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

by Schow, Ryan

  “Good God,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. Then: “You ready?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll swerve right, you go left. I’m not kidding when I said run them over.”

  “How many of them are there?” he asks.

  “Four, five maybe?” I answer. “I can’t see, clearly.”

  “Roger that,” Draven says, his voice pumped full of animosity.

  Ice sets the two-way down as we gather speed. We’re closing the distance fast, and that’s when I see them pulling the next bowling ball back.

  “Incoming!” I call out.

  “Heads behind the seats!” Ice shouts right after me.

  The bowling ball hammers us with force. It blows through the passenger side of the windshield with devastating effect. The windshield caves in on the right side, the bars broken and pressed inside the bus. Half the smashed ball drops into the stairs leading down to the folding doors with a heavy thunk.

  I don’t let off the gas.

  “Fire!” Adeline calls out.

  “I’m good!” I reply. “Just stay down!”

  We’re bearing down on these guys, but two of them are jumping up and down at the direct hit while three more are loading up another bowling ball and preparing for round three. That’s when I know we’re not going to make it through them.

  “Incoming!” I holler out again.

  The ball slams the grill, destroying the engine. The bus sputters to a stop not ten feet from these clowns. One of them has something in his hand. He’s pulling a pin and jogging toward us. He tosses something under the front of the bus and runs.

  “Grenade!” I shout, running for the back of the bus. The explosion is deafening, the front of the bus lifting off the ground.

  Through ringing ears and smoke, we hunker down, dazed, unable to assess the damage. I’m moving toward the back of the bus, but that’s when I see them roll another grenade at us, this time under the Angry Eggplant.

  “Get down!” I scream, but my scream comes out too soft.

  The grenade explodes, blowing glass from the bus’s back windows all over us. I’m not sure what happened after that, but when I wake up, it’s with a screaming headache and a total lack of awareness.

  I have no idea what’s going on, who I am, what happened or where I’m at. Then it all comes rushing back.

  Looking around, I see that I’m in a dirt hole.

  It has to be nine feet deep at least, and not much wider than a bathtub. The top is barred off with a metal grate and covered with tarp. The glow of sunlight behind the canvas at least tells me it’s day.

  Scratching my head, feeling my body for injuries, I crawl to my feet and absorb the reality of this situation.

  Whatever hell I’ve gotten myself into before, this is infinitely worse.

  Chapter Thirty

  DAY 61 – UNKNOWN…

  I feel my way around this big hole in the earth. The walls are packed dirt. Not as cool as I’d hoped. The dirt floor is cooler though, cool enough to lie on. I call out for someone, but no one comes. I have to piss in the corner, but it’s far enough away that I can lay back down on the other side of the pit and not have to smell it so strongly.

  Somehow, I drift off to sleep. And then I’m jolted awake to the sound of the tarp being pulled back.

  The face that blocks the view is looking down on me and not saying much. He shines a light on me, blinding me temporarily.

  I shield my eyes and say, “What the hell, man?”

  “Speak again and I shoot you,” he says. There’s a gun pointed down on me. I put up my hands in surrender.

  “I just want to know where we are,” I say.

  He moves the gun a fraction of an inch and fires. Something tears down my arm and I drop to the dirt, scooting back as far as I can away from the weapon.

  “Told you,” he says.

  A second later the tarp closes and I start feeling around the burning sensation in my arm. The shirt I’m wearing is wet. I find where it’s torn from the bullet, pull back my fingers and give them a taste.

  I’m not surprised by the blood. Feeling around a bit more, I probe the gash, make sure it’s not an entry or exit wound. It’s just a glancing shot. The second on this trip, although this one is a bit worse.

  I sit brooding and in pain in this hole, wondering about Adeline, Brooklyn and Orlando. I wonder about everyone else, too. Especially Carolina and Bianca. Thank God Xavier, Nyanath and Nasr stayed back in SLC.

  Right around dawn, I wake to the piercing sounds of a girl screaming. Veronica? It’s hard to tell who’s screaming because there are a couple of dogs that start barking madly, and this stirs up a bunch of what sounds like clucking chickens.

  I get to my feet then jump up as high as I can, grab the bars, pull my eyes to the metal despite the shock in my arm and my obvious lack of energy. The tarp keeps me from seeing anything, and it muddles the sound enough that I can’t tell what’s going on.

  “Leave her alone!” I scream. Others are screaming, too. And the damn dogs won’t stop barking.

  “Shut the hell up, Brutus!” one of the guys shouts. One dog falls quiet, then the other. The tarp is suddenly ripped back and a foot stomps on my fingers. Instinctively I let go, falling back into the pit. The guy glaring down at me, he’s got a red three gallon bucket in his hands. He dumps the contents on me. It’s a huge pile of rats, all of them raining down into the pit with me.

  “We get our breakfast, you get yours,” he says with laughter in his voice.

  I hear the rats scurrying about. One of them skitters over me, then runs away. It’s pitch black in here. I hop to my feet, start stomping on the ground. I squash two or three. Four of them. Five. Little bone crunching splats in the dark. Breathless, I’m sweating, panicking, still stomping when I hear them moving.

  Twice I roll my ankle, but both times I catch myself from falling.

  When I stop, I listen for them. Try to see how many remain. I never counted how many came in. It all happened too fast. And there were too many. Far more than I would have thought, maybe even double the amount I killed.

  After a few hours, the tarp is pulled off the metal grate, the brilliant sun blinding me. I cover my eyes, turn away. A rat scurries up my pant leg, moving fast toward my crotch. I thrash around, taking swipes at it until I hit it right and it goes flying.

  I scramble up to all fours as the varmint starts coming back.

  Looking down, still shading myself from the light, I wait to the right moment and then I snatch it up by the tail. It thrashes and bounces around, trying to get loose. Before it can break free, I start beating it into the side of the wall until it’s dead.

  Within a half hour I’m absolutely dripping from the heat. Two hours later, my skin is on fire. For the two hours after that, I’m hugging the one wall that promises me the most shade. That would imply there might be some shade, but there isn’t. Not yet. I have another half hour to go. Pulling my shirt over my head, I try covering every bit of my exposed skin.

  When the sun finally reaches that part of the sky that allows a wedge of shade to form, I tuck my weary body into the shadow. There are dead rats everywhere. Two of them are alive and eating their friend. Looking down, I don’t blame them. They’re the rodent Donner party. Except they aren’t trapped by snow. They’re just stupid rats willing to find food, even if it was once its friend, its brother, its mother.

  “Cannibals,” I say, my voice scratchy and raw.

  Grabbing one of them by the tail, I fling his little body at the wall. It hits, falls, lays there for a second, then it gets to its feet and scurries off into the corner where it just looks at me with those beady little eyes.

  “What are you thinking, Ratatouille?” I say. “Because I’m thinking you get fat on the meat of your buddy, then I get fat on the meat of you.”

  He says nothing. I stare him down. He’s first to look away.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I won’t say I ate the rats
, not just yet, but the longer I’m here, the more I listen and understand. First and foremost, I know this is the end. There’s no way out. With little or no food to eat, limited water and the direct heat of the sun, I feel myself getting weaker by the day.

  My skin is bright red in some spots and brown and peeling in other spots. I have blisters along my shoulders and on the back of my neck. The dried skin coming off me, I stack it in piles for the rats to eat. They go between that and the rats I’ve killed, nibbling away, staying full.

  I look at them and start to wonder if they’re so diseased that my immune system can’t handle it.

  Doesn’t matter, I think. They’re starting to look good to me.

  Each day before the tarp is pulled back and I’m forced to bake in the desert sunshine, a bucket is lowered with a bit of water in it. I drink the water, piss out what’s left over from yesterday, then watch as it’s pulled back up.

  And then I look at the rats. But just when I’ve resolved myself to eating one of them, the same bucket I drink from and piss in is lowered with a piece of meat in there.

  I don’t know what it is. I sniff it, lick it, suspect it’s not beef. It could be something else entirely. I could be eating one of our party. Then I look at the rat and think I could be eating one of his party, too.

  When I finish devouring the meat, I sit back and have the worst thought ever: what if I ate one of my family members?

  I call out their names in the night, whispering, raising my voice until I’m told to shut up or until I hear the others. On the sixth night I hear Ice.

  “Fire?” he says.

  “Ice,” I reply, nearly breaking into tears at the sound of his voice.

  “Oh thank God, man,” he says.

  “Shhh,” someone says. I’m not sure if it’s the jailor or one of us. We have strict instructions not to speak unless spoken to with the punishment being denial of food, water and a bucket to piss in.

  Several more agonizing days pass and I hear someone start screaming. It’s Veronica again. Then Orlando starts yelling and suddenly everything gets chaotic. I jump up and grab the rack of bars, pull my weak but now light body up until my face is smashed sideways into the bars and can catch a glimpse of the outside.

  I can’t see much. Only feet kicking up dirt, some girl being pulled away, the contents of the buckets being dumped into another pit and the guy dumping them saying, “You shutcher damn mouth, boy!”

  “I’m gonna kill you!” Orlando is yelling. He’s making a ruckus, almost like he’s shaking cage doors.

  Panic wells in me, a black balloon blowing up inside my chest. I want to protect Orlando and Veronica. I have to!

  All this rage building in me, it’s about to find an outlet.

  “Hey BITCH!” I finally scream, my voice hoarse but venomous.

  I see the feet turning and heading through the dirt my way. Dropping down, I grab the dead rats in my right hand, at least three of them. The guard stalks over, unlocks the grate’s padlock, then rips open the grate and says, “You got a problem?”

  That’s when I throw the rats in his filthy, ugly face. They hit him square, making him pull back and start cursing.

  “Get in here, you coward!” I roar. “Fight like you’ve got a set!”

  He reaches behind him, whips out a pistol, shoves the barrel of a gun into the hole, aiming right at me. At this distance, he won’t miss. He can’t miss. I feel so angry and so weak that at this point I almost want him to pull the trigger.

  “Look at you, you spineless turd,” I snarl, my entire body trembling with rage. “Typical redneck goat humper. Lets a cheap pistol do the work a real man would do. How big is your vagina? Can you fit that little baby gun up there? I bet you could fit two up there. Am I right Sally? You nutless, feckless bag of dick sweat.”

  “You think you can take me?” he barks, pulling the gun back and standing up tall.

  “I know I can.”

  He tosses the pistol away and a ladder drops down into the hole. He slides down the face of it fast, then turns around in time for me to charge him. I hit him low and hard, driving him back into the wall. His body crashes into the packed dirt with an ooof, but then the shots start coming and I realize he’s hitting hard and I’m all out of gas.

  The body shots drive me back and make it hard to stand. They’re the worst, but then he starts unloading on my face and those shots don’t feel so hot either. After sucking down the pain and taking a rocking shot on the cheekbone, I lunge at him, pull him into a bear hug. I need this to stop. Right now I’ll admit I’m desperate.

  He wiggles my arms apart with boisterous, meat smelling laughter. “Fighting you’s like punching kids,” he says with an abundance of humor in his voice.

  Okay, so this is where I have to tell you something. Sometimes when you’re panicked and your life is on the line, you’ll do dark things, sick and despicable things, things you wouldn’t tell your best friend or even your therapist about.

  I’m at this place. Right now.

  So you might want to look away because…hell, it’s about to get really ugly. Just please don’t judge me. I’m fighting for my life here.

  So after my abductor says fighting me is like fighting kids, I decide to show him he has no idea who he’s messing with. I lunge for the side of his face, grab his entire ear with my teeth, start to bite down.

  He’s not laughing anymore.

  I clamp down with all my might, gnawing at the flesh with the ferocity and the might of a pit bull. He’s beating on my back, grabbing fistfuls of my hair and tearing at it. But he won’t get me to let go. So he’s trying to shake me off and he’s screaming and it hurts like hell, but I’m latched on tight and staying the course.

  If this is my last stand, I’m gonna make it count.

  The truth is, any drunk idiot can start a fight, get hit, even get himself knocked out. It’s only when you start losing body parts that everything changes.

  When I finally shake and tear and rip that ear all the way off, half his fight goes just like that. That’s when everything gets real. This guy starts whooping like an agitated chimp the second he sees me spit out his ear. In that moment, I go for the neck. With the overwhelming fear that I’ll squander any advantage I have, I sink my teeth in deep, biting down as hard as I can.

  My only chance at living is in tearing open the Carotid artery and bleeding him out. It’s a long shot for the Carotid artery is deep, but it’s all I have.

  The harder I lock down my jaw, the deeper I get. And the longer this goes on, the more he loses steam. The frenzy is winding down. He’s still making a decent amount of noise, although now it’s like mewling, or maybe he’s just crying out.

  Either way, this has me focusing all my energy on digging down and tearing half his neck out in seconds rather than minutes. I need this done before his buddies come running and put a stop not only to this fight, but to my life.

  The second my mouth fills with the rush of hot blood, I know I’ve won. I push away from his neck and let it all spray out. He’s wide-eyed and cupping a hand over the injury, barely on his feet. My face is dripping wet and I know I must look half-crazed, certainly insane.

  If anyone saw me in this state, they’d say I was certifiable. A damn lunatic. They might be right.

  Still, the winning grin sits on my face like a joker’s grimace, or the glee of a serial killer after dispensing of their victim, and it’s this menacing look of anticipation that’s burning in my eyes like cold fire.

  “Told you I’d take you,” I growl.

  He makes one last attempt to grab hold of me, but he’s slow, lumbering. I step out of the way, but we’re in tight quarters so he gets me, pushes me down beneath him. We both back into the wall and collapse. By the time we’re both down, he can’t fight and he can’t get up. He doesn’t even try. He just lays there on top of me, bleeding to death and soaking me in it.

  “Angus?” a voice says from the top of the open pit.

  Great. The cavalry ha
s arrived. “Angus is busy,” I say from underneath him.

  A face pops down into the pit. He sees Angus laying on me and he says, “When did you go gay, bro?” Laughing, he says, “We got girls, man.”

  “Well he ain’t into girls right now,” I mutter. “Go away inbreeder.”

  When this new guy says he’s got girls, my mind starts racing at the implication. Different scenarios are playing out unchecked, appalling scenarios, each of them taking me to bold new levels of hysteria.

  I nudge the dead guy, but he won’t move.

  He’s too heavy.

  The spark of fight in me is just that, a dying spark. A small light in a sea of blackness that will never become a full fledged fire.

  Trying to move proves useless. I’m pinned down, too drained to squirm out from underneath this dying behemoth and fight his friend.

  “When you’re done with your little homo boy toy,” he says with irritation in his voice, “just let me know and I’ll let you out.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I say.

  He pulls up the ladder, closes the lid and snaps the padlock shut.

  As I lay there with Angus on top of me and the sun beating down on us, I wonder, if I eat him while he’s on me, will that help me or hurt me? Who can say for sure? All I know is I’m starving, and if I don’t turn this spark into a flame, I’m going to die under this man’s corpse.

  Time to find out what the Donner party went through.

  Time for that first bite…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Draven feigned weakness the second he was jerked out of the Angry Eggplant. It wasn’t hard. The grenade left him delirious. Looking back at the car as he was dragged down the pavement, he saw the thing was done for. He was then thrown into the back of some kind of paddy wagon with the others. Half of them weren’t even conscious, and most everyone looked burned to one degree or another. Or at least blackened by smoke. Realizing he was too weak to walk and maybe even injured, he decided it was best to play possum.