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

by Schow, Ryan

  “You just need some rest and relaxation, and maybe a bath,” the woman says.

  “We don’t want to contaminate the water,” Veronica offers.

  “Then don’t take a dump in it,” someone mumbles behind us. Orlando and I turn and see a guy looking worse for the wear. He says, “You’re looking at me like I’m the scourge here.”

  “Let’s go,” I tell the kids.

  We brush past the man, saying nothing as his eyes stay on Veronica and me. He isn’t worried about Orlando, but by the look in my son’s eyes, he should be.

  “Moron,” Orlando mutters when we’re in the street heading to our site.

  “There will be more of them,” I tell him. “Try not to show your emotions. It gives away your intentions.”

  “I could have dropped him right then and there,” Orlando says.

  “We’re not thugs,” I remind him. “We don’t know what he went through to get here. What he survived. Whom he might have lost.”

  When we get back to camp, there is a woman there in clean clothes, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her demeanor non-threatening. She sees me and smiles.

  “I’m Julie, but people call me Jules. I’m the resident psychologist. ”

  “What did they tell you?” I ask, feeling betrayed.

  “That you guys had a hard journey. We’ve all suffered plenty,” she says. “So if you want to talk, I’m in the tent next to Dr. Greenwald’s medicine tent. It’s the tan one with the vase of flowers in front of it.”

  Xavier and Draven get the fishing rods from the bus while Adeline starts to boil some water. A few of the guys are fishing, and it looks like the trout are biting. Draven and I take the rods and a net we found and head down to the water.

  “What are you using for bait?” Draven asks a couple of guys with their rods in the water.

  “They’re hitting our jigs,” one of the guys says. “The bladed swim jig works best.”

  Balancing the rod, he reaches down into a rather impressive tackle box, grabs a few of the fancy blue jigs, tosses us a couple of them.

  “Give it a shot,” he says.

  “Thanks,” both Draven and I say at the same time.

  We work the stream for a half hour before Draven’s jig is hit. He sets the hook, reels in the first fish. My line gets a tug a moment later. When I feel the nibble, I set the hook, reel in a healthy rainbow trout and then smile.

  “Thanks again,” I tell the guy as he’s taking his six fish in for the night.

  “You bet.”

  “We can wrap up now, get you those jigs back if you want,” Draven offers.

  “Keep them,” he says with a wave.

  Draven and I go back to fishing, pulling in three more rainbow trout. Finally he breaks the silence between us.

  “I’m sorry for the way I am,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Survival mode for me is different because of the things I’ve seen, the way I was trained. It’s not training for me though. This is who I am.”

  “You haven’t hurt any of us,” I tell him. “In fact, you protected us and that makes you something special, not something to apologize for.”

  “I appreciate you saying that,” he says. Then: “How are you?”

  “I was cracking before, but this…this is going to be good for me. I think I needed this.”

  “That guy back on the road, that biker…I saw what you did to him.”

  “He was really sick.”

  “I heard.”

  “He asked me to do it,” I confess.

  “Heard that, too.”

  “Didn’t make it any easier,” I tell him.

  “I believe you,” he says, reeling in his line for the night. “Is Brooklyn still scared of me? From what I did to the redhead who burned our houses down?”

  “I was worried about you after that night, but then…after today…sometimes we have to do awful things. So now maybe I’m not so concerned about you. And don’t worry about Brooklyn. The more she sees what we’ve got to do to survive, the less she’ll hold that night against you.”

  “I wanted her dead,” he says, looking at me. “The ginger. Her soul was rotten to the core.”

  “You knew her before that night?”

  He nods his head.

  “Her eyes were ugly. There was nothing behind them. Only…an encroaching darkness. The world is better off with her out of it. I knew that when I bashed her head in. I knew that the minute I saw her.”

  I reel in my jig, hook in on the line and say, “Let’s get these babies on the fire. Maybe warm up a bit of that Johnnie Walker.”

  That night, we drink a fair amount, tell a few stories, then get a light sleep as we adjust to our new surroundings. It’s not comfortable sleeping around so many people. Xavier takes first watch, but then Ice, Draven and I follow in shifts. Draven doesn’t wake me up and for that I’m thankful. I needed the sleep.

  “How do you feel?” he asks when I finally come out of mine and Adeline’s tent.

  “About a million times better,” I say.

  “Good,” he responds, smiling and patting my shoulder. “I’m going to bed.”

  When he turns in to his own tent, Brooklyn pulls me aside and says, “What did you two talk about last night?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I heard you mention my name,” she says.

  “He wanted to know if you were still scared of him after the…incident.”

  She looks down, then away. “What did you say?” she asks.

  “That you were seeing how things are and realizing sometimes violence is necessary, and sometimes dead is better.”

  “What happened to Morgan?” she asks me.

  “She was killed.”

  “I know that, but not the way he says,” Brooklyn whispers, glancing in the direction of Draven’s tent.

  This is where that “no lies” policy keeps me from sparing my daughter the more difficult realities of life.

  “She killed herself.”

  Brooklyn’s face cinched up for a second, and her eyes took on a brilliant shine as pain infected her features.

  “She was never going to make it,” I tell her, pulling her into a hug.

  “Are any of us?” she asks, quiet.

  “I hope so.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The psychologist was helpful to Brooklyn at first, but no one knew she had a dark side. Or that she’d take everyone else’s survival as serious as her own. Brooklyn sat with the woman in her tent. She needed to find ways to get the black pall of death out of her head.

  Jules was begging to help her, and, truth be told, she was happy to have someone to talk to. Somehow, over the last few days, their talks became about knowing how to survive and accepting the consequences of that.

  It’s when she started talking to Brooklyn about tolerable food sources that she began to worry.

  “Have you thought of eating other people?” Jules asked. “It might be the only way to survive.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “But what if you had to?” she asked.

  “I’m with people I love. Family and friends. You can’t just eat them if times get tough,” she said, folding her arms over her breasts and narrowing her eyes. “And if you do, you’re off your frickin’ rocker.”

  “Don’t say that too loud,” Jules warned. “Some of these people…they’ve had to make that choice.”

  “No they haven’t,” Brooklyn countered too quickly, her leg now bouncing on the ball of her right foot.

  “Desperation isn’t the same as poor mental health,” she said. “Or instability.”

  “This isn’t helping,” Brooklyn confessed, adjusting in her chair, a blush sitting fresh in her cheeks.

  “What if I told you I had to eat my husband just to be here today?” she probed with a slight tremor in her voice.

  Brooklyn stared at her, incredulous. She then stood up and without another word, left the tent. The idea of having to eat so
meone you love was just too much.

  A few days later, everyone started getting sick. Not in Brooklyn’s camp, but the other camps nearby. Because of what their group had been through between Chicago and here, they’d been boiling their water and purifying it with Clorox.

  Then, with the sickness seemingly getting worse, a few of the guys from other sites approached them. One of them was the jerk Veronica told Brooklyn she’d seen when they first got Veronica her antibiotics.

  “One of you take a crap in the water?” he asked.

  Eliana stepped forward and said, “We’re downstream from you, you brainless twat.”

  “Bro, step back,” he said, putting a hand up. Eliana held her ground. Then, looking around, his eyes dancing from Eliana to Carolina to Bianca, he asked, “You even legal?”

  “There is no law anymore,” Adeline told him, stepping forward to back up Eliana. “Which means everything is legal.”

  “Yeah, but they brought their diseases up from whatever garbage pit they crawled out of,” the guy argued.

  “We’re all perfectly healthy. But you’re not,” Adeline said. “So I suggest you get your sick ass off our plot and go play detective somewhere else.”

  “You may be healthy,” one of the other men said, “but you’re the dirtiest of all of us. I mean, you haven’t taken a bath since you got here.”

  “So?” Brooklyn asked, defiant.

  “You,” one of them said, pointing to Carolina.

  “What about her?” Eliana asked.

  “Bro, just chill,” the guy said, looking past her.

  Her father started in, but Eliana held up her hand to stop him. The guy saw Eliana holding off Fire, but then he panicked because he saw that look in Eliana’s eyes. He whipped out a pistol, took a swift step forward and stuck it to Adeline’s head as leverage.

  “Don’t do this,” Eliana warned.

  Adeline didn’t even flinch. She turned her head ever so slightly to look at the guy with the gun on her. While everyone was busy with Eliana and this idiot, Chase stepped into his tent, grabbed the fire extinguisher and slipped back out. Slowly he moved forward, through the people, up to Brooklyn’s father.

  The kid stayed behind him, his red canister concealed.

  Her father and her uncle moved in, but the second the guy moved his gun off Adeline and leveled it onto the two of them, Eliana attacked.

  The gun went off, a round cutting a line between them. Chase moved in to spray someone, but Eliana was lightning quick, cutting and slashing with her blade, ducking out of the way of arterial spray while moving on to the next guy.

  Chase couldn’t discharge the fire retardant without hitting Eliana. And since she’d been working on her gray man appearance, to the point where these fools thought she was a boy, coating her in white might cost the young, ambitious boy his life.

  By the time he realized he couldn’t use his powdery new weapon, all three of them were down and Eliana was standing over them flinging blood off her knife. She turned to the first guy, the rude guy. Her eyes were almost black. Like she was someone else. She dropped down and started gutting him like a fish.

  “Eliana!” her uncle Ice barked out.

  Everyone else turned away, but then they got a crowd. The gunshot brought everyone out of their tents in time to see Eliana sawing a line down the man’s torso. Ice grabbed her, yanked the knife out of her hand and pulled her back.

  “It’s over!” he said.

  Brooklyn watched Eliana’s eyes clear, like she was coming back into her body.

  “What were you going to do with him?” Ice asked, as astounded as the rest of them.

  “Gut him.”

  “Why?”

  “My father taught me that one rat begets many, but if you gut one, hang it out for the others to see, you will save yourself from having a rat problem.”

  “So you were going to gut him and leave him out for the others to see?” he asked.

  She nodded her head.

  “That’s some serious Ted Bundy business,” Draven replied.

  “We’re not doing that here,” Ice said, pulling Eliana up. “Not with the kids around.”

  “I was taught this when I was a kid,” Eliana said, looking around at the children. “They can learn it, too.”

  “This isn’t Mexico,” Adeline told her gently.

  “Guatemala.”

  “There either,” Adeline said, covering Bianca’s eyes.

  A few minutes later, armed guards visited them. The head guard didn’t talk to the adults, he simply studied the bodies and then asked to speak to Bianca. Kids had a harder time lying than adults. They didn’t understand why they had to lie, so they just didn’t.

  When Bianca told them what happened, they gave her statement due consideration. Then: “We’ll ask the rest of their party to leave, but we better not have any other issues with you or you’re gone.”

  Orlando stepped forward, outraged.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” he told the head guard.

  “Back up,” the guard said. Orlando didn’t back down. He just looked at the man. “If you give into the impulses to protect yourself at all costs, it’ll take us into the dark ages. You and me. And son? There’s no coming back from that.”

  “Look around, man,” Orlando said. “You think we can bounce back from this? Look at the skies. They were clear a few days ago, but now they’re getting black with soot. Can’t you smell it?”

  He was referring to the dusty smell of smoke in the air. A reminder of what we went through when Chicago started to burn.

  “I can smell it, son, but you still need to calm down.”

  “Calm down? How long until we get black rain? How long until the water is permanently contaminated? Some kid, he took a dump in the river. That’s why everyone is sick. And those who aren’t crapping upstream are washing their filthy bodies in our drinking water. Look at us, does it look like we’re bathing? No. You didn’t check us for diseases when you let us in, but we’ve had three people from our group die from disease. We may have it. You may have it. What’s to say any one of them won’t have it either?”

  “This ain’t Mexico,” the other guard said, looking at the dead bodies, specifically the one Eliana gutted.

  “How do you deal with the smell?” the first guard asked. “Because you guys stink.”

  “We just do,” Brooklyn said, speaking up.

  “You said you had three people die of disease?” one of the guards prodded.

  “They’re gone,” Carolina said. “We’re not sick.”

  “Three days,” one of the guards said, holding up three fingers. “We need to rotate your spot out.”

  “We’re not leaving,” Orlando replied, stepping closer.

  “Three days is fine,” Adeline said, moving in to corral him. Moving Orlando behind her, she said, “We appreciate having this time to recover.”

  “You’d better get a muzzle on that boy,” the guard said, escalating.

  “You’d better get one on you,” she replied. He looked down and saw Adeline had a blade to his gut.

  Looking back up at her, he said, “You got some balls on you lady.”

  “Don’t mess with mamma bear,” Adeline said. Except she didn’t say “mess.” What she said had four letters and rhymed with truck.

  When they were gone, Carolina pointed to the dead men and said, “What do we do about them?”

  “Stack them out front as a warning,” Eliana replied.

  “I got this,” Draven said.

  “I’ll help you,” Brooklyn offered, no longer scared of him.

  She didn’t feel so afraid anymore because they were all becoming like Eliana and Draven. Pretty soon, she’d be a monster, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  DAY 42 – DAY 60…

  We were specifically told not to go to Salt Lake City, that it was a madhouse. That was a week ago. Naturally we gave the “suggestion” a fair amount of deliberation, but in the end we decided that if it
was a choice between the easy way and the hard way, we were bound to be stubborn and take the hard way.

  I imagine the Donner party had the same choice. Then again, the circumstances were profoundly different.

  In the old world, before the attack and the EMP that followed, a week wouldn’t make a bit of difference to anyone for really any reason.

  Not now.

  It’s crazy how the world has changed in such little time!

  Nowadays, with people starving to death—with people being killed and killing themselves—a single week might as well be one hundred years for all the difference it could make.

  I’m serious.

  No lie.

  Tens of thousands of people who were alive and walking the earth at the start of this week were now likely dead and in various stages of decomposition.

  Just seven days.

  I wonder, what will the next seven days hold? The next thirty? What will a year look like from now? These are the things I consider while sitting in front of the campfire. I think it’s fair to say I’ve become consumed with the world of what ifs.

  Of course, my head is a busy beehive of other thoughts as well…

  I tell myself only an idiot would go through Salt Lake City. Truthfully, I don’t want to go. We don’t have enough weapons. A few guns, a few rounds, that’s it. But we have our spears, our fire extinguishers, my lawnmower blade machete. Is that enough? Ha! Is it even close to enough? I almost break out laughing at the futility of it. But then again, my specialty is blending in, and the distance between the sane me and the beastly me is not so far anymore.

  So I’ll blend.

  If the rioters and gangs and lone wolf assailants were rampaging the city last week, maybe this week they’re drawing flies. Maybe all these knuckle draggers killed each other and saved us the trouble of having to send them south the hard way.

  That’s the hope anyway.

  Still, the thing we’re most scared of is that these animals, whoever they may be, banded together to put a stranglehold on the city. We caught a glimpse of people coming together in Chicago. Given enough time, these groups will be bigger, more organized, territorial.