The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition] Read online

  THREE

  Aeric awoke to the slow beeping of electronic equipment and dim lighting. He tried to sit up, but his body was too sore, so he used his hands to push his back off of the bed. A sharp pain in his wrist made him reconsider and he brought his hand up in front of his face. There was an IV line sticking out of the big vein on the back of his hand.

  “What the hell?” he muttered and dropped his arm down to his forehead. Something soft touched his arm and he used his hand to feel around his skull. A bandage completely circled his head without obscuring his line of sight.

  He turned slightly and noticed Tyler sleeping in a chair beside the bed with his mouth open. “Hey. Hey, Ty. Wake up!” he croaked through parched lips. His throat felt like it was on fire. “Hey!”

  “Wha—”

  “Wake up!” Aeric repeated.

  Tyler rubbed the palm of his hand into his eye socket. “Oh, man, you’re awake! Geez, I was really worried about you.”

  Aeric tried to grin. His face hurt too much though, so he gave up the effort. “I’m alright. Did I fall down the stairs at the party or something?”

  Ty leaned forward and then stood up to look down on him. “You don’t remember what happened?”

  He searched his memory and nothing stood out. He remembered hanging out with some girls and drinking a lot, not much more after that except that he might have made out with someone. “Uh, it’s all a little fuzzy after the party got going.”

  “You don’t remember the Health Science building exploding or all the fires that the arsonists set on campus?”

  The blurry memory of fires painting the night sky orange and red did ring a bell. He thought he’d dreamt that part though. “I… I’m not sure, man. I don’t remember any explosions. The building blew up?”

  “Yeah. It was after hours, so nobody was hurt in the explosion. Several hundred people died in the dorm fires, though.”

  Aeric choked. “Several hundred?” His throat was killing him. “Can you get me some water?”

  “Yeah, hold on.”

  He heard a sink turn on and then Tyler came back into view and held the cup to his lips while he sipped the cool liquid. “They don’t know how many people died yet. Multiple arsonists disabled the fire alarms in all the university dorms and then set fires on the bottom floors. If we hadn’t gone downstairs to investigate the explosion, we’d probably be dead too.”

  “I’m sorry, Ty. I don’t remember any of that. Maybe I was more drunk than I thought.”

  “You did puke all over everything—I thought that was because of the truck that hit you though.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you remember Amber?” Tyler asked cautiously.

  He smiled. It wasn’t nearly as painful this time. “Yeah, that cute brunette from down the hall.”

  “She saved your life when we went outside. You were gonna get crushed by a big police truck—one of those big ones that the city bought from the military when we left the Middle East—but she pushed you out of the way.”

  “Oh wow! I— What is it?” he asked. His friend had tears running down his face.

  “Amber was killed by the truck when she pushed you out of the way. It tore her to shreds.”

  He recoiled deeper into the hospital bed’s mattress. “No! That… Oh, man, that sucks.”

  Tyler wiped his face with his hands and cleared his throat. “It gets worse.”

  “I don’t know if I can take anything else, Tyler,” he replied truthfully.

  “You need to hear it. Some hacker group hacked into the computer systems of every plane that was airborne over the United States yesterday and turned off their flight control systems. Most of the planes crashed. There were some that were high enough that the pilots were able to recover and find a landing strip, but not many. We’re talking thousands of planes that went down in an instant.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, bro. All those people are dead. The government is labeling it as a cyber-crime, not a terrorist act. There are massive riots in New York, Boston, LA… Well, you get the picture. All the places that have already had riots are having them again, except they’ve gotten out of control. I was watching the news until I got tired and turned it off. These aren’t even disguised as peaceful protests anymore. They’ve gone to full-on mob violence. People are getting killed protesting the government’s investigation into people getting killed. It’s totally crazy.”

  “Is this really happening?” Aeric mumbled as he tried to clear his head and organize his thoughts.

  “I’m afraid so. All of our stuff is gone, too. Blanton burned down. The university canceled classes indefinitely and the southeast side of town is a war zone. The police are fighting a losing battle with some of the Hispanic gangs out there.”

  Aeric tried to sit up again and Tyler placed one of his massive hands on him to hold him down. “We need to get out of town, Ty!”

  “Don’t get up. I’ll go find a doctor or nurse and see what they say.” He didn’t wait for Aeric to answer and strode out of the room.

  He turned his head and tried to see out of the window. Aeric stared hard at the sky through the deeply tinted window for a few seconds and decided that it must be either late evening or early morning. Dark, angry clouds rolled by in the distance, some of which looked like they might have been from fires and not heavily laden with rain.

  Amber was dead because of him. He’d been so drunk that he apparently couldn’t even get out of the way of a giant truck. What a fucking waste of a life. She’d seemed so vibrant and had a smile on her face every time that he’d seen her. Now she was gone—and so were a lot of other students. What kind of sick bastards would do something like that to innocent college students?

  The tears flowed freely down his cheeks while he stared blankly out the windows. The world’s sanity had been slowly eroding during the last twenty or thirty years. Now it had gone completely mad. How had it gotten to this point? He understood the problems with the terrorists. They had been a constant threat since the mid-1970s, popping up when the population had once again settled into complacency and the organizations had been relegated to obscurity. Unfortunately, those types of random attacks were things that Americans had come to expect. There was little that people could do to defend against them except to be vigilant.

  The bullshit bucket had finally overflowed and was now lying on its side to fill the streets. The social inequality and difference between the haves and the have-nots wasn’t any different than it had been for millennia. However, it seemed like everyone had developed a sense of entitlement and those who couldn’t afford the same things as their more wealthy peers had struck out in every direction.

  It started with the riots in the major cities and now it seemed like it had come home to roost in Austin. There was a clear disparity in Austin, an affluent city with a large, disillusioned youth population. He had a hard time believing that people would go so far as to commit arson and murder, but that’s what was happening and there were certainly fires burning out in the city even now.

  It occurred to him that he didn’t even know what hospital he was in. Was he in the University Medical Center or Saint David, or even the one way out north of town on Research? It seemed like a silly thing to think about, but it filled his mind and he couldn’t stop wondering where he was. The angle from his bed didn’t allow him to see the UT Tower or any other distinctive buildings so he was at a loss.

  He’d started to drift back to sleep by the time that Tyler returned with a nurse. “Hello, Mr. Gaines. Your friend said that you’re awake. How do you feel?”

  “Like crap,” he admitted. “I got hit by a truck, people everywhere are dead and my throat is on fire.”

  “Well, that’s probably because we had to perform a gastric suction on you—we had to pump your stomach,” she amended when she noticed his confused look. “You had too much alcohol in your system for us to be able to properly administer medications. It’s possible that your esophagus was a
ccidentally scraped during the procedure.”

  “Hmm,” he muttered.

  “As to getting hit by the truck, well you bounced off of it really,” she stated with a smile that made Aeric want to punch her in the face. A girl had died so that he could just “bounce off the truck.” It was serious, not something to joke about. “You don’t have any internal injuries, lots of bruising and a small contusion to the back of your head where it must have impacted with the truck. Other than that, there’s no swelling in your brain or anything to worry about.”

  He forced himself to calm down. Her nonchalant attitude wasn’t her fault. She worked with patients who died, or were dying, on a daily basis. Amber’s death hadn’t affected her the way it had him. “Okay, so am I free to leave then?” he asked.

  “You’ve been in and out of consciousness for about thirty hours, Mr. Gaines. We’d like to keep you for at least a day of observation, but if you feel that you’re healthy enough to leave, we can’t make you stay.”

  He glanced at Tyler, who shrugged and said, “Where are you gonna go? Our dorm burnt down, remember?”

  “Shit. Yeah, I guess I’ll stay then.”

  “Ok, we’ll notify the police department somehow. They want to get a statement from you about the events of the incident. With all the problems on the southeast, I’m not sure how long it will be until they can speak to you.”

  Aeric nodded, replying, “Well, they can always call my cell phone.”

  “Cell service is still out, man. Hell, even the regular phone lines are down,” Ty stated.

  “What do you mean? How are the cell phones down? They communicate over satellites.”

  “I don’t know. The news is still able to broadcast, but other communications satellites don’t seem to work. I guess the telephone lines must have been cut too. Austin is pretty isolated right now.”

  “What’s causing all of this?” Aeric asked.

  “Let me disconnect all of your wires,” the nurse interjected. “I don’t think you need to be hooked up to a heart rate monitor anymore. Then I’ll leave you two alone and check back in on you in a couple of hours. Just buzz if you need anything.” She unhooked all the wires and turned off the beeping equipment before she left. The IV stayed in his hand.

  Tyler watched her go and then said, “I don’t know what’s causing all of this, Aeric. It seems like everything is happening all over the place. The internet has been a hotbed of activity for years with people all over the world calling for the overthrow of whatever government that they had, but it seems like some groups have actually begun to carry out their plans.”

  Once again, Aeric muttered, “Is this really happening? I mean, are we really talking about the collapse of society because of disgruntled people banding together on the internet?”

  Tyler gestured towards the television and shrugged. “That’s what the news says.”

  “This…this sucks,” Aeric mumbled at a loss for words. “Hey, do my parents know about what’s going on?”

  Tyler shrugged again and replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to them, but the UT attack has been all over the news, so I’m sure that they know something is going on.”

  “Dammit! The phones don’t work?”

  “Nope, I’ve tried mine a bunch of times and the nurse said that the hospital’s phones don’t work either.”

  “What about the internet? If they’re broadcasting the television over satellite, is the internet still up and running? I doubt that hackers, or whoever is doing this, would turn their primary means of communication off, right?”

  “Good point. I hadn’t thought of that since my cell phone internet connection didn’t work. I thought it was all down.”

  “Cell phone data flows over the cellular network, so it makes sense that it doesn’t work. I bet that computers that have their modems hooked up to the cable company lines have internet access.”

  “Hold on, let me go find an internet lounge or something. Hospitals usually have them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Aeric said. “Help me up, I want to go with you.”

  It took some maneuvering to get him out of the bed, but they finally got him up and secured his open robe in the back. The IV drip pole had wheels, so Tyler rolled that along beside Aeric and they went looking for a computer.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Mr. Gaines?” the nurse who’d visited him earlier asked from her seat in the nurses’ station.

  “We’re looking for an internet café or something like that so I can send my parents an email to let them know that I’m okay.”

  She raised an eyebrow and stated, “There’s not an internet café in Saint David’s.”

  “Is there anywhere we could go?” Aeric pleaded. “My parents don’t know anything and I’m sure that they’ve seen the news saying my dorm was burned down.”

  She glanced at another nurse beside her, then stood up and said, “Come on around here. You can use my computer to send an email.”

  “Thanks,” Aeric said as he slid around the counter.

  He sat down in her vacated seat and grabbed the mouse. Then, he opened up the internet and went to his email account. There were several emails from his mother. He didn’t even bother to open them up. Instead he clicked on the New Email icon and began composing his message.

  Hey Mom and Dad,

  First off, I want to let you know that Tyler and I are okay. I was involved in a minor accident when our dorm burned down yesterday and was taken to Saint David’s Hospital in downtown Austin. It’s right near the university. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in the hospital, but the nurses tell me that I’m medically cleared to leave the hospital. I guess we’ll try and see what UT is doing for students who’ve been displaced.

  My cell phone doesn’t work and the landline phones are down also. The nurse was kind enough to let me use her hospital computer to send you this note. I’ll send you another email once we get to a semi-permanent location or maybe I’ll try to call and let you know where we are when the phones come back on.

  I don’t know if my car is alright. It was in the dorm parking lot and I’m pretty sure that the keys were in the building when it burned down. Isn’t all of this absolutely crazy? I haven’t seen the news yet, but Ty told me about the planes.

  Alright, guys. I love you. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, just need to get a place to stay for the next couple of nights until I can figure out what I’m going to do. Classes are cancelled for right now and everything is a mess down here.

  Talk to you soon!

  Love,

  Aeric

  He reviewed the message and tweaked a few areas to make it sound more upbeat than he felt. There wasn’t any sense in making his parents more upset than they likely already were. The nurse stood behind him, so he didn’t bother opening any of the emails from his mother. He knew the gist of what they’d say anyways.

  Aeric closed out his email program. He didn’t see the message from his mother telling him that his father had been on a plane to Austin to find him when his plane went down.

  *****

  Aeric signed the release forms and crammed the doctor’s prescription for pain reliever into his pocket. “Thank you for taking such great care of me and for letting me use your computer yesterday,” he said to the ever-present nurse.

  “It was my pleasure, Mr. Gaines. You be safe out there.”

  He nodded and walked over to where his hulking friend stood off to the side for privacy. “Ready, buddy?” Tyler asked.

  “Yeah. Are we gonna call a cab or walk?”

  “Phones are still out.”

  “Crap, I forgot,” Aeric admitted. “How far from the university are we?”

  “I don’t know,” Tyler’s big shoulders hunched up as he shrugged. “It’s seven or eight blocks to the Athletic Department. I guess that’s where we should start.”

  “It’s as good a place as any. I mean, maybe Coach Harris will be there, or at least there’ll be some type of notice for
what we’re supposed to do.”

  “I hope so. I don’t know what else to do. Honestly, being able to stay with you in the hospital was the best thing that could have happened. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go.”

  Aeric nodded his head noncommittally. It was time to figure out what they were going to do. It had been two days since the Health Science building explosion and the string of arsons on campus, which had burned all of the residence halls except one. Back at the hospital, the news had stated that the student death toll had grown to nearly ten thousand as investigators searched through the wreckage.

  The arsonist group had cut power to the fire alarms and blocked the stairwells before setting the fires in the lobbies of the buildings. Police didn’t know if the desk attendants had been in on it or if they’d been victims too. Speculation was that the arsonists—correction, the murderers—had likely killed the attendants before they started their fires. They knew what they were doing and the students had paid the price.

  Even the street war in the southeast had escalated to include most of the city to the east of Interstate 35 and parts of the downtown area as well. Austin’s emergency response services were overwhelmed as the injured inundated the hospitals and clinics, while the dead lay stacked like cordwood near the curbs for the garbage trucks to pick up.

  The first body that Aeric and Tyler saw freaked them out. It had multiple gunshot wounds to the body. The white button-down shirt that the man had worn when he died was stained maroon with dried blood. They saw several more bodies in the short trip from the hospital to the athletic department. It got easier for them with each one.

  They finally reached the athletic offices building, nestled in the shadows of the giant UT football stadium where they’d reported after class every day. The power was out and even in the full light of the early afternoon, the place looked sinister and haunting. “You think anyone’s in there?” Aeric asked.

  “I don’t know, man. Looks abandoned. We won’t know unless we go in, though.”