Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga) Read online

  Rumor was the provinces of Oregonia, Pacific Columbia, and Yukon might have some jobs. But thousands were already headed that way on the hunt for work. The modicum of stability citizens enjoyed there came from living in a virtual police state, certain to get worse as more migrants arrived. Plus, a new water rebellion was spreading through the sprawl of old Los Angeles, and her mother refused to risk the northward trek.

  Her mother suggested they move east to the Troy Township in the Ozarks Province, where her brother Christian and his family had found jobs.

  “We can find work there too,” she argued. “Get back on our feet and figure out our next move.”

  Kahleb objected, fearing the haboobs and the road raiders in the High Desert Territory, to say nothing of the bandits and scavengers terrorizing the Southern Rocky Mountains Territory. The unpredictable dusters and marauders that swept the Desert Plains Territory.

  Her mother countered that there would be safety in numbers if they took the train east. She was determined to be near her family now that things had come completely undone.

  “There ain’t no work there, damnit,” her father yelled. “Even Christian ain’t got steady work. And there ain’t no guarantee we’d get jobs even if we survived the trip.”

  Victoria knew, as her mother certainly did, that her father would lose his shit if she suggested that her family could support them; he would never suffer the humiliation of taking charity from her Uncle Christian, whom he always felt had looked askance at him.

  Victoria figured the argument would drag on without end, and she was too tired to follow it. So, she abandoned her spying and retired to her cot in the sleeping room, where Paul was already snoring softly.

  The next morning, Victoria woke up to the sound of her parents squabbling—and packing. When she and Paul emerged from the sleeping room, they were stunned to hear her father tell them to gear up. They were leaving before noon.

  “What?! That doesn’t even give us time to say goodbye to our friends!” she protested. But her father just replied with a menacing glare. Paul tugged her by the arm to extract her from the situation, and she broke into tears as they started off to gather their few belongings.

  Within the hour, their father entered the sleeping room, where Victoria and Paul were completing their packing. With a curious sentimental demeanor they only rarely saw, he summoned them to the autocar so they could go see the overlook one last time. On mild winter days, when they were young—and their father was sober—he drove them from the Irvine Hills to see the beach ruins.

  From the crumbling overpass of Harbor Boulevard and the old 405 they could make out the withered black slivers of the old Huntington Pier poking through the churning Pacific. Whitecaps broke on the gray domes that shielded the few remaining oil pumps. Giant cranes stooped in rusted tangles in the distance, where ships sometimes braved the treacherous sprint to trade food and machines—and people.

  Victoria had always found the vista both beautiful and melancholic. With her father’s condition far worse now and their departure imminent, the sight struck a nostalgic chord that almost brought her to tears again. Her father, distant and sad, stared out at the abandoned infrastructure, where he had spent so many cruel years toiling until a thunderous rumble echoed from the coastline.

  A flicker of sunlight glinted from the windscreens of two small jump-jets, screaming towards them, a flock of aerial drones encircling both ships in a defensive perimeter. Victoria covered her ears and squinted up at the beige hulls speeding over them, charcoal exhaust dissipating in the ocean breeze.

  “TEMPLETON ENTERPRISES,” read the black letters on one ship’s undercarriage.

  “IEC – Bringing Power to the People,” read the script on the second ship.

  They waited anxiously for their father’s reaction. One hand balled into a fist as the other trembled its way into his jacket pocket, his face red with rage. Her heart sank as he pulled out a flask, fumbled with the cap, swallowed a mouthful, and began to shake. Then her heart jumped as he hurled the half-full flask of his precious methylhol over their heads at the now-distant airships.

  “Motherfuckers!” he screamed. “You ruined us!” He unleashed a stream of profanity, stomping around the overlook like a rabid animal, fecklessly grabbing and throwing everything he could find—rocks, bottles, rusted bits of rebar—at the vacant air where the ships had once been.

  Victoria and Paul kept their distance until Kahleb’s furious jag gave way to exhaustion. Paul then walked cautiously over to him and placed a hand on his father’s sobbing shoulders, gesturing for Victoria to help get him back to the car. They hoisted Kahleb to his feet and eased him into the back seat. Paul keyed-in the ignition code and destination, and the battered old autocar coughed to life and chugged them home. Looking back, Victoria found her father asleep, and she closed her eyes to still her thumping heart.

  Back in the shanty, they parked the autocar under the tattered sun-sails stretched between the old streetlamps. There they left their father to sleep, suppressing the knowledge that the blistering sun could compound methylhol dehydration and kill him. As they entered the sweltering living room, their mother noticed their expressions, and let out a sigh.

  “Where is he?” she said with resignation.

  “In the car, asleep,” Paul muttered.

  “You left the windows open?”

  Victoria looked at her mother incredulously. “As if—”

  Appeased, her mother just shrugged and went back into the kitchen. Noticing the neatly stacked boxes in the room, Victoria followed her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. “And when do we leave?”

  “Troy Township,” her mother answered, draping a lock of Victoria’s purple hair behind her ear. “We’ll leave tomorrow.” She paused. “So, now you have a little time to say goodbye to your friends.” She cupped Victoria’s cheek. “I’m so sorry, dear.”

  “It’s OK, mom,” Victoria replied, though it was not at all OK. She accepted her mother’s tearful kiss and grabbed Paul by the hand and led them to the door. “We’ll be back before dark.”

  Victoria and Paul were back before the curfew sirens rang out over the shanty’s tin roofs. Her mother and father were again trading angry barbs, her father having resurrected the negotiation over where to go. Her mother was having none of it; her mind was made up, and the deal was done.

  “We leave tomorrow,” her mother said flatly.

  With those words—and her emphatic tone—her father’s face again flashed red, and Victoria braced herself for the worst. But to her surprise, he just spat, “fucking bitch!” and stormed out the back door, slamming it shut behind him.

  “We leave tomorrow!” Nessa shouted after him, knowing where he was headed. “With or without you!”

  Kahleb father returned from the pharma-dens the next morning, just as Nessa was loading the last boxes into the car. He was in no state to continue the argument from the night before, and her mother was too furious to speak with him. As Nessa gathered up their entire savings of Kroners and selling what possessions she could in the alleyway, he had been out spending their meager resources on a bender.

  In silence, they squeezed into the sagging autocar, which wouldn’t have gotten them half way, and they drove to the train station, hoping to flog it for a bit more currency. There was almost never such luck to be had in situations like these, and the same was true today, so they abandoned the vehicle before schlepping their gear to the weapon-detectors at the station’s entrance.

  Her mother approached the station entrance first, presenting the family’s antiquated OmniComms wrist-plat and leaning forward for her iris scan. Paul and Victoria followed, Kahleb begrudgingly entering only when he realized they were actually going to board without him.

  Within minutes, they were all climbing into a boxcar to find a handful of old church pews bolted to the walls, straw and sawdust covering the floor space in the middle. Strap-handles hung from nails in the ceiling joists. A steel shit-bucket
was mounted to the floor in one corner, partially concealed by a threadbare shower curtain.

  The pews were already full, and the floor space was filling quickly. Her mother shouldered through the crowd to find room on the floor and summoned them all to her. As the last of the passengers boarded and the jostling slowed, her mother surreptitiously passed four drought-oat rolls to them. Victoria and Paul discreetly brought small pieces to their hungry lips, eager to avoid attention. But her father set on his like a ravenous pig, attracting the interest of everyone around them and forcing them to conceal their loot.

  “Only a night to the Las Vegas MAC,” Nessa said cheerfully, trying to distract the family from their grumbling bellies. Her mother’s plan to get them east rested on hopping from one Migrant Assistance Center to another along the rail corridor, stopping only for the small doles of water and food rations. Irvine to Las Vegas. “Then a hop over the mountains, and voila!”

  Victoria’s father rolled his eyes, but Victoria’s bigger concern was the methylhol withdrawals that would soon be upon him. If the sickness were bad enough, he would steal or fight for a fix. Victoria caught herself imagining him dead in the overheated autocar, and she was surprised at how little guilt the idea triggered.

  As night began to fall, Victoria huddled with her family, trying to maintain a safe distance from the other passengers in the car, a task made easier by the other passengers trying to put distance between themselves and her father, who was already showing signs of withdrawals. The gloaming of the setting sun reflected off the first beads of sweat forming on his forehead as the withdrawals took hold.

  At last, the train lurched forward. The click-clack of the rails and the rocking put her into a daze. Through the gaping seems in the walls, she took-in the charred ruins of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Redlands. She wondered about the silhouettes of people huddling around small fires, the faint orange light reflecting off the rubble of ruined houses and burned-out strip malls.

  How do they survive? What do they eat? Where do they get water? How have they not been reduced to cinders under the sun?

  Victoria was sandwiched between her mother and brother, an arrangement almost certainly conceived by her mother for her protection. She studied her brother’s eyes drifting closed and snapping open as he fought sleep. Her mother stared vacantly into the darkness. All night.

  Or so she thought, until she woke up just before dawn, the endlessly flat expanse of the High Desert Territory stretched out before her in soft purple hues. Beautiful, but lifeless. She looked around the car, imagining the lives of the other passengers—their loves, worries, and heartbreaks—until she came upon one face staring back at her from the rear of the car. She looked away, startled and frightened, but she could sense his stare. She was grateful when the train finally began to squeal and jerk, jarring all the passengers awake, though she could still sense the stranger’s gaze.

  As the train screeched to a stop and elevated catwalks came into Victoria’s view through the windows, helmeted soldiers pacing back and forth on them with opaque shields and stun-clubs glistening in the morning light. There was a moment of silence before shouting and whistles filled the air and the boxcar doors slid open. The throng of passengers in her car came alive, gathering their things and tussling for space to move. The guard at the door slung a machine gun over his shoulder and barked into the pensive crowd.

  “Las Vega MAC! All passengers will disembark in an orderly fashion. Follow the yellow lines to the public health center. There will be absolutely no pushing or shoving. Any disturbances will be put down instantly, and problem passengers will be dealt with severely. I assure you, you don’t want any part of that.” The guard’s tone, well practiced, had the desired effect, and the passengers immediately became docile.

  Just as Victoria prepared for her turn to climb down from the boxcar, her mother began tying a stretchy rope around her wrist. Seeing the other end tied to her mother’s wrist, she pulled away momentarily—but only until she saw that Paul was already fastened to her mother’s other wrist. He gave her a quick nod, encouraging her to comply. She drew a deep breath, relented, and prepared herself to climb down onto the plaza of the MAC, a massive open space enclosed by rusted steel shipping containers crowned by spirals of razor wire. Towers with machine-gun nests punctuated the perimeter, connected by a lattice of overhead catwalks supporting heavily armed guards.

  Her heart pounded again as her mother tugged on the tether and they started into the crowds filling the plaza.

  Chapter 3: Re-Useful

  (Benjamin Holland)

  Benjamin Holland sat shotgun in the desert assault vehicle, third in a convoy of five winding its way through the rocky mountain landscape. His stomach lurched as they rounded the last bend, revealing their destination. Its curling pearlescent shell sparkled in the morning light. Never in his life had he imagined he would be nearing the very doorstep of one of the greatest shrines to the Commonwealth’s most powerful and prestigious people.

  Christmas Eve, he mused, and my birthday, and here I am about to enter the Nautilus. The thought, coupled with the sight before him, sent shivers through his body. He couldn’t help but feel a moment of joy in admiring the dramatic reversal of fortune that had brought him so far from where he began.

  Ben could only summon flash-card images from the day he had found himself at the Billings Home for Children, a dozen years before. His mother wiping her tear-streaked eyes. Her warm lips kissing his cold cheeks. Her forced smile as she straightened her skirt, shook her hair a little, and righted her posture before walking away to join three Arabs waiting in a limo-van. The chauffeur casting him one soulless look as he closed the door behind her and made his way to the driver’s seat. The limo-van’s glowing tail lights growing ever smaller in the haze of dust floating on the icy wind.

  He had no images of his father what-so-ever. Whatever his mother had told him was now buried in layers of cobwebs in his mind. But he knew that one of the many dark, painful holes in his heart belonged to his father. The far larger one to his mother.

  He remembered vividly, though, every one of his frightened steps on the frozen sidewalk—past the gawking faces of beggars, whores, and street urchins—as he followed his mother’s directions to the doors of the orphanage. Ben had little idea of what was in store for him just a block away. But his mother’s assurance—“You’ll be better off there”—could not have been more wrong.

  She had to’ve known, he sometimes told himself in moments of agonizing honesty. Now that he was older, he understood that everyone knew, even if they refused to admit it. On the rare occasions he felt magnanimous, he also appreciated that the understood there were few choices.

  Young men in the peasant class, like his father, had few choices: try to coax life from the obstinate ground; squeeze into packed buses, trucks, and railcars to follow day-labor jobs; or sell their fleeting strength to the Commonwealth’s military services, one of the provincial militias, or the myriad vigilantes, bandits, criminal syndicates, and drug gangs.

  Women like his mother fared little better: stay on the same dying farms; migrate as menial, subsistence labor; or whore themselves for whatever price their bodies might fetch. Temp work with the international consortiums or the Ellie industrialists was mostly limited to the skilled. The kibbutz townships were nearly impossible to get into without knowing someone of influence, and even then, access required more in bribes than the masses could afford.

  The aged and the sick fared worse still, often put down with dream-drops, when those could be found at the traveling medical clinics funded by the governments or one of the Big Five churches. When dream drops were scarce, the weak were left to the elements, along with the throngs of “untenable” infants and toddlers.

  “Viable” children of all ages worked, when work was available, even though it was still technically illegal—the law itself just a quaint holdover from the High Times. There was little hope of education—even if schools were operating. When there was
no work to be had, the tide of children left at the doorsteps of churches, government buildings, and orphanages surged. Or they were sold.

  Young girls fetched the best price, mostly for overseas buyers. Mostly Chinese, their scarcity of eligible females driving-up demand for brides, mistresses, concubines, and whores. Arabs too, with their culture of harems, kept prices high. Higher than for boys anyway.

  Strong, healthy boys could be sold for more modest sums, while weaker or otherwise undesirable boys (if they managed to survive infancy) were left to whatever group homes or orphanages would take them.

  A scrawny boy like Ben learned quickly that life gives and takes away at every turn and at every age. In his early years, the heavy air of the Desert Plains Territory left him with painful bouts of black-dust asthma—coughing and sneezing dirt-infused phlegm. At least in the orphanage, he was mostly spared the pangs of hunger with two meals a day. He also received some education for the first time, learning useful things like water purification, machine repair, survival basics, and low-water gardening.

  The orphanage also taught him there was a re-use for nearly everything. It salvaged and re-used computers, electronics, clothes, shoes, and furniture. It composted leftover food for the small gardens tended by the children. It melted plastic and metal trash, re-casting it into tableware, tools, toys, weapons. Sheets and clothes too tattered to re-use were made “re-useful” as canopy shades strung between tall poles to protect the fragile gardens from the sun’s relentless gaze. Furniture beyond its working life was taken for parts to repair everything from door jams to rat traps and rickshaws. Even old shoes were cut apart, the soles melted into sealant in the water-capture tanks. Everything was “re-useful.”