Fireside (25 page)

He was rolled gently from his back onto his stomach when the tank’s turret turned, bringing the gun back to the front. Close by his head, the sound of metal scraping against metal caused him to turn slightly towards the noise. He stared at a round metal door of some kind and beyond the door, a man had emerged. The man leaned forward to fire the large machine gun mounted in front of the opening towards the fleeing Shooters.

He giggled slightly to himself and pulled the last two grenades from his suspenders. They’d given him an opportunity to avenge Gloria’s senseless death. The pull-rings fit perfectly into the cuts in the joints of his fingers and he jerked them out.

With the last of his strength, Joseph pulled himself to the hatch and dropped both grenades inside.

*****

“Ah, fuck! I’ve gotta slow down, Traxx.”

He turned and regarded Tyler. Why should he care what he felt like? He’d made it evident that their friendship was over after this, so what did it matter? He slowed to a walk. It
did
matter to him. They’d been friends and helped each other out more than he could have ever imagined in ten lifetimes. He hadn’t stopped caring about the big guy, even if Tyler had given up on him.

“Okay. We can walk a couple of blocks, but no more.”

Tyler nodded and then started coughing. He bent over double, hacking violently. The pavement turned dark underneath him as fluid expelled from his lungs. It was more than a simple reaction to the acrid smoke that hung low across the city; it was his body failing him.

Aeric gave him a few moments before asking, “Are you gonna make it?”

Tyler straightened out and gave him a bloody grin. The dark red fluid ran from his nose, over his lips and dripped from his chin to land on his barrel chest. “Won’t be long now. This has taken too much out of me.”

“The cancer?”

“Yeah. I ain’t got long before I’m done.” He took several deep breaths and smeared the bloody mucus across his face with the back of his hands. “Okay, I’m ready.”

They started walking towards the north again, darting between shadows and hiding in patches of low-hanging smoke when they could. Aeric had decided to skip the Provisions Warehouse and head directly for the Northern Gate. Veronica would have gathered the family and gone there after Aiden passed his message that the city had fallen. Maybe she’d already taken it upon herself to lead them to Tennyson.

The old Air Force base passed by on their right and Aeric wondered about Lorelei and Joseph, the Shooter whom he’d grown fond of after their mission to Austin. Far to the western side of the city, probably near the Provisions Warehouse, a massive firefight still raged. They could hear the tanks firing and he hoped the Shooters would heed protocol. Their primary duty was to ensure the safety of the residents, not the supplies.

Several loud explosions reverberated from the west. It sounded like buildings crashed to the ground. The defenses around the Provisions Warehouse had surely fallen and the Vultures were destroying everything in their path. His city was gone.

“Aeric!” Tyler hissed. “We need to hide.”

“Huh?”

Tyler jerked him sideways into an alley and put his finger to his lips. Aeric nodded in understanding. Several people walked by in the street. He couldn’t make out who they were through the haze and ash. They all seemed to be armed, walking haphazardly without checking their surroundings; definitely
not
Shooters. It could have been residents of San Angelo who were going to the rally point or they could be Vultures, confident that they were in charge of the city.

A strangled noise came from Tyler and Aeric whipped his head around to see what was happening. The big man had his hand pressed against his mouth and covering his nose. He was trying to hold back another cough. If he let it out, whoever it was that had passed by would surely hear him and come down the alley to investigate. Aeric willed his friend to stop and keep it inside.

The group disappeared and Tyler allowed himself to cough. More blood flew outward between his fingers and ran down his arm. They waited for the inevitable return, weapons pointed at the head of the alley.

No one else appeared through the smoke, so they cautiously emerged from the alley onto the sidewalk. Tyler looked both ways. “I can’t see anyone else,” he said.

“Alright, let’s go.”

They passed several bodies, twisted grotesquely in death. Most of them had been shot in the back, gunned down as they fled. “The Vultures are heading towards the Northern Gate,” Aeric surmised.

“Are we too late?”

“I don’t know. The only thing we can do is keep going.”

A small shadow appeared in the darkness and a whispered voice drifted towards them, “Grandad? Grandad, are you here?”

“Aiden? Aiden? Is that you?”

“Grandad!” The little boy materialized through the smoke and ran up to Aeric, who knelt down and hugged him.

He finally broke away from the embrace and held Aiden at arms’ length. “What are you doing here, boy?”

“I came back to find you.”

Aeric’s lipped thinned as he pressed them together. “Did you get the message to your father and grandmother to evacuate the city?”

He nodded, “I told Grandma. She had all the grandkids with her. Dad and Mom were with Uncle John fighting against the Vultures.”

It made sense. Every healthy person who wasn’t charged with watching children was supposed to defend the city. “Did she listen? Did they get out of San Angelo?”

“Yes, sir. They left through the Northern Gate towards the town they’re supposed to go to.”

“Tennyson?”

“Yeah, that one. I ran back when they were leaving through the gate. I had to find you and Dad.”

Aeric hugged him again. “It’s not safe in the city, Aiden. You should have left with them.”

“Well, we can leave together now,” the boy reasoned. “Have you seen Dad?”

“No, I haven’t, sorry. Let’s keep moving. Maybe we’ll find him on the way to the gate.”

The three of them continued towards the Northern Gate. There was some type of temporary lull in the fighting, gunfire no longer sounded in the distance. They were only about half a mile from the exit and hadn’t seen anyone else besides the group that passed them before they reunited with Aiden. Aeric began to wonder if Huerta had escaped along with everyone else.

If he’d escaped, he probably went to Tennyson with the refugees. No one knew that he was responsible for destroying the walls or burning the city. He could infiltrate with the rest of the residents and betray them again. Aeric had to put a stop to Huerta if his people were ever going to be safe.

They turned onto one of the paths through the old golf course towards the gates. The fairways had been turned into farmland in places where there’d been grass before the fall of the old world. He was lost in his thoughts when the haze erupted into flashes of light from the corn fields on the southern side of the path. They’d walked right into an ambush. Aeric was hit three times before he fell to the ground.

“Grandad!” Aiden screamed.

“Aeric, hold on!” Tyler shouted as he threw Aiden to the ground.

Bullets chewed up the cart path around him, carving out long, linear grooves into the pavement. Another round slammed into Aeric’s ankle, shattering the bones. He cried out in pain, the other bullets had hit soft tissue and hadn’t been nearly as painful.

He felt himself jerked backwards as Tyler yanked his arm to pull him behind an old stone park bench. “Hang in there, buddy,” the big man grunted.

Aeric’s head lolled to the side. He was quickly losing consciousness. He must have been hit worse than he thought.
How long has it been since was shot
? he wondered. He had so much more to do; he didn’t have time to recover from an injury. He had to go to Austin…wait, that wasn’t right, he’d already done that. He needed to stop the birds from attacking people in the park, right?

His eyes focused for a moment on the dark green leaves of the sweet potato plants beside the path.
Wait, why are the bushes so tall
? He realized that he was looking
up
at them. Was he on the ground? He remembered working to plant the crops, but couldn’t recall the time since then when they grew to their current height. He tried to wipe his hand across his face. Nothing happened. What was wrong with him?

Small thuds of rounds impacting against the opposite side of the bench and someone returning fire nearby reminded him that he was in a fight. He had to help!

A little boy’s face appeared over him.
Who
? It was Aiden, his grandson. “Hey, little buddy,” Aeric murmured, his tongue thick in his mouth.

“Grandad! Are you okay?”

“Mmm…hmm. Sleepy,” he replied.

Tyler, his lifelong friend, the man whom he would give his own life for, showed up.
Where did he come from?
“Aeric, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, bro.” Something was wrong with his mouth; it didn’t sound anything like what he’d expected it to.

“Aeric, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said about our friendship being through. You’re the strongest person that I’ve ever met,” Tyler blubbered.

Is it raining? Why is Tyler’s face wet?
he asked himself in confusion.
Oh no! Acid rain is going to ruin the crops.
They had to harvest what they could before it was too late.

“Everything you’ve ever done to help our city has been selfless. You’ve made those decisions that I wasn’t strong enough to make myself.”

Aeric grinned, “It’s okay, Big Guy. You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I promise you that I’ll keep your family safe, the Vultures won’t get to them,” Tyler continued.

“Vultures?” he muttered.
Of course, the gang from Austin!
They were under attack, he had to fight. He couldn’t feel his weapon, had he lost it somehow?

A shock of black hair spread across his face as Aiden fell over him and hugged his torso tightly. Aeric’s body lifted up slightly, then again as Tyler pulled the boy away from him. Aiden was covered in blood. It spread over one side of his face and across his chest.
Oh no! Was his grandson injured?

“Grandad, you’re gonna be okay,” the boy sobbed.

Once again, Aeric tried to raise his hand so he could check Aiden for injuries, without success.
Why won’t my body respond?

“Aiden, we need to go,” Tyler said. “There’s nothing we can do for him. He’s gone.”

“No!” Aiden screamed. “We can’t leave him.”

“We can’t take him. We need to go.”

From far away, Aeric heard Tyler say something about lungs and intestines.
What did that mean?

There wasn’t any light calling him home. He didn’t feel himself floating upwards or any of the other clichés that he’d heard about dying when he was a kid. The darkness simply closed in around him and he knew no more.

SEVENTEEN

“They’ve stopped firing my lord,” Quellan stated.

Kendrick turned to the captain of his palace guard and regarded him silently. The man had proven himself time and again to be particularly adroit, however he also had a tendency to state the obvious, which was getting as tiresome as Starr’s lunacy had become.
Was it time to make a change in his position as well?
he wondered.

“I know they’ve stopped firing. I can hear that for myself, Captain. Send out a few men to see if there’s anyone who’s going to shoot us when we get back on the path.”

Quellan nodded and gestured three men forward. Kendrick watched as they broke the corn stalks, making a rough path from where they’d hidden to ambush the family who’d came up behind them in the darkness. His small force was on the only direct route to the Northern Gate. If they had any chance of snaring Traxx before he ran away to another stronghold, they had to take the paths through the northern crop fields.

He’d been told via the radio his men carried that one of their two remaining operational tanks had been destroyed by grenades. The inside firing controls were demolished and the breech had somehow been damaged beyond repair as well. The second tank had been immobilized by some sneaky sonsofbitches who’d blown the tracks off and damaged the road wheels. For the moment, both tanks were out of the fight. His men would have to cannibalize the first tank for parts to repair the other before they went to Tennyson.

“The way is clear, my lord,” Quellan said, gesturing to the men he’d sent to investigate the path.

Kendrick stood and walked cautiously to the spot where the family had hidden behind a bench. Several of his men stared at something on the ground. As he got closer, he determined it was a body. The smoke and haze made it difficult to see clearly until he got within a few feet of the scene.

“Oh my God,” he muttered.

“What is it, my lord?” Quellan asked in concern.

It was unmistakable. The man’s build was as he’d remembered it, tall and muscular, yet not nearly as tall as that freak he kept near him at all times. Patches of short-cropped dark hair poked their way through the layers upon layers of scars that crisscrossed the body’s ruined face. They’d gotten him. In a stroke of pure, blind luck, they’d killed the one reason for this war.

“It’s him.”

“Him?” Quellan asked. He examined the body at his feet and gasped. “Is that Traxx?”

Kendrick nodded his head confidently, “Yes, Captain. This is Aeric Traxx, the man who murdered my father and then tried to raise me as his own along with those three whelps of his.”

Tears threatened to pour forth from Kendrick’s eyes. He couldn’t believe that it was over. It had finally come to an end. He knelt beside the body and pressed his fingers roughly against Traxx’s jugular. No pulse, he was truly dead.

Kendrick pulled his knife from its sheath and turned the body over. If there was still pressure in his veins, he didn’t want to be covered too badly in blood. Without any hair or loose skin, he did the only thing he could and crammed his fingers in above the eyes, using the sockets to control the head as he sawed.

He’d never cut the head off of a body before and it took him longer than he thought it would. When he finished, he stood with the severed head and held it up for all of the members of his guard to see.

Out in the crops on the opposite side, a girl screamed. Harsh words drifted across the murk; someone was trying to keep the girl quiet. “Go,” he told Quellan, who dispatched the same three men to search the fields on the opposite side of the path.

“It is finished, Quellan.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Call off the army. We travel back to Austin immediately.”

“I… Sir, the people of this city are on the run. They’re fleeing through this Northern Gate that you had us headed towards. We can keep this place and take all of the supplies. I—”

“Don’t you dare speak to me in such a tone, Quellan! I am the master of the Vultures. I wanted to see Traxx’s head on a spike outside of the palace and I have it now. We are through here.”

“Forgive me, my lord. We need their supplies in Austin. Your father’s warehouses are almost empty. You’d be a fool to leave anything useful here.”

“What did you call me?”

Quellan’s hand dropped to the pistol on his belt and he drew it. “I said you’d be a fool to leave the supplies.”

Kendrick backed away a step, dropping Aeric’s head. “What are you doing? Guards, kill him!”

Quellan shook his head slowly. “No. They understand that we’ve wasted hundreds, if not thousands, of lives and destroyed the last remaining armored vehicles that we had to come here for your personal vendetta against that man. The food supply is perilously low in Austin. More people, these men’s families, will starve to death unless we bring back this food.”

“You treacherous snake!” Kendrick bellowed. Behind him in the direction where the girl had screamed, grunts of surprise and then pain sounded across the night. “There. Your men have met something that they weren’t expecting. I’d be willing to bet that Traxx’s pet giant showed them the dangers of overconfidence.”

“You’re not fit to lead the Vultures any longer, Rustwood. When you started this war, you told of the unlimited wealth of supplies that these people had amassed and I believed you. I sold your plan to the men. They wanted to mutiny before we even left.” He paused and then smiled, “Oh, you didn’t know that? Your heavy-handed, bizarre and sick practices with your whore were the butt of every joke among the men. You only stayed in command as a figurehead; I was the one who truly pulled the strings, you imbecile.”

Kendrick felt his insides boiling over to the point of madness. He was the leader of the Vultures, not the idiot Captain of the Guard. “How dare you—”

A small hand appeared and passed quickly in front of Quellan’s throat several times. He gurgled a response to Kendrick, not yet aware that he was dying and fired the pistol several times as he fell to the ground. In his place was a grinning, nude Starr.

She’d come back and saved him. “I’m not a whore,” she stated and stalked seductively towards him. He glanced at the remaining members of his personal guard. They had stood by, watching the interaction between him and Quellan without doing anything. They would pay for that later, but for now, he’d keep them around to make sure that he made it out of the walls safely with his prize.

Starr nudged Aeric’s head with her toe, “Who’s this?”

“This.” He bent and picked it up, “This is the reason we came to San Angelo. Starr, meet Aeric Traxx.”

“Ugly motherfucker.”

“Yeah, well. My father did that to him.”

Starr grunted in acknowledgement and said, “Do you forgive me yet?”

Forgive her?
his mind scoffed.
Forgive her for what, being a psychotic bitch or the part where she threatened to castrate him?
He suppressed his anger and replied, “I… Yes, I forgive you, Starr.”

She smiled and threw her arms wide. He hesitantly opened his and she dived in, wrapping her arms around his midsection and grabbing hold of his shirt as if she wanted to hold him close and never let him go. She snuggled up close to him, rubbing her nose into the space between his pec muscles and then stabbed him in the kidney.

He screamed in pain as she held him close and plunged her knife repeatedly into his right side. Kendrick couldn’t escape her tight grasp on his clothes and was already rapidly losing his strength. “Help!” he called out to the few remaining guards. They’d wandered away, no longer interested in what happened to him.

Starr’s right arm unwrapped from around him and came to the front. “I am not a whore!” she shouted into his chest as she gouged the knife into his stomach. “Do you hear me? I am not a whore!”

He leaned away and tried to head-butt her in the face. Starr anticipated it and pulled her head back. “I’m not as innocent as I pretended to be,” she hissed into his face through gritted teeth and bit down onto his nose. She jerked back hard, separating the soft tissue and stabbed him in the arm.

Finally, she let go and he collapsed to the ground. His arm didn’t work and he was starting to go into shock. He felt her hands unbuckle his belt and then jerk his pants down roughly. “Oh God. Please don’t,” he moaned, unable to stop her.

A few seconds later she held up two pale, bloody lumps of flesh and swung them back and forth above his face. “Lookie at what I’ve got!” she squealed and then popped one of them in her mouth.

She gagged and continued chewing until she swallowed. “Ugh, they could use some salt. Here, you try the other one.” She pulled his jaw down and crammed his second testicle into his mouth. Then she slammed his mouth shut on the soft tissue.

“How’s it taste, honey?”

She waited for his answer and then slammed the knife into his chest, leaving it in. “Okay, this is boring. See ya.”

Starr pushed up off of his stomach and wiped her bloody hands on his pant leg before wandering off into the corn field.

Kendrick realized the irony that he lay beside his stepfather’s body, bleeding to death. The one man who only two weeks prior would have done anything for him. Instead, the son had attacked his home, destroyed everything that he’d worked for and orchestrated the man’s death. Kendrick wanted to beg the corpse for an apology, but his pride wouldn’t allow him to do it.

Instead, he turned his head, choosing to stare at the green fields that he’d worked as a child. He tried to conjure up fond memories. The only ones that would come were of the shame and humiliation he felt from being lied to by Traxx, who pretended to be his father.

Kendrick watched the gently swaying corn stalks, feeding on his hatred of Traxx, until he died.

*****

They ran as soon as the girl appeared and provided the needed distraction. Aiden’s legs were bruised, probably bleeding underneath his jeans. He’d never given any thought to how tough sweet potato plants were before now.

What are you doing, you selfish turd?
his mind screamed at him. His grandfather was dead and that madman had cut his head off.
Why had he cut the head off of a dead man? What purpose did that serve?

He’d been the one who cried out when that happened and made those men come to investigate the noise. Tyler had made quick and quiet work of them and now he was covered in the blood of his grandfather
and
the three strangers.

Aiden had learned a great deal about Tyler from his grandfather over the last week when the man was bedridden after his heart attack. To the boy, he’d always been the big, goofy uncle who was clumsy and knocked things over because he couldn’t see well, especially in the dark. Aiden had been around him almost every day of his life until he got sick about a year ago and until last week, he thought he knew all that there was to know about him.

Further proof that he didn’t really know his uncle was the way that Tyler had flipped the switch from sorrow to mind-numbing violence when those three men entered the field and scared Aiden. He’d never witnessed anything like it before and he was in awe of the man’s capability to kill so effortlessly.

They’d run for a good ten minutes, jumping over old golf cart paths into new types of crops, never daring to run down the path itself, when Tyler called for a halt. “I’m sorry, Aiden,” he said between great, heaving coughs that spewed blood in all directions. “I need to walk. I can’t keep going like this… Just need a break.”

“It’s okay, Uncle Tyler. I know that you’re sick.”

He coughed into his clinched fist again and then craned his neck far to the side so he could see Aiden around his eye patch. “You know I’m not your real uncle, right?”

Aiden took an exaggerated step over a large watermelon. “Yeah, I know. Grandad told me all about you and him last week while he was resting.”

“Did he? Only the good parts, I hope.”

The boy shrugged, “I don’t know. He might have left out parts of the story, but I don’t think so. He seemed to think it was pretty important that I know the Traxx family history.”

Tyler nodded, “Your grandfather was a smart man—way smarter than me—and honest. Good Lord, was he honest.” He laughed and that turned into another coughing fit.

When that passed him by, he pointed to his eye patch and said, “We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, no pun intended.”

Aiden rolled his eyes and replied, “Ha ha, Uncle Tyler.”

A massive hand landed on his shoulder. “Look, son. I’m having a hard time dealing with Aeric’s loss as well. We’ve been almost inseparable for more than thirty years and now he’s gone. It’s… It’s tough.

“I told him…” he sniffled, causing Aiden to look up at him. Was he
crying
? “Only a few hours ago, I told him that our friendship was over. I’d disagreed with something that he did. Looking back on it, he was right. Those kids would have caused further damage to the survivors of the battle. It had to be done.”

“I’m confused. What had to be done?” Aiden asked.

“We had to kill them,” he replied. Over the next several minutes, Tyler related the events that had occurred in the Barrio after Aiden went to warn his grandmother.