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

by Schow, Ryan

  I try to put that out of my head. These aren’t productive thoughts.

  Not by a mile.

  Halfway to the city, we stop on the side of the road for an old truck in a ditch with a big bale of barbed wire sitting in the bed.

  “Pull over,” I tell Adeline. “I have an idea.”

  She pulls the bus to the side of the road and, as I’m getting out to examine the barbed wire, Veronica gets out and asks, “Why are we stopped?”

  “Bathroom break,” I say, not looking at her. It’s just a knee-jerk response.

  Since she received antibiotics from the medical tent back at Curt Gowdy State Park, Veronica’s made a full recovery and is as healthy as the rest of us. It’s a wonder what fresh air, plenty of sleep and the bounty of mother nature can and will do for a person. Although if I never eat another fish, it will be too soon.

  Ice joins me at the truck.

  I drop the tailgate and hop into the bed, looking at the barbed wire. The last thing I need is to cut myself.

  “What are you thinking?” Ice asks.

  Just then I hear a door squeal open while at the same time I’m startled by movement in the truck. I glance into the cab’s dusty back window, squint to see through the layer of dirt, and see the brownish outline of the dead guy moving around.

  “What in Jesus’s name…?” I grumble, scrambling out of the bed.

  I hurry around the truck and see Bianca and Nasr pulling the driver out of his seat. Phillip is there, too. He’s peeking into the cab where the body was, but then he pops his head out, looks at me and says, “Tools!”

  Glancing back at Ice, I say, “We’re raising monsters.”

  He snorts out a laugh.

  Nasr climbs inside with Phillip, pushing him forward. Phillip scoots to the other side of the truck, leans over the dead woman in the passenger seat, manages to open the door, then proceeds to start pushing her out. Nasr squeezes in next to Phillip and helps push the stinky corpse out of the truck. It slides out of the cab and lands in the dirt with a thud. The smell is horrific even for me and Ice, but the kids don’t let that stop them.

  “Can you smell how bad it is inside?” Ice asks them, making a face. “Or have your little noses stopped working?”

  All three of them look back at us, almost as if we’re an afterthought, something they need to address. Together, they all say, “Yes.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?” I ask them.

  “It’s really bad,” Bianca says, scrunching up her face, but then she’s back to looking at the tools again.

  Adeline joins us, as do some of the others. “Is that safe?” she asks. “Them being around the dead people?”

  “Unless you believe in zombies,” Ice mutters.

  “It wasn’t that,” Adeline replies. “I was referring to diseases. Airborne or otherwise.”

  The kids are now scurrying out of the truck. They have leather work gloves, heavy duty wire snippers, a fence stretching tool, nails and a hammer, and they’re acting like it’s the find of the day.

  Perhaps it is.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Ice turns and says to me.

  “That’s why I pulled over in the first place.”

  “You gonna put the wire around the cars?” Phillip asks. And this is why he’s our weapons specialist. He may be young, but the kid is on point. I nod, a grin creeping on my face, and he says, “I’m gonna help.”

  “Indeed you are,” I say with a fatherly smile.

  When you’re stringing barbed wire, it’s usually attached to a post and then stretched tight. Wrapping the barbed wire around the bus and the other cars requires some improvising since we don’t have the strength and stability of posts. We do have nails, though, and all we have to do is keep the wire tight enough so no one gets the idea of climbing on our vehicles.

  After ignoring three or four assertions by the women that this is a stupid idea, which I almost admit it is, we get the bus wrapped and the wire pulled tight.

  “We look like road warriors out of some kind of a nightmare,” Orlando says.

  “I like it,” Nasr replies, standing next to his sister.

  “I won’t admit that I was wrong about wrapping the cars,” Carolina says, her English getting better by the day, “but I will say this is scary looking. But good. That’s right, isn’t it? Good but scary?”

  Eliana nods, then says, “When we’re all done admiring our dicks, let’s go back to work.”

  “If I didn’t know you,” Brooklyn says, “I’d say you’re a dude.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  I’m wrapping the Barracuda when I hear a thumping ruckus and some yelling. I look over and see Adeline walking away from the kids.

  She comes straight for me, like she’s about to burst if she doesn’t say what’s on her mind, so I say, “What gives?”

  “Phillip was kicking the dead guy,” she explains in disbelief. “Not like a nudge. It’s like he’s trying to kick a hole in him.”

  I look over and the kids are standing around the corpse. At first I wondered if there really was some sort of risk of disease, but Draven—the resident assassin/computer nerd—said that’s a myth. He said there’s no proof that cadavers produce any kind of airborne disease that’s either harmful or contagious to the living, unless you eat them.

  “Stop it!” Bianca yells at the boys, causing me and Adeline to glance over at them.

  Phillip is kicking the dead guy again. And Adeline wasn’t lying when she said he was really kicking him.

  “Stop, Phillip!” Bianca screams again.

  “He can’t feel it,” the nine year old says, his breath short, but his eyes focused.

  Chase walks over with his porcupine stick, a.k.a., the bat with nails, and says, “What are you doing?”

  “Kicking him,” Phillip says, stopping to look up at his older brother.

  Standing over the dead guy’s face, Nasr says, “I’m watching his eyes to see if they open.”

  The corpse’s skin is pruning, shriveling, hugging the bones. He’s been dead too long to ever come back to life. So does he feel it? Nope. No way. Even if he were a zombie, he wouldn’t feel that.

  “You guys have been watching too many movies,” Chase says, pressing the spiked end of his bat into the man’s chest. The nails sink in. He pulls it out and there’s nothing to see. “See? Drier than a nun on Sunday.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Ice calls out. Chase looks up at him and Ice says, “They’re nine years old. And one of them is a girl.”

  “I’m seven,” Nasr says.

  “They’re poking a dead body and you’re worried about nun jokes?” Chase says, ignoring Nasr.

  Ice hops down off the Byzantine from where he’s working and says, “I’m not kidding.”

  Chase holds up his hand. “Alright, alright,” he says, relenting.

  While we wrap the rest of the cars in barbed wire, the kids play with the corpse, careful not to touch it skin to skin. Eliana asks Draven about it several times, but he tells her what he told me weeks ago, that no one is going to catch anything from them. And if the stink doesn’t deter them, then nothing will.

  Eliana finally puts a stop to it when Phillip manages to pull the man’s arm off.

  “That’s enough!” Eliana finally yells.

  She heads over to the kids, her demeanor frightening to the adults, but apparently not to the kids.

  Phillip sticks the arm up and pokes at Eliana with the stiff hand several times before she swats it away and says, “This isn’t a bug! You can’t pull its legs off!”

  “I didn’t pull the leg off,” he says. “Nasr’s doing that.”

  Looking up, she sees Nasr jerking on the man’s leg while Bianca is sitting on the torso to hold the body down. It starts to come off at the hip.

  “Let go of that!” she screams.

  “Hurry, Nasr!” Bianca shouts. With a solid grip around the ankle, and a big burst of energy, Nasir pulls the leg with all his might.
It pops loose, prompting Nasr to fall flat on his butt, the leg still in his hand, the man’s shoed foot resting in his lap.

  “Got it!” he cries out victoriously.

  Bianca crawls off the body and starts jumping around and doing a victory dance and chanting, “He got it! He got it!”

  After the kids were told they couldn’t play with the dead bodies, Adeline caught Chase sneaking over to the woman. He had the bat and a suspicious look in his eye.

  “Absolutely NOT!” Eliana warned.

  “I’m bored,” he says.

  Everyone not helping is bored, but then again, the long stretches of road the lack of TV, cell phones or the internet has everyone perpetually irked.

  When we’re done, when the cars are wrapped and checked to make sure the barbed wire doesn’t come loose and get hung up in the tires, we get back on the road heading for Salt Lake City.

  When we finally pull into the city, it quickly becomes a crazy house where the streets are loaded with people, not just dead people. Like back in Chicago, there are burn stacks. Huge piles of bodies either up in flames, or smoldering in a slow roast. No one wants the dead rotting into the sidewalks, the asphalt, the buildings, the cars sitting on the side of the road.

  It seems SLC is taking precautions, same as every major city.

  More than ever before, we see people on bikes. Lots of them. This must be their main mode of transportation now. It makes sense. Then again, we catch sight of an old four-wheeler and two people on horseback.

  “We should have bicycles in case we break down,” Brooklyn says.

  She’s not wrong.

  I’m driving the bus again and my family is in here with me. Others are here, too, but they’re staring out the barred, barbed wire windows at this strange new city. I wanted to drive the ‘Cuda, but Ice says it might get bad. He and Eliana opted to lead the caravan along the highway on the outskirts of the city.

  I’ve been in too good a mood to argue. Then again, it bothers me that Ice seems to think I can’t do what needs to be done when it’s needed. I thought I proved that to him when the old lady charged us and I didn’t hesitate to put her down. Or when we ran a sprint through those bodies blocking the highway.

  Then again, maybe on a fundamental level, he had a point. My sense of right and wrong is still rooted in the past. I’m still thinking about the rule of law. The new way of thinking is that survival is right and hesitation is wrong.

  People stop their bikes to look at us as we pass through at a slow pace because much of the highway is littered with cars, shopping carts, dead bodies, burn stacks and every other thing you can imagine. Those who are still alive stop talking and walking. It’s like the world has come to a stop to watch us drive through town in cars that actually work. It’s super creepy. Like out of some Stephen King movie where everyone’s under some trance that a pack of strangers come and interrupt and they all just stop and stare.

  Naturally, we’re the strangers.

  At first, I expected this to happen. There aren’t running cars on the road, unless they’re old and EMP proof. The deeper we get into the city, however, the harder it gets to maintain our current speed. The highways are less congested in some places, but even more messy in others. It’s not the cars, this time…it’s the stacks of burning corpses. Even the air seems to be a little dirtier the deeper we get into the city.

  Up ahead, as we near the I80/215 cloverleaf, we see a large gathering of people.

  “Great,” I say.

  “What is this?” Brooklyn asks, standing in the aisle next to me, hand on the back of my seat and peering through the bus’s front window.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, my blood pressure spiking, “but you’d better sit down.”

  The closer we get, the more we see these are people gathering in protest of FEMA. They’re shouting out that FEMA is killing people not helping people. It’s not an organized protest, because there’s nothing to really protest. It’s more like a gathering of people meeting to inform the others and maybe rise up against whatever forces FEMA has amassed. Which is strange to me. FEMA shouldn’t even be active under these circumstances. But judging by the crowd size, and the movement, it’s clear to see they’re animated, that their energy is high, and their tone retaliatory.

  Ice and Eliana pull the ‘Cuda to a stop before a crowd he can’t get through. The mob turns to us, some of them gathering around the front of the purple, barbed wire beast. They’re trying to peer inside, but they’re keeping a safe distance, their eyes drifting over all the barbed wire.

  “This is not good,” Adeline says.

  “Shhhh,” I whisper in a low, slow tone.

  I have to think about this. We can’t get through without driving over people, but maybe Ice can negotiate a hole we can move through. While we’re waiting, one of the ladies sidles up to the bus and screams, “FEMA isn’t FEMA!” She’s dirty as hell, her clothes tattered and there’s a wild look about her that tells me she’s either riled up or mentally gone.

  “What do you mean?” I ask through the slightly opened window.

  “FEMA trucks were hijacked by thugs who are now raping and robbing everyone blind,” she says. She’s got a smoker’s voice and bad skin. “FEMA equals death.”

  “Why would they do that?” Adeline asks, leaning over me to talk to her.

  “Wouldn’t you?” she says, aghast.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” Adeline challenges, offended by such a stupid remark.

  She shrugs her shoulders, then looks the bus up and down.

  “This is a nice ride,” she says, her tone suggestive. “You and your friends had better get it out of here before the mob gets you.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Suddenly the two-way comes to life. It takes a second, but the conversation going on in the background is the conversation taking place in the ‘Cuda. Apparently Ice wants us to hear what’s going on.

  “—aren’t getting through here without making a donation,” the voice says.

  “We don’t have any food to spare,” Ice tells the man leaning in toward his car. “And we don’t want any trouble, honest. We’re just passing though.”

  “Fine, no food,” the man says. “Leave one of the cars, or the bus.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Eliana says with authority, “you can move or we’ll move you. We’ve been polite but we’re all done with that, so move your asses or get ready to scrape them off the asphalt.”

  There’s a pregnant pause, but then the guy steps back and smiles. Turning his head, he announces to the crowd, “These fine folks don’t want to pay a toll!”

  “Oh crap,” I say, afraid for what’s next.

  Someone throws something at the ‘Cuda and that’s when the lady outside the bus says, “Told you dummies to go!”

  Everyone is now converging on the vehicles. From the back of our bus, a gun is fired, the deafening report echoing in our ears. The guy Ice was negotiating with, his head rocks sideways and he drops dead in the street. I spin around in my seat, see Orlando standing at the open window with a gun.

  “If you’re going to shoot, you’d better not miss,” I hiss. We have almost no ammunition and he’s about to start a riot.

  Deeper in the crowd, someone’s lighting what looks like a Molotov cocktail. He’s rearing back to throw it at the purple beast, but that’s when Orlando shoots the man.

  The kids are covering their ears, squinting.

  The guy with the fire bomb, he drops the burning bottle on the ground, causing it to explode and catch those around the dead man on fire.

  The ‘Cuda’s back tires bark and spin, smoke boiling up around the rubber until they grab hold of the asphalt and launch forward. With the back end sliding back and forth, Ice cuts a line through the bodies.

  “Hang on!” Adeline screams back at the kids. Everyone in the bus sits down as we bounce and shake our way into a very jarring start.

  When I look in the rear view mirror at the pass
engers, I see Phillip and Nasr getting their wooden spears ready. That’s when a Molotov cocktail hits the side of the bus and bursts into flames.

  “Fire!” Adeline yells. I’m not sure if she’s calling my name or telling me the bus is burning. Either way, I’m aware of what’s happening.

  I check the mirror, see Chase come to life and this stills my panic. The boy is feeding the discharge nozzle of the fire extinguisher out through the window’s opening and putting the fire out. I check the side mirror and the flames die out under a cloud of white.

  Nasr is on one side of the bus with the spear. He’s going hog wild, screaming in his native tongue, yelling in that high-pitched pre-teen voice as he’s jabbing at anyone trying to attack the bus. Phillip is doing the same, although he does his job wordlessly.

  Another fiery bomb crashes into the side of the bus causing everyone to jump back. Chase scrambles to the other side of the bus, puts that out. He also blasts a few people who are getting too close. The big cloud of white powder has them waving their hands in their faces and running for cover.

  “Keep stabbing!” Adeline screams, her voice in a dead panic as bodies slap and bounce off the front grill.

  Someone starts banging on the door, but Adeline grabs the shotgun, racks it, aims it at the people. They back off, not knowing the chamber is empty.

  Orlando fires a third shot and another person drops. “I’m out of bullets! Someone give me a weapon!”

  Chase hands him his knife.

  I’m dying to go back and help the boys, but they have it under control, and this bus won’t drive itself. Their quick response makes me proud, even though I’m scared of what we’re driving through.

  “Trade me weapons, Nasr,” Orlando says. The kid gives him the stick; Orlando hands him the knife and says, “Stab anything fleshy that gets through the windows. It’ll be hands and arms. And don’t be shy. You see it, stick it!”

  Up ahead, Ice is swerving to plow into bodies. The mob is like a wave of human flesh crashing into us, but none of us lets off the gas. What was a few bodies at first now becomes many.

  “Don’t stop!” Adeline says as I hesitate on the gas. “Floor it!”