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

  Nessa pointed accusingly at Kahleb, and the guards swarmed him. They pulled his father back to his feet, shackled him, and whisked him away into the sea of hardened faces.

  His father was gone as well.

  The guards soon left, and the crowd of onlookers went back to their business. Paul crawled over to Nessa, who was shaking from the trauma. Victoria sat beside her, tending to her bloody nose. As Paul sat in a rage, his mother stoic, and fell to sobbing inconsolable tears.

  Paul soon rallied them all to their feet and started them back on their way to the boxcar. Operetta’s cheerful voice announced the train’s imminent departure, and if the Chief Regent delivered on any of his promises, it was that the trains would run on time. Helping Nessa and Victoria into the boxcar, Paul looked around for either his father or the stranger, but he found neither. With an anguished heart, he turned from the door and watched his mother and sister squeeze into the small vacant spots on the boxcar floor.

  He looked to a line of five passengers sitting comfortably on the boxcar’s pews—each conspicuously avoiding eye contact with him or his injured mother. Paul would have none of it. He walked over to the first woman on the bench and leaned in to meet her eyes. She needed no other convincing and got out of her spot without ever making eye contact. The man next to her was still pretending to ignore him, so Paul shuffled over and leaned in with the same menacing look. The man tried for a moment to meet his gaze, but he capitulated after only a few seconds. By the time Paul had intimidated the third passenger on the bench into leaving, the remaining two had caught on and vacated their seats before Paul even arrived.

  Paul gestured for his mother to lie down on the bench. Nessa reluctantly complied, seeing the remnants of Paul’s determination. Victoria sat at the far end of the bench, letting her mother rest her head on Victoria’s lap. Paul took the spot at the far end and scanned the room again, half-hoping to meet a challenger. Almost disappointed at the lack of opportunity to vent his new-found rage, Paul gazed out the gap in the boxcar door as the rickety train rocked and clanked its way out of the Las Vegas MAC.

  Chapter 5: Fetch the Lancasters

  (Emily Goldbloom)

  Emily Goldbloom leaned against Oscar, her family’s reclaimed and refurbished garbage truck, named by Emily for the furry, green, trash-can dwelling beast she had seen on the children’s show from the High Times. So far now from the tender age of watching such shows, Emily carefully filled a magazine with ammunition and set it on the pile with the others she had already loaded. She drew a deep breath to settle her nerves as her father Christian and Uncle Joshua emerged from their tent and made their way toward the truck. Her brother Tim and her mother Honey followed.

  Emily stilled her beating heart as best she could, trying to muster a strong persona for her little brother, Tim. Thankfully, Tim snuggled up next to her, as he often did, appearing almost oblivious to the situation they faced and showing not the least bit of concern about her impending departure.

  Doesn’t he remember what we went through? She knew it was better if he didn’t. God knows, I carry enough worry for both of us.

  She could see the anxiety on the face of her mother, Honey. Elevated stress made her mother more volatile than usual. Emily gave Tim a gentle squeeze, realizing that he might have a tougher time of it being the only kid around their mother for two days. Her mother favored Tim, but no one could predict if Honey would dole out ebullient affection or an explosion of anger. Emily often got both in the same afternoon.

  Tim squirmed free of Emily’s hug and went back to fiddling with his wrist-plat. That would have to do as her goodbye from him. Honey was approaching, arms spread wide for a long, tight embrace. If Emily could have swapped the goodbyes between her bother and her mother, she surely would have.

  Emily let out a deep sigh. It seemed like they had only just arrived and gotten settled. A modicum of stability had finally arrived, and she was completely unprepared to leave. But there was no way out of it.

  ‘Family’s family,’ she reminded herself. That was her father’s slogan, and he was determined to stitch the family back together—even if doing so risks a complete unraveling.

  This had started to become clear to Emily the night before, when after a long day of work, her parents dragged her to a spontaneous reunion with her long-lost Uncle Joshua. A preacher in a traveling ministry, Uncle Joshua was an odd duck—at least to Emily’s way of thinking. He had arrived in the nearby town of Ogallala after years in the Wilds, when he called to invite them to visit a church service. Emily held deep suspicions of “people of faith,” and she tended to think of her uncle—when she thought of him at all—as more of a carnie than a holy man, though she couldn’t decide which was worse. Her mother, by contrast, considered herself a person of faith—for all the good it did her—and her father was keen to see his younger brother. Even Tim was excited to meet his uncle, whom he only knew from the occasional V-plat chat.

  “Muuuuhm,” Emily pleaded. “Can’t I just stay home? You know the people at these things scare me. What can I possibly get from going to some big-top jubilee? I don’t even know Uncle Joshua.”

  ““You are going, and that’s that,” her mother barked. “Now go get dressed.” Honey’s tone signaled an outburst in the offing, so Emily relented and went to the small room she shared with Tim, where she found that her mother had laid out a new outfit on her cot. Emily slipped into the tan cotton dress that fell to her knees and cinched its woven hemp belt at the waist. Draping mesh sleeves, embroidered with vines and flowers, matched the breeches that tucked into tall brown boots. The customary greeting gloves rested delicately on a broad-rimmed hat.

  Emily hated the feeling of dressing up like the Ellies, knowing her clothes were a poor imitation. Emulating this way seemed to draw attention to their inferior status and reinforced the Ellie’s love for themselves. On the other hand, she rarely wore anything but work coveralls, and it was strangely energizing getting “gussied up,” as her father put it.

  Her family greeted her with compliments and good-natured piropos when she returned to the sitting room. She blushed and waived the attention away as the family made its way to Bambi, the disused ambulance that her father salvaged and converted to a smaller work truck. As a toddler, Emily could not pronounce “ambulance,” and was still obsessed with the High Times deer movie—and its the long-lost animals. Her word fusion struck Christian as hilarious and adorable so it took.

  Minutes later, they were exiting the guarded walls of Troy Township. Her heart dropped into her stomach, as it always did when they went beyond the wall, past the fence-line, and through the shanty afueras, to the dusty road. She took only slight comfort in the safety of being part of a caravan on the road to Uncle Joshua’s big-top jubilee.

  All this, she groused silently, to listen to fanatics carry-on about God’s Plan. Book of Job. The Golden Calf. Then, the extraction of people’s scant coin before the shysters make a hasty exit. I’ll be exhausted at work tomorrow, handling a bajillion gigawatts of electricity.

  …‘Though it’s the ohms that’ll kill ya,’ her father always told her. She couldn’t help but smile at her father’s macabre humor, which only occasionally punctuated his otherwise stoic demeanor.

  Upon arriving at the site of her uncle’s big-top church service, she was let down to learn that Uncle Joshua couldn’t even find his way to greet them. So, they queued-up behind a number of fancily dressed Ellies—probably petroleros—who looked conspicuously uncomfortable and anxious to be so far out of their element.

  Whatever God these shysters are selling’ll have no room for you, she thought. …Then again, He’ll prob’ly have a thing or two to say to all of us.”

  To Emily’s pleasant surprise, when they reached the turnstile, the usher led them to “VIP” seating—cushioned chairs near the front row. The lights soon dimmed, gradually replaced by soft colors and sounds that shifted, merged, disintegrated, and started again. The holograms around her gave her the sense of be
ing deep in a green forest, though she had no idea what that would actually be like. Peaceful streams babbled nearby, clean and sparkling. The air itself felt pure and chill, like it had been washed by rain only moments before. She loved the rain, if only because it was so infrequent, and she had never been stuck in one of the flood disasters that periodically threw everything into chaos.

  The minister came into view under a gentle cone of golden light on center stage. His voice was deep, calm, and oddly reassuring. As he spoke, and the sense of nature enveloped her, she felt wave after wave of emotion. Grief and loss. An inexplicable nostalgia. Love. Peace. . . . And hope.

  Only once in the hour-long event was she distracted, and only because she happened to catch sight of Uncle Joshua just off stage. A young man sat next to him, the spitting image of the preacher. But while her uncle focused admiringly at the man at center stage, the attractive boy was laser focused on a panel of computer screens. Her heart pulled forward in her chest, and realizing he was the architect of the magical sights and sounds around her, she decided to refocus on the show and surrender herself to his art.

  Maybe my uncle isn’t a complete nutbag, she thought as she drifted away in the current of holographic bliss.

  When the overhead lights of the big tent cruelly returned, Emily found herself wading in a sea of disassociation. The hundreds of urchins around her looked to be feeling a similar maudlin longing for more. She looked back to the stage, hoping to see the handsome young man again. He was standing beside the preacher—whom she now recognized as his father—with the Ellies from the queue closing-in on them fast.

  “Em . . . Em! Come say hello to your uncle,” her mother called. “Dear Lord, that girl . . .”

  Realizing she had been spaced-out for some time, Emily stood up, slipped on her greeting glove, and made her way to her waiting uncle, who smiled warmly at the sight of her.

  “What did you think, Em?” Uncle Joshua asked.

  “It was wonderful,” she answered. “Truly,” she added, knowing her uncle probably suspected her disdain for his profession.

  He smiled with a humble appreciation. “I’m so glad,” he replied sincerely. “And Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Chris—”

  Before she could finish, though, Uncle Joshua had turned his attention to Tim. Her brother practically ran into Joshua’s arms, making her uncle beam with undiluted joy. Joshua squeezed Tim, and the full measure of her uncle’s love for them crystalized in her mind.

  Emily felt a new, unexpected admiration for her uncle, who had given up everything to bring this holy experience—a modicum of relief—to the untold masses of miserable and downtrodden strangers.

  An hour or two of peace. That’s not for nothin’. And at least they’re good at it. He could’ve ended up with all the crazies shouting gibberish the streets.

  Uncle Joshua then brought them to the vestry tent, where he introduced them to Alias Goodwell Sr., the leader of what she called the “big-top ministry.” Next to him was his son Alias, whom she found even more striking up close. But before she could find her way over to the son, the Goodwells were swept away by the waiting Ellies.

  With Alias’ sudden and premature departure, and Tim again absorbed in his wrist plat, Emily tried her best to focus on the conversation between her parents and Uncle Joshua. It was too noisy, though, and she was distracted by the conversation unfolding nearby between the Ellies and the Goodwells—a preoccupation her Uncle Joshua seemed to share. She was just too tired to focus for long, and when she again snapped out of a daze, the Goodwells were leaving the room with the Ellies, and Uncle Joshua was locked in an intense conversation with her parents. She tried to tune in, but she could only catch snippets through the noise.

  . . . Aunt Nessa and her cousins . . . Uncle Kahleb gone . . . On the train from California-Sur

  Some kind of trouble, from the sound of it.

  Her level of awareness became acute when Uncle Joshua unexpectedly followed them back to Bambi, and proceeded to climb in, taking the seat between Emily and Tim.

  “You’re coming with us?” she probed. “Don’t you have to stay here?”

  “I was able to get some leave,” Joshua answered with a conspicuous nonchalance. “So, I can finally spend Christmas with my family,” he added, draping his arms over her and Tim, pulling them close with a squeeze. But Emily knew there was more at play. She had seen too much in her young life to buy that kind of response. As the cold wind blew through the open windows on the drive home, she wished she had clued into the earlier conversation. There was an unnerving atmosphere in the van, like the entire family was taking a deep breath—the kind of breath people take before the clogging winds of a duster engulf them.

  She knew she couldn’t bring it up with her brother still awake in the car, so she waited. As soon as Tim fell asleep, Emily broke the silence.

  “Who’s gonna tell me what’s going on?”

  A pregnant pause greeted her question, followed by nonsensical tap-dancing from her mother. Nevertheless, Emily gathered that someone had to go get the Lancasters—possibly driving across the Desert Plains Territory. Maybe as far as the Southern Rocky Mountains Territory. Maybe even all the way into the High Desert Territory.

  That explains why Uncle Joshua decided to stay. They need the extra manpower. Emily’s face went hot at the prospect of heading back into the Wilds, unprotected. Uncle Joshua squirmed a little in his seat, knowing she understood the magnitude of the issue.

  Emily’s first dreaded trek through the Wilds had begun a year before, when her family finally resolved to leave their home in Paola, Desert Plains Territory.

  “Rise and shine, Sweetie,” her mother had chimed, thankfully in a good mood. “Big day today.” Emily didn’t move, even though such unresponsiveness could trigger a mood swing and furious shouting. “Busy day. Up and at ‘em,” Honey persisted cheerfully.

  Emily grudgingly wiped the sleep from her eyes, dragged herself out of bed, and staggered to the kitchenette, which was littered with bulging boxes and stuffed crates. She sat at the small kitchen table, sipping tepid Cafecito, the coffee-like beverage the International Agriculture Consortium fed to the urchins. She scraped the mixing bowl for residual dough from the drought-oat biscuits her mother was baking in the solar oven.

  Christian moved purposefully around the house, sifting and sorting, packing and discarding. Her brother sat quietly in the next room, fixated on some “how-to” lesson he’d probably seen a hundred times before on their antiquated OmniComms V-plat. Emily never understood how Tim could watch the same lessons over and over—except that it was all they had.

  Then Christian marched into the kitchen and instructed the family to follow him to the basement shelter. Emily licked the last traces of the sweet biscuit dough from her fingertips and dutifully followed her father downstairs. The basement had been emptied of its normal clutter. Cans of beans, root vegetables, and soups. Large drums of filtered water. Tubes of bio-protein paste and flavor packets. Rifles and handguns. Boxes of ammunition. All had been packed and stationed near the front door of their small flat.

  The family’s vintage V-plat sat blinking in the middle of the room, and Christian gestured for them to sit down.

  “The time has finally come,” he said as cheerfully as he could. As he continued, Emily sensed that he was convincing himself as much as he was trying to convince them, though Emily needed no convincing. She had been ready to leave Paola for as long as she could remember.

  Even her grandparents had apparently declared—just before they succumbed to the Swine Flu Epidemic—that the end of the Desert Plains Territory was “near at hand.” Her father and mother nevertheless clung to their home in Paola, despite the town’s descent. They refused to abandon the desiccated, lawless swath stretching from the Southern Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi, from the Meso-American border to the Ontario and Great Lakes Provinces. The scathing heat, fired, and occasional torrential rains only cultivated more desert, year by year. �
��Crop adaptation”—from wheat and livestock to sorghum to drought oats—finally failed with the collapse of the water table and the waves of insect infestations.

  Without a clear destination, though, her parents kept them afloat as long as they could. Her father sold his skills as a power and hydro-engineer, and eventually started hawking the equipment he salvaged to dying towns and the throngs of migrants passing through. They stayed until their Kroners had dwindled and were becoming increasingly worthless as successive waves of bank failures buffeted the Commonwealth. The “good faith and credit” of the government had long since frayed, and some provinces had taken to illegally printing their own currencies, deepening the financial malaise.

  It struck Emily as provenance when her father came home from work one day with a dirty bear of a man named Shamus Gray. “Shay,” as he asked to be called, followed in the dusty wake of her father as he returned home in Bambi.

  Shay was a barrel of a man, about forty years old, though his sun burnt and weathered face made him appear older. He wore a camouflage baseball cap, mirrored aviator sunglasses, and baggy cargo coveralls. A fashioned leather utility belt and holster cinched around his belly. The caked dust on his clothes and the sweat beading on his cheeks and beard added a certain foulness to his presence. His scraggly graying beard, and the deep crow’s feet that crinkled when he smiled—and he seemed to smile a lot—gave him a jovial quality.

  Emily stood gobsmacked when his father started to make introductions. Her brother Tim, however, took to Shay immediately, seeing him as some kind of commando Santa Claus. Her mother was slower to warm, and her father had to do a fair amount of convincing before Honey would loosen her white-knuckled grip on her pistol handle.