to her arm. Nodding, I say, “This is part of the training.”

  She shakes my hand off again, and this time I let go.

  Draven doesn’t wail on him as badly as he could. Orlando takes the shots, which are getting a bit harder, and he starts to fight back. Where he ratchets it up, so does Draven. Orlando is getting pummeled in the body, the cheekbones, slapped across the face and maneuvered out of position every time he tries to advance.

  I keep rooting for Orlando, and I don’t stop measuring the ferocity of Draven’s attack on him. Twice I almost intervene, but twice I stop myself. As for Adeline, it’s all she can do to keep herself contained. She keeps looking back at me, but I keep giving her the “it’s okay” nod.

  Dust begins to kick up around camp and everyone else has stopped what they’re doing to watch. Veronica looks at me with pleading eyes, but I wave her down, slowly shake my head back and forth. In other words, stay out of it. Some of the tension in her withers, but it doesn’t die.

  I’ve been seeing the restraint Draven is using and I understand that he’s not mad, he’s just teaching Orlando a lesson.