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

  Neither me nor my brother have that look like we’ll back down. I see the pistol tucked into the deep pocket in the back of Ice’s pants, and I know that if it comes to us or these fruit loops, it’s gonna be us that ends up standing.

  “The price is yer life,” the older guy says, puffing out his chest and setting his lower lip.

  “You strapped?” I ask the younger of the two men.

  “‘Course I ain’t.”

  “Tell ‘em you are, Earl!” the woman mutters a bit too loud. She says this with gusto, her brows pinched tight, that filthy tongue of hers as sharp as a spike.

  “Only weapons I got on me are my two fists and the pipe that made them two boys,” he says, grabbing his crotch half-heartedly.

  The woman frowns, which actually improves her looks.

  “Well it’s been forever since someone’s been hammered to death with a limp pickle like yours,” Ice replies with a grin.

  “I’ll say!” the woman answers, still looking at Ice. I can’t help laughing at how juvenile this has all become.

  “Look man,” Ice tells the group, “it’s a windshield you won’t use and a window you won’t miss.”

  “I’m building cars that’ll run,” Earl says, “so you don’t know what I need now or in the future.”

  “We’re taking it and that’s that,” I say.

  I reach into the car, pop the hood. Ice reconnects the battery cable as I’m fishing the keys from my pocket.

  “We just want some food or water,” the lady finally admits.

  “Look at my lips,” Ice says. They’re chapped, split and bleeding, the skin hard from dehydration.

  “Mine, too,” I say.

  I show her my mouth and she says, “Nice teeth.”

  “They’re all mine,” I answer.

  “You got’s to give us something,” the older of the two men says. He’s been quiet until this point, but now he’s pulling out a snub nosed revolver.

  “I got something Earl ain’t got”—he said, nodding at the gun—“and I’m not asking for water or food. I want the car. Which means you need to hand me them keys an’ get on your way, on foot.”

  “If you think you have the stones to kill me over a car that’s clearly seen better days,” Ice says, “then sack up and skin that smoke wagon.”

  I look at my brother. He’s deadly serious. Turning to the older guy, he’s zeroed in on him, not blinking, his mouth a flat slash, his jaw set.

  “I will,” the guy warns.

  “I want you to,” Ice challenges, taking a step toward him.

  Before Rock shot Isadoro, neither of my brothers had a death wish. I didn’t either. But the Dimas boys are adrenaline junkies through and through. How else do you explain our careers? We are guys who like to ride the hard line, consequences be damned.

  Times have changed, though. If this butthole decides to jerk the trigger and we end up in a life-or-death fight, no one will come to our rescue. There will be no ambulance, no hospitals, and no jury of our peers to blame it on these filthy gypsies and demand restitution.

  Before the drone attack and the EMP that followed, at least there were police, the courts, jail to make someone think twice about their actions. Here, in this new existence, accountability is overrated. It’s the laws of the jungle that stand tallest. And in the jungle, the biggest bully becomes the king of the mountain. Right now, my brother wants the crown.

  Right now, I want it with him.

  The standoff is long and tense, but then Ice just walks right up to the guy, rips the gun out of his hand and wonks him on the head with it.

  The sound the impact makes is like a hard plastic. I feel myself breathing again. Ice turns the gun in his face and pulls the trigger repeatedly, shooting spotty streams of water out. It’s a freaking water pistol, albeit an unbelievably real looking one.

  “It’s barely even loaded!” Ice roars at the man, who shrinks back from him.

  “It was the last of our water,” Earl says.

  “Now we’re thirsty,” the woman replies, smacking her sticky lips together.

  “We’re all thirsty,” the younger of the two kids says.

  By now this kid has pulled up his dirty shirt and has a finger swishing around in his belly button. Shaking my head, it’s hard not to feel bad for the kid. Sadly, he’s just as dirty as the rest of them. The other kid—he’s maybe six at best—he’s got his thumb hooked in his mouth.

  “We have nothing for you,” Ice says.

  I get in the car, fire it up, but they stand there in front of it, looking sad, desperate, whipped. We all feel that way.

  “Just at least give her some water,” Earl says, pointing to the woman.

  “As much as I appreciate your chivalry—”

  “It ain’t that,” she says. Grabbing ahold of one of her breasts, she says, “I’m the watering hole for these boys.”

  This is truly a cringe worthy moment.

  “That explains the deep stains all over her shirt,” Ice whispers to me with a fair amount of disgust.

  “Sorry guys, but we don’t even have anything for ourselves,” I say, honest and feeling bad that we can’t help.

  “You gots to have something,” the little boy says, taking his thumb out of his mouth.

  “I’ll give you something free,” I say, rolling down the window. “A bit of advice.”

  “Only advice that’s free is bad advice,” the old man says, a small knot rising on his forehead where Ice struck him.

  Ignoring the jab, I say, “You find any one of these houses with a water heater or a toilet in them, you’ll find water. But boil it first otherwise you’ll be crapping out angry circus animals.”

  “Last house we broke in, they kilt my wife,” the older man with the plastic water gun says.

  “Well you can try and maybe die, or sit here scared of your shadow until there’s nothing left but the desperation and her big floppy tits.”

  “We’re there now,” the woman admits, folding her arms.

  “I don’t think you are.”

  “How would you know?” she challenges.

  “Because you’re not eating each other,” Ice says. Then: “Go take a chance at living. It’s all you have.”

  “You heard about the power coming on at all?” Earl asks.

  “It’s not coming back on.”

  And with that, I rev the engine and the group begrudgingly moves out of the way.

  On the drive home, we encounter more of what we’ve already seen. Things are quickly devolving, that much is clear. Halfway to home, we pass a man who’s standing outside a wood house trying to chop it down. He’s got a lot of lumber already stacked. Maybe he’s prepping for the winter. Maybe he’s prepping for now. As screwy as this weather has become—the nearly unbearable heat during the day and the bitter cold at night—I’m pretty sure this will be kindling and firewood.

  Up ahead, there’s a black man on a car preaching to a crowd of folks of all colors, genders and ages. The rumbling of our big Detroit engine stops him.

  Everyone turns and looks at us.

  Despite the Dimas brothers being daring and a bit crazy, it’s well known that we don’t like being the center of attention. Yet here we are, the only running car around, the looks of the forlorn masses upon us.

  Several people start our way, followed by several more. The preacher hops off his soap box and starts after us, too, a determined look in his eye.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ice says, the tension lying naked in his voice.

  I slam the car in reverse, smoke the wheels, remember the windshield in the trunk, then decide not to crank the wheel and whip the front around.

  Something hits the outside of the car and bounces inside.

  It’s a big rock.

  Praying to God the windshield holds, I lurch forward and head down a side street, the mob sprinting after us, futile as it appears.

  When we’re at a safe distance, Ice says, “They were like a freaking attack mob the way the
y came after us. We ran, they took chase.”

  “What do you think they wanted?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think they just wanted something different, and this beast is something different,” I say aloud, not really looking for a response. “Or maybe they thought we’d be a way out. Something running in a world where most cars have stopped.”

  “This is going to get worse, Fire.”

  A disturbing thought has been rolling around in my mind, one I haven’t wanted to acknowledge, or really dig into, but here it is again. Sitting on the edge of my tongue. Just needing to be said.

  “How long until people get hungry enough and desperate enough to start eating each other?” I ask.

  “That’s a good question,” he answers. “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  “I didn’t want to say it…”

  “Survival will become hard, nearly impossible,” Ice says. “At some point in time, when the mind begins to embrace the obscene as a viable reason to eat one another, that’s when we as humans will make a break from humanity. That’s when we regress, when we turn back the evolutionary clock and become the beasts of a thousand years ago.”

  “I can already feel it,” I say. “Can you?”

  He gives me a sad nod, then says, “Yeah, I can.”

  A ruckus ahead has me easing off the gas. Some older lady in her bedclothes comes flying out of her house with a vase in hand. She pitches it at a small boy who’s moving at a full sprint, having just burst from her home. He’s got a bagged loaf of bread in his hands, the contents spilling out. The kid looks back, stops long enough to snatch up a few wayward slices, then takes off again. The lady can’t run much further than to the edge of her dead lawn. She’s already gasping for breath. I almost stop to check on her, but I know better.

  “A woman like that,” I say, “she’d kill that kid to get her bread back.”

  “What about you?” Ice asks, turning his head my way. “I mean, if it came down to it? Would you hurt the kid to get your bread back?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answer. “Fortunately I don’t have to make that call.”

  “One day you might,” he says.

  “Yeah, but not today.”

  “This life is inevitable, Fire. I know you lose your cool, snap, sometimes go a bit berserk. I also know that’s a tough place to get you to. Let’s switch perspectives. What if feeding your family means breaking into someone’s home and stealing their last loaf of bread? Could you be the kid stealing the old ladies’ loaf?”

  “How did you do what you did, Ice? Back in Mexico.”

  I glance over at him, hold his eye long enough to see he’s not that upset by the changing of subjects.

  “I shut myself off to feeling,” he admits. “Embraced the void within me. Then I realized that no one was left to judge me, so I decided that I would do to the cartel what they’ve done to millions of others. I’d cut a long, bloody swathe through their people, pitting one side against the other until every last one of them was dead.”

  “And did that fill all the empty holes in your life?”

  “No, but it did make me feel better, even if it was a short lived emotion.”

  “You went from defending your nation’s integrity to becoming a murderer for hire,” I say.

  For a second, looking at him, I think about how far he’s fallen.

  Ice looks at me and says, “I’m a murderer, but so are you. Pretty soon, everyone you see, they will be murderers, too.”

  “True.”

  “They say the meek will inherit the earth,” Ice proclaims. Shaking his head, he says, “No, brother, they won’t. The only thing left will be packs of savages and lone wolves. It’s tough to say who will be more dangerous—the tribes or the isolationists—but understand this: if we’re going to survive, we’ve got to unleash that animal inside each of us. Take the chains right off. Not because we need to go crazy or turn into psychopaths, but because we need to be ready to fight on a moment’s notice. Not for me, or you, but for Adeline, Brooklyn, Orlando. For Eliana and the girls. For Morgan and the boys.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you do, Fire. But there’s a big difference between knowing and doing. We have to be the guys that do.”

  Chapter Six

  Draven watched the dirtbag four-pack cross the parking lot toward them. He wasn’t worried for himself, but he thought of Orlando. The kid was in a coma recently for a head injury. And he was Fiyero’s kid. What was he thinking bringing him out in this?

  He looked down at the red wagon Orlando was rolling behind him, and then at all the loot inside. To a passerby, one might think they were moving. But they weren’t.

  They were shopping.

  Stealing.

  Looking back up at the pack approaching him, he got that feeling. You know how sometimes, when just the right guys approach you, and in their eyes you can see the mischief, the unwarranted animosity, that electric radiance dancing off them that says you’re not only their target, you’re in deep, deep trouble?

  That was the feeling Draven was getting.

  The four of them stopped short of getting in Draven’s and Orlando’s faces. “What are you two girlfriends doing skulking about with your little garbage wagon?”

  This guy asking the question, he and Draven were around the same size, neither having a height nor weight advantage over the other. Where Draven looked relatively clean and wholesome, this guy looked like a scumbag who’d lost his way in life enough to turn to intimidation, bullying and possibly violence.

  “Actually,” Draven answered, deadpan, “I was thinking you were brilliant. You both asked and answered your question at the same time.”

  Three of the four of them gave a slight chuckle, but it was clear they weren’t following what Draven was saying. It was a nervous laugh. Like when foreigners not fluent in English don’t understand what you were saying, yet they smiled simply because you were smiling.

  “What does that mean?” the pack alpha asked.

  “It means you can have this conversation all on your own,” Orlando said. “But without us. I mean, we don’t need to be here, right?”

  The guy’s eyes narrowed, his body becoming rigid. He wasn’t smart, but he was smart enough to know he was being dismissed, not taken seriously. When this guy turned to Orlando, Draven glanced down at his knuckles, saw the scars. In seconds, he took in the rest of the details of him. He was broken down tennis shoes, pants that didn’t have a belt, a shirt that was baggy enough to make his arms look wiry, but not necessarily weak. He was five days scruff, yellow eyes, messy hair and ugly.

  Turning to Orlando, Draven said, “The answer to that question is no. We don’t need to be here. Not really. These guys were just moving on so we can mind our own business and be on our way.”

  This brought all eyes back on Draven.

  “I don’t think so,” the alpha said stepping forward, an agitated weariness to him that oozed from his pupils like a bad poker player’s tell.

  “When did thinking ever make a difference for a guy like you?” Draven said, his tone deepening, darkening.

  “You steal that stuff?” another of the guys asked.

  He bore the same filthy look of his alpha. And he was every bit as downtrodden as the rest of the betas. The filthy look and smell of these guys didn’t bother Draven as much as all the open sores. They were scratched arms and necks. They were split open lips and yellowish scabs that looked moist, if not wet.

  Who knew what they were?

  Draven didn’t.

  They could be infected bug bites, the products of meth scratching, possibly even disease. Under these circumstances, upstanding citizens from before the attacks and the subsequent EMP were bound to look as bad as the vagrants who lived in the streets. When everyone was desperate and unprepared, when wealth and status and money meant exactly squat, the world was nothing if not a level playing field.

  “Define stealing,” Draven said. />
  “Taking something that’s not yours,” another replied.

  These were four men who didn’t strike Draven as having chemistry any more than he and Orlando had chemistry. That meant they probably hadn’t run together, fought together or buried friends together.

  Two of them now moved into punching distance, the other two into kicking distance. One was slightly to his right while the alpha stood slightly to his left. Seeing what was going on, feeling the dismal weight of their energy, it was clear they were a danger to him and Orlando. So much so that the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention.

  The switch inside him flipped. He couldn’t help it, but he didn’t stop it either.

  He knew this moment would come.

  Standing before him, these were no longer four guys trying to get through this and survive, they were four targets who might need to be neutralized.

  This distinction kept him from seeing them as human.

  The heat gathered inside him, became a fire he knew would quickly become an inferno given the right fuel. He would provide that fuel. Tapping into the hurt and anger he felt at Eudora’s passing, the stress of this situation, he willed himself into a state of rage.

  He lost family. His home. All his precious things. That inferno burned hot and bright, the flames licking the inside walls of his very soul.

  Closing the distance between them, Draven pointed his finger right in the alpha’s face and said, “Right now you’re stealing my time, because it’s not yours, so technically you’re the thief here. Not me.”

  His voice was murderous, a threat in and of itself.

  “Is that so?” the guy asked with a sneer, clearly unmoved by the posturing.

  Only this wasn’t posturing.

  “A word to the wise,” Draven snarled, bowing up on the guy to conceal the movement of his hand to the handle of his knife. “I don’t like thieves. Especially gutter thieves like you.”

  “Well we don’t like you either,” he said, moving into Draven’s space.

  “Then turn around and kick rocks,” Orlando chimed in, having Draven’s back, even though Draven and the alpha had already passed the point of no return.