The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition] Read online

  “Shit. This is the part in the movies where the audience is screaming at the people to not go into the building,” he muttered.

  “Well, neither of us are virgins, so we should be safe.” Tyler’s comment brought a smirk to his face.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m just being stupid.” He took a deep breath to steady himself and then started walking towards the building behind the bigger man.

  Tyler pushed his way through the building’s front door and called out, “Hello? Anyone in here?”

  There wasn’t an answer, so they went deeper into the building and their nostrils were assaulted by a strange, yet familiar smell. It was metallic, and reminded Aeric of the way that his hands smelled after handling old change. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It smells like when you open up the hood of a car after a long drive or something.”

  “I don’t like it. This place hasn’t ever smelled like this before,” Aeric said. Then, he took a turn and called out, “Hello?” The darkened hallway yawned back at them in silence.

  “I don’t know, Aeric. It’s pitch black further down this hallway. I doubt anyone is sitting back there in the dark.”

  He nodded his head in agreement. “Yeah, I guess nobody’s in here.”

  When they turned to leave, a voice called out from somewhere in the darkness, “Aww, the poor football players can’t find anyone to cuddle up with.”

  “We aren’t football players,” Aeric responded to the creepy voice without even thinking. “We play baseball for the school. Where are you?”

  “You’re still jocks. Your time ruling the world with your stupid over-sexed, beer- and testosterone-fueled attitudes is over. The bible says, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ That time is now!”

  Aeric felt his friend’s body tense beside him and he placed a restraining hand on Tyler’s arm. “Not worth it, Ty,” he whispered. “We can’t see shit in here and that dude might have some type of trap set. You saw all of those dead bodies outside. Things have changed, man. He sounds crazy, so there’s no telling what he’s capable of.”

  The big man pulled against Aeric’s hand for a moment and then relented. Tyler yelled into the darkness, “You don’t know us. We could be the nicest people in the world.”

  “You sure showed him,” Aeric whispered sarcastically.

  “We know your kind. That is why your world must die and a new one will be reborn. We will Reset the world, make it a place of true equality where it doesn’t matter what you look like or how much money you have. We will choose what values and attributes are important, not some stupid ability to catch a ball and lift heavy weights or looking pretty in a bikini.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Come out here so we can see you,” Aeric demanded.

  “I am not as stupid as you two, blindly rushing into somewhere that you have no business being.”

  Indeed, Aeric did sense that they were walking a fine edge between stupidity and outright danger. He tugged gently on Tyler’s arm and they slowly backed away towards the entrance. The voice seemed to get nearer as it teased, “Run along home to mommy, boys. Say hello to Colonel Harris for me if you see him. Tell him that the Vultures are looking for him. We’ll find where he weaseled off to eventually.”

  Aeric resisted the urge to laugh at the stupid name that the guy in the darkness called himself—or were the Vultures some sort of street gang that he’d never heard of before? Admittedly, he’d been self-absorbed with his classes and partying in between the mandatory team workouts, so he didn’t know anything about the various local Austin gangs. The Vultures sounded like something that a minor league hockey team would call themselves, not a street gang.

  Vultures feast off the remains of dead animals, was that what this guy meant? Were they preparing to feast off the remnants of a dead society? His initial reaction to laugh died on his lips when he thought of dead things. Was that what the metallic smell in the air was from? Were there dead people down that hallway? He quickened his pace to leave the athletic department offices as fast as he could.

  Society wasn’t dead as the voice in the darkness alluded to. It was on life support, though. Only a few more pushes towards the edge of the cliff and they’d be spinning headlong into an irreversible future. They reached the doors and Tyler pushed his way through them onto the sidewalk. From the darkness of the building came the laughter of a madman…and the sound of a pump shotgun racking a round into the chamber.

  They’d both grown up hunting and being around guns, so they knew what the sound was. They dived away from the doorway as the glass doors shattered and the boom of a shotgun exploded from the darkness. They didn’t wait for the second round before they scrambled to their feet and took off sprinting towards the center of campus. After two blocks, they slowed to a walk to catch their breath.

  “What the fuck was that?” Tyler asked, looking back towards the athletic offices.

  “I don’t know,” Aeric answered. “Have you heard of the Vultures before?”

  “No. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Me either. Can you believe that mother fucker shot at us!”

  “Why would that guy be sitting in the dark like that?”

  “Because he’s a fucking psychopath,” Aeric replied. “I think I know what that smell was.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have you ever helped your mom in the kitchen and opened a package of meat?”

  Tyler nodded and said, “I don’t like where this is going. Let’s head over towards Blanton Dormitory and see if there’s anything left.”

  “Good idea,” Aeric agreed and they started walking towards their old dorm. Once they’d crossed the street and after several glances over his shoulder, he continued, “So, you know that blood smell that comes from a package of raw meat? That’s what it smelled like to me.”

  “So you think that there’s some dude sitting in there with a bunch of dead bodies?”

  “I don’t know, man. With all the shit we’ve seen, just in the walk from the hospital to campus, I wouldn’t put it past someone who was off in the head to do that. He already tried to kill us.”

  “Not really,” Tyler countered. “If he’d wanted to kill us, he probably could have shot us in the darkness. What does he want us to talk to Coach Harris about?”

  “Does it matter? The guy’s a loony. I wonder if his Vulture group, or whatever, is behind any of this.”

  “Behind it, like you mean the arsonists?”

  Aeric shrugged. “The arsonists, the hackers, the gunmen who’ve shot some of the people that we’ve seen, I don’t know. That guy in there was definitely a whack-job though.”

  “We should call the cops.”

  He looked over at his big friend who slapped his forehead. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Maybe there will be police or firefighters at the dorm that we could talk to.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Aeric replied without conviction. He doubted that there’d be much of anything left for them in Austin.

  *****

  24th Street was silent as they walked the few blocks towards their old dorm building. The campus was mostly empty, giving it the feel of an old, abandoned town and the few people that they did pass scurried quickly away from their view. The charred hulk of the Mallet Chemical Library to their left reminded them that they weren’t walking through some Old West ghost town. They were witnessing the first stages of a war.

  They turned up University Avenue towards Blanton. All along the bottom row of windows, dark burn marks seared the light brown brick. It became more random as the flames had licked alternating windows on the higher floors. Their room had been on the fourth floor and Aeric allowed himself a moment of hope that their things had escaped the devastation that the lower floors had suffered.

  A dark stain of dried blood near the center of the road caused Aeric to stop. The stain stretched over ten feet, ending in a large splotch where it had pooled on the side. Amber died on the first night of t
he problems in Austin so they’d collected her body, but small chunks of meat littered the pavement and they hadn’t taken the time to wash away the blood. It reminded him of how the highway department handled dead deer back in Missouri.

  “At least they had the decency to pick her up,” Aeric said as he gestured towards the grizzly scene at their feet.

  “I’m sorry, man. I know that you two liked each other.”

  He looked up with red-rimmed eyes, the tears threatening to overflow. “It’s not even that, Ty—I barely knew Amber. This whole thing is so messed up. There are bodies all over the place, burned out buildings, weird dudes threatening people from inside powerless buildings. When is it gonna stop? This is the twenty-first century for fuck’s sake. We were supposed to have moved past all of this bullshit.”

  Tyler nodded his head, choosing to remain silent.

  “Alright,” Aeric sighed. “Let’s see if any of our stuff is around.”

  His roommate peered up towards the fourth floor. “It doesn’t look like the flames made it that high. Maybe our room is okay.”

  “I hope so,” he replied without commitment.

  The fire department hadn’t even bothered to block off the entrances to the burned out building with tape. They’d been too busy trying to stop the fires that burned unchecked around the rest of the city. It was like all the social rejects and degenerates had teamed up to ruin the small, beautiful city and the residents suffered because of it.

  They stepped through the shattered glass doors into the lobby. The acrid stench of burnt, stained wood singed their nostrils and Tyler scrunched up his nose. “This place reeks.”

  “Yeah, I’m not so sure that it’s safe to be in here,” Aeric replied as he looked around and then up at where the ceiling should have been. Instead he saw the sky above. The fire had burned the hottest here at the center of the building and destroyed all four floors and the roof in this section.

  Tyler glanced around, “It should be alright. Looks like the outside structure is fine. The walls and stairwells are made of concrete, so we should be okay.”

  “Is it going to collapse while we’re inside?”

  “It’s been safe for two days,” Tyler reasoned. “What’s it gonna hurt for us to go up the stairs real quick? I’ve got some irreplaceable things that I want to keep.”

  “Fine, let’s make this quick.” Tyler was much more of a risk-taker than he was. Aeric just wanted to get the hell out of the dorm before it collapsed on them.

  They made their way around the charred remains of the front desk to the stairwell. Aeric’s mind replayed blurred segments of that night. He thought that this was where they’d come down the stairs and found the arsonist at work, although they may have come down the other set of stairs. The stairwell seemed to be intact, so they eased their way up, taking their time before they placed their full weight on each step. Aeric trailed his hand across the wall as they went for support. It came away covered in deep, black soot.

  Peeled paint covered the back of the steel fire door that led from the stairwell to the fourth floor. There had clearly been a massive amount of heat on the other side and Aeric doubted even more that anything was left of their possessions. Tyler pushed the twisted metal handle down and pulled the door into the stairwell.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” he stated and stepped out of the way so Aeric could see. The floor was missing, it had been burned away.

  “There’s no way we can get around this. It doesn’t look like anything survived the fire.”

  Tyler looked over his roommate’s shoulder and asked, “You think we could make it over to the room somehow? I mean, there’s those metal bars that we could walk across.” He pointed towards the twisted floor joists that had once supported the floor.

  “I don’t think so, man. Besides, there’s nothing left down there.”

  “How do you know? The walls of the rooms are cinder block, so maybe they insulated our stuff.”

  Aeric turned around to face his friend. “It’s over. Our shit is gone, man. Even if our stuff didn’t actually burn, it was so hot that everything would have melted.”

  Tyler stared down into his eyes for a moment and then looked back at their old hallway. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking… So what are we gonna do?”

  “Let’s get out of here first. We need to find someplace safe to sleep for the night. Then maybe tomorrow we can rent a car to leave town or something.”

  “You’ve got to be twenty-five to rent a car, Aeric.”

  He frowned. “You think they’d still follow those rules?”

  “Yeah. It’s probably worse now. What about buying bus tickets?”

  Aeric hadn’t considered purchasing bus tickets to go back to Missouri. It was a foregone conclusion in his mind that he’d go back home to be with his parents until this all blew over. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He was only eighteen and this past summer was the first time that he’d ever made an entire day’s worth of meals for himself. It made sense to him to return home.

  “Bus tickets? That’s a good idea,” he admitted as he walked carefully back down the stairs. “I don’t have any identification—or money. My wallet was in the dorm along with the keys to my car when everything happened. I can’t get a new driver’s license down here, so first thing tomorrow morning I’m going to the student identification center to see about getting a new student ID. Then I’m going to the bank with my new ID and getting cash. Then I can see about a bus ticket out of here.”

  He’d come to the part in the conversation that he dreaded to hear the answer. “What are your plans?”

  Tyler considered it for a moment and then said, “Missouri is north of here, kind of on the way back to Lincoln. I can go with you to your parents’ house and then continue towards home on my own.”

  Aeric let out the breath that he hadn’t realized that he’d been holding. Having the big man at his side was a huge advantage that would help to keep some of the thugs away. Aeric wasn’t a small guy at six-four, but he was dwarfed by Tyler’s size. “That’d be great, man. Thank you.”

  “No worries, bro. Do you want to try and find some food? I’m starving.”

  “Yeah. Most of the restaurants that we’ve passed have been closed. Maybe one of the convenience stores is open.”

  They exited the building that they’d called home for two months and went north on University to Dean Keaton Street. Two blocks to the west was a row of campus-friendly restaurants. If none of those were open, then there was a gas station a block north of there that was sure to be open.

  As they neared the larger street, cars whizzed by in both directions. Were they running away or was it simply people coming and going from work, regardless of the dangers that faced them in the city? “I guess people are still going about their lives, huh?” Aeric said with a weak gesture towards the cars progressing through the powerless intersection.

  “Guess so. They’ve still gotta pay the bills, right?”

  He grunted in agreement. Tyler was right, people still had to buy food and pay their mortgages. This was a crazy confluence of events that would blow over in time. Those who did the right thing and continued to contribute to society would be fine, it was the ones who took part in all of the chaos and acted like this was the end of times that would face justice.

  When they got to the small shopping center, it was as Aeric had feared. The storefronts were darkened and several windows had been broken out leaving glass littered along the sidewalk. His mind wandered back to his thoughts of justice that he’d had only minutes before. Would the police ever be able arrest all of those responsible? Had they gone too far down the path towards anarchy?

  It was an insane thought. Only days had passed since the problems came to Austin. Other cities had been dealing with some of these issues for weeks—although, not as bad as the arsonists murdering thousands of college students in their sleep. Would the US Army be sent in? He knew that there was a big army base somewhe
re nearby to the north, he’d passed the signs on the highway when he drove down several months ago. In fact, why wasn’t the Army already on site? It wasn’t that far away, they should have been here by now.

  He didn’t have the answers, but his stomach grumbled in protest at not being fed since he left the hospital. They’d eaten at the row of restaurants several times since they were so close to campus and the sight of them made him even more aware of his hunger.

  “Looks like other people had the same idea,” he stated, pointing towards the smashed windows.

  “Yeah, and then they got pissed off when the taco shop wasn’t open because it didn’t have any power,” Tyler replied. “Fucking assholes. We’re not moving past this until the average citizen steps in to help out.”

  “What do you mean?” Aeric asked. “Like becoming a vigilante or something?”

  Tyler’s eyes sparkled as the retreating sun’s reflection off the windows of the city’s taller buildings hit him in the face. “I meant that we all had to hunker down and not take part in the violence and looting. I hadn’t thought about people becoming vigilantes and striking out against the people doing this. That’s a good idea.”

  Aeric reached out and wrapped his fingers around Tyler’s elbow. He gave his friend a good shake and said, “Snap out of it, buddy. We’re not trained to fight crime or whatever crazy thing that you’re thinking about. This is real life, not a video game. We get killed and there’s no respawn. What we need to do is get some food and then hole up somewhere close to campus for the night.”

  Tyler grinned at him. “No respawn, that’s good! I wasn’t planning on becoming a vigilante, man. But we do need to think about self-protection.” He hefted his bag to his shoulder and continued, “The only weapon that we have is my baseball bat. Well, maybe my cleats could work too—those would be pretty useless except as an absolute last resort.”

  “If we’re trying to use your shoes to defend ourselves, the odor will probably knock them out before the cleats touch them.”

  “We’ll use everything we have to our advantage,” Tyler deadpanned. “Let’s see if that gas station is open.”